Distinctly Montana Magazine

77 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m and one that is difficult to get national ad- vertisers to come into…because there just aren't the people in Montana to make it a market." As it turned out for Craney, it was far easier to flip a switch and send a signal from one Montana town to another than it was to convince ad men and television executives why the the rest of the country should send its signal to Montana. THE GHOST IN THE GLASS Imagine a map of Montana at night in 1953, shortly before the era of broadcast television—the ridges of the Bitterroot Range sweeping down into the dark valley and rising again toward the Sapphires; no interstate freeways, just unlit squiggles of two-lane roads and gravel turnouts threading small towns together. Plac- es along the Hi-Line with names like Havre, Cut Bank, Malta, Glasgow—names that meant nothing to passengers aboard the Empire Builder as it chugged west from Chicago to Seattle while everyone slept. Imagine then, one evening in August, a blue blip appearing over Butte—a test signal lighting up one dark corner of the map. Soon, nearby Missoula and Helena receive the signal, and two more blips come on and join the first. Before long, the sig- nal is relayed to Great Falls and Billings, and the blips come faster, brighter, and get boosted all the way to Havre, Cut Bank, Malta, Glasgow—to all the towns dotting the Hi-Line until the dark map becomes a constellation of stars. Sud- denly, Montana begins to take on that eerie, bluish glow that only a television screen at night can cast—and huddled in living rooms across the state, families who have never been to plac- es like Pasadena or Pittsburgh are now joining the rest of America in its latest obsessions: I Love Lucy and The Lone Ranger. And this signal that lights up the dark map is much stranger and more intimate than any signal before it. At a time when ra- dio cowboy shows still aired, when newsboys still shouted from street corners, and cinemas had, for decades, projected sound and moving images onto a screen—what made television differ- ent was its illusion of presence, how immediate and intimate it made images of people and the rest of the world feel. You could listen to the radio in your kitchen or while driving your car and imagine the story, or read yesterday's news about some tragedy happening half a world away, or watch an old movie in a the- visitbutte.com (406) 723-3177 Best St. Patrick's Day Parade Emmet Burke and Ed Craney broadcasting KGIR's all night Saturday show around 1935

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