professors at Montana State College (now the University of Montana) petitioned the newly created AFT (Chicago 1916) for affiliate status and became AFT Local 111. Unfortunately that unit soon disappeared not to remerge until 1972 again at the University of Montana. In the interim, AFT helped organize local AFT affiliates in union stronghold cities Butte and Anaconda and elsewhere mostly in western and southwestern Montana. In 1936, almost forty years before the state legislature provided public employees the right to organize for collective bargaining purposes, the Butte Teachers Union negotiated the first public employee labor agreement in America with the Butte School district. In 1972 a scattering of AFT affiliated local bargaining units organized MFT as an AFT state affiliate and chose Butte teacher Jim McGarvey as their first and as it turned out only executive director. McGarvey continued to serve as executive director until MFT merged with MEA in 2000. In 1971 MPEA started up as less a union than a concerted effort to organize a number of local government and state employee chapters to advocate for, protect, and enhance public employee retirement benefits. That same year, Tom Schneider became MPEA's first executive director and served as such until he retired in 2010. When authorized by state law to organize for collective bargaining purposes, MFPE morphed into a statewide public employee union. For years MFT and MPEA, led by McGarvey and Schneider respectively, competed for members and bargaining units especially across state government. For years, they made and broke promises to merge with each other. Ultimately they never did, at least not directly. Meanwhile MEA and MFT competed mostly for bargaining rights in school districts and Montana university system. Each raided the other. Where there was an opportunity to organize an unaffiliated group of education employees, each worked hard to win the bargaining unit election. Each expended enormous time, energy, and money organizing much the same membership and raiding each others domains. As stated above, however, MEA concentrated on public education employees while MFT in competition with MPEA also organized public employees outside education. Even though MPEA organized classified, or non-certificated public school support personnel, it never attempted to organize public school teachers. So, it came to pass that the public and the media viewed MEA as a teacher union, but not so much MFT, and never MPEA. Despite spirited competition for members, after MEA members elected Eric Feaver