Cheap coffee, priceless company: Belgrade McDonald's group has shared morning laughs and tears since the '50s

BELGRADE — It’s 7:30 a.m. at the Belgrade McDonald’s and the Coffee Club members have already started drinking their first cup.

The sun is just coming up over the horizon, and other customers are meandering into the place sleepily.

Except for the club, that is. They’re already having a lively discussion about a recent basketball game.

The Coffee Club is a group of Belgrade seniors who have been gathering at 7:30 a.m. every weekday for roughly 15 to 20 years, although the club has lasted much longer.

The group varies day by day, and they discuss everything from politics to religion to sports to technology to Belgrade’s growth, all over their 75-cent McDonald’s coffee.

Pat Kramarich can trace the origins of the club to the mid-1950s, and 92-year-old Pat Ray has been there since the beginning. Her husband, Hans Ray, started the club in 1956, one year after they were married.

In 1960, she and Hans bought a home in Belgrade for $18,000. This past summer she sold it for more than $600,000.

Hans Ray owned a local gas station called Ray’s Standard. The station was right across the street from the Lounge, where the Coffee Club met for decades.

“Sometimes he’d order coffee and then get a customer and so have to run back across the street,” Pat said with a laugh.

Hans Ray passed away in 2001, but his legacy lives on. Almost 20 years later the group is still roaring with laughter as they tell stories about him.

In the 70 years since Hans Ray started the group, The Coffee Club has met just about everywhere in town, from Bar 3 BBQ to Friendly’s to Burger King to McDonald’s.

Kramarich and another club member, Bill Green, both moved to Belgrade in 1969. At that time, the population was almost 1,600. Now it’s close to 14,000.

Green is a retired athletic director and football coach. Kramarich is a former teacher. They both worked at Belgrade High School and have seen a lot of change come to the Gallatin Valley in the past several decades.

Some of these changes came about because of Chet Huntley. Huntley was a television newscaster with NBC, known for the Huntley-Brinkley Report, and he co-founded the Big Sky Resort. It opened in 1973 and Huntley passed away in 1974.

Big Sky now sees hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, many coming through Belgrade from the airport. The community makes millions annually and has found worldwide recognition. But with more tourists comes a change in the pristine beauty of the region.

“There were elk everywhere,” said Brad Cooper.

“Not anymore,” said Green.

Green cites another reason for Belgrade’s boom.

“I think you can blame ‘A River Runs Through It’ movie,” he said.

The movie is set in Missoula but filmed in the areas surrounding Bozeman and Livingston, specifically the Gallatin River for the fishing scenes.

“It started our demise, so to speak,” Scott Redmond said about the movie.

According to Redmond, there was a small-town, laid-back atmosphere that Belgrade doesn’t have anymore.

“I think it’s gone,” he said.

Del Crabtree referred to Bozeman as “Bozangeles.”

Nowadays, Montana has seen an influx of people because of the TV show “Yellowstone”. The show was set in the Paradise Valley but mostly filmed in and around Missoula and on a ranch near Darby, in the upper Bitterroot Valley. It premiered in 2018 and lasted five seasons.

“It’s ridiculous, it’s not really Montana,” Cooper said of the show.

Belgrade is still considered a small town but has lost some sense of community, the club members agree. It’s grown commercially and economically. It’s seen a boom in population and a rise in tourism. The Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport on the outskirts of Belgrade saw more than 2.8 million visitors last year.

Belgrade High School is the only school in the state that has been in every Class: AA, A, B, and C. A school’s class is decided by its enrollment, with AA having the highest number of students.

“What you notice in a Class C school is truly a community,” Kramarich said. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody goes down to the local restaurant. Everybody sits and talks and gabs and so forth.”

“And that’s what we’ve lost.”

Belgrade High sports were incredibly important to the community back in the day, they said.

“We never had a game where the stands weren’t full,” said Cooper.

The club now finds community in each other and in their routine. Some members had parents who were once part of this Coffee Club. Cooper’s dad was the mayor. Redmond’s dad worked at the airport.

Cooper went to high school with both Redmond and Steve Brenner. Kramarich and Green taught several of the other members while they were at Belgrade High.

Another part of their routine is talking about grief. One of their regular members is in hospice care.

“At our age, we have friends, relatives, acquaintances, that get sick; they pass away, and that’s one of the subjects, just about every coffee, that we talk about,” said a member of the club who wished to be anonymous.

Kramarich said he thinks the group is an important support system when dealing with grief.

“Sometimes when you deal with life-or-death issues, we do hold each other’s hand, maybe not physically,” he said.

The coffee cups have run dry by the time everyone is ready to leave at 9 a.m. The sun has fully come out and everyone in the club is off to do their own thing — until they congregate in the same seats the next morning for another lively discussion.