My parents, born in French Canada, settled in western Montana in its rawer territorial days, my one sister and I being born late in their lives. Father was a carpenter and contractor. Missoula was our home town but we also lived in Butte and much of my childhood I passed near Frenchtown, in a rugged mountain valley homesteaded by relatives in the 1870s. That now I write television plays, having known in my own life a period when even rural electrification seemed a wild dream, appears to me less cause for wonder, however, than the fact it seems to give no cause for wonder at all. I am constrained to wonder how I became a writer only because others have done so. Perhaps the family propensity for wandering had something to do with it. Wandering can take place over the cultural map too. More probably it was the influence of the Carnegie library system, the effect of which on communities like Missoula social historians overlook. I was often ill, was forever immersed in a sea of print. They call what I had nowadays allergic. My people called it le riffe and some tried dog-grease on it.
