In 1942, the first full year of the Second World War for the United States, three short items in the Pocatello Tribune caught Arbon Valley at work on the home front. In May a crew of Arbon farmers was chosen to guard against fire. In October the county agent flew low over Arbon and Crystal looking for old iron for the scrap drive. Later that month an Arbon farmer carried the money from his neighborhood's scrap to the soldiers' canteen in Pocatello. The young men who went into uniform have their own post, Arbon Valley men in uniform, 1941–1946. This one is about the people who stayed home.
A fire crew for Arbon
In the first week of May 1942 three county men came out to Arbon to set up rural fire protection. They were J. Paul Evans of the Power County civilian defense office, the deputy sheriff Forest Mickelson and the county agent, Harold Ball. (Nothing in the item connects this J. Paul Evans, a county official, with the Evans family of Arbon.) Lee Newport, who had bought Tom and Susannah Evans's farm in 1940, was the Arbon man at the meeting, and out of it came a crew of local farmers.
The Tribune printed the names on May 8. Lee Newport was the leader and William Anderson his assistant. The others were Bob Swim, Luther Estep, Frank Barnett, T. H. Hill, Leroy Lindley, Harvey Anderson, Leland Bailey, Waldo Evans, Ernest Davis, Jess Keeler and Bud Roper. Once Arbon was done, the organizers planned to take the same work to Little Creek, Crystal and Fairview.
The paper says nothing about what equipment the thirteen men had, and no report of the crew at a fire has turned up. The county agent's own report for 1942, read for this site's family histories, lists the same men but gives the assistant as Willard Anderson (and Hill's initials as T. E.). A Willard Anderson and his wife were among Arbon's wartime neighborhood leaders later that year, so the newspaper's "William" may be a slip, but neither record settles it. The same report shows that Crystal did get a crew of its own, led by Eli Wolverton, with Norman Hayden among its members (see the Hayden family page).
Scrap from the air
By October, Power County was in the middle of a drive to collect scrap metal. Heaps of metal had already gathered in American Falls, schoolchildren had each carried some to class for a county rally day, and farm families were next in line, with their loads wanted for the drive's first shipment.
Arbon and Crystal got a different kind of visit. On a Friday, most likely October 2, Harold Ball and Bob Ewing Jr. went up in a plane flown by H. L. Davis and crossed the farms of both districts. Plenty of cast-off machinery and other junk metal lay around those farms, and at the plane's low altitude the searchers could see it. Every farmer whose land turned up a find was then told to bring the metal in, since the searchers had noted just where each lot lay. The Tribune of October 8 thought the search out of the ordinary. It does not say how many farms were spotted, where the plane flew from, or how much iron the valley sent in.
Scrap money for the soldiers
The USO, the service organization that ran canteens for men in uniform, kept a hut at the Union Pacific station in Pocatello for soldiers passing through on the trains. Edward Snyder, described as an Arbon farmer, had gathered old iron from around his own yard and his neighbors' yards. They sold it, and on a Tuesday in October, probably October 13, Snyder brought the money to the hut to help keep it running. So the war effort got the iron and the hut got the cash, a gift the Tribune of October 16 called "most acceptable." The same column told of a visit by twenty newly arrived Royal Air Force flyers and printed a letter of thanks from a soldier at Camp Lee, Virginia.
He was very probably Ed Snyder, who had married the widowed Hannah Evans in 1915, farmed the Evans homestead southwest of Arbon and carried the valley's rural mail for many years (see Ed and Hannah Snyder and the Arbon rural mail route). His obituary says the family moved to Pocatello in 1943. Another Ed Snyder had lived at Crystal some twenty years before, but this item places its man at Arbon. If the identification is right, the fire crew's Waldo Evans was his stepson: Hannah's son, who took over the mail route from Ed about 1943 (Waldo Evans). The paper does not give the amount of the gift or the names of the neighbors.
On this site: the Arbon and Crystal area pages, and, seventy years after the 1942 crew, the fire-fighting farmers of Arbon Valley, who were still answering the valley's fires themselves.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, October 8, 1942, page 7. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Power County took its hunt for scrap metal into the air in early October 1942, flying over the farms of Arbon and Crystal. The search came at the end of a short report from American Falls in the Tribune of Thursday, October 8, headlined "Power Scrap Drive Gains Momentum."
H. L. Davis flew the plane on the Friday before the report, carrying county agent Harold Ball and Bob Ewing Jr. Old machinery and other cast-off metal turned up in good quantity, easy to see because the plane kept low. The landowners heard afterward that their scrap was wanted, with its exact spot on their farms already marked by the searchers.
The flight was part of a county drive that, by the paper's account, was a success so far. Scrap stood piled at spots around American Falls, and the paper said communities elsewhere in the county had given generously. The drive's first shipment was scheduled for particular days, and farm families were expected to haul in iron for it. The money would go toward paying for the war.
Schools had carried the county's junk rally day the week before: on that Friday every pupil showed up with some iron. Merchants and other townspeople followed the high school band in a parade, pulling scrap along with them.
The paper found the same eagerness at Rockland, which had events of its own in the works. Burnell Wrigley (also printed Bernell), in charge of Rockland's drive, sat down with townspeople that Wednesday to divide up the work. Wrigley and R. M. Whittier would run the salvage crews, and J. E. May would see to loading the scrap and sending it off. The rest of the jobs went to twenty committee members, each with a neighborhood to cover: Edgar Eliason, Al Roper, Clarence Hunter, Ellis Allen, V. O. Ralphs, William Hess, Roy Cowman, Harry Teal, Shirley Byington, Clinton Robinson, J. E. Marsh, Frank Lowry, B. C. Kelly, J. W. Havlicak, Lloyd Barnard, L. C. Read, Harold White, Ona Walker, Andrew May and Lynn White.
The report gave no figures for how much scrap the county or any community had collected.