LIVINGSTON ENTERPRISE FIRES SALVO

Montana Newspaper Editor Calls Bozeman ‘Butt Ugly’

By Todd Wilkinson, 1-07-07

Bozeman, Montana has always assumed an air of superiority when referencing Livingston— that smaller neighboring, bare-knuckled, blue-collar, railroad and river town on the eastern side of Bozeman Pass along Interstate 90.

Back and forth across the Pass, the friendly civic jeering has gone on for years, like crowds at a high school football game heckling one another from opposite sides of the field.

We Bozemanites like to poke fun at Livingstonians for the way they pretend not to fawn over the celebrities who live amongst them but seem to keep track of sightings like a birder does with a life list. We nod in agreement, just to be courteous, when they say the incessant 50-mile per hour winds weltering up Paradise Valley don't really gnaw at them. And we like to point out that if Livingston is such a happening place then how come half the town commutes over here for work and entertainment?

Folks in Livingston, meanwhile, have shed their own crocodile tears as Bozeman and the surrounding Gallatin Valley continue to struggle mightily with the usual array of growth-related problems. Bozeman's a fine place to visit, they say, but you wouldn't want to.....

In the early 1990s, fashionable outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia pulled its mail order offices out of Bozeman, relocating them to Reno, Nev., following a much-publicized declaration from company founder Yvon Chouinard. Chouinard said that, judging by the visual blight of development creeping along North Seventh Avenue (which today is dwarfed by a much bigger corridor of clutter along North 19th Avenue) he didn't like the direction Bozeman was headed.

Now, in another attempt at one upsmanship, a fresh barb has been cast at Bozeman in the form of an editorial hand grenade lobbed by Stephen Matlow, managing editor of the Livingston Enterprise. Knowing Mr. Matlow, and appreciating his sense of humor, I'm sure he did it to stir things up in honor of the New Year.

Mr. Matlow has succeeded. I was handed a copy of his recent editorial by a person who was incensed.

"Lately there has been a lot of complaining going on in the major Gallatin County city just over the hill," Matlow wrote in The Enterprise. "Bozeman seems to be going through an identity crisis. Once a beautiful town in an ideal setting, it has now turned into something butt-ugly where any Californian would feel comfortable."

Ouch.

"Developments, super stores, superduper stores and mega strip malls are blooming like tulips in Holland," Matlow added. "Bozeman, as people there are starting to say, 'is not Bozeman anymore.' What a shame—but there is a solution."

Matlow suggests that Bozeman rename itself "West Livingston."

"West Livingston has a ring to it, and since some of us think of Bozeman as a suburb of Livingston anyway, it will give that town some much-needed status," he says.

Poking his stick deeper into the eyes of Bozeman's elected leaders who have helped to sculpt Bozeman's derriere-ish aesthetics, Matlow opines: "You can't go to Wal-Mart in Livingston, but you can fly-fish almost every day of the year [on the Yellowstone River]."

In a direct affront aimed at its across-the-Pass newspaper competitor, The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, as well as the local TV stations, Matlow observes: "Lots of folks around town and across Park County also wonder why, when the media in Bozeman want to tell a community-oriented story, they tend to do stories in our area instead of their own. It's because we have a real community, while over the hill [in Bozeman], it's gone."

(Perhaps the Bozeman Chronicle now may wish to call upon its own staff reporter Scott McMillion, a native of Livingston, who still writes and lives in his hometown, to mount a reply to Matlow?)

One can only hope that Mr. Matlow's in-your-face insult will not go unanswered by the citizens who live in my fair city. Unless, of course, they believe that what Matlow wrote is true.

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