Inducted June 23, 2007

For a generation, the People’s Voice was a hub for liberal thought and an advocate for workers, consumers and minorities at a time when conservatives dominated Montana’s politics, economy and daily press.

For its readers, the Voice would have been unrecognizable without the fearless and compassionate journalism of Gretchen Billings.

As the paper’s co-editor, reporter, columnist and principal fund-raiser, she was its heartbeat. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, she and husband Harry, the paper’s editor, published a feisty weekly whose influence far outpaced its meager circulation and scant financial support.

She was one of the few Montana female reporters in her era, and the only woman of the time to regularly cover state politics. Her incisive reporting and biting columns drew respect and sometimes anger.

“To this day,” she wrote years later, “I’ll never know if it was a specific grievance or accumulated pent-up emotions that caused a legislative lobbyist in his cups to take a swing at me at a convention I was covering. I did what came naturally – I ducked.”

Gretchen Garber was born in 1914 in Whitefish, but moved with her family to Tacoma, Wash., when she was young. She spent summers with her homesteader grandparents in Plains and met Harry, a University of Montana journalism graduate, on one of those visits.

The couple married in 1933 and traveled the Depression-ridden state as Harry found work on survey crews. During this time they had three sons: John, Mike and Leon. With the onset of World War II, they returned to Tacoma and found jobs in support of the war effort.

In 1946, Harry landed a job with the People’s Voice, working under its founding editor, “Cap” Bruce.

With Bruce’s retirement in 1948, Harry took the Voice’s reins, and, like many newspaper spouses, Gretchen was drawn into the paper’s life.

Her intelligence, wit and winning personality made her invaluable as a reporter, columnist and traveling fund-raiser who roamed the state while Harry banged out a relentless stream of fiery editorials.

Together, they supported many progressive causes, ranging from public power, civil rights and workers’ compensation to labor unions, health care for the elderly and tax fairness for wage earners.

They were pioneers in reporting on environmental issues. They also fought the expansion of gambling and lobbied for better treatment of Montana’s Native Americans and developmentally disabled. Among their proudest achievements was a successful campaign to save a mentally ill man from the gallows.

Those stands and their support of free speech and “small d” democracy put them regularly at odds with powerful conservatives ranging from the Anaconda Co. to the leadership of the American Legion.

Such battles cost them plenty. Vic Reinemer, an award-winning columnist who studied journalism at the University of Montana in the 1940s, recalled the regular attacks on the Voice as a ‘Red’ sheet by vested interests the paper frequently targeted. 

“I know of the fights their three boys got into in school, defending their parents from vicious slander,” he wrote in 1959. “I know something of the privation the family has endured in its almost miraculously successful effort to continue publishing the facts and hard-hitting comment.”

That same year, Gretchen and Harry were honored with the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award, given to journalists and authors distinguished in “the pursuit of social justice and public policy for the common good.”

They share the distinction with Edward R. Murrow, John Hersey, Theodore H. White, I. F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Neil Sheehan, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

The Voice’s financial struggles and factionalism among its own supporters took their toll, and Gretchen left the Voice in 1967 to save her health. Harry, whose early opposition to the Vietnam War made a fresh batch of enemies, followed two years later. The paper folded shortly thereafter.

Gretchen went on to become the secretary for a carpenter’s union and later served as executive director of the Montana Rural Electric Cooperative until her retirement in 1974.

She died on Feb. 23, 1999, at the age of 84, nine years after Harry’s death.

Among the letters the Billingses received at their retirement was one from then-Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Voice subscriber who nonetheless found himself an occasional target of Harry’s editorials or Gretchen’s private letters.

“I know that many times you are like voices crying in the wilderness,” Mansfield wrote, “but you have always stuck to your guns, following the dictates of your conscience, and you represent, in my opinion, journalism at its best.”

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