Arlyne Reichert
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1926-2024
Great Falls, Montana
Arlyne's Story
On Christmas night in 1942 in Buffalo, New York, a 16 1/2-year-old girl attended a USO party that she said years later would “change my entire life.” Not only did Arlyne Cohn’s presence at the party transform her life but it would also, through her decades of public service, transform Montana.
Originally, Honor Roll high school student Arlyne and her widowed mother had planned only to dine at the USO party but a 6’2” dark, mustachioed soldier approached their table and asked the teenager for a dance. Impressing both women, they invited him afterwards to their house for cookies so Arlyne’s younger brother, always interested in people in the military, could meet him.
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Arlyne at 16
1942 East High School
Buffalo, NY
Photo courtesy of Ancestry.com
Harold Reichert, the 23-year-old soldier had ranched with his Russian-born parents near Bridger, Montana since 1937 and was stationed at nearby Niagara Falls. Soon, Arlyne’s “Montana farm boy” as she affectionately called Reichert, was in England for the remainder of the war. She, by 1944, was in the US Cadet Nurse Corps and studying at the University of Buffalo. By the end of the summer of 1945, however, both Arlyne and Harold were in Great Falls, with the latter working at Gore Field, a US Army airfield. They were married by a US Army chaplain on September 4th, 1945.
For the next seventy-nine years, Arlyne would call Great Falls home, serving as secretary for the Cascade County Democratic Central Committee, president of the Great Falls Public Library, board member of the League of Women Voters, was active in the local Hadassah chapter and rearing five children. Sadly, in 1967, her “Montana farm boy,” who had attained the rank of captain with the city’s fire department, was afflicted with kidney cancer and died a year later. Arlyne then began work as an executive assistant at the McLaughlin Institute, a biomedical research institute, her role growing for 25 years.
Although Great Falls was Montana’s second largest city for much of the 20th century, it lacked a synagogue. During the 1960s, Malmstrom Air Force Base on the east edge of Great Falls, however, wanted to offer Jewish airmen and families religious services in the base chapel so rabbis were flown in from afar. Claire, one of Arlyne’s daughters, recalls: “Men from our congregation would roll in a large blond wood Torah cabinet that was kept in a nearby storage closet for our services. The congregation was diverse, with Air Force members from 'Back East', folks who'd settled here…There was often a mixture of Reform and Conservative Jews…When I was about 12, a visiting rabbi refused to use the chapel because a huge cross loomed over the apse. To please him, the congregation had to trudge to the cafeteria. Once we settled in with our Union Prayer Books, the rabbi counted, shrugged, and said, ‘There will be no services tonight.’ There were about 25 people there, but only NINE men. When the concept of a minyan was explained to me, I was insulted and aghast. My presence literally...didn't count.”
Of all Arlyne’s public service roles, the most consequential was as a delegate to the 1972 Constitutional Convention in Helena. One of only nineteen women elected to the 100-person body and most likely the only Jewish delegate, the Montana Standard newspaper characterized her as “…an earnest novice when the convention started and one of the key floor leaders of the informal liberal bloc when the convention ended.” Her primary goal, formed from her experience as a League of Women Voters lobbyist, was a unicameral legislature that would provide accountability, efficiency, and responsiveness. Working with Methodist minister George Harper from Helena, they obtained the support of a few dozen delegates for this innovation. In the end, however, she shifted her energies to ensure that Montana voters would ratify the new Constitution: “I’m very worried now because so many of the powers that be seem to be lined up against the proposed constitution.”
Unidentified photographer, [Arlyne E. Reichert signing the Montana Constitution at the Montana State Capitol with Convention secretary Jean Bowman watching.]. (1972-03-22). Montana History Portal. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/94492
But Arlyne's public service was not yet done. In the following years, Arlyne was a state legislator in 1979 and led a campaign to change Great Falls’ government from a mayor-alderman system to a city commission-manager structure. Her final effort was to save the monumental concrete Tenth Street Bridge over the Missouri River. The preservation project took twenty years and several million dollars and today is a major component of the city’s River Edge Trail system.
Arlyne died in Great Falls at the age of 98 on May 3, 2024.