VAN'S IGA -- WHEN IT WAS TEEPLES IN BROWNING

Teeples, Browning, MT

When I first arrived in Browning in 1961 to teach high school English, my mother had “advanced” me enough money to rent an apartment chosen by the superintendent.  It was across from the Catholic church and the empty lot that became the Catholic elementary school.  Phil Ward told me he picked it because it had a bookcase.  Good thing: when Jimmy Fisher, the school engineer, unloaded from the school's red-and-black pickup the dozen whisky boxes of books I’d shipped and joked about how I surely must be the hardest drinker in the checkered history of Browning teachers.

Actually, I was the greenest and dumbest teacher hired that year.  But my worst characteristic was, as my future husband Bob Scriver put it, my head was always in the clouds.  So I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do to pay for food.  It hadn’t really registered that the first paycheck wasn’t issued until after we had taught a couple of weeks.  We were paid according to what was actually done, not what was prospective.  I had maybe ten bucks.

The Espresso Tipi was dormant at that time.

In those days there was a little grocery store called Teeples on the main highway through town, which was actually 2 and 89 on top of each other -- they merged at the Y and separated again on the west side of town.  Now the buildings have either been torn down or probably should be, except for the cement block ones.  Teeples is among the missing, I think.  In a few years it moved to what was then an amazing idea: a little strip mall on the other side of the double-highway that included H and J dimestore backed by a teacher (Jim Harding?) and a rancher (Fred Johnson).  Much remodeled, the store is still there, but now its name is Van’s.

The humble little Teeples was a friendly-seeming place.  I had no consciousness of the Browning Merc or the tribally owned Buttreys on the real main street that led down to the bridge across Willow Creek and continued in Government Square.  So I went in and asked for credit.

Dolly Teeple was confounded and conflicted.  A small, pretty brunette, she was a hard worker who succeeded on judgement:  was this big clumsy girl with red hair likely to stick as a teacher long enough to pay a running account?  Some left before Thanksgiving.  Clearly I was right out of college and not local, so it was hard to peg me class-wise.  Class in Browning was confusing because it was not about race but about “class” (meaning prosperity) which was the real distinction under white versus Indian.  Prosperous Indians were considered “white.”  There was no category for white poor people, but teachers had to be pulling down a salary.  My contract was for $3450.  In fact, I had more discretionary money in those days than ever after, mostly because I had no car, no phone -- just a lot of books.

Dolly let me charge groceries, writing them in the wirebound stenographer’s notebook under the counter.  By the time I could pay, I often used “counter checks” which were on a pad at the checkout.  You wrote in the name of the bank, then the rest.  If you paid cash, it was in silver dollars.  The clerk was usually Mary Flammond, one of those gentle, cheerful older women who sees everything but exercises total discretion.  

Her son, Albert, was one of the best police chiefs of the Town of Browning’s independent police force, later subsumed into the tribal police in spite of major protests.  It had been organized after WWII when returning veterans brought back the inevitable trauma, alcoholism, and killing skills.  More tribal people than any other demographic had volunteered to fight, performed honorably, and came back to find not just that their world had changed, but that they had seen the larger world and expected respect they weren’t getting.  When I read through all the back issues of the Glacier Reporter in preparation for writing “Bronze Inside and Out,” the biographical memoir about Bob Scriver, after the war there were suddenly big ads for whiskey saying,  “Real men drink this!” and showing upperclass Englishmen.

But even after Teeples became an IGA store, they remained local until -- was it Dolly or her daughter? -- marriage to Paul Vander Jagt which led to an explosion of IGA stores all over Montana.  Today the “principal” is Leannette Vanderjagt, but I’ve lost track of how the generations have developed.  I just remember that we thought Paul was a handsome man who deserved an elegant and worthy wife.

Restocking

This was not a “white” store though the really old-time people mostly shopped at the Browning Merc, where the granddaughter of the founder, Laurel Scriver, eventually was shocked to find the unpaid accounts of some people dated back to the Thirties.

I was in what I still called “Teeples” when I was approached by one of the oldtimers, a large alcoholic full-blood who tried to live a life that helped others though his thinking was fairly simple.  He knew me because he was a regular customer of Bob’s court, always for public drunkenness, and I acted as an informal bailiff for the brisk hearings at the shop every morning.  

In the store he was near tears when he came up to me.  “Would you look at my head?” he asked.  Well, okay, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.  “Do I have cooties?”  It turned out that some mean girls had mocked him and accused him of having head lice.  I couldn’t see any, but I have to admit I didn’t look very hard.  Anyway, I told him no cooties.

He was enormously grateful and to give me the only thing he had to give, he began a blessing prayer in Blackfeet -- I mean, “Siksika.”  He passed his hands over and around me, singing and chanting, making a kind of envelope in the air.  Then I was the one near tears.  He went off, satisfied, and I stood there next to the meat counter -- loaded with cheap meat meant to be boiled the way bison meat has been prepared for millennia.  So that’s part of my association with Teeples that became Van’s and is now being closed in Great Falls.

I will miss this store the Vander Jagt’s bought in 1997.  It had the lowest prices, the friendliest clerks, and stocked the shelves with things I eat.  I once found a whole bin of pimento neufchatel and bought two dozen of the little jars with tin lids because it’s rarely on the shelves anywhere else and it’s my fav thing to put on celery stalks.

I won’t close with any cliches, except that time teaches us to enjoy what we’ve got, which is only ever the present.  

The Great Falls Van's

From the Internet.

Local Since 1997!

The Vander Jagt family purchased this store in 1997. The Vander Jagt family owns stores in Montana: in Browning, Great Falls (2), Bozeman, Billings and Forsyth. Van's Thriftway is part of Associated Food Stores retail owned wholesaler that operates distribution centers in Helena, Billings and Salt Lake City.

Paula Vander Jagt won the 2011 Kay McKenna Community Service award for volunteer work and donations to community non-profit groups! Paula is a great representation of the high standards we hold.