Growing up in Bigfork: Dockstader sisters remember Bigfork childhood

Monday morning Bigfork Community Center board Vice President JoLynn Yenne introduced the fourth speakers in the Growing up in Bigfork oral history series. The Dockstader sisters’ reputation made them a must-have in the series and Mary Sullivan and Maureen Hein laughed at the idea of their reputation.

Hein and Sullivan grew up in Bigfork, the daughters of James and Effie Dockstader.

Their grandfather was born in Columbia Falls and was the first sheriff of what is now Flathead County. Jim Dockstader was born in 1908 and he married their mother in 1936. The family lived in Somers, where Jim worked for the Somers Lumber Company before World War II took the family to Washington state, where he worked on the atomic bomb,

When the war was over the family returned to Bigfork where the Dockstaders got into agriculture businesses, eventually planting the first Christmas tree farm in Bigfork.

Hein recalled growing up on Electric Avenue in Bigfork, before Montana 35 skirted downtown and large trucks would travel through town, making the streets a bit more dangerous.

“How mom ever raised three of us kids safely I don’t know,” Hein said.

Their mother, Effie, was born in Nebraska and came to the Flathead with her parents in a model T. The family reclaimed an old homestead, and Effie’s father built a sawmill on their property and drove a school bus. Their mother was the oldest of her siblings, and when she passed in 2007 was the only one of her siblings left beside her youngest brother.

Effie went to Bigfork schools until the eighth grade. As there wasn’t a high school in Bigfork she would have to board in Kalispell for her secondary education. However, when she finished eighth grade her parents decided she wasn’t old enough to board and Effie spent another year at Bigfork’s school as a teacher’s aide.

“She was quite the teachers aide,” Sullivan said. She didn’t think the fire drills were realistic enough, so one time before a drill she took a smudge pot outside and lit some branches on fire, Sullivan said. There was smoke everywhere. Some students jumped out windows, and others ran home and didn’t return to school that day.

She went on to graduate from Flathead High School and then attended Sacred Heart School of Nursing in Spokane.

“It was unusual for someone from Bigfork to go to college,” Sullivan said. “Especially a girl.” So the town threw her a party.

Effie worked as a nurse professionally until she was married and began raising the three Dockstader children.

However, she still used her nursing skills often, tending to everyone in Bigfork.

“People referred to her as the QRU of Bigfork,” Sullivan said.

Though Sullivan tended to everyone in town, Hein and Sullivan said when it came to her own children, she would tell them to wait and see how they were the next day.

Hein recalled one of her biggest memories for her childhood, when she was four years old and severely broke her leg while helping pump water from a well on a cherry orchard. It was one of the only times as a child she saw a doctor. Sullivan said she didn’t go to a doctor until she was in her 20s and had her tonsils taken out.

Hein recalled the fun she had sitting outside their house on Electric Avenue, in an old wheel chair with her broken leg. People would come by and push the chair around or give her presents.

“Growing up on main street in Bigfork was great,” she said.

There was always someone on the street, she said, and in the summer the place to be was the dock on Bigfork Bay.

In the winter the bay would freeze over and they would ice skate on it, Hein said, but they also had some great spots for sledding.

An old car hood was their tool of choice for more winter fun.

“You could turn that car hood over and it made a great toboggan,” Hein said.

The hood could fit about 12 kids, and they would run it down Crane Mountain.

Sullivan also recalled sledding at Horseshoe bend.

“We’d get going so fast we’d fly across the road,” Sullivan said. One time she said, she got going so fast that she flew over the snow berm that usually stopped them and landed on the road below it, breaking her collarbone.

Hein recalled her first job at the Coffee Cup Café when she was 14, and then working at Bigfork Drug, and having 2-4 off every day.

“All you could do at that time was go swimming,” she said.

The bay was the place to be in the summer time, and people used to water ski on the bay. “The best part of the bay was you could show off,” Hein said.

The sisters recalled climbing up the water tower to paint their graduation year on it, and when the bridge on Montana 35 was built where the bay flows into Flathead Lake.

“I was the first girl to jump off that bridge, which is my claim to fame,” Sullivan said.

The sisters recalled how connected all the families were in Bigfork and important the school was to the town.

Hein and Sullivan hope that Bigfork remembers their parents for how much they cared about others.

Their mother would nurse the whole town and would never accept payment for her services, and their father was always worried about those who had less. He would open up a charge account at the grocery store that is now Papa’s Market in Woods Bay, for families who were hungry.

“Both of my parents always gave of themselves,” Hein said.