He was on the newspaper's staff in 1993, when the town suffered a wave of vicious racial and religious hatred.
[5] Citizens who attended a Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration returned to their cars to find racist literature on them.
[6][7] The people of Billings banded together, with volunteers re-painting the home and ridding it of the hate-filled graffiti; religious groups held marches and those who were not members of a particular religion began attending other services in addition to their own, to show unity and support for each other.
The Billings Chief of Police, Gary Inman, issued a challenge to the town's citizens: for every instance of vandalism, ten more people should display the picture of the Menorah; by the end of December, 1993, there were over 10,000 Menorah images openly displayed in the town.
[6] Svee, a fiction adviser to the Saturday Evening Post, credited his writing ability to being raised in a family of storytellers, and to his mentor and teacher at the University of Montana, Dorothy M.