Heritage Court 2009
Alice schernthanner
Alice Schernthanner has been a fixture at Dollar Mountain for 30 years
But she wondered if she would ever fit in when she first came to Sun Valley. As Alice tells it, she was following her Austrian ski instructor-husband Andy to Sun Valley in 1962
when her train from Denver pulled into Shoshone and the conductor ordered everyone out.
“I had no idea where I was. I had thought I’d be getting out in Sun Valley and, as far as I knew, I was in the wrong state,” she recalled. “There were three of us on the bus for Sun Valley. It was Jan. 18 and that particular year the mountains were as brown as could be—except for the White Clouds…
Ethel Wells
Ethel Wells has enjoyed several very different lives in her lifetime—from that of a young mother to an award-winning career to a string of national tennis championships in retirement.
Now at 92 the perky 5-foot woman with a head full of red Lucille Ball-like curls is in the volunteer phase of her life.
“I think a lot of my good health comes from being active,” she says. “Of course, my mother lived to be 99. One grandpa lived to be 101 and the other lived to 100.”
Ethel was born in 1917 as World War I was ending.
She grew up two blocks away from the University of Kansas stadium that her uncle built. But the Depression hit her family hard as construction stopped and her father found himself out of work.
Esther Boyd
Esther Boyd has been around long enough to tell a lot of big fish tales.
There was, for instance, the time she fetched a pail of water while camping near Redfish Lake and found so many coho salmon in the creek that the members of her camping party went after them with hooks stuck on the ends of two-foot sticks.
“We hooked seven big ones,” she said, holding her hands four feet apart. “We roasted them over the fire and had a mighty good dinner that night. Of course, I’m sure you couldn’t do that today. I don’t know whether it was legal back then.”
At 89, Esther is a card-carrying member of one of the valley’s pioneer families and so can attest to the many changes that have occurred in the valley through the years.
Rita Hurst
At 78, Rita Hurst putters around the Rosebud Deli, laying out silverware and carrying dirty plates to the dishwasher.
This is easy work, she sniffs, compared to what she used to do.
There was a time, Rita boasts, that she used to put in a full day doing a man’s job.
That included driving a 10-wheel logging truck up and over the narrow, dirt-covered hairpin turns of the old Galena Highway in the 1940s and ‘50s.
“I didn’t need to do it, but I loved it. I liked the smell of the pines and being my own boss,” says Rita, who will be inducted into the Blaine County Historical Museum Heritage Court on June 14...