Living The Big Sky Life: Famous Files

Although U.S. Highway 93 (a/k/a “Pray for me, I drive 93”) was considered during my residency to be the most direct route north into Whitefish from Kalispell, there were several other north/south options into town as well. Farm-To-Market Road was an old west-of-town option. Highway 2/LaSalle Road was an east-of-town option, and where Kalispell’s Glacier Park International Airport is located. And then there was Whitefish Stage Road which ran parallel between Highways 93 and 2.

It was west of Whitefish Stage Road just south of Highway 40 that you would’ve found Wagon Wheel Road – home to the house once owned by Emilio Estevez. When it came time to exchange his humble hideaway house in the Wagon Wheel neighborhood south of town for something more desirable like waterfront property on Whitefish Lake, he listed his property for sale with local agent, Ben Singer.

Ben Singer was, and I’m assuming still is, a longtime local real estate broker who – I was told - had Hollywood connections. He was known to handle his fair share of the valley’s higher profile celebrity transactions so I had little reason to question what I was told with regard to the family connections he had. The transactional truth in dealing with Ben was hard to deny however. He was obviously getting the business somehow and it wasn’t because of his business acumen or acute attention to detail. It seemed that’s what his wife, Candace, was for, and frankly, it was a good thing he had her.

I never knew Ben before the accident, and therefore have nothing to compare things to, but I was told that after he dangerously slammed into a tree while skiing and suffered a serious head injury, he was never quite the same. No surprise there. He was lucky to be alive they said. One had to admire his spirit and perseverance in spite of it all, and far be it from me to take that away from him.

The low key sale of Emilio’s low profile Wagon Wheel Road house sometime in 1993 was hardly noteworthy … until I got an urgent phone call one morning from Ben asking me to come to his office in person to do the closing that afternoon. Not a biggie unto itself, but it was something that simply never happened in Whitefish. My office was barely three blocks away from Ben’s office and was by far the most efficient closing option. But he insisted, so I complied without really understanding what all the fuss was about.

I showed up at Ben’s office as agreed, briefcase in hand, and was ushered into a poorly lit windowless conference room where Emilio and then wife, Paula Abdul, were seated around the closing table. Emilio was seated at the head of the table with his back to the door. Paula was seated near the middle of the table to the right of Emilio backed up against the wall, and Ben sat in a chair in the corner between Emilio and Paula, also backed up against the wall. I chose to sit at the table to the left of Emilio and across from Paula where I could see everyone in the room.

After the introductions were made, I pulled the closing paperwork out of my briefcase and began the signing. The house was bought by Emilio prior to his marriage to Paula so she was not an owner/seller of the Wagon Wheel house, and was in attendance as merely an observer. My dealings were solely with Emilio at this point.

His intentions were to sell the Wagon Wheel house utilizing a 1031 tax deferred exchange which required legal agreements/paperwork be prepared by the MOWB (and in my opinion, inept) Kalispell attorney Ben had referred him to, and the exchange accommodator chosen by said attorney whose sole function was to act as a neutral third party to the transaction for the purpose of holding the sales proceeds from this closing in a trust account only he controlled for later use in the exchange purchase of a new lakefront property yet to be named.

1031 exchanges are done all of the time in the investment real estate business. The tax code is complicated and the requirements for a successful tax deferred exchange are very specific so the details are extremely important. One of the most important requirements for a successful exchange stipulates that the seller should never have control over the funds received from the sale of the exchange property, or the “down leg.” Another requirement is that ownership to the newly purchased property, or the “up leg,” must match the vested ownership of the down leg property at the time of sale.

The exchange accommodator for Emilio’s transaction was a Kalispell accountant whom I’d never met (other than over the phone) but had transacted other uneventful 1031 closings with. I had no real reason for concern this day, but I would be lying if I didn’t say the entire 1031 accommodator thing has always disturbed me, for a variety of reasons - the primary being that the accommodator can theoretically be anybody. No insurance or bonding required, no protection for the seller and its funds being held in trust by some unknown the seller is supposed to trust - a person who could essentially abscond with enormous sums in cash proceeds if so inclined. And believe you me, it’s happened.

Let me add too that the IRS typically does not care if the seller’s down leg proceeds have been embezzled by an unscrupulous accommodator. It will require the seller to pay any capital gains tax owed on the proceeds realized from the sale of the down leg should the up leg purchase not be consummated as required by the tax code. No matter the reason.

As I began moving paperwork by Emilio for signature, we chatted casually about the house being sold and the ping pong table being left behind, but when we got to the exchange part of the closing, there was nothing casual about his examination of the attorney prepared paperwork. His sales proceeds were relatively substantial and quite unexpectedly, he focused his piercing blue eyes upon me and asked the million dollar question no seller had ever asked me before: “What’s to keep this accommodator from taking off with my money?”

I could see Ben’s face in the corner go apoplectic red as his eyes bulged in their sockets, but Emilio was oblivious to everything except my answer, which was, “Well, you’d better hope he has a wife and a family that he loves.” What else was there to say? He was a smart man or he wouldn’t have asked the question. His response (and I was the only one who saw it) saw his sharp blue eyes widen to double their size, and then he quietly turned to re-review the attorney's paperwork as he slowly exhaled. And that was it. He signed everything while we informally conversed about what he was looking to replace the Wagon Wheel house with.

The up leg purchase was going to involve Paula and that’s where her paranoia of paparazzi got involved. She was adamant that everything be top secret. She wanted absolutely no one to know anything about anything. Having been a part of the Flathead Valley for as long as he had, Emilio was far more laid back about the whole thing, but strived to pacify Paula all the same. The ownership vesting on the up leg did ultimately prove to be an issue, but the attorney believed he knew better so I shut my mouth and proceeded as instructed. 

Less than a month later, Penny Brooks , the listing agent on the Whitefish Lake house Emilio had identified as his up leg delivered the signed contract to my office so we could open escrow. It was indeed top secret and she wanted to make sure Joan and I understood the confidentiality clause in the contract. Yes, of course - every transaction that took place in our office was treated with the level of confidentiality now required by law simply because I believed that good business was nobody’s business.

It wasn’t long before word got out around town all the same. Penny came storming into our office one afternoon in a fit of rage accusing us of violating the contract’s confidentiality clause by divulging sensitive details about the super-secret sale on Whitefish Lake. I told her flat out that if word got out, it didn’t come from my office. Hell, Carla didn’t even know who Emilio Estevez or Paula Abdul were. Penny was unconvinced and left in a dramatic huff.

It wasn’t long after those false accusations that we learned the source of the leak was Penny’s very own seller who’d gotten drunk on the golf course and bragged over the course of an afternoon to anyone who would listen about who was buying his house. So much for confidences and small town secrets.

And now for my favorite part! On his new lakefront purchase contract, I noticed immediately that Emilio had set the earnest money deposit for the exact amount of the sales proceeds I’d deposited with his 1031 accommodator on the down leg sale barely a month earlier. All of that money he was justifiably concerned about was now going to be legitimately moved from the unknown to the known until close of escrow - from the accommodator’s trust account to Ben’s broker trust account where Emil clearly believed it more secure. 

I chuckled with smug delight for days, and have been air high-fiving Emil ever since. Nice job, Mr. Estevez. I suspect your brother would righteously call this "Winning!" 

Living The Big Sky Life^TM 

© by DK King

The Journey

A special thanks to Artist KAd Collins for allowing me to use as my avatar the magical surrealistic portrait she created in silverpoint called "The Journey." She has beautifully captured a part of my life's journey in a highly personalized story-telling work of art bursting with expressive and meaningful symbology. For me, it transcends all words.

The Journey © Copyright by Artist, KAd Collins. 
To find out more about the artist or to commission your own surrealistic story-telling portrait, contact the artist directly at ArtistKAdCollins or KAd's Etsy Studio.

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: I Could Run But I Couldn't Hide

I discovered early on that one of the easiest ways to get a pulse on the inherent cultural nuances of the Whitefish community in 1992 was to simply read the local weekly paper, the Whitefish Pilot. I personally found 82-year old Ida Hunnewell’s “Olney Briefs” column to be especially enchanting. And who wouldn’t? An Olney native herself, Ida proudly reported the social goings-on of those born and bred in her tiny town of Olney (15 miles northwest of Whitefish) with the unsophisticated simplicity of a fifth grader.

Ultimately though, it took working in a Whitefish title office and closing a majority of the regional residents’ real estate transactions to show me just how incestuously intertwined those residents really were.

Living the big sky life in a small town like Whitefish meant that just about everyone knew where I lived and worked. It was unavoidable. The kind of work I did, however, meant that if I wanted to protect my personal time, I had to keep my home phone number private. By carelessly allowing my home number to become public knowledge, I would’ve been forced to fight against the assumption of the local real estate agents that I was on call and available for business and problem solving 24/7 - a challenge effectively circumvented with an unlisted home phone number. The only person who knew that phone number was my assistant Joan, and she’d been given strict instruction not to share it with anyone for any reason, no matter how pushy they got or how much they begged. And faithful Joan never surrendered it.

When it came to the delivery of packages, on the other hand, it was admissibly convenient for both the postman and the FedEx delivery lady to know where I lived and worked; and they somehow always seemed to know where I was at any given moment. There were more than several occasions when the postman showed up at my office so that I could sign for a package that had been addressed to my home, or when I saw the FedEx lady drive her big delivery truck down my long dirt driveway to deliver a package to me at home that had been sent to my office.

My moderately multi-cultural upbringing in The OC gave me a pretty open-minded and tolerant approach to diversity when it came to people, their belief systems, and their lifestyle preferences. I arrived in Montana taking much of that social conditioning for granted, and I naïvely made the mistake of assuming most Americans operated under a similar premise until I rudely realized, of course, that they did not. Not only was good ole boy intolerance the norm in big sky country, there appeared to be no need or desire to change the way things had been done since Custer tried to take out the original Americans at Little Bighorn.

• White alone - (99%)
• Hispanic - (2.8%)
• Two or more races - (1.6%)
• American Indian alone - (0.7%)
• Asian alone - (0.7%)
• Black alone - (0.5%)
• Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone - (0.06%)
• Other race alone - (0.05%)

Every year the Whitefish Pilot was known to publish the town’s census statistics by race. This was something I’d never seen before, and yet I was utterly fascinated with its blatant (and proud) lack of diversity. In spite of any compulsory public show of political correctness, the truth was, anyone who was different didn’t tend to last long enough to make the paper a year later.  

As hard as some tried to sustain the pretense of political correctness, it couldn’t completely cover up the area’s shadowed past, for truth has the strangest way of rising to the surface in spite of all attempts to suppress it … kind of like a mushroom sprouting from a pile of dung.

One big mushroom that comes to mind involved a sales transaction I closed for a lot along the shoreline of Coon Lake, a few miles west of town. I know water front property is supposed to be all the rage, but whatever water front property was claimed to exist around this lake was, in my opinion, a joke. It was, hands down, the ugliest algae infested tully lake I’d ever seen - good only for breeding mosquitoes and the bass that feed upon them. By the time this escrow had opened and Joan had ordered the title work, I’d closed quite a few transactions around Coon Lake and gave little thought to the place, let alone where the name of the lake came from. I simply assumed it was short for ‘raccoon’ or ‘coondog’.

When I got the title prelim a week later, I began casually reviewing it for closing conditions as was customary, but something wasn’t right, and I kept saying that out loud to Joan. The exceptions listed in the report were not the usual Coon Lake exceptions, and when I got to the plat map, I just about lost it. What was this???

The plat map read Nigger Lake, not Coon Lake. I turned to Joan, a Whitefish native, and demanded answers.

By the time I pulled my eyes away from the prelim report to look at her, Joan had turned her head away from me and cowered over her desk with her hand blocking the side of her face I was looking at, ashamed and reluctant to talk about awful things that she wished had been buried along with their sordid past. Nothing she personally had anything to do with, but apparently some unsavory things she’d been witness to as a young girl.   

Joan told me that the reason this prelim was different than every other Coon Lake transaction we’d previously closed was because this sale was from an original owner and the title work had never been dated down to the present day like all the others. After this sale closed, the report I saw would no longer exist and all future title work for the property would be from the date of closing onward.

As for the name of the lake, she believed it had been originally named because of the lynchings that had been known to occur on its shores during the first part of the century. It was changed in the 1960’s after the federal government required all states to be in compliance with the Civil Rights Act; meaning any inappropriately named lake, waterway, park, etc. would need to be changed to something that was considered racially neutral and not derogatory. Apparently Nigger Lake, Nigger River, and Nigger Road in upstate New York were overlooked by the 1960’s compliance police. And then there are the private exceptions, such as Texas governor Rick Perry’s Niggerhead Ranch…

Undoubtedly, the Montana Moby Dicks of the 1960’s pulled a fast one on the federal government by selecting the name of Coon Lake, for no one seemed to catch the poorly disguised slur. Given my original assumption about the name however, I can hardly find fault with the enforcers in Washington way back when. Maybe they’d been naïve too. Either that or well paid off.  

In the end, I think the good ole boy intolerance that permeated just about everything took a huge toll on me. It bred limitation in every possible way, and for someone like me, that limitation felt like incarceration. No wonder I couldn’t wait to escape.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Rocking It On Holy Ground

céad míle fáilte (a hundred thousand welcomes) ~

The bucket list adventure I shared with Eileen last fall did not end with a little ferry ride from Mallaig to the Isle of Skye on All Saints’ Day. We had bigger plans for the second half of our trip. Giant plans, in fact - plans so gigantic that if we could’ve followed in the giant’s footsteps straight from Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish side of the Causeway to get there, we would have.

Our determination to rock it big on holy ground required instead that we fly into Belfast and drive to the northern shoreline of County Antrim to reach our landmark destination, the Giant’s Causeway - one of the windiest points in Northern Ireland. It was November 3^rd, and it was (not surprisingly) a very blustery, cold winter day.

To step out of our car was to step headlong into a forceful wind that was so biting it made us question our reason for being there in the first place. Just how bad did we want to do this? Eileen gave me every opportunity to back out, but I’d told her from the beginning that I was in, and in I was. So we sucked it up - faces frozen in place from the icy cold - and leaned into the wind that seemed determined to knock us over in the parking lot as we strived to reach the visitor center with satchels in hand.

Inside that suitcase full of costumes Eileen had been determined to schlepp across several continents were two pink morph body suits, pink ballet slippers, and frosted long haired wigs for this very occasion - but an on-site costume change would be required. We giggled like two giddy schoolgirls behind our respective bathroom stall doors while we struggled (over many layers of long underwear and as much insulation as we could manage) to change into those pink morph suits.

Once changed, we walked out of the bathroom camoflauged in sweatsuits, wigs securely safety-pinned to the hoods of our morph suits. No one even noticed that we had transformed ourselves into seasoned nymphs intent upon shamelessly re-creating an amazing album cover from our youth in front of a hundred tourists, many of whom were too young to get it. The album cover, of course, was Led Zepplin’s “Houses of the Holy.”

Conceptually we may have been dating ourselves, but we weren’t looking so old once we stripped off our sweatsuits and began scrambling over those slippery octagonal stones against heavy winds and seaspray like a pair of performance art monkeys … monkey see, monkey do.

It was awesome! 

Sláinte!

© by DK King

Eileen with a fist full of Irish soil
Giant Finn MacCool’s Chimney Stacks as backdrop

Beany and Cecil Take Loch Ness By Storm

The latter half of 2012 may have seen me delicately dodging the onslaught of shit bombs life had seen fit to lob my way, but in hindsight I can now admit that it wasn’t all bitterness and gnashing of teeth. My hard-earned inner strength probably had something to do with that, but I suspect my cynically optimistic nature (thanks to a hearty Irish gene pool) had everything to do with putting things into proper, albeit sardonic, perspective. There were, in truth, a few sweet moments sprinkled over the top of all that sour.   

One highlight was an overseas bucket list adventure I’d been invited to share with a dear friend I’ve known since grade school. Eileen Dennin, the instigator and bucket list benefactress, had always wanted to spend Samhain in the Scottish Highlands, more particularly at the castle that seemed to share her name, the Eilean Donan Castle.  

To keep with the theme she’d envisioned, she had stowed a separate suitcase filled solely with the costumes we needed to dress as ancient Celtic druids prepared to perform ceremony on the shores of Loch Duich under Halloween’s misty moonlight. The castle’s security cameras undoubtedly captured our hooded figures walking solemnly over the island’s stone bridge with glowing candles in hand as we made our way across to release our jack-o-lantern sky balloons beyond the castle's seawall into the darkness.

Storming the castle was no mean feat. It took some serious planning, and of course, a 25-mile scenic trek along the infamous Loch Ness with little expectation of a real life Nessie sighting. That’s OK. These two Beanys simply brought their own Cecils.

© by DK King

"Help, Cecil, Help!"       "I'm a comin', Beany-Boy!!" 

2012: R.I.P.

The last thing I want to do is wish my life away, but 2012 has been one interminably long year of wishing it was over. It felt as if the year would never end, yet it seemed to deliver unto me little more than one ending after another.

And now that the end has finally arrived, there will be no fond farewell to its passing from me tonight. Nor will Auld Lang Syne finds its melody sung from my lips as I surrender 2012 at the stroke of midnight with a deep sigh of relief. As much as I'd like to consciously forget the difficulties of this year gone by, the dismal irony is that I probably won’t have to do a thing to help the bad memories fade away since aging and the passing of time will most likely take care of everything. Clearly a blessing and a curse.   

I suspect that I’m not alone in my sentiments about the passing away of 2012, nor have I experienced the worst of it when compared to those who are struggling to survive devastations wreaked throughout the year in the name of gratuitous violence and natural disasters. All to whom my heart goes out.

So it's with great release that I now bid my final ‘goodbye and good riddance’ to 2012. Swaha!

© by DK King

The Rock of Gibraltar Bows to the Strong Winds of Change

I’ve known some rough years. I’ve known quite a few bad patches too - some of them admittedly self-created, and the rest, well, perhaps not so much so. And while many of my life-long friends have observed with occasional comment how challenging my life appears to them, it’s the only life I have right now and I feel an inexplicable moral obligation to make the best of it. I confess though that I do at times feel as if I’m a walking testament to the veracity of “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” – Lord knows I’ve muttered those words to myself like a mantra long enough to almost be convinced it’s true.

The reality is that I don’t do victimhood or martyrdom very well. Nor do I have much use for the notion of “suffering for suffering’s sake.” Frankly at this stage, I think if I hear one more person offer me up (what is usually meant to be a compliment) some well-intended words of twisted encouragement about how strong I am because of what I’ve endured as if that’s supposed to be enough to keep me going, I think I’m going to puke.

In my experience, the development of inner strength is directly related to how one navigates through the land mines of life and subsequently processes through the post-explosion wounds and emotional compression that is the aftermath … not unlike that which transpires during the formation of a diamond or in the tempering of fine steel.

I believe most people really do try to pave their individual journeys around the wheel of life with good intentions as they maneuver through it all in the best way they know how, the way they’ve been taught. Yet when life hits us between the eyes with a painful and profound compression event which we frequently have little or no control over, it seems the most expeditious and effective way we have as human beings to alleviate our own suffering while simultaneously strengthening our character is to voluntarily change our perceptions, our belief systems and/or our way of being – whatever that entails.

The process of change is very personal and often irreversible. Although change tends to be frighteningly hard for most people, I personally don’t find the actions associated with change to be especially devastating … not anymore anyway. The devastation in my experience comes not from the act of change itself, but from the illusion that has to be shattered in order for the act of change to become a healthy necessity.

 

I call these illusion-shattering land mines “Towers” because, like the blind-siding shit bombs that they are, these explosions historically strike at my Tower with destructive purpose and without mercy. Upon impact, I know with trembling certainty that something deep inside of me will be violently ripped from my core as the rest of the world callously carries on unaware and unaffected by the gaping hole that’s about to be left in my soul. The feeling of anguish is almost indescribable. Yet it’s from this black hole that true strength is born. Go figure.

The day my excuse for a father narcissistically tried to defend his lifetime of abusive bad behavior by insinuating he’d done me a favor and deserved some credit for making me strong, was the day I knew it was time to release any illusion I’d ever held with regard to his place in my life. It was also the day I officially resigned from my lifetime role as the 'strong one', aka The Rock of Gibraltar. This shit bomb of a “Tower” was clearly a monumental one, yet the changes I ultimately made because of it, a blessing. 

I quickly discovered that people get fighting mad when the rules of a relationship are unilaterally changed and new boundaries are established, particularly when their self-serving agendas have been abruptly obstructed in the process. Resigning from my role as everyone’s Rock of Gibraltar meant that my strength could no longer be used against me or taken for granted. It meant that I could no longer be held to a higher standard simply because I was stronger. It meant that the emotional emergency room I’d generously sustained for decades was permanently shuttered to those who had abused or taken my strong support for granted. And above all, it meant that those around me could have the opportunity to step up and find their own inner strength. Yes, a blessing indeed.

This being said, all I can say now is that the Thanksgiving holiday finally allowed me the opportunity to catch my breath long enough to recognize that the last 12 months have been one of the most difficult years I’ve known in a very long time; the last 3 months, especially so. Talk about feeling overwhelmed by a blitzkrieg of shit bombs. I suppose Winston Churchill was feeling much the same way when he said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Perhaps his brusque quip is just a poignant way of reminding me that “this too shall pass.”

Well, what stone remains of this former Rock of Gibraltar has suffered markedly from the eroding effects of emotional compression, and the cracks are starting to show. It must be time to let go of everything and bow once again to the strong winds of change…

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Transferring Title

There's a saying in the business world that goes something like this: “You’re only as good as the last deal.” What this really seems to mean is that loyalty is the exception, not the rule. How this tends to play out in the real estate realm is that any repeat business points you think you’ve scored for flawlessly closing hundreds of transactions vanish with a *poof* the instant you make a mistake at the closing table today.

It wasn’t until I began working escrow in Whitefish, Montana that I began to fully grasp the harsh reality of this locution. And boy did I learn it the hard way. Yet how was I supposed to know going in that the title insurance company I was hired to work for had a nepotistic staff of substandard title officers who were never held accountable for the quality of their work?

My experience saw the title officers of Security Title routinely and apathetically shrug off substantial errors in the title reports they prepared, and then become righteously indignant when I dared to become upset, even though everyone knew that I was totally dependent upon those preliminary title reports (called “prelims” for short) to do my job well. And how well I did my job was pretty important since it directly affected the branch’s profitability and long term relevance. Oh duh.

For the sake of an insultingly low paycheck, I endured six stressful months of defensively dancing the quick-step in an attempt to parry and subdue the screaming machine gun fire of demanding and irritated real estate agents, which was inexcusably exacerbated by the inadequacies of my own colleagues in Kalispell on a regular basis.

Call me crazy but I tend to take my livelihood pretty seriously, and the Whitefish buck I needed to earn started and stopped with my reputation. It was hard not to feel at times as if the careless crew at Security Title was going out of its way to sabotage my diligent efforts to develop a solid book of business within the real estate community under its banner as they repeatedly abandoned me to the time-wasting task of damage control for mistakes over which I had no control. 

In the end, management’s callous indifference toward my professional reputation ultimately cost Security Title its branch office. How could the management of a company who arrogantly treated the bulk of its employees as disposable know going in that I would be nigh impossible to replace? Apparently that was a lesson Chef was destined to learn as well.

They say (even in today’s insanely tough job market) it’s easier to find a new job when you already have one. So let the record show that I took that old advice to heart and didn’t waste one moment working whatever edge I might’ve had to my advantage the afternoon I had my “Maryanne” moment on the phone with Deidra.

Joan may have been convinced that it was necessary to loyally endure years of poor treatment by the likes of Security Title in exchange for the illusion of job security, but I was not so compelled. Security Title had done absolutely nothing to cultivate my loyalty, and frankly, any points it may have scored for hiring me in the first place vanished with a *poof* the second Deidra brushed off that last prelim closing crisis with impotent nonchalance because the title officer happened to be her sister.

Part of my routine during the six months I spent working for Security Title was to listen to Joan recite the weekly stats for the valley’s four title companies as published in the Flathead County market share report, and her ending commentary was always the same ... she’d wistfully acknowledge the consistent and significant hold of Citizen’s Title onto the largest piece of the market share pie, and then she’d begin to pine on about how she always wanted to work at Citizen’s Title for they clearly were the biggest and the best. Well, it seems all it took to make Joan’s career dreams come true was for me to have one “Maryanne” moment because as soon as I hung up the phone on Deidra that fateful afternoon, I proceeded to dial up Vern Burton, the owner of Citizen’s Title, and leave a message.

  

Burton called me back within the hour. He couldn’t believe his luck actually. He told me how Citizen’s Title had been seriously contemplating opening a Whitefish office for years but Whitefish was a very cliquey market and next to impossible to break in to without the right person. Apparently he’d been watching me progressively gather up local market share in spite of myself and Security Title’s self-inflicted roadblocks, and he was impressed enough to now expand into Whitefish with me at the helm. Of course I recruited Joan to make the transfer with me.

Citizen’s Title was underwritten by First American Title and ownership was controlled by Burton’s holding company, Kalispell Title Services, Inc. The holding company had strategically acquired ownership of Flathead County Title sometime earlier because it offered the expansion benefits that come from having another title insurance underwriter (Old Republic) and title plant at its disposal. This acquisition also made the company’s combined market share insurmountable by the competition.

Kalispell Title Services, Inc. leased an office on 3^rd Street next door to the Buffalo Café and across the street from Mountain Bank, and established a new office for me under the name of Whitefish Title Services, Inc. (WTS). In a maneuver designed to ensure the loyal lending business of the biggest bank in Whitefish, Mountain Bank, Burton and his corporate cohort, Dan Black, brought in the president/owner of Mountain Bank, Buster Schreiber (aka Mr. B.S.), as a 10% WTS investor.

While Joan and I did receive a nominal pay raise for transferring title companies, our meager salaries were expected to be supplemented with a monthly commission based upon our closing volume as reflected in collected escrow fees. The total escrow fee being charged on a sales transaction at the time was only $75. Typically this escrow fee was split in half and $37.50 was charged to each side (seller/buyer) of the transaction. Aside from the obvious fact that this flat fee was obscenely low, nothing about it made sense to me so I logically decided it was time to increase the escrow fee by $25 – time to make it an even $100.

Well, the local real estate agents squealed in protest like a sty full of stuck pigs. You’d a thought I was trying to drain them of their own life’s blood for an extra $12.50 that they themselves didn’t even have to pay for. Yes, I know. Even at $100, the fee was still obscenely low, especially when compared to what I knew was being charged for the same services in The OC. I could only push the envelope so far however, and given the heated reaction, it was clear anything over $100 would’ve just pushed too far.    

I suppose raising the escrow fee proved to be one of my undistinguished claims to fame. When the local swine finally stopped squealing, it was ironic to watch the four title companies in Kalispell (Citizen’s Title and Flathead County Title included) safely slip through the door of opportunity that I alone had the chutzpah to kick open as they all fell in line behind me and increased their escrow fees to $100 as well. And I'm talking quick, quick and with tacit enthusiasm.

The good news is that the fast dancing I was forced to learn at the onset to the stressful tune of screaming machine gun fire eventually turned into what later came to be called the “funding dance.” At least that’s what everyone who ever worked with me called it. Probably because I’d make them all dance around my office to the tune of the big funding bell I was known to grab from the corner of my desk and ring with the swing of Quasimodo every time a transaction funded. We have a funder! Whoop! Whoop!

Believe you me, everybody wanted to hear my funding bell ring for that meant all parties concerned would soon be dancing their way straight to the bank or into a new home.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Fake It ‘Til You Make It

Montana proved to be a grueling taskmaster. Of course all of the signs were there at the beginning had I only been able to read them with a clarity that is undeniably dispensed through the lens of hindsight.

Frankly, I find it hard to thrive in a place that labors to brainwash me into believing that I should consider myself blessed and thereby be appreciative of the fact that I can work like a slave for a slave’s wage yet somehow be expected to feel incomparable contentment because financial slavery is the price one must pay for the prospect of “quality of life.”  

I tried to believe the hype. I tried to capitulate. Yes, I tried to “live the life.” I really did. But I’m not the type who can thrive when living a lie. Yet unlike some of those well-heeled bulldogs who brought their riches with them, I didn’t have the luxury of not generating an income while living the big sky life and found myself promptly tasked with finding suitable employment upon arrival in June 1992. Standards be damned.

Prior to moving to Whitefish, my career had solidly transitioned years earlier from banking to commercial real estate lending, and the last position I held before the big move was vice president and California corporate broker for a Denver-based lender that specialized in originating commercial mortgage loans throughout the western United States. How was I supposed to convert my specialized, yet somehow unbelievably inapplicable, education and career experience into a paycheck I could live with in a cow town like Whitefish, or anywhere else within the Flathead Valley for that matter, decades before the age of cloud computing?

I began my job search by dropping off resumes anywhere that seemed semi-suitable (given my basic skill set) within the Whitefish community. This basically meant the four banks in town. Talk about lowering my standards. Just the thought of seeking employment at any bank was a claustrophobic compromise for me since I’d purposely left banking for a reason. Glass ceilings that enclose glass cubicles have an asthmatic way of suffocating me with boundless limitation.

It didn’t take long to recognize (admittedly with a huge sigh of relief) that I was mutually classified an over-qualified female and none of the local banks wanted what I had to offer as a consequence, so I took my job hunt down to Kalispell. I left resumes with any business I could find with a tie to the lending industry I knew so well, and this included the four major title companies: Citizen’s Title, Flathead County Title, County Guaranty Title, and Security Title.

I returned home from Kalispell that afternoon to find a phone message on the machine from one of the title companies I’d left a resume with barely an hour earlier. Diedra, the county manager of Security Title, wanted me to meet her at their Whitefish escrow office that Saturday, which came as a huge surprise to me for several reasons. Aside from the fact that there was no evidence (not even a street sign) that any of the major title companies had a branch office in Whitefish, nothing I had submitted for employment consideration even remotely insinuated that I’d ever had any hands-on title or escrow management experience.

Frank Lloyd Wright Building
341 Central Avenue, Whitefish. MT 59937

Security Title’s escrow office was located in the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building on Central Avenue just north of 4^th Street. It was sandwiched between Central Avenue and a paralleling alleyway that offered egress for the cars pulling out of Mountain Bank’s drive-through teller stalls.  

Experience or no, Deidra hired me on the spot and was eager for me to start my new escrow officer/manager job on Monday morning. Apparently Security Title’s local two-person branch office had abruptly downsized to one assistant when the previous managing escrow officer, Maryanne, had stormed out several weeks earlier. Well, it didn’t take me long to understand why.  

No one has ever been happier to see me for the first time than my new assistant, Joan. Joan was a bubbly 55-year old Whitefish native who’d been working for Security Title at least twenty years. Most of those years were spent in Security’s Kalispell office and when the company decided to be the sole title insurer to establish an escrow office in the town of Whitefish, Joan jumped on the chance to work closer to home.

Security Title eventually sent me to its Boise, Idaho headquarters for a week’s worth of corporate training a month or two into my tenure, but it seemed hardly worth the bother for the second that office door slammed shut behind me on my first day of work, my high-stress on-the-job training dance began … and it was to the tune of machine gun fire. The rapid fire commands of those demanding real estate agents forced me to dance as fast as I could while their screaming bullets aimed mercilessly at my feet hoping I'd stumble and they’d have someone to blame for something, anything.

Joan proved to be invaluable to me. She showed me the way with authentic exuberance, and she actively promoted and legitimized me to the locals in a way that only a true native can. My learning curve fortunately proved to be short and it didn’t take me long to make a prominent name for myself in the Whitefish real estate community – something no one else had heretofore been able to do.

This sure came in handy when I had my “Maryanne” moment with Deidra down in the Kalispell office. My dismissed and ignored frustrations had been mounting for months, and when the tipping point finally arrived, I let Deidra have it over the phone one fateful afternoon. Joan and I were alone in the office at the time, and I’ll never forget the look on Joan’s face when I hung up. Seems I said everything she’d ever dreamed of saying after enduring twenty years of mistreatment by Security Title's management.

It proved to be the moment that changed everything for both of us …

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King