By Cole Boehler You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.
And you can take Glen Mendenhall out of his native Eastern Montana hills and valleys; you can put him to work for international conglomerates Bechtel and Westinghouse working on turbines and generators in Colstrip, Pennsylvania, Florida, the Philippines and Thailand, but this boy's still prone to coming back to his country roots.
The proprietor of the Corner Bar in Circle--between Jordan and Sidney on Highway 200--is apparently a bit of a betting man, too, and he's betting on the come. Right now Mendenhall's got his stake bet on the Circle tavern, a Dairy Queen restaurant in Beach, N.D., and a little hay and cattle ranch north of town, working at all these enterprises daily and accumulating well over 100 miles travel every day.
Mendenhall, like all small business owners, is an optimist. Right now he's optimistic that the rich deposits of fossil fuels in Eastern Montana will not only slow the steady economic decline of the last few decades, but will actually turn it around.
Specifically, he believes a sizeable coal-fired generator planned for the Nelson Creek area to the west of Circle will bring in 1,000 good, high-paying construction jobs as well as over 150 permanent operators jobs. These workers are known to get thirsty and to patronize pubs.
And what's good for the rest of the local merchants and for the local economy would be good for Glen Mendenhall and the Corner Bar.
The plant has been on the drawing board for some years and its prospective builders have been wading through the bureaucratic maze that constitutes the application process. Nelson Creek is in Western McCone County and is not far from the Big Dry Arm that hangs south off the Ft. Peck Reservoir near the dam.
The progeny of Brockway area homesteaders on his father's side, and Powder River homesteaders on his maternal side, Mendenhall grew up farming in the Terry area but attended Custer County High School in Miles City.
Mendenhall says, "I didn't like to farm," so off he went to work on the big power plants built around Colstrip in the mid- to late-1970s. Then, after spending the next dozen or so years chasing work and good pay around the world, he happened to be sitting in the Corner Bar when the owner at the time, LuAnn Ried, mentioned she planned to sell the place.
"I said, 'Let's see what we can work out' and I bought the place in Sept. of '04," Mendenhall relates.
The bar, he says, "has so much potential." It has never been aggressively promoted and was pretty much run solely by the previous owner, he says.
The back end of the building was an apartment and Mendenhall is remodeling that to accommodate his gaming crowd including pool, darts and video gaming machines. He then plans to add more buddy bars and TVs to accommodate sports enthusiasts.
The divorced father of five--one girl, 35, and four boys of 33, 30, 25 and 18--has also spruced up the interior of the bar, which was rebuilt in the 1980s, with fresh paint on the walls and ceiling and a few more televisions sets.
The place has a decidedly "locals" flavor about it, opening at noon for the coffee crowd, but moving good quantities of Budweiser, Coors and Miller as things begin to pick up around 3-4 p.m.
"It's a beer-and-a-shot kind of place," Mendenhall characterizes it. "We don't sell a lot of Daiquiris," he laughs.
Oilfield activity in neighboring Richland County hasn't quite spread to the Circle area yet--"there's a rig at Vida about 30 miles away"--and while the coal seams, said to be hundreds of feet thick, may be exploited soon, the area relies primarily on agriculture, proving to be suited for both spring and winter wheat and producing good grass hay to support thousands of beeves.
Agriculture has been spotty over the last several decades with crop yields and prices spiking up and down. In the last few years, the area has enjoyed some good moisture so pastures and crops have been healthy and beef prices remain very good.
As far as the bar business goes, Mendenhall says there is good, friendly competition between the holders of the town's three all-beverage licenses and a beer and wine licensee.
"The customers rotate," says Mendenhall. For example, when the local VFW runs music, bunches from there will take a break to visit the Corner Bar, then will move back again, he says. "The locals are loyal," he adds.
Mendenhall isn't enamored with the state's smoking ban with its temporary exemptions for bars.
"It cuts off part of your business," he says. "It hurts us bad in the small towns where the bar is the only place open on Sunday and maybe at night. Bars are the only place you can get a pizza or a game of pool.
"But, maybe if the same law applies to everybody it won't be so bad," he allows.
The business has enough cash flow to "make the payments and a little more," Mendenhall says. "During winter when things are dead, the gaming machines keep the doors open," he notes.
"But this is a tremendous opportunity," Mendenhall maintains of his adopted town. "Circle is down as far as its going to go. We've still got our base industries." There's nowhere to go but up.
And with a potential power plant in the works, if not an economic "boom," perhaps at least a "bang" in the future.
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, June, 2006, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.