City Council Meetings to Start 10 Minutes Late to Honor Colleague Who Was Never on Time

TBO.com ^ | 3/19/02 | Tom Laceky

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

Dr. Chester Hope was late for everything - late coming back from his lunch hour, late seeing his patients and late getting to City Council meetings.

"It got to be a pretty big joke with all of us," Mayor Andy Feury recalled. "I'd say, 'We'll just go ahead and start, Chet will be here in a few minutes.'"

So to honor Hope, who was shot to death last month, the council unanimously passed a measure calling for meetings to be held 10 minutes late.

"During his entire nine-year term," the ordinance says, "Chet Hope was rarely on time and typically arrived at the council meeting approximately 10 minutes after it had begun. ... As a lasting memorial to Chet Hope, the City Council shall convene its regular monthly meetings at 7:10 p.m."

Hope, 56, and his wife, Carol, a teacher, were shot to death in their home Feb. 10 by their eldest son, Jared, 24, who also killed himself. He had been diagnosed with manic depression.

More than 1,000 people filled the small-town baseball stadium Feb. 16 for a memorial for the parents and son alike. All three, Feury said, were victims of "a disease that took three lives."

"Chet was a remarkable man," fellow council member Turner Askew said. "He fit more life into a day than you could imagine, but the clock wasn't something that bothered him. Chet was always into something on the far side."

The late Dr. Hope was an avid hiker and biker, but most of all he was a fishing fanatic, and temptation flowed all around. The Flathead River runs by the edge of Columbia Falls, where he and another doctor ran a clinic for 25 years, and the Whitefish River bisects his hometown of Whitefish, six miles away.

"He wanted to be on the fishes' level and watch them and see how they moved, so he started snorkeling," said Sarah Fitzgerald, who served with Hope on the council.

It was an everyday sight: There went Dr. Hope, late as usual, pedaling his bike back to the clinic in his black snorkeling outfit, goggles on his head and flippers on the handlebars, after his lunch-hour swim in the river.

Every day. Even in December.

Hope even ran late for appointments with his patients. His nurses had to remind him that others were waiting.

"He was a good doctor, not just trying to push you through," said Feury, one of those patients. "He wanted to know what was going on with you and would spend a fair amount of time with you in his office."

Before he took up snorkeling, Hope usually spent his lunch "hour" running to a mountain lake for a swim in the summer, or cross-country skiing in winter, said Rhonda Fitzgerald, a next-door neighbor and Sarah Fitzgerald's mother.

"That delightful wildness" was part of what endeared him to the community, she said.

Hope was defeated for re-election in November, though. Some said it was his strong support for a proposed hiking and biking path around town that lost him votes.

Askew said he hopes the city will find a more substantial way to honor the doctor.

"I think we could do a little better than that for Chet," he said. "We'll come up with something."

[WSGilcrest]

Was he late for his own funeral?