Retirement Won’t Take Joe Out Of Montana
The backroads Montana hamlet of Ismay, which changed its moniker to Joe two years ago to capitalize on the popularity of possibly the greatest quarterback who ever lived, is losing its namesake to retirement.
But officials of the upstart cow-town on the edge of nowhere are selling Joe Montana souvenirs like hotcakes since last Wednesday’s announcement that the grid great is giving up the game.
“We’ve gotten quite a flood of calls for T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and a variety of smaller momentos,” reports town clerk Wayne Rieger.
And the community can sure use the revenue. Several thousand bucks are still needed to reach the community’s goal.
Building a community center was the whole motivation behind Ismay’s fling at fame and fortune. It began two years ago with two Midwest radio disc-jockeys dreaming up the name change as a way to promote the legendary signal caller’s move from San Francisco to Kansas City.
Since then, Joe Montana and the Chiefs have taken a couple of unsuccessful cracks at going to the Super Bowl. And the community that adopted him has netted about $70,000 from sales of paraphernalia playing up the super-hero’s name.
Proceeds all go to the project.
To plug sales, he and mayor Gene Nemitz have been busy responding to phone interviews with the media in the San Francisco Bay area and in Kansas City since last week’s big news.
“We’ve still got induction into the Football Hall of Fame to look foward to,” notes Rieger. “That’ll be sometime down the road.”
Where will the piggyback ride end?
“Who knows?” says Rieger. “This guy has performed well for us.”
Until the answer is clear, Montana’s smallest incorporated community - population 23 - will keep its borrowed name.
“For now,” says Rieger, “our 800 number just keeps right on ringing.” The number to call is 1-800-Help Joe.
As some readers may recall, Ismay/Joe is my wife’s home town.
Meantime, officials in my old stomping grounds are hell bent on running the community’s foremost cultural and visitor attraction out of town.
Instead of doing all they can to keep the Festival at Sandpoint in Sandpoint, the City Council voted 5-1 last Monday to toss the widely acclaimed musical celebration out of the football stadium it calls home three weeks each summer.
Those weeks are among the busiest of the entire season for Sandpoint merchants, restaurants, and lodging establishments.
But members of a neighborhood group upset by noise and traffic and crowds of concert-goers during the festival’s brief run at Memorial Field are threatening to sue the city. And a contingent of misguided sports fans are backing the play of a disgruntled minority.
Festival oganizers say they’d like to stay in the Sandpoint area but will consider sites in other cities.
It’s impossible to imagine a more perfect setting for a summer concert than under the stars out in this old stadium beside beautiful Lake Pend Oreille on a July night. Nothing can compare.
What a waste it would be if the community can’t be persuaded to perpetuate this rare combination.
And finally, here in Washington, Senate Democratic do-gooders have gutted a House Republican bill that would have stripped state prisoners of luxuries, forced them to start working or go to school, and cut prison staff by one-fifth.
“We cannot even require an inmate to work,” said Rep. Ida Ballasiotes, sponsor of the GOP bill, “and I think that is absurd.”
Says Ballasiotes, “Our corrections systems spends $33 million in one year on prisoner health. Corrections is this state’s third major budget division, after education and welfare.”
What makes this even more distressing, says the Mount Vernon legislator, who chairs the Corrections Committee, is that 1 of 10 in the state’s prison population of 11,000 isn’t even from this country.
Figures supplied by the Washington Corrections Department show 13 percent of state prisoners are illegal aliens. They cost Washington citizens $32 million a year to incarcerate and support. And 70 percent are drug pushers.
Dandy.
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