In April 1908 the Butte Evening News began a contest for Butte schoolchildren, offering $5,000 worth of musical instruments as prizes. First prize was a $500 piano made by the Bush & Gertz Company of Chicago, a value equivalent to about $17,000 in purchasing power today.
The contest was essentially a popularity contest, based on coupons printed in the Evening News and cut out to submit to the official counting committee, which included Butte Mayor Joseph Corby. But you could also earn points for one of the thousand-plus nominated students by subscribing to the News for a period up to five years. A five-year subscription cost $25 and garnered 10,000 votes for your chosen student.
Additional prizes included forty violins, thirty guitars, and thirty mandolins valued at $45 each. When the counting was over in early July, Helen McMillan won the piano with an amazing 163,284 votes, following a see-saw battle with second-place Winnie Copeland, who finished with 121,144 votes. We might suppose there were many 5-year subscriptions sold to generate those totals.
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Helen McMillan was already well known as a musician, performing piano solos and accompaniments for various recitals and events, especially for the St. Andrews Society and the Daughters of Rebekah, a branch of the Odd Fellows. She performed a whistling solo for the assembled Butte lodges of the Odd Fellows in 1908 as the Evening News contest was beginning. She was in Seventh Grade at the time.
Helen McMillan graduated from Butte High in 1913 and attended the Montana Normal College in Dillon, after which she taught school briefly at Gildford, near Havre, before beginning a long career at the Lincoln School in Anaconda, where her family had relocated. She was Superintendent of Schools for Deer Lodge County for most of the 1930s.
The Evening News was “an independent newspaper” published in Butte beginning in 1904. It was owned by F. Augustus Heinze and became the daily version of his more political weekly newspaper, the Reveille.
The Evening News itself served Heinze’s business interests as well, and even though it was ostensibly independent, like the Reveille it was “a newspaper opposed to Standard Oil domination in Montana.” Historian Dennis Swibold described the Evening News as “a salty mix of scandal, sports, and lurid crime, accompanied by incessant circulation contests and the relentless drumbeat of its anti-company editorials.” The contest that Helen McMillan won was one of those ploys to drive up circulation for the paper.
Heinze was effectively bought out by the Amalgamated (Anaconda) Company in 1906, but he continued to subsidize his newspapers until 1909 when the Reveille ceased publication, followed by the Butte Evening News in 1911. Butte could not sustain four daily newspapers – all of them variably the mouthpieces of politicians – and the five-year subscribers who bought votes for Helen McMillan in 1908 were out of luck.