Heritage Court 2004
Marge Heiss
was in her mid 20s when she and her sister Roberta showed a dark-haired man with an Austrian accent around their ranch, pushing themselves along on skis with the handles of pitchforks.
The man didn’t make much of an impression on Heiss.
“He was just a man with ski clothes on. And he had skis that were very different from our long wooden hand-me-downs with their elk hide coverings,” said Heiss, her 94-year-old grey eyes sharp as a tack beneath her wispy red hair. “I remember him coming off Dollar Mountain and I couldn’t believe the pretty short turns he could make…”
Billie Buhler
hasn’t strayed far from her birthplace.
Born in a house on Hailey’s Second Avenue, she now lives a few doors down in a tidy unobtrusive home that she and her husband built next to the Ezra Pound house.
And, yes, she lived there, too.
“The Ezra Pound was about the fourth house we lived in. But I’m not sure we even knew it was his birthplace when we were living there,” she says.
“ I don’t know why we kept moving—my folks just kept moving down the street…
Lillian Wright
surveys the colorful beds of columbine, poppies and irises that sit next to the old chicken coop and tool shed in her back yard.
Then she turns around 180 degrees and gestures as she scans the houses that sit across Fourth Street and down Poplar Street.
“When we moved here, nothing was here but the house my husband grew up in,” she says. “My, how Bellevue has changed.”
Indeed, if it weren’t for the bald knobby sagebrush-covered hills that seem to stay the same and the pine-covered outline of Baldy to the north…
Verda Edwards O’Crowley
sighs as her daughter Holly Rivera bursts through the front door with the news that the house on the corner is being demolished to make way for a car wash.
The town–pushing 600 people–is getting too danged big, she laments.
O’Crowley, 74, can be forgiven for thinking that.
After all, there were so few people around when she was a youngster that her parents enrolled her in school early so there would be enough children to support a teacher in the one-room schoolhouse…
Mary Jane Griffith Conger
By all logic Ketchum might just as well have been dubbed Griffithville.
After all, it was Al Griffith who poked and prodded the ground for silver and gold, along with town namesake David Ketchum that first year in 1879.
After the two left for the winter, Al Griffith came back to set up house and raise a family. David Ketchum never did…