They were tough times, Stan Flagg remembers.

The Great Depression was hard on a lot of people, and the Flagg family in Kalispell was certainly no exception. 

Stan Flagg’s father, Fred Alexander Flagg, would pack the family up in a truck and head to a secret huckleberry patch on the Fisher River.

“I was just a kid, somewhere between 8 and 12,” said Flagg, now 86. “There were two patches. One was easier to get to and was very popular. The other one you had to hike four miles up a mountain to get to. That’s the one we went to.”

While there, the six Flagg children (two others died while young) along with Mom, Dad and maybe his sister’s boyfriend, could harvest 100 gallons of huckleberries a day. Stan, the baby of the family, could haul back five gallons on the hike.

Others toted considerably heavier loads.

“Every year we’d go up there and see this grizzly bear with an injured paw,” Flagg said. “We called him Slue-foot, and he never bothered us. Our father always told us if he’s in a patch, it’s his patch.

“And if we’re in a patch he walks into, well that’s his patch too.”

The Flagg family didn’t pick my hand, and instead used tennis-racquet-shaped instruments to whack the berry bushes and drop ripe berries into buckets beneath.

In a mult-day trip the family might return to Kalispell with more than 1,000 gallons, depending how long they stayed in prime territory.

While picking, the children were charged with separating the pretty berries from the mediocre ones. Flagg recalls his “ingenious” father devising a system which would do this for them.

A chute, run up the second floor of the Flagg house (which still stands, on Seventh Avenue West in Kalispell) would lead to a canvas stretched taut below. The buckets of berries would roll down the chute and the full, tasty berries would hit the canvas, bounce outward and roll onto a tarp on the lawn below.

Refuse, like leaves and branches, wouldn’t bounce, but rather fall below to a brush pile.

“People would come from around the neighborhood and take photos of us doing this,” Flagg said. “We’d take this big, perfect berries and go around to the rich area of town selling them to rich folks for $1 a gallon. Nowadays I think you can buy them for $50 a gallon.”

Whatever berries didn’t sell to “rich folks” would be sold to the cannery down the street, making money for the family. The Flaggs also operated a sawmill and did other odd jobs to provide for the family.

“A dollar was money,” Flagg said. “Times were real tough. You hardly ever saw money.”

The rich days of “huckleberrying” ended when Flagg’s mother died in 1939. With this grievous loss to the family and with the improving economy as a result of a world headed to war, traveling to the Fisher for berries became too much work for too little payoff.

Flagg went on to become a chiropractic physician, and officially retired just three years ago. He still practices on friends and family.

“Chiropractic is just adjusting bones,” he said. “But they can’t move by themselves. A muscle had to move them there. Balance the muscle and balance the body.”

Other schools of chiropractic thought came and went, and Flagg learned from all of them. 

He said he never went back huckleberrying, but he never really thought much about it.

“Everything we did, we did as a family,” Flagg said. “I thought going to pick berries was just part of being in the family.”

Times were tough, but so was the Flagg family.