Bobby Miles: Always a Griz fan

By Amy Joyner for The Montana Standard - 09/04/2004

Bobby Miles

When the Anaconda Copper Co. strike of 1946 hit the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad, Bobby Miles' father, Harold, had to make some changes to feed his family — wife Erma and two sons.

Harold Miles, a man who joined the marines at age 14 to fight in World War I, had the determination to move his family to Southern California to find some work. Harold's youngest son was Bobby, and he went along.

"My brother (six years older) went to school in Bozeman and played football there in '46 and '47," Bobby explains. Though he admits that he doesn't utter it too often, Bobby says, "Gene Miles was one of best players who came out of Anaconda in those days."

Harold's sister had a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and promised to find her brother some work using his plumbing, carpentry and railroad boilermaker experience.

"It was a vacation more than anything," remembers Bobby, who is now 76 years old. "Dad went right to work as plumber. … My mother liked it, and we decided to stay." Bobby, then a 17-year-old high school junior, stayed behind in the Sunshine State when his parents returned to sell the family's Anaconda home at 309 E. Front.

When the family was together again in California, they bought a grocery store in Sunset Beach, which had a family apartment upstairs. "I loved it down there," Bobby recalls. "It was a whole new world to me.

"I planned on going back to school. The coach at Anaconda High, Mike O'Leary, called. I told them I wasn't coming back. I wanted to finish high school and play ball down there." He finished his senior year in Huntington Beach in 1947.

That same year, his mother became ill. "My father thought we should get her back to Anaconda," Bobby Miles tells.

But the couple ended up in Bozeman. "Don't ask me why," Bobby remarks. "I never did ask them. Then they moved to Missoula.

"I come back to Montana that summer, and they were living in Missoula then. I got a job with a contractor tearing up some roads. … Helped tear up the brick on Higgins Avenue."

The University of Montana football coaches remembered Bobby from his days playing for Anaconda High, and he knew several of his Anaconda classmates who were at UM. "(Ed) Chinske was the coach then, and he wanted me to go to school (in Missoula). I kept thinking ‘California.'"

When a coach from Santa Anna Junior College drove to Montana and offered Bobby a scholarship, that's all it took. He played two years in California and subsequently received a scholarship to play tackle for the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricanes.

"They had the platoon system — players who played offense and players who played defense," he notes. "They wanted me to play defense." What he didn't initially know was that NCAA rules forbade junior college transfers from playing their first year. "I had to redshirt. I could practice and still had a full scholarship. But I

couldn't play I-A ball."

The 6-foot, 240-pound starter hurt his elbow the second year and couldn't complete the season. "I couldn't play anymore and that was my whole life. I just got disgusted."

Bobby's time on the sideline coincided with a call to arms overseas. "Three or four of us at the time thought about the Korean War," he explains.

He spent three years in the U.S. Army, 1951 to 1954. After basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., he volunteered for ranger training jump school, where he could make another $75 a month from Uncle Sam.

"It was the toughest training I had ever had. Fort Benton, Ga., in the summer is hot. When you got through with that you were in pretty good shape"

He volunteered to serve in Korea and was sent to Japan. Bobby enthusiastically tells of when training came to a close in Japan, and his 187th regimental combat team was loading up for its first Korean jump.

"We were ready to go. Our first sergeant was going around handing everybody a scarf made of parachute material, green camouflage. I asked what it was for. The sergeant said, ‘When you hit the ground in Korea, you shoot everyone who doesn't have a scarf.' Talk about the hairs standing up on end."

After his 1954 discharge, he had less than two years of college left to earn his degree in health and physical education. His parents remained in Missoula, so Bobby registered at UM under the G.I. Bill.

That fall, he watched football practice thinking, "I'm too old, not in too good of shape. … But I got the bug."

When speaking to coaches Ed Chinske and George "Jiggs" Dahlberg, he learned that three or four other teammates were war veterans, too. At his brother's urging, he spent a day in Bozeman talking with MSU coach Clyde Carpenter, too.

He signed in Missoula, saying, "I was always a Griz fan. I'm Griz all the way." He lettered in football at UM in 1954.

After college, at age 28, Bobby married Jerry Nooney in 1956 and had three children. Son Louis lives in Missoula; daughter Linda Cardinal works in the athletic department at UM; and, daughter Laurie is a Missoula police dispatcher. Bobby and Jerry have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The bulk of Bobby's career was with the Montana Dept. of Corrections, where he worked as a prison guard from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. When he retired, he served as director for the Board of Pardons. He and his wife owned the Lido Lounge in Anaconda for a few years before returning to Missoula.

Even now, he fondly recalls being a kid in Anaconda, and being proud that his brother, Gene, played football for Anaconda High School from 1938 to 1940. "I was just like a lot of other kids in Anaconda," he says. "We played a lot of tough football and such."

But the toughest football was played in Butte each year when the Bobcats took on the Grizzlies on neutral ground. "We'd look forward to the Griz-Cat game in Butte," he says. "You idolized those guys. That was where and when I wanted to become a Grizzly."

Now that Bobby Miles has lived his dream, he has convinced a handful of former Griz to join forces to give younger athletes that same dream. The football team of 1954 is having its reunion this year at Homecoming and will hopefully finalize the remaining money needed to start an endowment from the football classes of 1952 to 1955.

Only $6,000 remains toward the $20,000 needed to form the endowment, according to Jim O'Day, director of development for intercollegiate athletics at UM. Once established, the principle amount can be added to and will remain untouched; earnings will be used for annual athletic scholarships.

This isn't Bobby's first endeavor to raise money for UM athletics. His work as a philanthropist goes back to 1954 when his graduating class of football players challenged the incoming varsity team to a game in the spring of 1954. "We gave the gate receipts to the athletic department," he says, and started tradition. We were called the Silvertip Alumni."

— Amy Joyner is a free-lance writer living in Missoula and plans to contribute more articles to The Montana Standard about former Montana and Montana State athletes from the Southwest Montana area.