Centennial Mania

Matt Unrau

When you hear the number 100 you think a lot of different things. 100 yards in a football field. 100 pennies in a dollar. Or even 100 sober people at your average Montana Grizzly football game, give or take a few dozen.

But, after this weekend of meeting and chatting with a dozen or so members of the Paradise United Methodist Church, I have 100 years on my brain.

This is the fourth centennial or bicentennial celebration that I have heard of or reported on in Sanders and Mineral County since the Noxon Centennial in July.

Now all that’s running through my mind, is that Western Montana must have been buzzing in 1909.

Not only did our pioneering forefathers have time to build the church in Paradise, but they also went ahead and incorporated the town of Noxon and celebrate the centennial of David Thompson coming through the area(this coincidence alone makes my head spin.)

Then for good measure you take the next year in 1910 and the St. Regis school is up and running and oh yeah, the big fire comes through and torches all of Western Montana including Noxon during their 1-year anniversary.

Before moving to Plains the closest I had ever come to grasping the idea of 100 years is when I celebrated the grandmother’s 100th birthday in 2007. I remember it vividly. It was when I was just starting a lot of my photography classes at UM and halfway through blowing out her candles my grandmother turned to my aunt very annoyed and said “who is that taking all of the pictures”(I quickly ducked behind my cousins and put the camera away for the rest of the night).

The only other time I’ve gotten to experience anything to do with the number 100 is when I saw a $100 bill. It was pretty neat. It was on TV. Although I have seen 100 bolivares, the currency in Venezuela, I can’t remember quite how much that’s worth, but I think it was around two or three bucks.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is how the previous generations set a high standard and now the buck has been passed to us to start new future centennial celebrations.

This is also borderline depressing for me to think about, because now I’m wondering “what have I done of significance this year.” The only thing I’m coming up with right now is that when I was jobless for the first part of the year I lived at my parent’s house for a month and set every conceivable record on Mario Cart for Nintendo 64.

Other than that, I got a career for the first time in my life. Now if I only work until I’m 123, I will have something truly memorable to celebrate.

If you have any pioneering you’ve done this year, whether serious or hilarious I would love to hear about it. Shoot me an email at editor@VP-MI.com.