From sports to war to the White House: One reporter's adventure in journalism
FRANK MIELE/Daily Inter Lake | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 11 years, 7 months AGO
One pleasure of scanning old Inter Lakes is discovering a familiar name among the ink-stained wretches whose career has ambled through Kalispell at one time or another.
It certainly seems like we have had our share of reporters who have gone on to bigger and better things.
Hometown boy (and former paperboy!) Dale Burk got his start here as a sports reporter back in 1959 and later went on to have a significant career as an outdoor writer and publisher as the owner of Stoneydale Press in Stevensville.
In the mid-1970s, George Geise was the sports editor at the Inter Lake, shortly before he moved to the Great Falls Tribune for a long career there in the same position.
Around the same time, Bob Anez got his start at the Inter Lake as a general assignment reporter. He went on to a successful career as the AP statehouse reporter in Helena and recently retired from his post as communications director at the state Department of Corrections.
Not many people remember that Jim O’Day, the longtime athletic director of the University of Montana, was also a sports reporter at the Inter Lake in the late 1970s.
But perhaps the most significant writer to have spent his apprenticeship at the Inter Lake is Tom Tiede, an author whom I first became familiar with when I was a young assistant wire editor at the Bismarck Tribune. My supervisor, Steve Wallick, had a hankering for colorful writing, and Tiede supplied it on a regular basis as the roving feature columnist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (or NEA).
I hadn’t thought of Tiede for many years, but recently when I was doing research on the legendary baseball player Gus Thompson, I came across a sports column by Tiede published in the Inter Lake that mentioned Thompson, who had played in the first World Series, back in 1903.
I was hunting down information about Thompson for a story that Inter Lake reporter Tom Lotshaw was working on about how the city park named after Thompson had been rechristened as East Side Park a few years ago because no one around still knew who Thompson was!
Probably the same way a lot of readers today wouldn’t know who Tom Tiede was either, but his name had always stuck out for me as a promise of fresh, entertaining copy. At first, I assumed the Oct. 19, 1960, column in the Inter Lake must have been syndicated, but then I looked a little closer and saw a reference to Thompson’s Kalispell connections.
Wait a minute! That meant Tom Tiede had been one of our own — a Daily Inter Lake reporter!
I read on with interest and discovered that Tiede’s column was about Mrs. Harold Thompson, Gus Thompson’s daughter who bragged that she had been “raised on baseball.” No doubt! Her father had stayed active in local baseball for many years after he left the Big Leagues, and from what I have read, he had the gift of gab and loved to talk about the old days!
Mrs. Thompson’s maiden name being the same as her married name gave me some heartburn for a while until I found a 1963 column by Inter Lake publisher Joe Caraher who remarked that Mrs. Harold Thompson was “one of the few ladies in town who didn’t have to change her name when she was married” since her father and husband had the same last name!
Tiede’s column detailed some of Mrs. Thompson’s recollections about attending a New York Yankees-Baltimore Orioles game as the guest of a friend of her late father — Ford Frick, who was then commissioner of baseball. Frick’s generosity was no doubt in part making up for a mistake made in 1953 when Gus Thompson was inadvertently omitted from the invitation list to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the World Series.
In a dozen inches of copy, Tiede told the whole action-packed vacation of the Thompsons in New York, including a visit to the United Nations where, Mrs. Thompson related, “We were close enough to boo Khruschev!” They also visited the Statue of Liberty and attended both the new Broadway musical “The Music Man” and the first episode of Arthur Godfrey’s only season hosting “Candid Camera.”
I haven’t had time yet to look at any of Tiede’s other writing for the Inter Lake, but I certainly hope to do so. When he left the Inter Lake in 1961 after a two-year stint, the Washington State University graduate (class of 1959) went on to a few more sports jobs, but then in the mid-1960s joined NEA and was assigned to cover the Vietnam War.
His five tours of the battleground as a combat reporter made a considerable mark on the public’s conscience of what it was like on the front lines.
“I tried to do it the Ernie Pyle way... talking to the individual soldier,” Tiede told the NEA for an article about his pending departure from the syndicate in 1988. “I rarely talked to the generals — it was hello, goodbye, and where are your men? I’d go out to the field.”
Whatever Tiede did, it worked. For his stories out of the just-then exploding war in Southeast Asia, Tiede was awarded the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award, named after the World War II correspondent who didn’t make it home from the war in the Pacific.
Tiede also did several years as White House correspondent for NEA in the 1970s as the Nixon presidency was collapsing and has written more than a half-dozen books. Much of his work from his career as NEA’s national correspondent is housed at Boston University as part of its 20th Century Archive.
Before retiring (he lives now in Virginia) Tiede ended his career in community journalism as a small-town publisher, which is fitting, considering his start in Kalispell way back in 1960. But nothing about his career is small, and I am proud to share with him the love of a good story, everyday people and local journalism.
Tiede’s words about one of his heroes — William Allen White, the longtime publisher of the Emporia (Kan.) Gazette International — now can be quoted back to reflect my admiration for Tiede himself:
“He thought the real headline makers were in small towns. So do I.”
MORE COLUMNS STORIES
'Shorty' Stockard returns to call Kalispell home once again
Bigfork Eagle | Updated 8 years, 4 months ago

'Shorty' Stockard returns to call Kalispell home once again
Daily Inter-Lake | Updated 8 years, 4 months ago
ARTICLES BY FRANK MIELE/DAILY INTER LAKE
'You can keep your freedom, if you like your freedom' (or maybe not)
'Walking Dead,' the Constitution and the Roman Empire: You do the math...
'L'etat c'est moi': Obama vs. the people
What is “the state”? On that question hinges the fate of Obamacare, and perhaps the fate of the nation.