By Izaak Opatz
Izaak Opatz: I first learned about Terry Holo by reading the obituary his brother, Bob, wrote about him, but it was the picture that ran with it that caught my eye. It showed Terry in his late fifties or early sixties with long, wavy hair, a bristly mustache and goatee, and a friendly face. He looked like Jeff Bridge’s character, The Dude, from my favorite movie, “The Big Lebowski.” The obituary itself described Terry in six short paragraphs as a fun-loving guy who was full of what, at first read, sounded like contradictions. He was a bachelor most of his life, but a father figure to six kids. He butted heads with his dad as a young man. Then when his dad got dementia, Terry became his live-in caretaker for eight years. The obituary didn’t say anything about a marriage or make clear what Terry had done for a living. For an assignment in grad school, I’d scanned dozens of obituaries. I found lots of them that listed decades of loving marriage and committed service to companies or careers, but this one was different. I was single at the time, 35, surviving on a jumble of side hustles and odd jobs, and Terry’s life looked a little familiar, maybe instructional. My curiosity peaked, I sent Bob Holo a letter to see if he’d be interested in talking to me about his brother. When I didn’t hear back, I called and left a message on his answering machine.
Answering Machine: Received on Friday, September 30th at 1:38 PM.
Izaak on answering machine: Hi Bob. My name’s Isaac Opatz. Um, I’m a journalism student at the University of Montana in Missoula, and I’m just calling to follow up on, um, that letter I sent earlier in the week. Um, I know it was probably a strange thing to receive and um, I just wanted to check in.
Izaak: He didn’t say yes right away. He consulted his family. He Googled me and found out I’m a singer-songwriter. It was only fair. In the course of tracking down his info, I discovered that Bob makes world-class gypsy jazz guitars. The Holos are a musical family, and my being a musician seemed to help my case.
Izaak on Zoom: You can be anyone you want
Bob Holo: Exactly
Izaak: We met over Zoom.
Izaak on Zoom: Um, I can’t see you. I don’t know if that…
Bob: Oh! Uh, start video.
Izaak: And when Bob made a trip from Oregon, where he lives, to Montana, where Terry died, he invited me along.
Izaak scene tape: Hi. Izaak.
Bob: Good to meet you.
Izaak scene tape: Yeah, good to meet you.
Bob: Well, c’mon in. You want to get your stuff?
Izaak scene tape: Yeah, I’ll just grab my backpack
Izaak: He was there to go through some of Terry’s things and do what needs to be done with the property.
Izaak scene tape: This is it.
Bob: Yeah!
Izaak: Bob and I stand near the shore of the lower Clark Fork River in northwest Montana on a piece of land his family’s owned for 50 years.
Bob: Yeah, I remember coming up here and helping weatherize this house. And uh, yeah, we used to spend a lot of time here when I was a kid running around on this.
Izaak on tape: There was no house up there?
Bob: No. There was no house up there.
Izaak: Just up the hill is the small cabin. Terry built. It has a wide deck overlooking the river, surrounded by larch trees with yellowing needles.
Bob: And so Terry, uh, in, I think it was 2018, when he said, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna try to figure out how to put, uh, something on this property, because Dad had wanted this to be a place where all the kids could come. It’s, it’s about 90% finished.
Izaak: Terry died before he could finish it and Bob hadn’t been back since. We walk around to the front door.
Bob: You’d see him out and just chilling and think, ‘Oh, that guy doesn’t have anything on his mind,’ but he had goals and he’d write things down and he’d accomplish them.
Izaak: It’s bright and wood paneled inside, neatly ordered and clean. There’s a bed at one end with Terry’s blue weight stashed underneath and a small kitchen. Just steps away from that a log frame couch and a stereo with the tape deck underneath the window.
Bob: Oh yeah, I was just listening to Terry’s tapes.
Izaak on tape: Stevie Ray? That’s what Ty said, that was one of his favorites.
Izaak: It feels like an RV inside, unpretentious and condensed. I could cover the length in 10 long steps.
Bob: So again, not a guy focused on making money. This was enough for him. And you just said, yep, this is, this is all I need.
Izaak: Standing in Terry’s living room listening to his old Stevie Ray Vaughan tapes, Bob began talking about the two of them weighing their different lives and choices.
Bob and Terry were alike in some ways and different in others. Bob had careers in high finance, business and engineering before he began building guitars. He’s a meticulous, detail oriented person. Terry was meticulous, too. Bordering on obsessive about things like cars, basketball and weightlifting. But they prioritized different things.
Bob progressed steadily in his professions, got married, bought a house near Portland, Oregon, and settled down. Terry never really did. He described himself as a traveling salesman and lived in dozens of different places. When he wasn’t working, he visited family and friends around the West.
Bob: And not be there to sleep on their couch, right? Go there to say, how can I help you? What can I do for you? How can we enrich our friendship and relationship?
Izaak: Sitting at Terry’s kitchen counter, Bob spoke with a sort of wonder about the way his brother chose to live. Terry invested time and energy into his relationships where Bob was more career focused. Terry focused on the people in front of him, Bob said, but didn’t necessarily plan for the future, didn’t make a ton of money.
Bob: So there’s a downside. Whereas I have a, I have a stock and bond portfolio. You know what good is that gonna do me when I’m dead? I don’t know. I’ve missed out on a lot of really amazing opportunities in my life because I was chugging along on something safe. So. I haven’t been to Sturgis 35 times. I haven’t helped raise six kids. You know? That stock portfolio is starting to look a little bit sad alongside life experience he had.
Izaak: Bob described himself as being part of the Reagan generation, which tended to be more interested in things than people. He said Terry, who was 16 years older, seemed closer to a millennial in his mindset.
Bob: Now, you’re probably uniquely qualified to tell Terry’s story because none of the people my age understood it, but I think people your age may have a much better insight to what he was all about.
Izaak: I do identify with Terry’s restlessness. Throughout my twenties and into my early thirties. I bounced around between a summer job in Glacier National Park and short term stints living in Nashville and Los Angeles, interspersed with two or three week tours as a musician. I got hooked on the freedom of living outta my little Toyota pickup. I slept in the truckbed under the topper, visited friends and family on the road, and declined to invest in a stable career or even a serious relationship. Meanwhile, my friends got married, bought houses, had kids. I wondered if I was taking the easy way out by not checking those boxes. And I wondered if Terry felt that way, too, if he died feeling that way. So I talked for a long time with his brother and found a few more of his people, too. I found out Terry Holo was born in Langdon, North Dakota. He was the second of four children to parents Rip and Arlene, two hard-scrabble school teachers who moved around a lot. The family chased jobs around North Dakota and Montana before settling in Thompson Falls where Bob and his sister, Mary, were born. By that time, Terry was already out of the house. Terry had been a high school basketball star and played a couple of years at the state college in Bozeman before he was caught with alcohol in his car and kicked off the team. He returned to the Thompson Falls area, where his parents lived. He planted trees for the Forest Service one summer and worked for a while at the local sawmill, hefting boards on a part of the line called the dry chain. His friend, Steve Patton, worked with him and could see the job was driving Terry a little nuts.
Steve Patton: Terry’s really, really smart, but he didn’t like standing on that dry chain doing that over and over and over and every day, and I told him, hey Terry, you better, you better get out of there and do something.
Izaak: Terry put a lot of his energy into, well, partying. I visited one of his friends from that time, Mike Shearer, and stood in his living room in front of Terry’s obituary, framed and hung on the wall. Mike pointed to Terry’s high school graduation picture, showing him clean shaven and short haired and smooth skinned, and then to the picture of Terry in his sixties where he looked like an older version of The Dude.
Mike Shearer: Yeah, and it was somewhere between here and here that I, we, partied.
Izaak on tape: Yeah, I could see the difference.
Izaak: They went to parties in the woods, concerts and festivals from Bozeman to Spokane. Mike described a scary amount of drunk-driving and a lot of competitive foosball in bars.
Mike: Terry had a good right hook, just boom, slam it right in.
Izaak: Terry had a swagger to him that could border on arrogance. He was popular, could talk forever and about anything and was fearless with women. It rubbed some people the wrong way, but Mike said Terry’s self-confidence was exciting to be near.
Mike: He was just a fun guy to be around because he had that ego. He would put us in situations that we wouldn’t normally, normally go into.
Izaak: He went to a Fleetwood Mac concert with Terry, who snuck around to the side of the stage while the band was playing.
Mike: He had this joint in his pocket and he walked back and tapped Christine McVie on the, and said, Hey, hey, hey. And she quit playing and he asked her to sign this joint and she signed this joint: Have a good time or whatever. He took it home and varnished it.
Izaak: Eventually Terry took his friend Steve Patton’s advice and moved on. He ended up working at an asphalt company in Bozeman, where on break one day he struck up a conversation with a guy walking by in a suit, Steve said.
Steve: And the guy said, yeah, if you’re, if you’re into sales, you can make a lot of money. If you got the gift of gab, which Terry had.
Izaak: Sales came naturally to Terry. He found that he loved the challenge of connecting with strangers, putting his charisma to work and persuading them to trust him after just five minutes. After a few other gigs, he ended up selling ads in the Yellow Pages. This was in the eighties and nineties when the phone book was the internet and phone companies pushed businesses to buy the largest yellow page ads possible. Here’s his brother, Bob, again.
Bob: He went in and he sold people great big ads because he was a silver-tongued devil, right? But then that started bothering him.
Izaak: Terry thought the phone companies were too greedy. Terry and a friend quit and started a new company, where they helped businesses save money by shrinking their Yellow Pages ads. When Bob was younger, he shadowed Terry at one of his meetings.
Bob: I remember walking out of that meeting thinking that’s, like, the nicest way I’ve ever seen anyone make money.
Izaak: The job required the kind of wit, self-assurance and personability that Terry had in spades. He closed 95% of his sales calls, according to his former partner. He did well for himself.
Bob: Just would literally roll into a town and say, okay, well I’m gonna go make some money now.
Izaak: Once he’d pitched all the businesses in one town, he’d move to the next, check into a hotel, sit down on the bed, and start flipping through the phone book and circling the largest ads. The business was so good, he recruited a few of his friends to join, including Steve Patton from the sawmill. For a while, Steve said, it was fun to be on the road together, but the constant travel wore on him.
Steve: So I lasted about three and a half years and, and I told Terry, I said, this just ain’t living for me. I was in a motel all the time. I don’t get to see my friends. And I came back and got a job back in the saw mill.
Izaak: I asked him how he thought Terry put up with it for so long. He was a loner, Steve said
Izaak on tape: But he really was a people person, it sounds like.
Steve: Oh yeah. Yeah. But then he was private.
Izaak: Terry was married in his early twenties, but because he was on the road so much, it fell apart quickly. And as far as the friends and family I talked to knew, he didn’t have another long term relationship. He wasn’t a dad, but he loved kids. Sitting at the table of the house where he grew up in Thompson Falls. Bob played an old family video on his laptop showing a teenage Terry kneeling in front of Bob, who was just a toddler at the time.
Bob: But he would just literally pick me up until I’d stand and then I wouldn’t wanna stand and he’d pick me up again.
Izaak: When he is not helping Bob stand, Terry’s lying next to him on the carpet or rubbing the top of his head.
Bob: I’m sure he never stopped loving me, but when I stopped being a kid who needed help, uh, you know. Yeah. His, his interest definitely swung toward, uh, the kids and raising kids.
Izaak: Terry spent a couple of months every year with his friend’s family, just helping out. While the parents worked, Terry kept an eye on the kids – Jessica and Aaron. He played basketball with them, horsed around and cooked meals. He was a stable presence during their parents’ contentious divorce. Bob played me another video showing Jessica, now an adult, with her arms around Terry.
Jessica on video: You’re the best uncle ever. You’re a cherish, you’re a love. You can come see us and come live with us forever and ever.
Terry on video: I’ll come back next year and…
Jessica on video: We just can’t live without you, that’s why. We can never live without you. We love you. Thank you for growing us up.
Terry on video: I love you too.
Jessica on video: Alright, bye-bye. Mwah!
Izaak: I also talked to Jessica about having Terry as a surrogate dad. She told me he was that, but that he didn’t want the responsibility of having a family full time.
Jessica Croft: He liked to get up and leave when and if he wanted, he didn’t wanna have to be strapped down to anybody or anything at any given time.
Izaak: Bob still grapples with that aspect of his older brother’s life.
Bob: You know, for a guy who ran from responsibility, he sure took on a lot of responsibility. I haven’t really settled that in my mind yet.
Izaak: Terry also grew up his sister Mary’s kids, Ty and Savannah, who lived in Eugene. This was when Terry moved to Oregon to take care of his dad, Rip. Mary and her family lived just a 15-minute drive away and Terry became a frequent presence at the house, Ty said.
Ty: he’d never really give anybody a heads up. He would just come over after school, like Terry’s in the living room, and
Izaak: He became a second dad to Ty, and basketball was a big part of their connection. Some years he coached Ty’s team. Other years he didn’t, but he made it to every game and then some.
Ty: He would bring his camcorder, he’d bring his tripod, he would record every point from every player on both sides of the team. We’re talking third and fourth grade basketball. Like, this is, this is not a big deal, but for him it was like it was a huge deal.
Terry on video: Good shot, Ty.
Izaak: He spent countless hours running drills in the gym with Ty, and he would set up the tripod and tape these, too.
In the spring of 2022, Ty’s mom, Mary, got a call from the postmaster, Liz Hackinson, in Trout Creek. Terry had come into the post office looking unwell that day, and Liz pushed him to see a doctor. She went with him to the hospital in Thompson Falls and was there when the doctor gave Terry his test results, which revealed that he had advanced pancreatic cancer.
The previous fall, Terry’s oldest brother, Dave, had died a week after getting the same diagnosis. Mary and her husband started driving to Montana that night and called Bob.
Bob: They called me from the road, from the car, and said, Hey, Bob, if you wanna say goodbye to Terry, you better get your butt in the car.
Izaak: Within a few days, the whole family was gathered at the Thompson Falls house. Terry’s siblings, Jessica and Aaron from North Dakota, Ty and Savannah were all there. Some of his old buddies also showed up.
They made him comfortable, let him smoke in the house and told stories. Ty said he and Terry watched some of his old basketball footage together.
Ty: One of the things we got to do kind of towards the end, too, was like he had compiled like all of my like highlight reels and stuff. Sorry. It’s kind of tough.
Izaak: It seemed to suddenly strike Ty, how Terry’s dedication to a small thing like showing up for those third and fourth grade basketball games, recording them and editing the footage was actually a really big deal. It wasn’t necessarily something that would make it into an obituary, but it was a huge demonstration of love.
It was also another example of how Terry’s life was hard to pin down and how his real achievements were sort of baked into the every day. He gave himself the freedom to do what he wanted, but more often than not, he used it to be there for other people. He didn’t have his own children, but had a huge impact on the lives of the six kids he helped raise – including his brother. He shaped a unique career around his skills and values, and he worked hard and was good at it. His wasn’t the easy way. It was just different. Maybe that’s why the obit that Bob wrote stood out. It was filled with stories of things that Terry did, not just a list of dates and achievements. It turns out, Terry wasn’t a cautionary tale for me. Learning about the way he tailored his life to fit himself, but committed it to others, made me feel less guilty about the atypical shape of my own life. Because Terry was loved. And he made a difference. He was responsible, and he was a free bird, too. Terry Holo died on March 6th, 2022, with his family close by. He was 71 years old.