Mick Holien, the late former Griz play-by-play announcer, wore a lot of hats in his three-plus decades in Missoula and Polson, but my earliest memory of him is at a Washington-Grizzly Stadium that was less than half the size it is now.

I’m making up a name to protect the innocent here, but what I remember was: “Paging the parents of 7-year-old Tommy Thompson… YOU ARE LOST.”

The first game at Wa-Griz was on Oct. 18, 1986. There were grass berms where the end zone seats are now. The Bengals’ Merrill Hoge, destined for the Pittsburgh Steelers and ESPN, hit his knee on an exposed sprinkler head and fumbled for a critical turnover.

I was in the press box, as a college senior in Journalism. Holien was on the P.A. system, calling out yards gained and downs and wayward parents.

Holien died this past Friday from complications with multiple sclerosis — he was diagnosed with the degenerative disease in early 2015. In May or June of 2017 I had my last interaction with him, after both of us attended a memorial for trivia master and Flathead High graduate Chris Walterskirchen.

Holien had a scooter to help him get around by then; I helped him load it back into his pickup before he headed back to Polson.

He’d been forced into what was a semi-retirement by the University of Montana, which didn’t renew his contract after 2015-16. You hope when you retire you get some decades to ease back in that bubba chair, but Holien, who wasn’t in superb health before the MS diagnosis, only had a few years to enjoy his boat at Flathead Lake.

Beyond that there was a certain air of mystery about the man. Profiles in the Missoulian mentioned jobs as a bowling columnist at the Spokesman-Review and as a “clubbie” for the Spokane minor league baseball team.

He also mentioned military service in another article, which had me thinking: “What?” How I had missed that. Turns out, according to his obituary that came out Wednesday, he enlisted in the Navy at 17; after his discharge he earned a Journalism degree from Eastern Washington while working at the Spokesman.

But if my math is correct he was 40 and married for 12 years when he arrived in Missoula in 1984. There are gaps. We know he spent much of that time building an extensive collection of autographs and memorabilia, and that he helped raise a son and a daughter, and that he switched from radio to the Missoulian reporter in 1992 —å just a few months before UM approached him to broadcast football and men’s basketball.

It’s a pretty good picture of the man.

And there’s the voice: There’s a reason he had “GRIZVOX” on his license plate.

In 1991 I started a job at the Billings Gazette but kept tabs on the Grizzlies from afar. It was on Nov. 13, 1993, that I walked the sidelines in Sidney and watched the Eagles win a seventh straight State A football crown, beating Miles City.

I remember the game a little — Sidney had two cannons going, one for TDs and one for PATs and I was a little shell-shocked by the end — and what happened when I got in my car more.