Episode 19 - The Porter Sisters

Welcome to Mining City Reflections. In this third part of our series, we reflect on the oral histories of women currently living in Butte. I’m your host Marian Jensen.

In this edition we’ll hear from Dianna and Joan Porter, whose oral history was taken in 2018 by Archives Director, Ellen Crain.

Every mining town has more than its fair share of widows, and Butte has not been different. To see how these women left their mark, take a look at their children. The Porter sisters’ oral history is filled with stories about how their widowed mother helped to shape their lives. Well-educated and well-traveled, the Porters tell their story with good humor and aplomb— recounting adventures that took them far and wide but eventually brought them full circle back to Butte.

Dianna and Joan, the daughters of Josephine “Josie” Sullivan and Harold Porter lived in St. Mary’s parish. Josie, the cheerful daughter of Irish immigrants from County Cork, whose father owned The Good Old Summer Time Bar, enjoyed life. Dianna’s friend said: ‘your mother doesn’t drink but she knows every bartender.’

Harold, a mining engineer who graduated from the University of North Dakota, died at the age of 49 of a heart attack, leaving his wife with three small children.

“She was from Butte and he was originally from Mandan, North Dakota and came out here looking for work. Then they met and so, we grew up in Muckerville which was one of the five Irish neighborhoods up on the hill. We lived in the same house that my mother grew up in and it had originally been a boarding house that her mother ran. So we all just kept living in the same three story house on Main Street growing up. Across the street from the school, next door to a saloon, on top of a tunnel, a rail tunnel…”

Dianna came along in 1942. While the sisters were seven years apart, their early years mirrored one another. Both attended St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary school down the street. When high school came along, both attended Butte Girls Central, with Joan paving the way for Dianna in the new school. Their Catholic education had a lasting impact.

“Well I always liked school, and I wanted to go to school before I was old enough to go to school. So I always looked forward to going to school, it was never a problem for me, I always enjoyed it. The influences that I had must be that I really liked learning, cause I keep doing it. Even now at this age I keep going on taking courses, reading, following up on things. It must have just been a interest in learning that I got mostly from St. Mary”

“The devotion of the family’s in St. Mary’s Parish was such that… the priests and the nuns were held with such high regard that we always did what they told us. I was a good little girl, I never bucked authority.”

When time for college came along, Joan followed the tradition in many Butte’s Irish families and entered the Sisters of Charity as a novitiate, and enrolled in St. Mary’s College of Leavenworth Kansas.

“It was run by the same sisters that taught at the high school and so that was viceroy much an influence about where they would go, and then there were scholarships sorts of things that were offered also. I remember thinking that I really wanted to go to Gonzaga and the first time I saw the price of tuition, I knew that I was not going to Gonzaga. But my mother was very supportive of the idea of my going to the convent and so I think that was part of… not the impetus but it helped. I kept saying that I wanted to stay home and work, and she would say no, no I think this is a better idea.”

I thought that was for college, when you didn’t want to go to college?”

Well I didn’t want to go to college either, because of that same reason.”

Working in secretarial and bookkeeping jobs as a widowed mother, college education was a financial challenge for Josie Porter. She took bold steps to provide for her children.

“It was so important to our mother, who was a single parent and was working, that she mortgaged the house so that we would be able to go to college. She paid that off and then she…”

Then she mortgaged the house for me to go to college.”

I was at St. Mary’s and could not tell you what I was going to do, so they were lined up, y’know for nursing or med tech or whatever. So there was sociology so I just got in that line because it seemed like something I would be interested in. So That’s how I got into sociology, and have never regretted it, I think it was just meant to be because it’s always been an interest and it really does permeate your whole view, even now. You always look at things from that perspective.”

Joan eventually got a Masters degree in social work in Washington DC and worked in clinical work at the prestigious Kennedy Child Studies Center Los Angeles.

“Then I was sent to Catholic University to get a degree in social work so that I could work at the Kennedy child studies center.”

She also got to attend the inauguration of President Kennedy.

“Really, the connections that the sisters had with different people was amazing. When we were in Washington, this sister had a brother, that brother had an uncle… and so as it turned out all three of us that were studying at that time were from Butte. So then we had all that connection in the senate office and in the house. I remember it was cold, it was cold that day, but we really had very good positions because we were from Butte. Honestly! All you had to do was say you were from Butte and besides being a nun that was an entree into a lot of things.”

Meanwhile, Dianna graduated from College in 1964 also in sociology and would work for Vista in Wyoming and then landed in Helena in Catholic Charities in adoption. Her inspiration was a sister at the college.

“Same sister, she was a very strong person, she’s from Montana. Sister Francis Theresa, very strong. Taught sociology and very much into social justice also. She had a tremendous influence on me. It was while I was in college that I got involved in civil rights and participated in the NAACP, I went to a regional conference and also a national conference in D.C. and also coordinated a program for bringing whites together with blacks within the community of Leavenworth. It was essentially for whites to understand what it feels like to be discriminated against or how you feel in certain circumstances. So we expanded that beyond the students meeting with local African American couples to white couples meeting with African American couples. Then they took it over themselves but is started as a college project.

Well I joined something called Extension Volunteers, and it’s like VISTA Volunteers, the government supportive version of the Peace Corps but it was with the Catholic Church and it was called extension volunteers. So I thought with my involvement with civil rights they’d send me two the inner city of Chicago but instead they sent me to Wyoming… to set up a Diocesan CCD office. That’s Catholic Education for children that go to public schools, so for three years I was working mostly in adoptions, traveling gate state and working with unwed mothers and placing babies.”

In 1967Joan returned to St. Mary’s College to teach sociology, but eventually left the order after nine years. She moved to Ireland to work in the country’s first drug treatment program.

“Then it was from there that I decided to leave, so I went to Ireland and I worked in Ireland for almost two years in a drug treatment center. They actually didn’t have a drug treatment center I had to do a… you couldn’t call it a study, but to see if they really had a problem because they really didn’t want to fund a program if they didn’t need it. So they decided that they did need it and so I was the coordinator for the program. I lived with the family of a friend and they had a family hotel so I worked in the hotel. When I decided to stay in Ireland I wanted to stay ion Cork City but I couldn’t get work there so I worked in Dublin at Jervis Street Hospital. I really just got in just because they needed somebody, and having a background in the clinical work at Kennedy they let me stay. I didn’t even know it was a problem until later.”

In 1970 Joan returned to Butte to tend their ailing mother and eventually established a career in Social Work teaching, first at Warm Springs and then at Montana State University where she taught sociology and oversaw the University’s social work internship program.

“Really an eye opener y’know that I worked on a ward where men had been on the ward since before I was born. That was a time when the population was just overcrowded and so I was there for a year and then this person that had hired me for Catholic charities he was then the head of the social work department at Bozeman and he told me there was an opening for someone to teach at the sociology department art MSU. I got that job and I was there for seven years. That first year at the University I thought y’know this isn’t much different than Warm Springs… It was all ion the political things that go into a university, I just didn’t know. I thought these were all intellectuals that would handle everything very easily, but it was always a drama going on in the university.”

Dianna also returned to Butte to work for Model Cities and set up a counseling program, a forerunner of the local government’s health department’s family services.

“When Mother became ill I left Catholic Charities and then came back to Butte. Model cities had a number of programs but one of them was to set up a family services center for counseling services and also we set up a well baby clinic. We did actually some counseling for abortions but we were forbid by Montana law at that time to do it so we did some references at that time to Spokane. We were located in the old St. James Hospital, there was a halfway house there too so it was a little bit of everything. They were really utilizing the St. James building at that time.”

After the death of their mother, Dianna’s wanderlust reared its head. She traveled to England in hopes of finding work. When a work visa did not materialize after several months, she decided to travel, visiting all over Western Europe, the Soviet Union and even Central Asia.

“Oh Gosh, we went to the Central Asian part of the Soviet Union. We went to Tashkent, that was very exotic, it was my first experience where there was a Muslim population and the caravans and such, historically, went through those areas. It was very exotic. I stayed in student hostels a lot and with the Euro Pass I could just jump on a train and travel all of Europe.”

Finally returning to the States in her 30’s, Dianna’s new found interest in Gerontology led to graduate work and a Masters. She completed a field placement in Washington DC with the Senate Committee on Aging. She continued her career in gerontology in Houston, Texas. Keen to get another degree in every decade, Dianna went to law school and received a J.D. from the University of Houston Law School. With her old contacts in DC, Dianna developed her career working for the Senate Committee on Aging, the National Council on Aging, and the Alliance for Aging. She made a vital contribution to public policy that protected older Americans.

“I decided, since I liked the policy part, that it would help to have a law degree, so I went to law school while I was in Houston. After that I made my way back to Washington D.C.. Senator Melcher got to be chair of the Senate Aging Committee at that time because the Democrats won the senate again at that time so he hired me and I was with the Senate Aging Committee. One thing that I did which was very valuable, for me anyway, was that we had a coalition of what we called aging organizations in Washington, we called it the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations. We did a lot of things together as a united front on a variety of issues. We met once a month and the chair-ship of it rotated through the four of the larger organizations then I was the staff person when my organization chaired it. So it was a lot of coordinated work with other organizations, we met with each other we had special interest. Some were focused mostly on nursing homes, some were on housing, some were on services. We supported each other and worked together.”

Her experience working in aging led to an assignment in Macedonia where she set up the country’s pension program, and traveled to study aging in other countries including China, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Israel, and Greece.

“I was with the Senate Aging Committee, then the Older Women’s League, then I went to Macedonia for four years because it was a U.S. aid project to set up a private pension system with the government. I travelled quite a bit while I was there cause once you’re over there it’s quite easy to go to other countries. I did have a book from my experiences in Macedonia called Your Woman in Scopia I think it was. I wrote letters back to family and friends, it was probably like a forerunner to a blog, I just wrote about what I did and that kind of thing and it got circulated back here in the U.S. I was there during the Serbian bombing of Kosovo for instance.”

Back in Montana, Joan oversaw the Social Work internship program at Montana State, eventually doing doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh. Eventually she established a private practice in Butte and also part- time at the city’s community health center as a psychiatric social worker.

“I really enjoyed the students and I was in charge of taking all of the students to different places in Montana so that they could see different settings for social work. So we’d travel all over Montana, we’d take a van and drive these students all over. Then I was in charge of the internship program and did a lot of traveling with that too, visiting students at their internship. I really had to get a doctorate to do anything so I finally went to Pittsburg. But I really liked it, I enjoyed the community health center and I enjoyed private practice as well because you could meet all different kinds of people. People would always ask if I got depressed working with people with emotional problems and really, I have to say, they were really inspiring to me. How people can cope with situations and how they do cope and people’s stamina for being able to live out their life and solve their problems. I always found a lot of energy, in fact that was one of the harder things when I retired altogether was feeling the lack of energy because you would just get energy from that type of work and you learn a lot about yourself in this work, yes you do. Because you can see yourself in situations that people present to you, you can recall situations. But it really does help you to know yourself. And when students would ask me me what the best part of the work was, I would always tell them that it’s what you learn about yourself.”

Joan’s travels stateside took the form of cross country trips with long time companion, Jim ‘Harr’ Harrington, who had gotten a motorcycle in retirement.

“Our favorite place was Montana actually, we had loops that we would take. We went all over Montana. We had condo rentals in Colorado, New Mexico, we went through Idaho a couple times, Wyoming, North and South Dakota. But we just travelled that way, on the motorcycle. It gives you another view of people and towns, it’s so interesting. It made me appreciate Montana and the people you would meet, it was not difficult meeting people in Montana because people kinda take you as you are. Even in all your leathers, they take you as you are.”

Dianna decided she needed one more degree and enrolled at the London School of Economics where she received a diploma via distance learning while still living in Macedonia.

“I just thought it was a neat thing to get. And I went back for the graduation where they had the little trip corner hats and gowns, you curtsy to the person giving you the diploma”

In 2003 after writing a book on gerontology and a travel journal about her time in Macedonia and Bosnia where she witnessed the Serbian bombings, Dianna finally retired to Butte in 2003. Neither of the sisters ever married. Their candid attitude about the single life developed in Butte where they remember not only their mother but other women who either by choice or necessity made meaningful lives without benefit of matrimony.

“Since our father died so young and our mother had to go to work and she worked five and half days a week and Joan was so much older and my brother was so much older… I, uh, I pretty much grew up by myself. I had a dog from first grade until I was a freshman in college who was my companion. But I spent a lot of time alone and I think thats why I didn’t have to feel… I didn’t have a need to get married or to have a long term relationship that kept me in one place. It was just my own life and I just went where things took me.

I think too, with mother working, it really gave the impetus that you take care of yourself. I mean there was no sense that you had to be married to get taken care of. You could do it yourself. Even though it was difficult for her, she always seemed to like her work though.

She was social, and wherever she worked she got along well with coworkers and they were dedicated to each other. So she liked working too I think.

But we had other women in the family too that didn’t marry. Aunts that didn’t marry.

And widows, we had a lot of women role models essentially, who were not attached to any man.

Actually one time, when I was in Bozeman I met this one woman and she was from Butte and she grew up on the hill too. She told me, “Y’know, really there were so many families where the father was incapacitated or missing or had died that it really was not that unusual to just have a mother as a parent. That you weren’t that different in that regard.

Yeah, you couldn’t work if you were married at that time, I think that’s why mother had the job that she did because she was a widow. These different public jobs would tend to hire widows.

I think they used to say the courthouse was like a widows walk, because so many of the women were widows.”

In retirement the sisters have traveled together to Italy twice, then to Ireland and more recently the Canadian Rockies. Their travels have given them perspective on Butte, and they have seen many changes in their home town.

“There was a period in Butte’s history where people were coming in and buying and saying they were gonna do something with buildings, and then didn’t do anything with them. So you can feel agitated at that time, but it’s a strange kind of experience that you live in the present and in the past because you can walk down Park Street and just remember things like they used to be. It really is strange like your living in the past.. as to what this was, what you did, who was there, all of that y’know? So it gives you another reality besides being sad.

I do tours now at the Copper King Mansion and I always tell them about the Columbia Gardens and that still hurts, to think that we lost the Columbia Gardens.”

While the Porter sisters are planning their next trip, they have advice to give to other seniors.

“Keep learning, I guess.”