Clifford Wayne Haskins

Clifford Wayne Haskins died in Billings on August 25, 2026. He was seventy-six. Born there on September 22, 1949, he learned the yard before he learned a trade. His father worked the railroad. Clifford worked it too, then the hump, then whatever job would keep a man outdoors in a city that does not flatter anyone who waits for mild weather. He spent decades coupling cars, checking hoses, and teaching younger men that ice on a step is not a story you tell afterward if you have been careful. He did not romanticize the work. He said the river was beautiful from a bluff and dishonest from a cut, and that both facts could be true before breakfast. He married Elaine Haskins in 1972. They kept a house up the rim and a cabin they almost never finished painting. Two sons grew up knowing how to bait a hook and how to be quiet in a boat. Elaine taught school. Clifford packed her lunches with the same seriousness he packed a toolbox. After he retired he walked the rims in every month except the ones when the wind made walking a kind of argument. Friends remember a dry laugh, a refusal to own more than one good coat, and a habit of showing up to help move a freezer as if that were the natural use of a Saturday. He could name the trains of his youth and would stop himself before the list became a lecture. He died in Billings, the city whose rail and weather had written his calendar. The yard still works. He would have liked that the work outlasted the man.