Montana's Dimple Knees Sex Scandal by John Kuglin

Author:John Kuglin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2018-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

BUTTE VICE AND THE ELECTION

My choice early in life was to be either a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there’s hardly a difference.

—Harry S Truman64

The “Bev and Dimple Show” quickly became an issue in the 1968 governor’s race. Exchanges between the incumbent Republican, Babcock, and his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Forrest Anderson, were especially nasty, even for Montana politics.

Babcock, from his party’s conservative wing, operated a trucking business in Eastern Montana when he was elected lieutenant governor in 1962. He became governor after Governor Donald Nutter died on a Montana National Guard plane that crashed with no survivors during a blizzard in Wolf Creek Canyon, between Helena and Great Falls.

Babcock won the governor’s race in 1964 and made the mistake of running for the Senate against popular Democratic incumbent Lee Metcalf two years later. He failed to pick off Metcalf, who received 53 percent of the vote.

If nothing else, the Senate campaign was amusing, with the populist Metcalf chiding the governor for engaging in “Babtalk.” Metcalf, one of Montana’s better senators, championed regulating private utilities. With his aide Vic Reinemer, Metcalf wrote Overcharge: How Electric Utilities Exploit and Mislead the Public. Metcalf also supported wilderness protection. After he died in 1978, a national wildlife refuge south of Missoula was named after him, along with the Lee Metcalf Wilderness in southwestern Montana.

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