Grabbing a morning cup of joe

Ralph Ammondson spends many early mornings stopping in to get coffee at the Bulldog Saloon in downtown Whitefish. Many afternoons find him at the Nite Owl in Columbia Falls grabbing a cup of joe and chatting with old friends.

“Something that keeps me going is that I just get up and move around every day,” he said. “Every morning I force myself to get up.”

Ammondson, 90, was born in Decorah, Iowa. Before he was 2, his family moved to Fairfield, Montana, where he graduated from high school in 1944.

“I didn’t want to enlist in the infantry, so I tried to get in the Navy,” he said.

He tried to get into radar school, but failed the test. So he decided to wait until he was drafted. He entered the U.S. Army in 1945 and went to basic training in Texas.

“Just before my training ended they dropped the bombs and ended the war,” he recalled. “I attribute Harry Truman for saving my life. If we had had a ground invasion there would have been a lot more Americans killed.”

He met and married his wife Shirley in 1945. He served overseas in Japan before returning to Iowa and worked delivering milk.

After he was discharged from the Army they lived in Fairfield, where he served an apprenticeship in printing at the Fairfield Times newspaper in 1947.

When a job opened up at the Hungry Horse News, he applied and started running the press in 1956. He worked under the paper’s founder Mel Ruder. He worked there for 14 years during the time Ruder won the Pulitzer Prize for community service for his coverage of the Flood of 1964. Ammondson recalled that Ruder was a “hard worker and a perfectionist.”

Ammondson said the issue chronicling the flood was the only time he could recall printing two editions of a weekly paper in the same week. Both issues contained pictures from the flood.

“We printed 1,000 copies and then on Saturday we did a special edition with another 5,000 copies,” he said.

Eventually Ammondson realized he liked commercial printing rather than printing newspapers. In 1970, he and his wife moved to Missoula where he worked in the commercial printing department of the Missoulian. He ended up moving to Eugene, Oregon, where he worked in a larger commercial print shop.

“There was more variety in a small print shop,” he said. “I ended up in a bigger shop later where you were doing the same thing.”

Over the years, Ammondson became an excellent proofreader even though in school he didn’t enjoy English.

“Setting type I learned to spell,” he said. “I’d glance down at a column and take out the misspelled words. I liked math and science, but not English in school.”

Ammondson enjoyed fly fishing and Shirley learned too so she didn’t have to stay home when he went out.

“When I lived in Montana I did a lot of fly fishing and camping,” he said.

He fished west of Augusta, the North Fork of the Flathead and when he lived in Missoula he fished Fish Creek.

“I got hooked on fly fishing in my 20s,” he said. “Catching a fish with a fly you tied yourself that had me hooked.”

When he moved to Oregon he gave up fly fishing and eventually gave away his gear to his grandchildren.

His wife suffered from migraines and he became interested in massage as a way to help her. He went to massage school and became a licensed massage therapist in Oregon in the mid-1980s. So when he retired from printing, he went to work part-time doing chair massages. He found that he could help relieve people’s pain.

They returned to Montana in 1999 when Shirley was suffering from a neurological problem. She passed away in 2007.

In recent years, Ammondson spent time with companion Shirley Potter. Before she passed away this fall, they would go for car rides together and go to the Bulldog Saloon and Pin and Cue.

Ammondson is active in the Whitefish Community Center and in 2008 was selected as the center’s senior king for the Whitefish Winter Carnival. The Flathead County Agency on Aging honored him in 2014 for volunteering with the community center.

Ammondson speaks proudly about the accomplishments of his three children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. For his 90th birthday last month, family members came from all over the country to help him celebrate.