On Wednesday, November 29, 1933, the Pocatello Tribune printed a short notice on its second page about a boy from Arbon Valley. Seventeen-year-old William Eugene Allard, whose parents were Mr. and Mrs. William Allard of Arbon, had been in his third year at Pocatello High School. His death came on Tuesday, November 28, the day before the notice ran, in a hospital in Pocatello.
His father was well known in the valley. William Allard had homesteaded on the Knox Canyon Road in 1909 and was the first valley man found in the Idaho Legislature, sitting in the House for Power County in 1915 and again in 1919–20. In June 1933 he chaired the committee that organized the Arbon Valley Grange. His story is told in William Allard of Arbon and the 1914 race for the Legislature and in the first legislator from the valley. The 1933 notice names the boy's parents only as Mr. and Mrs. William Allard of Arbon, but the brother and sisters it lists, Charles, Elinore and Margaret, are the same three children named in William Allard's own obituary forty years later. There is little doubt the boy was his son.
A valley boy
The papers give only a few glimpses of his life. In January 1916 the Arbon column of the American Falls Press announced a birth in the Allard family:
Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Allard are the proud parents of a fine baby boy, born Tuesday, January 21, at Pocatello. Everyone is feeling fine, especially Mr. Allard, who is wearing a smile that won't come off.
The column did not give the baby's name. A boy born that month would have been 17 in November 1933, as Eugene was, while his brother, Charles, was much older and already teaching the upper grades at the Pauline school by 1921. The notice has one slip: January 21, 1916, fell on a Friday, and the Tuesday of that week was January 18, so either the day or the date is wrong. The full column is on this site in the Arbon Central school literary society.
In September 1921 the Press reported that his sister Margaret had gone to Pocatello to attend high school.
In April 1924 the Press printed a county list of rural pupils, school by school, under a heading about attendance records. Under Arbon it named Billy Allard alongside pupils named Hill and Bailey. Billy was very likely Eugene, then eight years old. By 1933 he, too, was at school in Pocatello.
What is not known
The Tribune did not give a cause of death or name the hospital, and no later report of the funeral has been found. Friday, December 1, was the day chosen for the funeral in the McHan chapel, and he was to be buried in Mountain View Cemetery. The officiating minister, the Rev. Frank E. Carlson, was probably the man the Tribune's church listings that spring named as minister of Pocatello's First Congregational Church.
The family afterward
In June 1937 the Tribune listed "Elnore Allard" among the graduates of the Arbon high school, very likely his sister Elinore. She is also very likely the Eleanor who, with her husband, J. D. Nuckols, farmed the Allard homestead from 1951. When William Allard died in May 1973, at 97, his own burial was set for Mountain View Cemetery, as told in Two men of 1875.
On this site: the Stories pages also follow the family to the old Allard homestead house, which burned in 1981.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, November 29, 1933, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Tuesday afternoon, November 28, 1933, brought the death of a 17-year-old from Arbon in a Pocatello hospital. He had reached his junior year at Pocatello High School.
His name was William Eugene Allard, and his parents were Mr. and Mrs. William Allard of Arbon. The paper did not say what caused his death, and it did not name the hospital where he died.
His sisters, Margaret and Elinore, and his brother, Charles, were left to mourn him along with his mother and father.
The Rev. Frank E. Carlson was named to lead the funeral, which was set for one o'clock in the afternoon on Friday, December 1, in the McHan chapel. Mountain View Cemetery was chosen for the burial.
The Tribune ran the notice the day after his death, under a headline that called him a high school boy. It appeared on page two alongside the day's other death and funeral notices, among them the death at Arco of a pioneer of the Lost River valley. It was five sentences long, and it is the only report of his death found so far.