First woman to don green and gray in Glacier

Visitors to Glacier National Park today will see a lot of women wearing the green and gray uniforms of the National Park Service. But it wasn’t always that way. Women in uniformed positions were once a rarity in Glacier Park.

Nancy Jo (Smith) Hall was likely the first woman to ever wear a uniform in the Park — and it wasn’t as long ago as one might think.

Smith had worked about a year and a half in the Park’s landscape architect office. She had a natural gift for gab, and when the Park opened its new headquarters in 1963, Hall took a position as a receptionist at the front desk.

That’s when she donned a Glacier Park uniform, which included a cap, blouse and skirt. Hungry Horse News photographer and editor Mel Ruder came and took her picture.

“As far as I know, I was the first woman in uniform in Glacier,” she said in an interview last week.

Park spokeswoman Denise Germann confirmed that Hall was likely the first woman in uniform in the Park.

Hall noted that women worked in the Park prior to that, but they didn’t have posts where they would wear a uniform. Back then, rangers and naturalists wore uniforms, but many other employees didn’t.

“It was my 15 minutes of fame,” she said.

Hall was a wealth of information for visitors, even if her information was snared from the Park brochures she read.

“I never hiked, I never fished, but I could tell you a good story about it … I was just full of bull,” she said.

Today Hall lives in Great Falls. Half Chippewa, she grew up in Dixon and attended the Haskell Institute in Kansas, now the Haskell Indian Nations University. She graduated top of her class.

Her father, Dick, worked on the Glacier Park’s road crew for 16 years as the lead bulldozer operator plowing the Sun Road. Her brother, Joe Smith, lives in Columbia Falls. He worked at the aluminum plant for years and also owned a bakery.

Hall only stayed at Park headquarters for three months. She ended up marrying the telephone man, she explained. In the spring, her husband, Virgil, who worked for the phone company, had the job of reconnecting phones in private residences along Lake McDonald.

The phone business back then was a territorial affair, and the Kalispell operator wouldn’t answer Virgil’s test calls, so he got in the habit of calling Park headquarters to test the phones. Hall, as receptionist, answered all his calls and the two hit it off. They will have been married 49 years this September.

Hall went on to be a housewife and raised two children. At 70, she still visits Glacier Park at least a couple times a year. But she still doesn’t like to hike or fish. She just enjoys the views.

The family has a strong Park connection — many of her family members have had jobs at the West Glacier Mercantile at one point in their lives. The latest employee is her granddaughter, 19-year-old Emily Hall, who has taken a summer job at the restaurant.

Hall said she doesn’t know what happened to the uniform. She thinks she still might have the hat, but not likely the blouse and skirt.

“It got to be way too small,” she said. “I only weighed 90 pounds when I had that job.”