Loc a l k n ow le d g e Scott McMillion

Carved From Stone

Rocky Mountain College is a success story of perseverance and determination against all odds

The afternoon brought the blessing of a cool breeze that

knocked away the urban mugginess and sent airy seeds of
cottonwood trees dancing through the shade. Thunderheads
were flexing big muscles in the west, promising a drum song,
but for the moment there was other music.
In Losekamp Hall, an impressive four-story pile of hand-
hewn sandstone, somebody was playing a violin, running
through scales and then a difficult melody. The musician
was not yet a master, but somebody was in there trying hard

photos courtesy rocky Mountain college President portrait courtesy Billings Gazette, photo by James Woodcock.
and making it work, mostly, letting the balm flow from the
windows of one of the signature buildings on the campus of
Rocky Mountain College.

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Opposite: Students and faculty pose during the dedication services Feb. 1,
1914 for Losecamp Hall. RMC president, Michael Mace. This page from top:
Students worked in the quarries during the early 1900s to build the stone
structures that anchor the RMC campus today. Students pouring concrete for
the foundation of Prescott Hall in 1914. Losecamp Hall today.
A few steps away I spooked a handful of doves that had
been pecking at the ground, making a very different kind
music. Then I found a well-thumbed copy of Shakespeare’s
“Julius Caesar” on a pew in an outdoor chapel. The name
inside the cover said Dawn Carter and I left the book there,
pretty certain she’d return for it.
Classical music. Shakespeare. Historic stone buildings
surrounding a shady arbor where doves coo. This was aca-
deme. A whole grove of it.
Somewhere, I realized, in lonesome prairie graves,
Montana pioneers smiled in satisfaction. Their dream was
still alive.
In fact, it’s more vigorous than ever.
The story of Rocky Mountain College is really the story
of three colleges, including two that opened their doors long
before Montana was even a state. The first was the Montana
Collegiate Institute at Deer Lodge, which offered its first lec-
tures in 1878, when Custer was barely cold in his grave and
just a year after Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce almost made
it to freedom.
Shortly afterward, Montana Wesleyan College began
planting roots in Helena.
In Billings, where Rocky stands today, Billings Polytechnic
Institute literally carved itself from the stone of the nearby
rimrocks in the early years of 20th century, rising from a
muddy beet field to become one of the best-rated small col-
leges in the West.
Since the three institutions became one, Rocky bills itself
as the oldest college in Montana and the oldest continually
operating business. To argue with these assertions would be
quibbling and hair splitting, for Rocky, in one incarnation or
another, has been producing teachers and agronomists, musi-
cians, painters and business leaders for almost 130 years, and
some of those years have been incredibly long ones.
“It is an often named and renamed college that has had
many lives, and has looked death in the face more times than
a cat and somehow come away bloodied but alive to fight
another day,” former Rocky President Arthur DeRosier wrote
in a 2002 history of Rocky, a book called Courageous Journey,
authored by Lawrence Small, another former president.
Rocky isn’t a big place, and if the traffic demands your
attention you could easily drive right past the campus in its
neighborhood on the west side of Billings. Even on a quiet
day, the charms of its campus are insulated from the thor-
Big Sky Journal 73
 Somewhere, I realized, in lonesome prairie graves,
Montana pioneers smiled in satisfaction. Their dream was still alive.
oughfares by playing fields and parking lots, accouterments
of any modern campus.
Getting a feel for the place means you’ve got to look a
little closer.
U.S. News and World Report did so and for nine years
has listed Rocky as one of the 10 best comprehensive colleges
in the West. And the same magazine has placed it among the
top 10 in terms of value, where you get the most learning for
your dollar.
Even the neighbors often don’t give it much thought.
Michael Mace grew up in nearby Laurel and said he knew
Rocky existed, but it never made much of a blip on his radar
screen and he never thought of attending.
“I thought that was where the smart kids went,” Mace
told me.
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He’s right. Smart kids do come here. But the statement
packs a certain irony coming from Mace. He’s now the college
president and the man credited with finally putting Rocky on
firm financial footing.
Students here study a core of liberal arts, honing their
brains in a variety of disciplines; but 86 percent of them
choose professional majors ranging from education to busi-
ness, from aeronautics to equestrian studies to a variety of
sciences. Some even learn to become physicians’ assistants.
Rocky attracts leading scholars in the study of religion and,
while all sorts of places focus on the study of war, Rocky hosts
an institute dedicated to the study of peace, offering lessons
that range from playground dispute resolution to geopolitics.
It even has a national champion ski team, and we’re not talk-
ing ski bums: Of the 12 people on the team, eight are academic
All-Americans.
Not bad for a campus with just 850 students, making it
smaller than many urban high schools (another 300 or so take
“distance learning” classes).
So while most of the world just whizzes right by, others
take notice. The student body attracts scholars and strivers
from 35 states and nine foreign countries. Dignitaries who
have trekked to Rocky range from Robert Frost to Bishop
Desmond Tutu.
All of this, right in the middle of Billings.
It might not be the “Athens of the West,” as early boosters
This page: Early Rocky students farmed their own wheat with horse and plow.
They produced their own grain, milled it, packaged it and sold it at Green and
Gold Flour throughout Billings. Opposite, clockwise: Former Pres. Theodore
Roosevelt spoke at RMC on Oct. 15, 1918. The Kimball building in the fore-
ground and Prescott Hall in the background were constructed from stones
quarried by students during the early 1900s. Prescott Hall today.

had hoped. But Rocky’s in good shape today. And getting here
was an incredible slog. Money was always tight, and many
presidents spent fitful nights, wondering if they’d be able to
open the doors in the fall. But somehow, they always made
it happen, nursing the school through flu epidemics, tenures
in four different Montana towns, world wars, economic
collapses, the dust bowl years, the Great Depression and
devastating earthquakes. Rocky’s people always did what it
took—begging, borrowing and even renting out dormitories
as housing for Italian prisoners of war shipped here to hoe
the beet fields that once surrounded this campus. There were
times Rocky couldn’t even pay the faculty, but somehow, the
doors stayed open.
The mission began in 1878 in Deer Lodge, best known
today as the home of the state prison, but, at that time savor-
ing a reputation as a more family-oriented community than
the hardscrabble mining and cattle towns around the region—
the boozy, brawling towns stitched together fast from canvas
and rough-cut green timber, places that baited in miners and
speculators and gamblers, highwaymen and vigilantes and
whores looking for a quick buck and a quick exit.
Deer Lodge, on the other hand, was built from the outset
by settlers, ranchers and farmers of a Stegnerian mindset who
worked hard and looked forward to church on Sunday, peo-
ple who’d planted their feet for the long haul and believed
the best rewards are to be savored at a later time. Many of
these men and women were educated and they knew the
benefits of schooling. They wanted that for their children and
they were planning to be there long enough to see their hopes
come to fruition.
So they started something called the Montana Collegiate
Institute in a vast territory that contained less than 40,000
souls—not even half the population of modern Billings.
Clearly, those people were optimists, but they also knew
that hope alone doesn’t pay much, so they bent to the chore
of building a college, just as they bent to their branding and
planting and threshing.
They weren’t altogether altruistic, however. Montana
territory contained a smattering of Catholic schools, and
staunch Protestants weren’t keen on the specter of “Romish
influences.”
The plan worked for a while. Brick buildings were
erected, the sagebrush and cactus were cleared from the cam-
pus grounds. Teachers were hired, students arrived, and the
Big Sky Journal 75
 Students ate what they grew, and the school sold surpluses and seed for cash.
school moved in fits and starts for several years.
Meanwhile, Wesleyan was taking shape in Helena, under
the tutelage of the Methodists.
Both schools faced similar hurdles.
The creation of the state’s public university system in
1893 drew away both students and faculty, then World War I
erupted and the new military draft took even more students.
Eventually, the Deer Lodge campus was shuttered and the
school merged with Wesleyan in Helena, but the struggles
never ended there either. Finally, a series of earthquakes in
1935 shattered buildings and drove the school out of town.
Staff and students packed up what they could salvage
and moved it to Great Falls but couldn’t muster much support
there, eventually deciding to merge with Billings Polytechnic,
another institution with a history of staggering from one crisis
to another.
But while the challenges were similar, Poly took a dif-
ferent approach. The Deer Lodge and Helena institutions
had relied largely on support from churches and generous
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private benefactors, partly in Montana but largely in the East.
At Poly, too, campus bosses constantly solicited support,
but when that wasn’t enough, people simply rolled up their
sleeves and innovated.
If students couldn’t pay tuition, they could work some
of it off. The school owned a sizable irrigated farm that sup-
ported everything from salad greens to sugar beets to wheat.
Students ate what they grew, and the school sold sur-
pluses and seed for cash. For years students milled wheat,
creating the popular cereal, Cream of the West, and shipping it
to breakfast tables around the nation. Whenever construction
was on tap, which was often, both men and women students
climbed to the nearby sandstone rimrocks—Billings’ most
famous landmark—quarried stone, hauled it back to campus
and made buildings from it. Their work stands today in the
impressive structures that form the core of the campus.
One of them, Prescott Hall, is as impressive on the inside
as it is on the outside. One of its high-ceilinged, paneled and
book-lined rooms now serves as Mace’s office.
 Two cowboys circa 1940s, when RMC had its own herd of
cattle and a state-registered brand.

“This used to be the kitchen,” he told me with a grin,

rising from an overstuffed chair to fetch pictures of the early
quarrying work. Behind him, an oversized oil painting by
J.K. Ralston portrays oxen teams muscling overladen wagons
through a creekside bog, the kind of place where it seems the
mud has no bottom.
It was, I thought, a fitting adornment at Rocky: persever-
ance against all odds, families bringing dreams, making plans
to stay and tame a wild land.
Mace, 54, isn’t what you’d expect to find in the office of
a university president. But he might be exactly what it needs.
Solidly built, intense and friendly, he’s a businessman, not an
academic, and he knows he doesn’t fit the mold.
He jokingly describes himself as a doorknob salesman,
but that doesn’t quite fit. In reality, he invented the key card,
the device that looks like a credit card and unlocks the doors
in hotel rooms. His factories also manufacture doors, door-
jambs and hardware. Check into a modern hotel anywhere
in the country, and there’s a 1-in- 4 percent chance you’ll be
using one of Mace’s “doorknobs.”
When asked to assume the role of president late in 2005,
Mace had been on Rocky’s board for some time. At the time
the school was $430,000 in the red. There were enough rumors
flying around that Mace found it necessary to make a public
announcement that workers would indeed be paid.
“Payroll will be met,” he wrote in the college magazine,
shortly after he was installed. “It always will be met.”
By the following June, Rocky was $1.2 million in the
black. Plus, Mace had raised enough money to grow the
school’s endowment from $17 million to $24 million, greatly
increasing the amount of scholarship money available.
Yet he’s dismissive of his own role.
“There’s not much of a story really,” he told me. “We had an
institution that was in financial trouble and we turned it around.”
This was not done without pain. Some academic majors
will be eliminated. Some staff has been laid off, a decision he
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 Rocky bills itself as the oldest college in Montana.
called “heartrending,” but Mace said he simply applied the same
business principles that made his other companies succeed.
“I’m really a nontraditional president,” he said, “a man who
thinks in terms of ‘customers’ and ‘return on investment’.”
“In academia,” he said, “sometimes that’s a bit threatening.”
Perhaps so, but it’s working, and Mace did the job for
free, almost.
“I told them I’d take the job for $1 a year,” he said.
Now he’s planning to stay on “for as long as they’ll have
me,” but said he’ll start accepting a real salary.
He’s proud of the school and believes in its mission
of training people for careers while basing their education
around a liberal arts core that trains them for life.
And for the first time in its 128-year history, Rocky is on
firm financial footing.
“Rocky is at a point where we’ll probably never have to
run a hand-to-mouth existence again,” he said. “It’s always
had a history of financial turmoil. This is the first time we’ve
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been this steady.”
And that’s good news for the school, for the city of
Billings, and for future generations of teachers and artists,
aircraft pilots, racetrack managers and more.
When I left Mace’s office, a group had started a pickup
baseball game. Somebody connected with a pitch, and the
chink of a metal bat rang across campus, echoing off the
stone buildings and through the leafy cottonwoods.
The violinist in Losekamp Hall had knocked off for the
day, and except for the ball game the campus was quiet.
But it was steady.
The pioneers were still smiling.
After living in places as varied as New York City and
South Korea, Scott McMillion returned to Montana in 1988,
where his family has lived for four generations. The author
of “Mark of the Grizzly” (Falcon Press, 1998), he also is a
regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. BSJ