Death Can’t Silence Writer’s Voice Bert Russell’s Wife Finishes His Idaho Tales

No one knew Harrison’s old-timers like Bert Russell. He was one of ‘em, born and bred spittin’ distance from the St. Joe in the days of steam-driven sawmills and fried salt pork suppers.

Bert wasn’t much taller than a picket fence when he discovered riches in the pioneers around him. Their stories fascinated him. He devoted his lifetime to collecting and writing those tales.

When Alzheimer’s disease put him in a nursing home three years ago, Bert hadn’t yet written two dozen miners’ stories he’d collected. So his wife, Marie, finished the job.

“I felt obligated to print all the stories that were told to him,” she says. “They were very precious.”

Writing was Bert’s calling right up to his death at age 88 last month. But publishers showed no interest in his historical works until Marie took over. The University of Idaho Press is publishing “Rock Burst,” Marie’s compilation of Bert’s last interviews.

“Finally, after all these years, someone wanted to publish his work,” she says. “I told him, but I don’t know if he understood.”

Bert grew up at the family sawmill, hunting, walking towlines behind tugs and scaling logs. He was as rough and tumble as the times demanded but more sensitive than most to the human condition.

He ached for the shell-shocked World War I veterans, worried about the poor, protested war and stumped for women’s rights.

He absorbed everything, including his family’s business struggles with partners, and filed it in his brain. He pined to write whenever life permitted.

Bert and Marie married in 1946 and trapped muskrats to sell the skins and built homes to survive those first few years. Bert wrote in the winters. A writers’ workshop he’d attended in Hollywood advised formula stories for magazine sales. Bert’s homespun tales didn’t fit, but he wrote them anyway.

He knew stories flowed nonstop at social gatherings, so, with help from Marie and friends, Bert launched Harrison’s annual Old Time Picnic in 1953. Nearly 5,000 people came, ate and talked. Bert listened that year and for many more until he had enough material for several books.

Publishers’ disinterest didn’t deter him. Marie typed his tales; the family illustrated them. He and Marie followed an arduous self-publishing process. They rented a Grange hall to spread and collate the pages for 250 books, stapled, trimmed, glued on covers and then distributed the books.

“Calked Boots,” Bert’s first collection of stories, hit bookstores in 1967. By 1982, the St. Maries Gazette Record had printed 16,000 more copies for the Russells to keep up with demand.

The senior centers of the 1970s were a gold mine of oral history for Bert. Old loggers, miners and farmers were full of tales, and no one had time to listen. So Bert listened, recorded and wrote in their words.

“The moonshiners used our rowboat, too,” Bert quotes 83-year-old Annetta Bellows in his 1979 book, “Swiftwater People.” “It seemed like a lot of people were bootlegging: Harry Burns and Jim Peters at Marble Creek, the Benton Boys up Big Creek. A good profit in it and not much work to it, I guess.”

Bert collected tales of lake storms and runaway sleighs, flooded farms and women homesteaders from Orofino to Wallace. By 1990, he’d published four books and was hard at work on a fifth, this one about the family sawmill.

Marie, who’s 76, knows now that Alzheimer’s disease was clouding Bert’s judgment by then. He took a more bitter approach to “The Sawdust Dream” than she liked and needed her help more than ever.

Bert moved into a nursing home in late 1993 before he could compile his interviews with old miners from the Harrison area. Marie was heartbroken and Bert’s work offered solace. She transcribed late into the nights and even added a few interviews of her own.

“I’m surprised I really enjoyed the writing. I didn’t think I would,” she says. “I’m seriously thinking of doing more interviews.”

“Rock Burst” will hit bookstores early next year with its typical Bert Russell hometown detail - thanks to Marie. She expects more books to come. Bert may be gone, but his legacy lives on.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WHERE TO FIND THEM Bert’s books, “Calked Boots,” “Hardships and Happy Times,” “Swiftwater People,” “North Fork” and “The Sawdust Dream” are mostly available at local bookstores, libraries and the Museum of North Idaho.