Longtime Hungry Horse News reporter and columnist Gladys Shay died Monday evening of natural causes.

Shay, 87, grew up with a penchant for the news.

When just a child, she recalled seeing the lights and hearing the fire engines outside the window of her Kalispell home as firefighters raced to save a house ablaze.

“And I automatically started writing a story,” she said in an interview earlier this year. Just a few days before her death, Shay was sending news tips via email to the newspaper.

“She always had an interesting news item to share,” said Hungry Horse News Editor Chris Peterson, who worked with Shay for 18 years. “She was a great source of information and history. It’s a sad day for the newspaper.”

Shay was the “Girl Friday” for Hungry Horse News founder and editor Mel Ruder for 30 years, covering society news, Columbia Falls City Council and a host of other topics for Ruder, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 in community journalism for his coverage of the 1964 flood.

Shay’s journalism career, however, started long before she went to work for Ruder. As a child, she wrote for the Kalispell Times, the weekly newspaper in Kalispell at the time.

In her teens she worked in the newspaper mailroom and then came to Columbia Falls once a week to pick up ads from businesses. Shay was one of four children. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a mainline conductor for the Great Northern Railway. In 1929 he got a transfer so he could drive the Galloping Goose — a passenger train — from Columbia Falls to Kalispell everyday.

Shay graduated from Flathead High School in 1946 and her uncle, John O’Connell, was mayor of Columbia Falls at the time. Shay was visiting her uncle and Ruder walked in one day that same year and said he was starting a newspaper in Columbia Falls.

“He had egg on his tie,” Shay recalled.

Ruder knew she worked for the Kalispell paper and hired her shortly thereafter.

“I was his first and only news employee,” she said.

They sat and typed stories in desks close to each other. Both talked to themselves as they wrote and people often thought they were talking to each other, which wasn’t the case. Ruder hated being interrupted.

“If he was typing, you left him alone,” she said. “Ruder was a good name for him.”

Both of their writing styles were clipped. They left articles like the word “the” out of their sentences to save space. And they were protective of their news and their sources.

She wrote a column of local news called “Heard Around the Town Square,” which debuted with the newspaper’s first edition Aug. 8, 1946. The job entailed much, much more, though, than simply writing about who had entertained guests or traveled afar.

“I was a reporter, ad salesman, bookkeeper and I handled subscriptions,” she noted in a 2013 interview with the Daily Inter Lake.

With a shorthand speed of 125 words a minute, she quickly became Ruder’s right-hand assistant. It allowed Ruder time to photograph Glacier National Park and events throughout the Columbia Falls community.

“Mel mostly worked nights and weekends in the office,” Shay recalled. “I’m probably the only person who ever argued with Mel. You couldn’t work for him without being a perfectionist.”

A crucial part of her job was soothing things over with newspaper customers who’d been ruffled by Ruder’s notoriously prickly personality.

She married Al Shay in 1947 and she had six children: Gail, Janet, Howard, Laurie, Tim and Becky. There was a 20-year span between the oldest and youngest and when Becky was born, Shay, who had a wry sense of humor, quipped that she “was having her own grandchild.”

But in the mid-1970s her life took an abrupt turn when her husband left her for another woman.

Shay still had children to feed and the newspaper business didn’t make ends meet. So she quit.

“I never told Ruder why,” she said.

Ruder would later say that letting her go was the worst thing he ever did. Shay got a better-paying job as a receptionist for Dr. Robert Cotner’s dental office. Later she was a clerk/typist and nurse’s aide at the Montana Veterans Home. During World War II she had been a Girl Scout and had served as a nurse’s aide at Kalispell General Hospital. (Incidentally, she also wrote troop news for her Girl Scout troop in grade school, an early hint at her vocation for writing.)

In 1978 she changed jobs again, finding employment at the Columbia Falls liquor store. When the store manager retired, she ran the store.

She never strayed far from writing, though, and eventually resumed writing her column and offered up occasional feature stories for the Hungry Horse News.

Through the years Shay has been involved at some level in most of the town’s civic organizations.

She was president of the Girl Scout Association and a troop leader for Brownies, Campfire Girls and Girl Scouts, and also was a Cub Scout den mother and pack secretary.

When she was 25 she was the youngest-ever Worthy Matron for the Order of Eastern Star. She’s a founding member of the Methodist Church Ladies Aid in Columbia Falls.

Shay is a past president of the VFW Auxiliary and was president of the Columbia Falls Library Association when the library moved to City Hall decades ago. Her involvement with the Columbia Falls Lions Club and North Valley Senior Citizens also spanned decades.

A graveside service is planned at 3 p.m. Friday at Woodlawn Cemetery in Columbia Falls.

Lynnette Hintze of the Daily Inter Lake contributed to this story.