Quiet and Busy All the Time Story and Photos by Lorie Palmer Russell I have never understood how people can be bored in a small town. In Grangeville, which has a population of about 3,300, our family always
A Backwoods Strategy By Max Jenkins When I was a kid, I liked to listen to my dad while he was on the telephone, because it was always entertaining. He was the county agent of Idaho County in
A Thunderbird Convertible By Max Jenkins On a pleasant evening in Grangeville in July 1955, I came home early from work and was helping Mom set the table when Dad pulled into the driveway. He’d been honking halfway
Private or Public Potatoes? By Max Jenkins Photos Courtesy of Max Jenkins On a Saturday morning early in 1950, as I dusted the new cars in the Jordan Motors showroom, a big black vehicle pulled up and parked
The Plot Arises for a Stirring Novel By Lorie Palmer When my editor at the Idaho County Free Press told me that Emily Ruskovich’s parents lived in Grangeville, I went into geek mode. “The author of Idaho? Her
In a Forty-Below Winter By Max Jenkins My Dad, Wes Jenkins, became part-owner of an auto sales company in Grangeville in the spring of 1948, when I was in third grade. He was always a good salesman, and
The Challenge of Alzheimer’s By Lorie Palmer Russell Photos courtesy of Lorie Palmer Russell. “I don’t know how I got these bruises.” My eighty-one-year-old mother, Estella Arlene Faurot Palmer, showed me her tiny arm. “Do you remember you
As a farm kid, I faced some pretty scary bullies, but I knew the secrets to keeping them at bay. On our farm at the edge of the Clearwater National Forest just outside Grangeville, I faced my bullies at chore time. Continue reading
I grew up in a non-dancing family. Our church didn’t allow it back then, and after I moved to Grangeville, I was a little afraid to sign up my oldest daughter, Avery, for dance class.
Probably only a few non-dancers would know the strange reaction I had upon entering a dance class for the first time. It was like walking into a hall where my hearing was muted and even my vision of the students was blurry.
By the time my daughter Hailey was old enough to take dance, I felt more familiar with the experience. Now a high school freshman, Hailey began dancing in preschool, which was the first time I met Shirley Wilson Sears. Right away, I knew she meant business. Continue reading
Early last spring, my youngest grandson, Jesse Shreve, and his girlfriend, Tracy Buchanan, rented a place north-northeast of Grangeville, off Lukes Gulch Road.
Looking at my Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer, I noticed another road going north from Grangeville, named “Old Stites Stage Road.” A light went on in my head—this must be the route my maternal grandfather, William Ellis McGaffee, followed when he was hauling freight to White Bird and Slate Creek for the Salmon River Stores Company of Thomas Pogue.
William E. “Billy” McGaffee was born near Ione, in Amador County, Calif., on November 17, 1879. He came with his parents and siblings to Grangeville in the summer of 1883, before he turned four. His father, John Sybile McGaffee, is reputed to have operated the first steam-driven thresher on the Camas Prairie. John Sybile bought a house on the north edge of Grangeville. Sometime in the late 1980s, before my mother, Murrielle McGaffee Wilson, lost her sight, she typed up for my brothers and me many of the stories she’d heard from her father. Here’s her account of how Billy got his early training to be a teamster:
When Billy was ten and Fred [his next older brother] was twelve, their father had just returned from a trip, and at breakfast the next morning he told them,‘There’s a team of black mares in the barn lot. They are yours if you can break them to work.’ The boys rushed out to the barn lot as soon as breakfast was eaten, and sure enough two young black work mares stood with halters on. They started working with the mares, currying, brushing, talking and, of course, giving them a little feed of oats. Continue reading
