When we first met, in the summer of 1999, he still wanted to talk about it, even after thirty years. He told me in all sincerity that he would have been content to spend his life coaching at Butte Central. But as it happened, Peoples coached for only three years until, in 1972, an old friend of his persuaded him to go to work as a planner and manager for the city administration. He rose quickly within the local government. He became mayor in 1979, when he was thirty-nine, and he remained in office through multiple elections for more than a decade during the final collapse of mining in Butte and the worst years of despair.
History is never that simple, of course.
It had been slowly losing population since World War I when, suddenly, in the mid-1960s, it slipped into what appeared to be a final decline. Pit caused real-estate prices to collapse. People began to flee the hill, abandoning their houses and small businesses by the hundreds. The Model Cities program lasted six years, and it softened Butte's pain. But the cancer kept spreading anyway.