Anthony Palmiotti’s wife likes to think her husband could give Jonathan Goldsmith, Dos Equis' most interesting man in the world, a run for his money.  

“She’s been teasing me,” he said one January morning, inside the Flathead County Search and Rescue building.   

Similar to the man in the Mexican beer ads, Palmiotti has the same head of silvery white hair, snowy goatee and bright sea-blue eyes that brim with youthful energy.    

He sipped his black coffee as he sat across the plastic table, with his 8-year-old Newfoundland-mix rescue dog, Hercules, curled up at his feet. Even at 68 years old, Palmiotti is not one to sit still.   

He and his wife, Kathleen, moved to Kalispell from New York in 2019, the same year he retired from his 30-plus-year teaching career at the State University of New York Maritime College.   

“Luckily, my wife loves it,” Palmiotti said. “Taking a New York girl to Kalispell, Montana, is a big life change.”  

Not wanting to spend his retirement sitting around, twiddling his thumbs, Palmiotti and his wife signed up to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, where they help build houses and clean rain gutters once a week. But this alone wasn’t enough to quell his adventurous spirit.  

He looked around and applied to join the Flathead County Search and Rescue, where he served countless missions searching for, and sometimes rescuing, lost people in the Flathead Valley. His background made him particularly useful at driving the boat in river operations.  

He is in his sixth year as a member of the search and rescue team, and his third year serving as its president.  

“Every day I'm doing something with search and rescue,” Palmiotti said. “For every hour you spend on a mission, there's three to four hours behind that.”

When he isn’t building houses or waking up at 2 a.m. to find a lost hiker, Palmiotti enjoys writing historical fiction, with all of his stories set during World War II.   

In a way, it’s how he gets to relive his old glory days on the training ships as a maritime college instructor.   

“They're my guys,” Palmiotti said, referring to the characters in his books. “A bunch of sailors who went to sea, right? And they all have adventures.”  

He’s authored six published novels and one marine navigation textbook, so far, and is about to release another novel. Each one is based on a true story, told to him by maritime colleague and World War II veteran, Hugh Stephens.   

THE TWO men often ate meals together during training voyages over the summer at the maritime college. Palmiotti was a senior deck training officer, and Stephens was one of the instructors.   

“He would just start telling a story,” Palmiotti said. “Some of them were like, OK, and then some of them were just really interesting, because he's got all these adventures in his life.”  

Even in his late 80s, Stephens could recall the dangerous convoys he made to Russia and other parts of Europe, as if it were yesterday.  

“One of his adventures was his convoy to Murmansk,” Palmiotti said. “They were dangerous. The most dangerous thing I think you could do in World War II was go on a convoy to Murmansk.”  

“The Hell Run,” published in 2021, retells one such convoy. After the liberty ship John Ireland survived a treacherous mission delivering supplies to the Russian army in Murmansk, its crew members were recruited in a rescue mission to save an island of Norwegian civilians. German soldiers planned to wipe out the entire island after discovering an undercover resistance movement.    

“You never hear about all these little stories. Like you hear about the Battle of the Bulge, and everybody knows about D-Day,” Palmiotti said. “But all these other amazing stories ... you just don't know. But here Hugh lived through it.” 

He started jotting down notes and later dived into research. All of Stephens’ stories were backed up by sources, Palmiotti found. It wasn’t long before he turned the veteran’s memories into works of historical fiction. 

“He told a story about how they were in this big storm, and all the Norwegian women were crying because ships around them were breaking down and sinking,” Palmiotti said. “You could see the ship would lose its rudder. The old Liberty ships had a habit of losing steering, and when they lose the rudder, the ship is now at the mercy of the waves.” 

GROWING UP, Palmiotti was always fascinated by the large tankers that sailed north on the Hudson River toward Albany, visible from his home. His family moved to upstate New York when he was 13, trading Brooklyn’s busy sidewalks and crowded subways for endless miles of forest in the Hudson Valley.  

“I'm not a city guy," Palmiotti said. “I love being able to walk out the back door and just keep going.”   

In the woods behind his parents’ house, his imagination ran wild. He liked to pretend he was American pioneer Daniel Boone and fantasize what life was like during the Revolutionary War, an era he found much more interesting than the present day.   

He considered two different career paths after high school graduation. One option was to make a career in the woods by studying environmental science and forestry. The other was to work in the ship industry.  

After getting accepted to the maritime college at New York State University, Palmiotti took a step off the beaten path.  

No one else in his family, including distant relatives, had worked in the ship industry. His father hailed from a long line of Italian stone cutters. His mother worked part-time at a second-hand bakery before switching over to work as a secretary at the State University of New York at New Paltz.   

It was a big ordeal when 19-year-old Palmiotti packed his bags to attend the maritime college as a young, eager cadet. In traditional Italian family style, all of his aunts and uncles came out to see him off.  

“My father thought I was crazy,” Palmiotti said. “He looks at me, he goes, ‘What do you want to do this for? Come on. Let's go.’” 

But life as a maritime cadet was a dream come true for the young voyager. Over the next four summers, Palmiotti joined 800 other cadets on a training ship out at sea, sailing to nine different countries.  

“I didn't want to stay home and just cut grass," Palmiotti said. “You don't even know what the adventure is until you get there.”   

Reporter Hannah Shields can be reached at 758-4439 or [email protected].