Episode 21 - Kitty Brilliant

Welcome to Mining City Reflections. I’m your host, Marian Jensen.

In this third installment of our series, we shift to the stories of women currently living in Butte. The Anaconda Mining Company ruled the lives of most of the families in the city in the 20th century until its closure in 1983. The women in this group of podcasts witnessed the once glorious mining city brought almost to its knees. We’ll hear how they survived and flourished.

In this episode we hear from Kitty Brilliant, whose oral history was taken in 2018 at the Butte Archives by Clark Grant, KBMF radio manager.

A product of Butte’s close-knit Catholic community, Kitty embraced the adversity that was common to mining families. Her story reflects a generation of Butte residents who left the city when their options dwindled along with the mining industry and the economy in general.

Clever and out-going, Kitty’s devotion to her home town, however, only grew as life circumstances would take her away from it. A performer at heart, her recollections are marked with humor and an eye for detail that you’d expect from someone who has never, literally, missed a beat.

“I started singing when I was four years old and never stopped.”

Born to Helen and ‘Jap” Cowan, Denise Katherine ‘Kitty’ Cowan was one of six children who grew up in their W. Woolman Street home in the Immaculate Conception parish on the Butte Hill.

Her mother, Helen ‘Dolly’ Harrington, the youngest of nine became the caretaker of her widowed mother who died while Helen was still in high school. Thanks to a parish family, who took her in, she graduated.

“She was really an incredibly bright woman, I mean she did crosswords in ink back as long as I can remember. I never saw her do them in a pencil. She played the piano by ear and could read music, she was really talented. But she was horribly shy, incredibly shy. She just couldn’t do it in front of people.”

Kitty’s father Ellis Jasper “Jap “ Cowan, who grew up in Butte, left after junior high school to work in the mine yard. He began work down in the mine as soon as he was of age, eventually becoming a shift boss. After a whirlwind courtship that ended in elopement , Dolly and ‘Jap’ raised their family on West Woolman Street in a great neighborhood.

“I think Butte was a terrific place to grow up. West Woolman, I know other people are gonna tell you their neighborhood was the best, but I’m going to tell you that you just couldn’t hold a candle to west Woolman. I mean we really did have… there was almost always something going on. We had kids who came from the HUB edition, first of all there was a nice combination of boys and girls. When we started in grade school at IC there were, when we graduated, there were forty eight kids but there were a lot of kids from the neighborhood that were in my class. So we get together and as one of my friends said to me one day we became a pack.”

One of Kitty’s favorite memories was of the Immaculate Conception Basketball tournament, where all the Catholic schools in Butte and Anaconda competed annually. The tournament took place in the Church’s now demolished parish hall. The venue also provided a stage for The Coquettes, the girls singing group that included Kitty as its lead singer. The group performed all over the city.

“The trio was Sheila, Sharon and Marilyn. And they had harmony… like you wouldn’t believe. They were good, and Marilyn and Pam sounded wonderful together, so I said how about if the six of us get together and we form this group.”

Kitty’s desire to leave Butte and see the world began innocently when she and the neighborhood kids discovered World Book Encyclopedia.

“One of my favorite things that we would do, this really sounds stupid, but we would sit and we would take a book out and look up a country or a city or something and we’d sit and we’d read about it and then we’d talk about it. So I became absolutely, how do I say it, driven to see these places. So my whole life I kept thinking that I gotta get outta Butte. I gotta get outta Butte.”

Kitty recalls that her father loved his job and had always loved mining, not that the Anaconda Mining Company reciprocated. In 1960, after thirty years working underground, the Company let him go.

“He would get to the mine, he’d always get there early, and he would go down and check his level making sure everything is… he’d check it all out to see what was going on. Then he’d come up and then he’d go down with the guys and that and he was the last person to leave his shift. He just was a very conscientious person. He’d walkabout the mines and talk about the people. He worked the Mountain Con; mile down he was the shift boss, he said he was one of the only people that could stand the heat down there cause it was so hot. Most of the people that actually worked under him were actually Mexicans and Chinese and he loved them, they were hard workers… He just loved, you could see that he just loved this job. And then unfortunately when he turned forty eight, which was when I was a junior in high school, the Anaconda Company in there great wisdom had given him his choice, he and several other men; they could start again at the bottom, they could take a $4000 cash settlement or they could retire on $150 a month and keep their benefits. I remember daddy and momma siting at the table on West Woolman Street talking about it. And I was old enough to sit down and listen to them try and make this decision. They decided he would retire because then he got his medical benefits, but if he got another job the amount of money would go down t $75 and he still had three children at home.”

Despite her parents’ initial objections, in 1960, Kitty decided, along with 10 other Butte Central seniors, to enter the Convent at St. Mary’s College in Leavenworth, Kansas.

“I really wanted to be a nun, I really thought that that’s what I should do. I had wonderful nuns in grade school, BVM’s. Pudge and Sharon both became BVM’s, we had ten people in our class that entered the convent that year. And I think as many boys entered the brothers and the priesthood. Sometimes it takes time to figure out why you are where you are when you’re there.”

Despite her initial motivation and what would become a strong, lifelong commitment to her faith, the convent was not the place for Kitty.

“So I went to the convent, I stayed three years and I became professed and then I thought… hmm… nope. This is not for me. And it took me a full year of sleepless nights, I used to sit in the bathroom on the floor because it was the only place where there was a light on. I read two or three of Dickens’ books and I read Carl Sandberg’s Lincoln. I didn’t sleep much, but I finally realized that this was not for me. I now what I’m about, I know that I’m doing the right thing.”

Kitty moved to Denver in 1964 where her parents had moved three years earlier and then in 1965, she moved to Washington, DC ready for new adventures.

“I spent three years really learning about myself, really realizing who I am.”

Kitty left the convent but not the church. In her time in Washington her spiritual devotion led her to meet her husband, David Brilliant, a seminary student who turned out to be leaving the order.

“We were talking after mass one day and I said to him, “When do you leave to go back to Florida?”

And he said, “Oh, next Tuesday.”

“Are you coming back?”

And he looked at me really funny and said, “Why do you ask?’

“I just have an instinct”

He said, “I haven’t told anyone but my confessor, but I have a job interview tomorrow for a teaching job at Bishop McNamara High School.”

David and Kitty were married in December that year, and moved to Colorado in 1972, teaching and working in the Colorado Springs school system and traveling in the summers. They stayed for 32 years, raising 2 sons and a daughter. The church remained a big part of the ex-nun and ex-seminary student’s life, particularly through music. They formed a Catholic Gospel music group , singing together for more than twenty years.

In retirement Kitty pursued her musical interest with the Opera Theater of the Rockies. There she helped in production and in a summer opera and classical vocal music symposium at Colorado College while David taught part time at community college.

Eventually Kitty felt the call of home.

“Colorado Springs had gone from being 150,000 including all the outlying communities to being probably 600,000.”

Intermittently returning for high school reunions, Kitty and her husband of more than 50 years returned permanently to Butte in 2004. True to form Kitty immediately became involved and helped with the Butte symphony, organizing her 45th high school reunion, and campaigning for the expansion of a community swimming pool she had wished she’d had when she was a kid.

“Susan Welch had gotten killed in a tragic bike accident, and so some of the board members came to me and asked if I would be willing to run the symphony. And I said that, no I’m retired, I don’t want to do that… Then I’m talking to my daughter Becky who lives in Seattle and she said, “Mother, you always said you only get out of your community what you put into it. You owe it to your community, you could do this with your hands tied behind your back and you owe them a year.” Don’t tell your kids anything you don’t want to come back and bite you on the butt.”

After more than 15 years, resettled in her home town, Kitty still holds a rosary circle on Thursday with girlfriends from elementary school, and regularly attends mass at the Immaculate Conception church. She remains a staunch ambassador for her hometown, extolling the virtues of a place where people take care of each other and make the best of what they have.

“Well Butte is the place to be for the 4th of July, this is small town America at it’s very best.”