'Shorty' Stockard returns to call Kalispell home once again

William “Shorty” Stockard seems surprised when one marvels at his encyclopedic recall of names and dates involving the black community in Kalispell’s earlier decades.

No big deal, he insists. “I was there,” Stockard points out. And many of the black residents who called the Flathead Valley home were related in some way to Stockard. His mother Alice was Howard Gibbs’ sister. Howard ran a shoe-shine parlor on Main Street in Kalispell for decades.

Stockard, who moved back to Kalispell five years ago, said black families throughout Montana gathered every summer for an annual picnic, congregating in a different place each year. Picnics were in Miles City, Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Butte and a couple were staged in Kalispell.

“Everybody knew everybody,” he said about the black community. “The picnics lasted until everyone left.”

Through the years most of the offspring from local black families moved to bigger cities such as Seattle, where opportunities for education and employment awaited.

Stockard, 71, retired from a 35-year career as a technician with Xerox Corp., first in Seattle and later in upstate New York. He moved back to his hometown of Kalispell in 2012, shortly after his retirement, accompanied by wife Jeanne, who also has taken an active role in documenting and preserving Stockard’s family history.

Stockard’s grandparents, John “Jack” Wesley Thompson and Clemmie Taylor Gibbs Thompson, were influential in his life. As the story goes, enterprising Jack was involved in “running booze” in Devils Lake, North Dakota, during Prohibition, and the family snuck away to the Flathead Valley in the middle of the night as authorities prepared to close in.

Despite Grandpa Thompson’s questionable dealings in Devils Lake, he and Grandma Thompson always stressed the value of a good education. It was advice Stockard and many of his family members took seriously. The Gibbs and Thompson families produced a number of nurses, engineers and other professionals.

Stockard earned a doctorate in meteorology simply because he took an interest in the subject.

“I didn’t really do anything with it,” he said about his Ph.D. “I just had the interest.”

Added Jeanne with a smile: “We do have two weather stations in the yard, though.”

Stockard graduated from Flathead County High School in 1964 and was recognized for his dedication to managing the Braves football team. In 1962, Inter Lake reporter Burl Lyons — who became the newspaper publisher a year later — featured Stockard in his column, saying “you can’t overlook those hustling Flathead team managers who have a host of important duties. The veteran manager is Bill (Shorty) Stockard who Coach Russ Ritter calls ‘my assistant coach.’”

A photograph of the team managers in a September 1963 edition of the Inter Lake shows Stockard as one of the faithful team managers, whom the newspaper noted “are the unsung heroes of high school football teams.”

At a Flathead awards assembly Stockard was given a special award for serving as manager of all sports during his four years of high school, the Inter Lake noted in May 1964. He officiated sports games during high school and afterward while a student in cultural studies at the University of Washington.

Stockard has a propensity for fixing things, home-grown skills that helped launch his career as a specialist with Xerox. He started out fixing machines and ended up in the corporation’s research and development unit in Rochester, New York.

He taught electronics and small engines at a technical school in New York.

During his school days in Kalispell, Stockard said he got along well with peers, except for a lone bully who did his best to make life miserable for Stockard.

“I had trouble with one guy, a bully,” he recalled. “We had to go by his place every day and every day he chased me.”

Stockard said the neighborhood bully got his comeuppance.

“I took care of him with a 2-by-4. I didn’t put up with name-calling,” he said.

Getting along in life as a minority in a small town has a lot to do with personality, “and how you deal” with situations, Stockard said. He dearly wanted to get a part-time job at Woolworth’s and was qualified for the position, but the job went to someone else, a white person with no qualifications.

In Stockard’s mind it wasn’t a case of prejudice, but rather was a choice, perhaps even a subtle decision the Woolworth’s manager made.

Stockard had one summer job that was a real plum, though. He manned the lookout tower on Red Plume Mountain in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and remembers playing chess over the radio with other fire tower attendants in the area.

These days Stockard is enjoying the quiet life of rural living at his home outside of Kalispell. He’s reconnected with a couple of old friends.

He still putters with motors and engines. He and Jeanne, who also appreciates classic cars, are the proud owner of three vintage vehicles, a 1969 Buick Electra 225, plus a 1970 Electra convertible and hard-top.

Stockard also has been a lifelong lover of motorcycles, once completing the 10,858-mile “Four Corners Ride,” traveling to Washington, California, Florida and Maine on his Goldwing cycle.

There have been plenty of other accomplishments in Stockard’s life. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, but declines to talk about that chapter of his life. His wife pointed out he was actively involved in Boy Scouts in a number of capacities, something else he shrugs off as not that important. He’d rather talk about early-day calculators or climate change, ever a big-picture thinker who found his footing amid small-town life in Kalispell.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.