Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

When Dragnet is over, I head into my bedroom and retrieve five thick green office folders and one less encumbered one, which I carry into the next room, where my desk and computer sit. I spend several minutes counting and organizing and thumbing through the sheets of paper, occasionally stopping to read one. I then turn on the computer and pull up Microsoft Word to compose a letter.

Dear Father,

This will be the final letter I write to you. Even if I sent my letters of complaint, which I have not done since what you call the “Garth Brooks incident,” this one would not get a stamp. There is no mail service wherever you have gone.

I have counted 178 letters of complaint to you over the past eight years. This will make 179. This one is notably different from the others in one way: The complaint lies with me, not with you. I never could find a way to make you proud of me, and at some point, I think I stopped trying. When you were here, I blamed you for that. I think now that the failure is mine.

The 178 previous letters of complaint are full of indignation about ways in which you slighted me or made me feel bad or disregarded me, and while I remember many of the instances and feel justified for the things I said, what difference does it make now? You are gone. I am here. I thought maybe someday we would reach an understanding. Now we never will. These are facts, and I accept them. I’ve always said I prefer facts, and that means I have to prefer them even on a day like today.

Had I known that it would end up this way, I would not have taunted you yesterday in Jay L. Lamb’s office. It occurs to me that death is a funny thing—not funny in a laughter sort of way, but in a twisty sort of way. It’s the people who are left behind who have to grapple with the regret. The one who is gone is just gone. I don’t think that is fair. Wherever you are, Father, I hope you have regret about what happened yesterday.

Finally, I will close with the hope that you have taken care of Mother now that you are no longer here. She misses you. That’s also a fact. She is deifying you, which I will not do. I am not a bad son. I am bad at pretending things are different from what is obvious.

You weren’t a deity. You were my father. I love you.

I put my father’s 179th letter in the third green folder, then reach into my pocket and pull out a picture that I took from one of the albums in my father’s office.

It’s from Easter 1976. We had made a family trip to Texas and went to Six Flags. My father is younger in it than I am now, with a head of bushy brown hair. He and I are mugging for the camera. The grins on our faces are huge. I can’t remember ever grinning like that. And yet I have photographic proof, and so I know it happened.

I place the picture in with my father’s letters. Then I clutch them to my chest, and I rock slowly in my chair.

On the 305th day of the year (because it’s a leap year), I awake at 7:38 a.m., the 225th time this year that I have done so. It is my most common waking time, and yet today is the most uncommon of days. It is the first full day of my life that my father has been dead. I consider whether this is something I ought to add to my data sheets. I think it is.

I reach for my notebook and make my notations, and my data is complete.

As I could have predicted—although I didn’t, and thus have no proof that I could have done it—my father’s death is front-page news in this morning’s Billings Herald-Gleaner. I begin reading the article on the walk from the front door to the dining room, and then I sit down and finish it.

Longtime Yellowstone County commissioner Ted Stanton, one of the most powerful and divisive politicians in the region, died suddenly Thursday after collapsing at a West End golf course. He was sixty-four.

Stanton’s death sent shock waves through the Yellowstone County political structure, rattling allies and foes alike, who noted that the county has lost a persuasive, at times bare-knuckled advocate for growth and business development.

One of Stanton’s frequent opponents, fellow commissioner Rolf Eklund, said his presence would be greatly missed.

“While I often didn’t see eye to eye with Ted on how the county should proceed, I always credited the depth of his vision and his powerful commitment to his ideals,” said Eklund, who was elected to the county commission in 1996, four years after Stanton. “He was gifted and strong and a real advocate for this county’s prosperity. I will miss him.”

Stanton, a native of Texas who came to Montana in the mid-1960s as a young oil executive, broke onto the political scene in 1980, winning election to one of the two Ward 5 seats as a Billings city councilman. He worked tirelessly to move the council toward pro-business positions, and his advocacy for growth can be seen in the city’s persistent expansion to the west.

On the council, he also flashed the combative style that, in many ways, defined his public image. In 1984, he challenged a popular mayor, Stephen Benoit, and emerged with a surprising victory by promising prosperity for a city that, at the time, was being lashed by collapsing home prices and the fallout from the energy bust.

“He was, perhaps, a more driving, ambitious politician than we had seen,” said Benoit, reached for comment in Largo, Fla., where he now lives. “You have to remember that Billings, at that time, was still a fairly sleepy town. But I give Ted Stanton credit: he ran a tough, hard, clean race, and he won.”

Stanton, however, chafed at Billings’s form of city government, which empowers not the mayor but the city administrator, and in his eight years in the post, he clashed repeatedly with a succession of city managers. But there was one constant: the city administrators came and went, and Stanton remained standing.

In 1992, he ran for an open seat on the county commission, winning handily against three other candidates.

“I look at it like this,” Stanton said in a 1993 interview, soon after joining the commission. “I could have stuck around city government for a while, trying to get through to a bunch of knuckleheads whose eye was on negotiating the length of a lunch break with the police union. Or I could go somewhere that would allow me to help make the whole region a better place to live and do business. It was an easy decision.”

While Stanton’s rough-and-tumble style didn’t always sit well with fellow politicians, he was beloved among the business community in Yellowstone County, and he ran unopposed for reelection in 1994, 2000, and 2006.

“If you go stand on the corner of Twenty-Fourth Street and Monad Road and look south and west, that’s all Ted Stanton,” said Billings developer Cody Clines, referring to the corridor of restaurants, auto dealerships, and big-box stores that drive much of the region’s commerce. “It’s his vision that made that happen. He’ll be missed.”

Stanton, a Republican, had one notable misstep, where he broke with his base of support and nearly paid a high political toll for doing so. He became an advocate for instituting a local-option sales tax in Yellowstone County, which he contended would allow the county to extract revenue from tourists passing through the region. He endured backlash from many quarters, particularly from constituents who endorse Montana’s no-sales-tax status. Stanton was heavily criticized in the press.

“They’re just not ready for it,” Stanton said in a 2006 profile by the Herald-Gleaner , one of his frequent sparring partners over the years. “I accept that. I don’t agree with it. But I accept it. It doesn’t detract one iota from what I’m trying to accomplish around here.”