Distinctly Montana Magazine

56 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 - 2 0 2 6 with Kittredge, too, who imparted the wisdom that the piece is not done until you have deleted your favorite line. Reid was something of an outlier in his cohort. When he start- ed graduate school, he had been married to Gayle for several years. They had a young daughter. He was older than many of his classmates and not as "free or loose." He didn't have time to socialize. He managed the World Theater, an old-time sin- gle-screen movie house near campus. It's the building on South Higgins that collapsed under the snow in 2017. These days, Reid golfs some. He plays bagpipes in Missoula's Celtic Dragon Pipe Band. He works on his yard and house, reads broadly, spends time with Gayle and a young labradoodle, and has coffee fairly often with fellow writer and Missoulian Jon Jackson. His retired lifestyle is hard- earned. After a devoted public safe- ty career, working pa- trol, as a detective, a sergeant in crime analysis, as ad- ministrative c a p t a i n , then as Missoula County's director of Disaster and Emergency Services, when Reid retired, he retired. TV shows fail to capture how exhausted detectives are all the time, he says. When a show depicts evidence collection, for in- stance, "they'll have all these technicians that do all of this work, a team, and they'll have 10 people working for them. Well, in the '80s, there would be two of us that did all that work." Reid was also a founding member of Missoula's hostage nego- tiation and crisis team, formed in 1982. A 1996 Missoulian arti- cle details a harrowing 77-hour standoff between law enforce- ment and a man who, violating an order of protection, invaded the home of his estranged wife and daughter with a gun, knife, leather straps, chains, and padlocks. Reid was the city's senior hostage negotiator at the time and led the negotiation effort. Before joining the Missoula Police Department, he completed his first novel, the coming-of-age story Max Holly, and attempt- ed to sell life insurance. This sales position held no enchant- ment for him. He needed a new job. Law enforcement seemed interesting enough. "I could get someone to confess," Reid says, "but I couldn't sell anyone life insurance." Reid describes law enforcement as a blue-collar job, in a good way, when he started in the early '80s as a patrol officer. Many don't realize that the job is often routine and boring. Reid says when he'd work the county fair, he'd field enough of the same questions from kids to hang a sign around his neck that said, "It's a .357. I've never shot anyone. The bathroom is that way." Bad things do happen on the job, of course, but it can be fun. Comical encounters abound. Many people worry about the physical danger, but he believes the greatest threat to patrol offi- cers "is all those hours that you spend alone in a car, in the mid- dle of the night, riding around brooding over things. You can THERE CAN'T BE ANOTHER MORGUE IN THE WORLD THAT HAS A VIEW LIKE THIS, HE THOUGHT ONCE. JENNY HINES

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