Living

More than vegetables and flowers grow in Missoula's newest neighborhood garden. In what once was a barren, scraggly lot between the Joseph Residence - which serves Missoula's homeless families - and Blessed Trinity Catholic Church near Eaton Street, now other things are taking root. With the help of Garden City Harvest, this once weedy plot of church land has become a place where community happens and a sense of well-being deepens.

Vince Werner celebrated his 65th wedding anniversary on Saturday to the 1940s stylings of the Silk Stockings jazz quartet. On Monday, he was serenaded by another old favorite: the four engines of a B-17 bomber. Werner was part of the welcoming committee as the restored “Sentimental Journey” taxied up to the Museum of Mountain Flying after a one-hour hop from Great Falls. And he was one of the first people to take a spin around Missoula in his old navigator's seat in the nose cone. “I can't say too much about the ‘Flying Boxcar' - the B-24,” the retired Missoula architect said. “But we loved the B-17. We could fly 4,000 feet higher and we could see the fighters coming. There was great visibility from that airplane.”

Three Native American teenagers beat hand drums while singing a prayer Monday during the groundbreaking ceremony for a tobacco garden, where ingredients for traditional tobacco will be grown as a way to reduce the number of Native youths who smoke commercial tobacco. The Missoula Indian Center, an organization that offers health care and a chemical dependency program for Native Americans, is building a garden to educate its community and youth about the sacred role of traditional tobacco, said Dana Kingfisher of the center's Alcohol Substance and Tobacco Abuse Prevention program. “It's like a religion to our people,” Kingfisher said.

SKILLYVILLE - If the wind’s just right, you can almost hear the strains of Bob Skillicorn’s mandolin. Say it’s a soft June morning, like one last week or 70 years ago, when Skillicorn, his wife Myrtle and their brood of eight kids practiced in these hills east of Salmon Lake for Saturday night gigs at Holland Lake Lodge, at Ovando, at Seeley or Salmon Lake. If it’s the bump-ditty of a banjo that drifts across the meadow, it must be from the nimble fingers of Warren, who entertained at the nearby Kozy Korner Steakhouse up to his death four years ago at the age of 97.

Meet Julie Moore, who got western Montana's best birthday present of the week RONAN - Julie Moore was pretty sure her 50th birthday was going to slip by with little fanfare. Her son Bill, an X-ray technician at Community Medical Center in Missoula, was scheduled to work, and her daughter, Jeri Rice, lives far away in Fayetteville, Ark., with husband Steve. Besides, Julie and her husband Willard had been busy planning another celebration, the 30th anniversary of their purchase of Willard's, their downtown bar, for Friday. That was tempered by the death of a dear friend, longtime Ronan teacher William “Pat” Williams; the Moores served as ushers at his funeral last Saturday morning, then joined others at the Mission Mountain Country Club to hit golf balls on Williams' favorite hole in his memory.

This is a spring to celebrate if you love bluebirds. Kathy Heffernan's dedicated effort to help restore Montana's fragile bluebird population is working, one clutch at a time in Missoula's Rattlesnake Valley. As of Sunday, 30 healthy babies and 16 eggs were counted during the Missoula schoolteacher's weekly inspection of 17 bluebird houses she monitors on Waterworks Hill. Later in the week, Heffernan will know who is occupying the other 14 houses she oversees in the North Hills.

By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian

Watch a video report from Tuesday's hearing on the nation's health care woes

Steve McArthur is a management consultant.

Read self-employed.

That means he has to buy his own insurance, a Blue Cross Blue Shield policy that costs him $584 a month and carries a $10,000 deductible.

On Tuesday morning, he listened for a long time as Missoulians discussed health care reform at a listening session at St. Patrick Hospital sponsored by U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.

ELMO - Her name was Hanna Cini. She was 5 years old when she had her dream.

It came to her after Hanna and her mother, Robin, had seen something disturbing on television about children in India being forced into slave labor.

When Robin tucked little Hanna into bed in their home in Columbia Falls that night, they prayed for the children of the world.

By ALLISON MAIER for the Missoulian

When talking about her son, Bambi Schreckendgust often repeats something one of his doctors said: “For him to be alive now, he has a mission in life.”

Two-year-old Tyler Schreckendgust fell out of a third-story window last August while at a baby-sitter's house. In the weeks following the accident, he suffered a seizure and a stroke that left the entire left side of his brain dead. A little over a month later, he developed an abscess on that same side of his brain.

PABLO - After sprinkling iron filings over the curved shape of a World War II radar magnet, 8-year-old Olivia Perez strategically added a few lug nuts, some bolts and screws, then stepped back to admire her handiwork. In just a few moments the humble pile of scrap metal was transformed into an alien sea beast. “These materials make great, scary creatures,” Perez said as she gazed at the spiky-haired monster she designed on Sunday during the first day of the University of Montana's two-day spectrUM Discovery Area exhibit at Salish Kootenai College.