Heritage Court 2013
Wendy Collins
Wendy Collins became a mailbox minister in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War for personal reasons.
“I had two little boys and didn’t want them to get drafted because Vietnam was so horrible. I thought if I should show we had a conscientious objector in our family, I could protect them from the draft,” she said, adding that the boys were free to enlist if they so choose.
That ministerial license bought through the mail eventually grew into a full-fledged ordained minister’s license and a full-time passion for Collins.
She has married countless couples, conducted Sunday services for the Wood River Spiritual Center for seven years and even officiated over the…
Dolly Collier
Dolly Collier tells the story that so many Wood River Valley residents tell.
She and her husband Lynn spent their honeymoon in Sun Valley skiing. When they returned to show their kids where they’d spent their honeymoon, they fell in love with the area all over again.
They sold their chicken farm next to the then-fledgling Disneyland in Orange County, California, in 1968. And they and a hundred dairy cows moved onto a farm south of Bellevue.
“It was so nice,” said Collier, who had grown up in Hollywood where her Dad was in the butter and egg business. “You could sit by the highway and talk for hours without ever seeing another car.”
Collier has had plenty of opportunities to reminisce about the good ol’ days in the Wood River Valley since the Bellevue Historical Society named her to the…
Mary Green
Mary Green has lived in the Carey area all over her 77 years, save a stint during high school when she spent a summer working as a maid for Sun Valley and stayed in the resort dorm. “I enjoyed it,” she said. “We could hike on the golf course after work and I liked to sit and watch the people—like Bing Crosby, who was making a show while I was there.
Mary Green was born the year the Sun Valley Lodge was built. But she didn’t have to drive the 46 miles from her home near Carey to skate on the iconic ice skating rink that soon emerged outside the lodge.
She grew up skating, instead, on a pond that sat the length of a football field from her family’s farmhouse on the Little Wood River six miles north of Carey.
Laren Price
Lauren Price has been a Job’s Daughter and an Eastern Star. She played alto saxophone in the school band.
It would be difficult to find many people whose roots stretch deeper into the Wood River Valley’s soil than Laren Price.
Both sets of great-grandparents came to the Wood River Valley in 1881 as the valley’s mining boomed.
“My dad’s bunch—David and Mary Davies—were from Wales. My great-grandfather worked in the Philadelphia Smelter in Ketchum before moving to Broadford near what is now Bellevue to work for the Queen of the Hills mine,” she said.
“My maternal great grandparents—Frances Ensign and his Dublin-born wife Margaret came to Hailey from Silver City and built a home near Bullion and 3rd Avenue. He was chairman of the Democratic Territorial Central Committee and ran a couple times for Supreme Court justice.”