Many thanks to Patrick “Pat” Melby, the middle of the five children of Tip and Ruth Melby, for sitting down to record these recollections. What follows came out of a long conversation about his parents and the Missoula mill neighborhood where he grew up, and it carries what no record or document can: the rope trailing behind the stock truck on the long road west from South Dakota, the saws switched back on after the mills closed on a Friday afternoon, the photograph of the sunrise sent every morning to his sister Karen. We are grateful he was willing to go back and find them for us.
THE CRANSTON FAMILY STORY PROJECT
Summary of the Interview
Patrick “Pat” Melby
On August 20, 2026, Charles Cranston Jett recorded a forty-five-minute conversation from Chicago with his first cousin Patrick “Pat” Melby for the family archive at thecranstonline.com.
Pat, a lawyer who built his practice in Helena, Montana, and who now spends winters in Tucson, is the middle of the five children of Tip and Ruth Melby — Bill, Karen, Pat, Janice, and Jean. Charles opened the session without an agenda and said so: impromptu, ad lib, and recorded, with the single purpose of establishing what it was like to grow up in the Cranston family with Tip cracking the whip and Ruth, who went too soon, holding the house together. The three quarters of an hour that follow are largely Pat’s, and they move from a South Dakota ranch to a Missoula mill neighborhood to a set of judgments about his parents that he has evidently been forming for sixty years.
Pat has no first-hand memory of the Willett place, where he spent his first three years, and says so plainly; what he has is what his mother and father told him. He was born in Belle Fourche, SDak, in a house rather than a hospital, because the ranch was nowhere near a doctor. He got pneumonia on the ranch, and it was Charles’s father, Wood Jett, who flew up to the ranch in his small plane and carried him down to Belle Fourche to be near medical care. He had his own bum lamb, and somewhere there is a photograph of him dragging it around by a hind foot, which he looked for before this conversation and could not find.
The summer he turned three, Tip sold the ranch. He also sold his pickup truck and bought a stock truck, and the family drove to Missoula in it on a two-lane highway the whole way from South Dakota, with Ruth, Tip, Jan, and Pat in the cab and Bill and Karen riding in the back, trailing a rope behind them at times in the hope that a following car would run it over. The move is recorded in Tip’s Musings, and Bill and Karen told the story for the rest of their lives. As Pat observes, you would be jailed for that sort of stunt now.
Tip bought the house at 2024 South Avenue West, and Pat is candid about how he chose it. The largest place Tip had ever lived was Bowman, North Dakota; he had no way to read a city, and he wanted his children raised among the children of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and businesspeople. What he bought was a house within a quarter mile of three lumber mills and a concrete pipe company, so his children grew up among the sons and daughters of mill workers and loggers. Pat’s first memory of the house is splitting his left eyebrow open on the concrete front step and being sewn up at the old community hospital.
His memories of the neighborhood are a catalogue of hazards recalled with delight. The mills shut off the saws at five on Friday afternoons, and everyone went home; by half past five the children were all over them, walking the logs in the mill pond, going inside to switch the saws back on, sledding the sawdust piles down toward a barbed-wire fence they had to stop short of, and daring one another to walk a complete circle inside a tepee burner while the scrap wood was still alight. His brother Bill went through the ice into the mill pond one January and could barely move by the time he got home because his clothes were frozen so solid. The Daly Ditch, a block to the west, was the local swimming hole, where a broken beer bottle laid Pat’s foot open. The Bitterroot railroad tracks were a block to the east, where the boys threw nail-studded boards on ropes into the passing hopper cars to pull off sugar beets. With Army surplus helmet liners from a store nearby they fought the recently concluded war on the log piles, any one of which could have rolled. His own verdict is that it was a wonderful place to grow up but a horrible one, and he holds both judgments at once.
The account of Ruth Melby is the steadiest thing in the recording. With Tip driving truck to the West Coast and back, and later absorbed in carpentry in the garage, the major load of raising five small children fell on her, and Pat says without qualification that she did a great job. When she went back to teaching, she sat up until midnight correcting papers and preparing lesson plans, then rose early to make breakfast for five children and a husband and to pack their lunches — she was still packing Pat’s lunch when he was in his early college years and working summers for the Forest Service, which he now thinks was ridiculous but which he did nothing to stop.
Her method was to incentivize rather than instruct. She never told him to sit down and do his homework; she handed him the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and later a book by Maxwell Maltz on picturing an action until you can perform it, which Pat found actually worked when he learned to ski. The point, as he puts it, was that you never felt pressured, but you wanted to please. She was calm, and she treated people respectfully.
She died when Pat was twenty-eight and a junior in law school, by which time all five children were out of the house — Karen in Butte, Bill in Helena, Jan in Missoula, and Jean in Germany, where she was summoned home by telegram, arriving just barely in time.
Pat’s father, Tip, emerges more complicated and, in Pat’s telling, more instructive for it. Tip drove a truck for the lumber yard across the street, moved into carpentry work that he loved, then went back to school for a master’s degree and became a teacher and school administrator — and was in the garage wood shop in every hour that remained. He tried to run a strict house, but he was too absorbed in the wood shop to know what was going on, so Ruth was the disciplinarian in practice, with the occasional well-aimed boot from Tip when word reached him.
The lessons Pat takes from both parents are hard work, learned by people who came out of the Depression and off the Great Plains of the Dakotas; charity; and tolerance — with the immediate qualification that his father was not always tolerant, though never on grounds of race, creed, or religion. Tip’s intolerance was reserved for people he took for fools, and its regular victims were the clerks in the hardware department at Missoula Mercantile, whom he would berate for the store’s shortcomings while Pat retreated to the men’s or sports department in embarrassment. Pat counts this among the lessons too: he learned never to do that to a store clerk.
As adults the two became close. Pat was a hundred and twenty miles away in Helena but got over to Missoula often to visit; he and Bill took their father to football games and always made him buy dinner. Tip pressed classical music on a nineteen-year-old trying to get out the door to drink beer with his friends — “Sit down, you have to hear this” — and Pat, who was not attracted to it then, now goes to the symphony with his wife in Tucson. Tip was quick to anger and quick to forget, never held a grudge, and had a sense of humor that Charles still trades on: the World Poetry Contest joke that ends in Timbuktu, which Charles tells to this day and credits to his very intellectual uncle. In assisted living in Missoula, Tip observed that people just sat around waiting for the ambulance to come — and that it came damn often.
On the older generation Pat has one memory and one correction. The memory is the Battle Mountain Court, and a party with a great many children, and the game in which a blindfolded child is told the board he is standing on is being raised toward the ceiling while the adults slowly stoop, until the child is bent double in terror six inches off the floor when the board begins to shake and the adults cry out that they are about to drop it.
The correction concerns his father’s name. Charles suggested Tip changed it because of his closeness to Ole Melby; Pat immediately reframed it. Closeness to Ole is why he did not hesitate, but the reason he changed it was practical — he had used Melby his whole life, through grade school and high school and college, but it was not his legal name. Chris “Doc” Cranston tried to talk him out of changing it on the grounds that Cranston was an old and well-respected name, and Pat remembers his father mentioning that conversation. Tip never much liked Chris and disliked the way he had treated Bess, as Tip had been the youngest child during Chris’s worst years. Both Charles and Pat agree on the conclusion: Chris had little role in raising him, and Tip in every sense counted Ole as his father.
Pat describes his position among the siblings as an education in itself. With Bill and Karen above him and Jan and Jean below, he learned two things from watching his older brother: not to ask permission, and not to tell his father his plans. Bill often sought his father’s approval for his plans, but Tip meant to protect Bill. That protection took the form of cataloguing every downside of Bill’s plan until the idea died of exposure, and Pat believes it cost his brother — that Bill never finished college and was a problem child for a while as a consequence of having the cold water poured so consistently and not gaining his father’s approval. Pat simply did what he intended to do and reported afterward, and notes drily that he was not robbing banks.
Jan, a year apart from him, was the closest companion of his childhood, coming along on the paper route and covering it when he needed her; Jean was little Jean, and the two of them grew closer as adults. The family divided politically, largely, Pat thinks, through the influence of his sisters’ husbands, and eventually decided the subject was not worth the cost — he and Bill now have lunch once a week and simply do not discuss politics, and Charles notes Diane Hamilton’s account that Karen reached the same conclusion.
The bond that grew strongest was with Karen. They read the same books, she pulled him into Outlander, they followed the same television, and they shared Escape to Rural France, a YouTube series by an English presenter who had bought a burned-out chalet in France and was rebuilding it without safety restraints, so that every second week they compared notes on when he would finally fall off. When Karen became ill, Pat — always awake at sunrise — began photographing the sunrise every morning and sending it to her, and if he was late, a text would arrive: “where’s my sunrise?” He sent her eighteen months of sunrises. He was in the middle of Idaho, driving to Arizona, when the call came that she had died.
The wider family comes in at the end. Pat’s fondest memory of Charles’s mother, Helen, was made as an adult: visiting her in Columbia, Maryland, where she insisted over his protests on giving him the bed and taking the sofa herself, and then drove him down to Harpers Ferry and gave him the tour. Charles matched it with Helen’s complaint about her assisted-living facility — that the people there were too damned old, and that someone would yell bingo on the first number called.
Pat’s Painter memories run through a summer he and Karen spent at the ranch while Tip built the family a house, which is also where he learned what his father could teach: given a can of nails and told to put two through each board into the floor joists, he nailed happily into the air between them and was corrected without anger. Dan Painter came through Missoula once, before he was a Mormon, and Dan, Bill, and he went out beer drinking. Helen Painter, near his own age, was the cousin he was closest to, but contact was lost when the family scattered to Colorado and Nebraska; of the nine Painter children, three remain.
Tip kept up with his sister Helen all his life and was protective of her, going down to McAllen periodically after her second husband died. They were not only brother and sister but best friends, and thrifty enough that a safe arrival home from the Dakotas was announced by placing a person-to-person long-distance call to Sam Cranston, who was of course not there — Scottish to the core, as Charles put it.
Asked what else he wanted to put on the record, Pat returned to the mill neighborhood and to the two boys who had been his best friends there. Neither finished high school; both went into the Marine Corps; one was killed in a car wreck and the other died of diabetes brought on by his drinking. He went to law school. He says he feels lucky to have dodged that life.
Asked what he would want the grandchildren to know about the Cranstons, he gave an answer that gently declined the premise: his character traits come less from the Cranston side than from the Campbell side, and to the extent they come from the Melby house at all they come from Bess and Ole rather than from Chris. Charles observed that what keeps coming across from every quarter of this family is how tightly it has held together and how well it has stayed in touch. Pat closed by thanking Charles for the work on the site, hoping their children and grandchildren will appreciate it, and noting that very few families have anything of the kind.
~ Pat Melby September 2026