Distinctly Montana Magazine

76 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 5 MONTANA'S DON DRAPER In photographs dating from the 1940s and 1950s archived by the Montana Historical So- ciety, Craney appears very much the business- man and salesman of his era. He has on a starch- white shirt underneath a double-breasted suit, a tie knotted to his throat; wire-rimmed glass- es appear snug against his face, through eyes half-squinting, as though he's constantly sizing up others; his hair perfectly parted and gelled solid to one side, without a strand out of place. The rest of Craney—in both style and substance of his era—is easy for us to imagine because this image of Craney is drawn from the same me- dium, television, that he brought to Montana. Someone like Don Draper, maybe, of Mad Men. Edmund "Ed" Craney was born on February 19, 1905 in Spo- kane, Washington to a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked for the railroad. Even at an early age, Craney was ob- sessed by broadcast radio. He built Spokane's first radio trans- mitter and went live on October 18, 1922, creating the city's first radio station in the process. In Scott Parini's "Ed Craney: The Voice of Montana," Parini interviews Shag Miller, who called Craney a "superb" business- man, but also went on to describe Craney as something of an enigma who "would do anything for you, but also cut your heart out." According to Miller, even back when Craney was in radio, he had his own way of pulling in advertisers to fill out his pro- gramming slots. It wasn't unheard of for ad reps—the other Don Drapers of Craney's orbit—to come to client meetings at his of- fice and encounter a full spread of caviar, Danish hams, cheeses, and imported liquor. He would also send gifts to his important clients in big cities like Chicago and New York—copper jewelry and Flathead cherries, of course—to re- mind them, and the advertisers they worked for, of Craney's generosity that time they visited Montana. Subtlety wasn't part of Craney's playbook. But he also understood that Montana was a unique market for advertisers, whether in radio or television, as he recalled to an interviewer in 1977: "It is a high cost market M O N TA N A W O U L D F I N A L LY J O I N T H E M I L L I O N S OF OTHER LIVING ROOMS ACROSS AMERICA— AND IT WOULD NEVER LOOK THE SAME AGAIN Edmund "Ed" Craney

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