'Archie', Meredith's own

For years, Bob Montana brought a chuckle or two every day for the thousands who read his "Archie" comic strip in their daily newspaper. Montana's life took him all over the country and he lived overseas for a few years here and there. But when it came down to the place he would call home, he chose Meredith, and he embraced his community with both arms.

Lynn Montana and Paige Kuether, his daughters, continue to live in Meredith. They presented a program on their father and his work on Tuesday night at the Meredith Historical Society.

Montana was born in Stockton, Calif. in 1920 to a family working the Vaudeville circuit. "Montana" was the family's stage name, Coleman was the legal name although the family would legally adopt "Montana" in 1927.

As Kuether and her sister recounted, their father was on tour with his parents at age three and by age five he was performing on stage with them, performing rope tricks and telling jokes to accompany his father's cowboy banjo act. When he wasn't performing, his parents provided him with art supplies to keep himself entertained backstage or at the hotel room.

It was through a friend in the Vaudeville shows that the family first came to know the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. In 1924 they stayed at the friend's camp in Center Harbor. They liked the region so much that they bought a farm on Meredith Neck and spent their summers there.

The Vaudeville circuit died and in 1930 the Montana family moved to Meredith full-time, growing fruits and vegetables and selling their produce in Montana's restaurant, also located in Meredith. Bob's mother cooked, his sister and friend were the wait staff. "Bob and his dad handled the entertainment," said Paige.

The entertainment included an improvised instrument called the "jazz stick" that Bob had invented.

The Montana's first fling with Meredith didn't last too long. In 1932, the family lost the farm when the banks collapsed. They moved to Boston, where his father opened the "Ranchero" night club. It struggled for a couple of years, but flourished following the repeal of prohibition.

In Boston, young Bob enrolled in art classes with the Museum of Fine Arts. He painted murals on the walls of the club, and enjoyed drawing caricatures of the patrons. Patrons who enjoyed his handiwork hired him to create posters for their businesses.

The Montana family was upset once again in 1934, when Bob's father unexpectedly died. The family moved to Haverhill, Mass., where Bob enrolled in high school and his mother remarried. After a few years, the family moved to Manchester, N.H., and Bob graduated from Manchester Central High School.

"Much of his high school days were portrayed in his comic strip. He always said these were the best days of his life," said Paige.

In 1940, Bob moved to New York City, where he enrolled in art classes at the Pheonix Art Institute. It was also then that he got his first job in comics. He first worked for Fox Comics, then for Rube Goldberg and worked as an inker for Parent Magazine's True Comics.

It was at his next line of work, at MLJ Comics, where he caught his break. He created an adventure strip with four schoolboys. He wasn't able to sell it immediately, but when the president of MLJ asked him to do a story in the vein of Andy Hardy, Montana created the character of Archie, not to mention Jughead, Betty and Veronica.

"Bob was just 21, and his puckish red headed 40s version of Tom Sawyer was such a hit that in 1942 MLJ commissioned him to come up with enough stories and art work for a whole Archie comic book," said Paige.

Montana left the city, rented a cottage in Meredith for the summer, and produced the material. The book, "The Mirth of a Nation," was released in November of that year. Shortly thereafter he enrolled in the Army.

Given his skills, Montana served in the US Army Signal Corps creating encoded maps. The maps appeared to be schematic plans for radio devices, but in reality they represented geographic features and movements of troops. The maps were designed to be used by troops behind enemy lines. When he wasn't working for the Army, he continued to create as many Archie comic book stories as he could.

It was during his service to his country that Montana met the love of his life, Peggy Wherett, a secretary working at the same Fort Mammoth, N.J. base that Montana was stationed at.

Wherett sat near a window in an office adjacent to the office used by Montana and the map makers. Wherett and the others in the secretary pool were mystified by the various houseflies that would make their way into the window. Some would be typical in their appearance but others would be bright pink, yellow or green. One day, Wherett confronted Montana in the hallway and asked if he knew anything about the flies.

"It turned out he'd been airbrushing the flies. That was the first time she met my father and thought it was pretty cute," said Lynn. The romance quickly grew, fueled by the ballet and restaurants of New York City. Peggy and Bob married in 1946 and moved to the city.

Just prior to their wedding, "Archie" became syndicated in newspapers. It was released in Feb., 1946. It started in 20 newspapers, and would ultimately be run in more than 700 around the world.

In 1948, the family moved back to Meredith. Montana had moved many times in his life, but this move would stick. He and Peggy bought an old New England farmhouse on the corner of Meredith Neck Road and Blueberry Hill Road. In a barn on the property, on the second floor, Bob built a studio. It was in that studio that nearly every Archie comic strip was produced.

"He really thought of himself as a gentleman farmer," said Kuether. "It was great for us kids to grow up on the farm." They raised whatever vegetables Montana felt like planting, and kept many different animals on the farm.

His contract called for him to produce six daily comic strips and one longer Sunday strip for each week of the year. As his daughters recalled, Montana had developed a work regimen in which he would spend the first week of every month locked in his studio writing a week's worth of "gags," or stories for the strips. The next week he would spend penciling the strips, and the third week he would ink them. The fourth week of each month he would spend playing.

"Because it was very intense, his writing time, he needed his relaxing time," said Kuether. Relaxing for Bob Montana often meant enjoying the outdoors: hunting and fishing, sailing his sloop on Lake Winnipesaukee, or cross-country skiing in the winter. He had to give up waterskiing and downhill skiing for fear that he would break his wrist or arm and be unable to fulfill his contract.

Montana thought it was important to travel in order to stay inspired and stay connected to the teenagers of the world. He took his family with him to live for a year in Mexico, London or Italy, anywhere so long as he could mail his work back to New York City.

If Archie could be described as "puckish," his creator was equally so. When his character began to be successful, Montana purchased a 1923 Ford Model T, just like the one Archie drove. He fitted the engine bay with a trick water bag that would squirt water from the radiator, and he carried a pistol filled with blanks so he could simulate a back-firing engine.

As he was working on his strips, Montana would use the family as a test panel to see which jokes were funny and which were funny just to him. "He was always trying out his jokes, the dinner table was a great place to be," said Kuether.

He was also a constant prankster, playing tricks on his two sons, two daughters and even his wife. "One time, she was in the bathtub and he figured that would be an appropriate time to try out the fire alarm — you never knew what to expect with my dad," said Kuether. And that wasn't the worst of it, by far.

"My dad was a pyromaniac," she said, fondly. He had brought two cannons home from a trip to London, had them mounted in the front yard and would delight in firing them off, giving the neighbors fits. The two sisters have no recollection of town fireworks from their youth, because their house hosted an explosives show that rivaled anything else around.

"One 4th of July, he was doing cherry bombs and he blew up my mother's bird bath," Kuether said.

Despite his antics, or perhaps because of them, Montana was something of a celebrity in town. It was a status he embraced, as long as he wasn't trying to work. He would gladly take town children for a ride in the Model T, and his strips often included cameos of local characters and events inspired by Meredith happenings.

In 1967, he remodeled the former Sprague's Esso Station in the Village Gallery, and tried to move his studio to the Main Street storefront. However, his well-wishers and fans took too great an advantage of the greater access. In order to get work done, he was forced to lock the door and hang a sign that read "out for a drink of lunch." Soon, he was back in his barn studio when he had work to do.

Lynn said, "He really thought a lot of Meredith, he really got involved in the town in many ways." He started the Meredith Beautification Committee, agitated for the removal of parking meters in downtown and tried to turn the community into an art colony.

His art colony vision failed to be realized, but his influence can be seen in the town today. A developer was seeking to build a line of lakefront multi-story condominium buildings along Main Street and Pleasant Street, which would block the view of Meredith Bay from downtown. This was before the town adopted zoning ordinances, but Montana and others were successful in blocking the project.

He was active in the Meredith Village Players as a writer and producer of performances. he produced and directed two movies, "A Close Shave" and "The Deed," which featured local actors and actresses. In 1968, he produced and directed the film "The First 200 Years" in honor of the town's bicentennial

On January 4, 1975, Montana died of a heart attack while skiing. He was 55. Archie continues on, drawn by other artists. To his daughter's eyes, though, the true Archie can only be found in the panels drawn by their father's hand.