When you tell somebody that you quit drinking, you will get immediate compliments and congratulations.

People you hardly know will be taken aback, and they will be proud of you. I know this because I quit drinking alcohol 18 and a half years ago.

My last drink came early in the morning of Oct. 28, 2007. It was two weeks before the birth of our second child.

I was also on a collision course with a divorce because I did not have an off switch when I drank alcohol. One was too many and 24 was not enough. I needed to quit, but I did not know that I needed to quit.

Until Oct. 28, that is.

That, however, is not a date I celebrate because there is nothing good about that date in my eyes. Sunday, Oct. 28, 2007 was when my good friend Leo McCarthy lost his daughter.

I spent that Saturday working for The Montana Standard. I covered Montana Tech’s Senior Day football game against Montana Western.

After writing the story of Tech’s 28-21 win over the Bulldogs, I helped put the sports pages together before sneaking out the front door of the paper to unwind at Maloney’s Bar just before midnight. Co-workers heard the call over the police scanner not long after I left.

The call was for three 14-year-old Butte girls who were hit by an underage drunk driver as they walked on a trail along Blacktail Lane. Mariah McCarthy was flown to Missoula, where she was pronounced dead.

Her friends, Valerie Kilmer and Kaitlyn Okrusch, suffered injuries that kept them in the local hospital for several days. Their physical wounds eventually healed, but the emotional scars will likely be there forever.

Before that night, I was perfectly content living a dangerous and destructive lifestyle. I was fine with our culture that accepted drunk driving and underage drinking as something we all just do sometimes.

When someone we knew got arrested for driving drunk, we would blame the police officer. Our first question would inevitably be, “Who was the cop?” We would turn into defense attorneys, feeling sorry for ourselves and our friends as we put our lives — and the lives of strangers — in jeopardy because it was too tough to take a cab ride home.

That one October night, tough, changed everything.

The news that my friend lost his daughter, who was 10 years older than my oldest daughter, hit me hard. The sad days in the aftermath of the tragedy completely took away my desire to drink.

Instead of picturing myself in the shoes of the driver of the crash, like we too often do, I could only see myself in Leo’s shoes. I kept hugging and kissing my daughter to the point that I was bugging her that Sunday and the rest of the following week.

Several days after the tragedy, I made a promise to my little girl that I would never drink again, and I have lived up to that promise for nearly two decades.

That promise was made because the death of Mariah made me take a long, hard look in the mirror. I decided that if my children were going to grow up to drink and drive, they would not learn it from me.

Following the lead of Leo, I decided I was going to do my part to break the destructive cycle.

Along with his wife, Janice, and daughter, Jenna, Leo started Mariah’s Challenge. At Mariah’s funeral, Leo promised Mariah’s friends that if they did their part to break the cycle, he would have scholarship money for them to go to college.

He thought he was talking to just a few friends, but it turns out an entire community was listening. In April of 2009, the first Mariah’s Challenge Scholarships were awarded to 31 high school seniors.

Since then, Mariah’s Challenge has doled out a half a million dollars, $1,000 at a time. This May 21, we will see 17 more “Mariah’s Messengers,” as Leo calls them, awarded a scholarship at a ceremony at Montana Tech.

Those recipients are Xaiden Daly, Ava Field, Ally Godbout, Preston Jensen, Kylah Johnson, McKenna LeCoure, Peyton Liva, Jaydyn Mason, Caden Phillips, Reece Zahler and Ziggy Okrusch of Butte High; Molly Peck, Will McGree, Ryan Peoples and Caden Tippett of Butte Central; Brayden Villasenor of Anaconda; and Butte native Marcus Schutey of East Helena.

They will be honored for living by the ideals of Mariah’s Challenge, which means refraining for drinking under age and never getting into a vehicle driven by someone who is impaired.

That is no easy task.

My sobriety, which followed a decade and a half of partying hard, actually came easy for me. That is because I had so much positive reinforcement.

Sure, it took several weeks to convince my friends and coworkers that I was really giving up the booze. Eventually, though, they knew that I meant it, and they were proud of me.

My wife was proud of me, and so was my little girl. As our next two children started to grow up, they, too, were impressed that they never saw me with a drink in my hand. They never saw me drunk, and I think they all know that I made the change for them.

My parents were proud of me, and so were my grandparents before they passed. People I don’t even know were proud of me.

To this day, if I bring up, even strangers will tell me how proud they are.

Literally every day of my life, I find some sort of positive reinforcement to stay away from alcohol. There is plenty of negative reinforcement, too, because I still remember how destructive of a lifestyle I was living.

But it is the positive support that makes the difference.

What these 17 Mariah’s Messengers have accomplished, however, has come despite experience the exact opposite. They live every day under constant peer pressure to drink. They often must sacrifice friendships because they are standing by their convictions.

I saw that firsthand when my oldest daughter went to her last prom four years ago. After pictures and dinner with friends, she came home for an hour or so to wait for the dance to start.

She did that because all her friends were going to a hotel room to drink. The room was booked by some parents of her friends, and I think they might have provided the booze, too.

Delaney stayed away from that because of the pact we made in the days after Mariah’s death. It was a decision that could not have been easy. It was a decision that cost her friends.

That is the kind of decision the 17 scholarship winners from 2026 must make all the time. While I believe that the younger generations are light years ahead of mine when it comes to avoiding drinking and driving, alcohol still plays a very dominant role in our culture.

These young men and women were not around to when the tragedy that took Mariah shook our community, so their commitment is probably much more difficult to live up to than the first classes of scholarship winners.

Making things worse is that we offer very little for our teenagers to do a night. We lost our indoor movie theater, and we have no mall or teen center for them to gather.

Butte has turned into the town from the great Hal Ketchum song “Small Town Saturday Night.” We are basically daring our kids to go to the outskirts of town and drink, and the clock is only ticking on the next inevitable tragedy.

That is why these 17 Mariah’s Messengers — and the 500 or so who preceded them — are so special. That is why their commitment is so important.

If one of these 17 is on your graduation list, double the amount you were planning to put in that graduation card.

More importantly, tell them how amazing they are and how much you admire their dedication, strength and courage. Give them that same positive reinforcement that you would give to a stranger who told you he quit drinking.

Tell them thank you for keeping Mariah’s message going strong 18 and a half years after she left us.

— Bill Foley can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.