Rick Foote and Pam Swiger came to the booth to talk about their time as reporters in the 1960s for Montana’s major newspaper, The Montana Standard. They would cover their beat around town by hopping from one watering hole to the next, getting the latest scoop from the miners and madames who would stay up all night drinking.

The famous M&M bar, one of the many bars Rick and Pam frequented, used to be a round-the-clock drinking parlor and gambling house that catered to miners after a hard day of work. When beat poet Jack Kerouac happened to come upon the M&M in 1970, he described the characters in the place: “old prospectors, gamblers, whores, miners, Indians, cowboys, tobacco chewing businessmen” and maybe even Rick and Pam. Kerouac also proclaimed that the M&M was “the end of [his] quest for an ideal bar.” After a brief pause during the hard economic times of the 1980s in Butte, the M&M is once again a 24-hour bar. What else can we say but cheers to that.