Among America’s most recognizable figures of the 1950s and 60s, newscaster Chet Huntley grew up on a Montana farm before his family had to move to town after drought, hailstorms, locusts, crop disease, invasive species, and fire forced them to abandon their land. In point of fortune, a better title for this memoir of his youth might have been The Miserly Years. Yet, despite the troubles, growing up there seems to have been something special. Huntley remarks on how “Spring was such a burst of energy that children were simply compelled, frequently, to jump up and down in sheer exuberance.”

Montana town life didn’t lack for interest either, what with the gambling halls, speakeasies, dance halls, and bordellos, not to mention the occasional very public canine mating fiasco.

Huntley’s is not a singular book. A lot of memoirs similar to his have been written over the years. Other than being the record of a famous man’s youth, it might be dismissed as just one more. Still, if you remember and liked him, the book is well written and time spent reading it is time spent in good company. ( )

"he Generous Years of which Chet Huntley writes began just before the First World War and reached into the mid-twenties. For these were the years of Mr. Huntley's growing up on one of America's last frontiers - the prairies and towns of Montana at the time when traffic accidents were caused by run away horses, and education meant the one-room school." Amazon.

5072. The Generous Years Remembrances of a frontier boyhood. by Chet Huntley (read 7 Oct 2013) This is a 215-page book published in 1968. The author was born in 1911 in Cardwell, Montana, and when he was an infant his parents went to land near Saco, a town in a county in central Montana adjoining the Canadian border. He went to a one-room schoolhouse with ten students, one in each grade. His father was a railroad telegrapher and they moved around a lot. The author graduated from high school in 1929. The book essentially ends at that time and this is regrettable since one would like to know more about Huntley's life before he became famous in about 1955. The book is filled with interesting incidents during the time Huntley was growing up. He even tells a little about Montana political history, and about Senator William A. Clark (whose career is more fully and more accurately related in the 2013 book Empty Mansions, by William Dedman and Paul Clark Newell). Huntley obviously felt enamored of Montana and his book is almost poetic at times as he talks of his youth and of Montana. I liked the fact that he worked on farms even when he did not live on a farm, and knew how to handle horses and operate every kind of farm implement. In fact, he did some farm tasks which I never did, though I lived on a farm in my youth, tasks such as castrating sheep and pigs. This evoked my admiration. ( )