Pat Walsh spent most of his childhood at the Flathead County Jail, but he wasn’t behind bars.

Until the late 1960s, county sheriffs and their families lived on the upper floor of the  historic 1903 jail while prisoners bunked in small cells downstairs.

“I actually grew up here,” Walsh told a group of county department heads and others who toured the building on Wednesday.

Walsh was just 18 months old when his father, Dick Walsh, was elected sheriff and moved his family to the jail in 1947. The younger Walsh was a senior in high school when his father no longer was sheriff and they moved out of the jail.

The tour was orchestrated by County Administrator Mike Pence to take one last look at the historic jail adjacent to the courthouse before it’s gutted and transformed into new space for the County Attorney’s Office. Environmental cleanup, namely removing asbestos and lead paint, is the first step of the $2.9 million project.

Walsh followed in his father’s footsteps, with a law-enforcement career that spanned 32 years before he retired as a detective sergeant a couple of years ago. He recalled working in the detectives’ office in the old jail in an upstairs room that once was his bedroom.

“It seemed a whole lot smaller than I remembered [the bedroom] as a kid,” he said.

One story led to another during the tour.

Walsh recalled how his mother, Bernice, was in charge of meals for the prisoners. She hired cooks and a dumbwaiter was used to send food down to the prisoners.

“One day they found a prisoner in the dumbwaiter,” he said. “He had the DTs (delirium tremens, also known as the shakes) and was chasing some kind of bug.”

The sheriff typically entrusted various jail duties with a couple of “trusties.” The name implied they were trustworthy “but they couldn’t be trusted,” Walsh said.

He remembered the time Billy Weber, “almost a permanent trusty,” was asked to drive the county fire truck to a fire. In those days the sheriff served as the county fire chief, and when a call came, “the deputies would grab the trusties and go out to fight the fire.”

Weber never showed up at that particular fire, but later was found passed out in the fire truck in Whitefish. He had headed to a local watering hole instead of the fire.

Walsh talked about “The Hole,” a makeshift solitary confinement holding cell in the jail basement, where the heating pipes made it almost unbearably warm for misbehaving prisoners.

“Dad actually put his own brother in there once,” Walsh said with a laugh.

Walsh pulled his own share of pranks at the jail. He once removed rocks out of the basement root cellar wall and tunneled into the courthouse lawn.

Another time, when he was about 12, he and a buddy attempted to make some rhubarb wine and stashed it in the basement to ferment. When they later retrieved it, the alleged wine was covered with layers of mold. They persuaded Weber to drink it to see if it was any good, and he gladly slurped it down, mold and all. The boys didn’t have the stomach to drink their own concoction.

Walsh used to jump out the upstairs windows and swing on the ivy vines that covered the jail’s south and west exterior walls.

“I never fell,” he said with a smile.

And then there was the time Walsh locked his sister, Maureen, in a cell and forgot she was there for quite a while.

“One time Mom heard a noise in the attic, so Dad checked and there was a prisoner up there,” Walsh said as tour participants one by one poked their heads into the upper reach of the building. The prisoner apparently was trying to escape from jail.

“I was never scared here as a kid. I had no sense” of any real danger, Walsh said.

Life in Kalispell in the late ’40s and through the 1950s was laid back. In 1957 the Sheriff’s Office logged 400 calls for the entire year. Compare that to last year’s 122,000-plus calls.

“Dad started with five deputies and in 1963 when he left office there were 17 deputies,” Walsh said.

Deputies bought their own cars and were reimbursed for mileage. The old wind-up sirens blared on and on as deputies went out on calls because there was no way to squelch the noise. The siren simply had to wind down.

The old jail had a maximum capacity of 27 prisoners and was severely overcrowded by the time the new Justice Center was built in the late 1980s.

Steel “tanks” of cell blocks were rumored to have come from an old ship, but that’s not true, Walsh noted. Some of the steel gates and decorative posts from the cells will be preserved and incorporated into the renovation, according to CTA Architects and Engineers, which is doing the design development, architectural work and construction administration of the project.

CTA’s $243,000 contract includes modifications to the adjacent detention center.

Until recently the jail was used for county storage. Janitorial supplies were stuffed into old jail cells and the county maintenance department had a metal shop and stored tools and equipment there.

The county is using federal Brownfields Program grant funding to remove the asbestos and lead paint prior to the renovation. A half-dozen contractors have scoped out the environmental cleanup, Pence said.

It will take about 100 days to complete the environmental cleanup.

“We hope to get going [on the renovation] before winter sets in,” Pence added.

The county had hoped to use the attic as office space but that won’t happen, Pence said, because it couldn’t be converted within required building codes.

A new addition will be built on the east side of the jail, and that’s where an elevator and stairwells will be located.

Architectural improvements will be done to the building’s exterior to retain the historical character and make the facility aesthetically pleasing since it’s the southern entrance to Kalispell’s historic downtown district, Pence said. 

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.