BUTTE, MONTANA

TO SEE THE BEST OF BUTTE, Montana, all Joyce O'Bill has to do is look out her front window at the gleaming white Virgin Mary on the mountain.

- Bill Hangley Jr.

"I look out every morning and say hi," she says.

Perched high on a ridge outside of town, the massive statue known as Our Lady of the Rockies (or just Our Lady to locals) can be seen from almost everywhere in this famously hardworking city. Bob O'Bill built it as a tribute to his wife while she battled cancer. While Joyce was hard at work beating the disease, her husband's modest vision of a 5-foot front-yard statue was blossoming into a 90-foot mountaintop memorial to both family and motherhood.

"Bob said, 'I'm not religious, but I've got a lot of faith," says Joyce. "I tell everybody that it doesn't have so much to do with me, or religion. It's for all mothers."

Joyce ended up outliving Bob: He passed away in 2016, and she's still going strong at 90. So strong, in fact, that she drives twice weekly to the Butte Emergency Food Bank to give back to the community that has given so much to her.

"I started 31 years ago, and kept going and going. I'm the old one there," she says. "When we started, it was only four of us. Now we have 60 or 70 volunteers."

It's people like her who inspire Lorraine Hamry most. A retired banker and Butte native, Hamry started volunteering at the Butte Emergency Food Bank a decade ago and is now its director.

"I've absolutely fallen in love with it. I had no idea how much Butte gives back," says Hamry. "People in Butte are so proud. They think everybody should know where Butte is. It's not 'Butte, Montana,' it's 'Butte, America."

Founded in 1864 and once the largest city in the West, Butte has always been a rugged place. Joyce O'Bill still remembers when the local high school got its first turf field.

"The kids played on rocks and dirt for years," she says. "When they finally put in grass for the football field, we thought we were big time."