My grandfather, Sam Thompson, was a clerk at the Ingham Hotel from the early 1950's until near the end of his life in 1964. Edith Slack was the owner of the hotel. Every Christmas a very tall Christmas tree was erected in the hotel lobby and my grandfather kept a supply of candy canes hanging from its branches which all of us kids reached out from the second story staircase landing to retrieve. Behind the desk was a large telephone switchboard complete with lights, connecting cords, and buzzers which Grandad operated to connect guests with outside callers. The coke machine along the back wall (10 cents) was always filled with the coldest and sweetest cokes I ever drank (Grandad always had a few dimes in his pocket). A large tinted photo of Jesse Stahl, a black cowboy, riding a horse called Glasseye at the Salinas, California rodeo in 1913 hung near the front door. An old large grandfather clock ticked away the hours on the north wall. The lobby furniture was all fine leather and wood. An oilman named Tuffy Ferris had a small office in the lobby. In the basement were a few large rooms which Grandad said were specially reserved for traveling salesmen to display their wares to local merchants. Sometime in the late 1950's, a black couple from back east stopped in Miles City and tried to get a room. Nobody in the other hotels in town would rent then a room. Without a second thought, Grandad rented them a room at the Ingham. In about 1957, my brother, Barry, and I, while snooping around in the basement, discovered that the north wall separating the Ingham from the Miles City Bank consisted at one point of just a series of closely spaced bars. The installers of the bars had set them close enough together to keep any would-be adult bankrobbers from squeezing through from the hotel into the bank. They must never have figured that a couple of skinny 8 year old kids might try to get through. Barry and I made it. Actually, we made it into the large wide open vault inside the bank's basement before we lost our nerve. To this day we often wondered how we might have gotten ahead early in life if only we had found more courage while in that bank vault. With no sign of forced entry, the bank management would have guessed that the robbery could only have come about as a result of "an inside job!"
Unfortunately, both the Ingham Hotel and Miles City Bank as well as the CrossRoads Inn east of town were burned to the ground in the 1970's or early 1980's by a Miles City kid, Pat Cain, who lived just two blocks from our house on the north side of Miles City. Pat spent some time in prison for the arson and I met him years later when he was a grounds keeper at a Billings golf course. Pat died a few years ago.
[This message has been edited by Don Thompson (7/15/2012)]
[This message has been edited by Don Thompson (7/15/2012)]