Despite doing some important things up in the clouds, Virgil Walter of Kalispell has had enough hard knocks to keep him well grounded.

In the late 1970s, Walter was instrumental in getting the ALERT helicopter in the air. As the logging manager at Royal Logging (since bought out by Plum Creek), he was present for a terrifying injury in the forest. The young man could not be treated during transport and died en route to the hospital. 

“We went through the industry and asked for money for a helicopter,” Walter said. “We got $15,000 just like that.”

He and Clyde Smith, whose son was involved in another injury in the woods, quickly helped put together the ALERT air ambulance program. Walter even got to fly the helicopter part of the way back toward Montana from Forth Worth, Texas.

With the support of lumber companies, Kalispell Regional Hospital and the community, ALERT began saving lives shortly after the tragic accident.

“In 1978, at the first ALERT banquet, we raised around $35,000,” Walter said. “In those first years it cost around $85,000 a year. Now? It helps pay for itself.”

Serving as chairman of the ALERT advisory board for its first eight years, in the last several decades Walter has seen the air ambulance service add a turboprop plane and a ground ambulance, and the money raised shoot through the roof.

But it wasn’t always accolades for the 87-year-old.

He was born to a farming family in Polson, one of seven children. His mother died young and his father moved the family to Lakeside and took in a female housekeeper, who later became his girlfriend.

The state came in and gave Walter’s father two choices: marry the housekeeper or give Virgil and two of his sisters to a foster home.

“It was hell. It really was,” Walter said of his temporary foster home in Kalispell. “I was there for eight months before I was sent down to Twin Bridges down by Dillon.”

In Twin Bridges there was an orphanage where Walter spent the next four years of his life. At 10 years old, he was one of the eldest children there, so he was put in charge of the chickens and cows. 

“I didn’t really know what I was doing, and after about two weeks they brought in 200 baby chicks and told me to keep them alive,” he said. “I did it. I kept them alive.”

His young sisters went to live with Walter’s older sister in Helena, but he was forced to stay at the orphanage until his father wrote a letter asking him to return home.

“The superintendent said life would be better for me if I stayed there and finished school,” he said. “But I didn’t listen, and I went back to our stump farm in Lakeside.”

Walter no longer resents his father for abandoning him, but that remains a touchy subject among his surviving siblings.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about our childhood lately,” he said. “I used to get mad. I don’t anymore.”

He never finished high school, instead heading to Spokane to work for the Armour meat-packing plant after lying about his age. In 1943, he headed to Bainbridge Island in Washington to build minesweeper boats with his brother.

Quickly joining the U.S. Navy, he was posted at the Farragut Naval Training Station in Idaho before shipping to Hawaii on the USS Essex, an aircraft carrier. Walter, along with his other fresh-faced compatriots, slept on the flight deck on the voyage. 

He volunteered to be an aircraft mechanic, taking gunnery school at the same time.

“I loved shooting those machine guns,” Walter said. “And then I joined the air-sea rescue group and flew in a PBY.”

The PBY, or “Catalina,” was a two-propeller seaplane that Walter’s crew used to rescue downed pilots on Johnston Island. The island, a bright white spit of land 860 miles southwest of Hawaii, was a valuable refueling point for planes coming from Saipan, Okinawa and the Philippines. 

As a mechanic, Walter went up with the rescue crews to keep the “bird in the air.”

He recalls one time when his crew was sent up to guide a Douglas C-47 transport plane heading for Honolulu and then California. It was low on fuel and everyone was expecting a rough water landing.

“The plane was bringing tires to be recapped back to Los Angeles,” Walter said. “The crew started dumping these to reduce weight. All of a sudden, the pilot retracts the landing gear and cruises ahead of us. We thought he must have lost his mind.”

He didn’t hear what became of that C-47 Skytrain until years later. Walter, drinking with co-workers after a hard day’s work up on Margaret Creek near the Hungry Horse Reservoir, started to tell war stories.

He mentioned he was stationed on Johnston Island. His boss, Holly Larson, asked him if he recalled the cargo plane that zoomed off.

Larson was the pilot that day. It turned out there was a fuel gauge mistake and the plane was full of gas, allowing the plane to land safely, and the two then-strangers to work with each other thousands of miles away and nearly a decade later.

Walter served a similar role as mechanic on Okinawa in the Korean War before heading back to the United States where has had a successful logging career and three marriages (two good, one not so good) and found hundreds of friends.

All was almost cut short when Walter was out for a walk in snowshoes one winter day. The ground seemingly caved underneath him and, in desperation, he shot an arm out.

He grabbed a young sapling and pulled himself to safety in a bit of cosmic irony.

“You spend your entire life cutting down trees and then one ends up saving your life. That’s funny, isn’t it?” Walter said. “I’ve been fortunate. I got to see the virgin forests. Those aren’t there anymore.”

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.