In the 1950’s if I recall, famed Montana author Dan Cushman wrote his most famous book entitled, “Stay Away Joe.”
Cushman had been born and raised in the Box Elder and Big Sandy communities and at the time was living in Great Falls.
The book was a story about a Native American named Joe and his Family’s efforts to get ahead in a world which was geared mostly for white people.
The book was laugh out loud funny. Or it was so sad people cried when they read it, depending on where those people were coming from.
One of the best scenes in the book was when a Havre automobile dealer came out to repossess one of his cars and found that it had been stripped, a stove installed in it and Joe was living in it.
That incident really happened. I knew the automobile dealer well. It was Claude Dowen, the Chevy dealer in Havre and he had sold a car to a family and the car quit running so they quit paying for it. That was the way of the time for many Native Americans. If the dealer could keep their cars running, the payments kept coming in. When the car stopped, the payments stopped as well.
Many years later, when I spent some time working for the Chevy Dealer in Havre selling cars, it had gotten worse. In the era of Claude Dowen banks financed cars on reservations with adequate dealer guarantees. In the years that I worked for an auto dealer, that was no longer the case. If a dealer wanted to extend credit to a Native American, he did it out of his own pocket.
So, it was even more important to keep Native American cars running. So much so that in the dealership where I worked, honest paying jobs in the shop were set aside just to keep an old clunker going that probably should have bitten the dust years before.
That all changed. Finally Native Americans got some money and they started buying new cars and trucks from dealerships and the rest of the community started driving their trade-ins. That was better on the dealers because chances are the new car or truck would last 36 months worth of payments.
Then payments went to 45 and 60 months and again dealers found themselves in the grease as even new cars went bad in those extended time frames.
I am getting far afield. Claude Dowen and a banker from GMAC one winter day in around 1950 trudged up a hill very quietly to steal back a car that had not been paid for. They had an extra set of keys to the car made and expected no trouble. When they got over the rise, there next to an old house sat their car. Quickly they ran over to it and jumped in to take the car back and get off the Reservation quickly. It was when they were several feet away from the car that Claude noticed there was a stove pipe sticking out of a rear window and smoke coming out of the stove pipe. When they opened the car doors to jump in, there were no seats at all. It was more like a kitchen for tiny people. And there was a bed. The two trudged back down the hill to their car realizing that their car turned into housing would stay on the Reservation for a long time.
Many years later when I was working for the Chevy dealership in Havre, the dealer asked a friend and me to take the summer off and go out and get some ten to twenty cars back that people had ceased to pay for.
That made for an interesting summer to say the least.
And yes we did repo cars from many white people too that summer. However, I have forgotten most of them as there was no challenge there. All they would do is hand the keys over and away we would go.
Once we had to chase a band of gypsies around as they had bought four old clunkers and paid for none of them. They were in Spokane, in their Cadillac’s with their huge diamond rings on. Matter of fact they gave one of the Havre dealers a diamond which he gave me when he found out it was a fake. I still have it in my jewelry case. I have tried to get it set in a ring but the fake diamond keeps splitting We got our cars back from the Spokane Gypsies with little effort and in talking to them I was reminded of the Gypsy camps that used to set up on what is now West Second Street for several weeks at a time. That was the area going up to the fair grounds.
When they were camped there my mother used to admonish me more than usual that if I was not good, she was going to give me to the Gypsies. After hearing that for a month one summer I finally said that anything would be better than living with her so get the car out and take me to them at once. I didn’t hear about the Gypsies for some time after that.
But that dreadful repo summer, we learned so much but most of all we learned how not to sell an automobile. We saw brand new pickups go out of the dealership with nothing down and not even a last name on the paperwork. But I am getting ahead of my story.
First, we were told to get a Camaro back from a reserve just east of the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan. So off we went to a reserve that was sort of like on the top of a small butte just this side of Maple Creek. I was amazed at the poverty. People were living in slums with a central water pump to get their drinking water. There was our Camaro right beside a pump. We had a set of keys so my friend jumped in, started the car and off we went. We were running late that afternoon and wanted to get through the boundary gate before it closed at 6pm. We were heading quickly down a steep hill when all of a sudden a wheel and tire went sailing off into the prairie. We got the car stopped without wrecking it, got the spare on and there was a spare. We never did find the wheel and tire in the prairie and that taught us a good lesson. People who think that their cars are going to be taken from them often loosen lug nuts to make things worse. Sure enough all the lug nuts were loose. We got up and running again and the radiator sprung a leak. When we got to Guvenlock we bought all the “Stop Leak” they had and limped to the Montana gate which was closed. We begged the customs man, telling him our sad story and he opened the gate. I thought I bet that is a first.
One week we repoed several cars from the Haystack area of Rocky Boy. Most of them belonged to one family who had hit on hard times and could not pay for their cars and to make matters worse none of the cars ran. To make the job go more quickly we towed the cars up over a small divide and down to the Beaver Creek road at Kiwanis Camp. That made our job much easier that summer week.
There was only one problem. One rancher lived right next to that little used road and he had seen us towing maybe a half dozen cars to town and got really upset about it. So, this one day he came out with a rifle and said if we did not turn around and take that car back to where it had been, he was going to shoot the both of us. My friend and I stood on the other side of our lead pickup and talked the matter over while the man shouted at us from his front porch. I told my friend it obviously was a bluff. This was our last repo from there and if we just jumped in and got out of there quickly he would not do anything. My friend, who had more chances of getting shot than me, agreed so we both quickly jumped into our vehicles and I gunned the pickup and before I knew it I was down to the Beaver Creek Road. I looked back and there was no car behind me. When we stopped the tow chain had fallen off. So back I went to my friend sitting in the middle of the prairie. Fortunately the man had gone inside so we hooked up and got out of there never to return again.
My biggest challenge in getting a car back was a brand new Chevy pickup that had been bought by a man named Bad Hat who was supposedly living at a town called Hobbega somewhere in Canada. This was a brand new Chevy mind you and that was all we had to go on.
So, we packed a week’s worth of duds and took off for sunny Alberta. We went to Mounted Police Headquarters in Medicine Hat and they could not help us at all but for telling us there was no town in Canada called Hobbega. So it was on to Lethbridge where we stopped at Mounted Police Headquarters there as well. Nothing there but a very old Native American came up to us and said that we could be looking for a town named Hobbema which was north of Calgary.
So it was off to north of Calgary. I knew that area quite well as my grandmother’s sister and her family lived at Raven, Alberta and I had been there many times. Sure enough there was a Hobbema and it took us about five minutes to find out that the new pickup was in a shop back lot with no motor in it. So we hitched up and drug it though downtown Calgary and finally got it back to Havre several days later than we had started.
That trip to Canada had been hard on the both of us so we told the dealer that we were through repoing cars for that summer and I added or any other summer. It was dangerous, sad, lonely and a horrible way to see the country.
However, I have never forgotten those times and never well. I asked my friend that the other day and he said the same thing. It was an experience that we did not want to do at all in the first place and will never forget. It was a story of a very sad people and I never did figure out who was the most sad of all, those we were repoing from or us!
