In the mid-1950s Arbon Valley had its own post of the Ground Observer Corps. The Air Force ran the corps with civilian volunteers, who were schooled in spotting aircraft overhead and reporting any that could belong to an enemy. Only two items about the Arbon post have turned up in the Pocatello newspaper pages searched for this story, one from June 1954 and one from March 1955. Between them they show a post with a supervisor and Air Force training, and, by the recruiter's account, half the community enrolled.
A sergeant at the Arbon school
On Sunday, June 6, 1954, the Idaho Sunday Journal announced a Ground Observer Corps meeting at the Arbon school for the coming Tuesday, June 8, at 7 p.m. The speaker was Staff Sergeant William Weber of the Boise Filter Center. Radar had its limits, and his talk was to cover them, along with the workings of the Air Force's Air Defense Command and the part a report from a ground watcher played in finding enemy planes. To go with the talk, Weber planned to screen "Air Defense," a film about how a radar station operates. The notice named Mrs. Lee Newport as the one in charge of the Arbon post.
Mrs. Lee Newport was almost certainly Gena Newport, born Gena Rust, who had married Lee Newport in 1932. In 1940 the Newports bought the T. B. Evans farm, and with it they took over the valley's telephone switchboard, which Susannah Evans had run in the same house since 1915. The 1954 USGS map marks the place "Newport Ranch and Telephone Office." The papers do not say where the Arbon observation post stood, how its reports were sent on to Boise, or who else served on it.
"Half the community"
Nine months later the subject came up again in Pocatello. On March 28, 1955, the Idaho State Journal reported that Staff Sergeant Paul E. Jobe, the Air Force's recruiter for ground observers in Pocatello, was struggling to fill his two city posts. Pocatello had only 60 volunteers and he wanted 200. Jobe pointed the city to two small places as examples. Both had only a handful of residents, he said, and in each of them "half the community" now held a place on the observer roster, training completed.
The figure is the sergeant's, offered as an example to a larger town, and the article gives no count or names for Arbon. It does show that by early 1955 the Air Force's recruiter in Pocatello knew of the Arbon post and counted it a success.
What is not known
Neither item says when the Arbon post began, how many shifts its volunteers kept, or when it closed. No later report of it has turned up in the papers searched for this post.
Gena Newport later kept a different kind of watch for the government. For 20 years she had served the National Weather Service as its cooperative observer in Arbon Valley, and in June 1982, when she was 82, the agency gave her a plaque for it, the Idaho State Journal reported. Her daily task was to take the day's top and bottom temperatures at the official station on the family ranch; the numbers fed into the monthly climate summaries the government published for Idaho. Bob Glodo, head of the weather office at the Pocatello airport, presented the plaque; she was working on the election board at the Arbon Valley School when she received it.
On this site: the Evans family page tells how the farm and switchboard passed to the Newports, Floods cut off Arbon Valley, March 1962 finds Mrs. Newport at the switchboard during the flood, and Arbon in the Sheep Store News, 1914 meets her as Miss Gena Rust, a Pocatello high school girl visiting her family at Arbon.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, March 28, 1955, page 14. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Pocatello had signed up fewer than a third of the 200 plane spotters it wanted, the Air Force's Ground Observer Corps recruiter there said on March 28, 1955. He held up two of the region's smallest settlements, Arbon valley and Fish Haven, as the standard: there, he said, "half the community" was enrolled and trained.
The recruiter was Staff Sergeant Paul E. Jobe, posted to Pocatello by the Air Force. His job was to find civilian volunteers, teach them to watch the sky, and see that any suspected enemy plane got reported.
His goal for July 1 was a reliable roster of 200. That many people, each giving two hours a week, would keep watch at the two Pocatello posts, one at Phillips field and one up on the west bench near the city reservoir. Enrollment had reached 60, and only six of those had come in during the previous fortnight. Jobe summed up the public mood in two words: "apathy reigns."
Events overseas, in Jobe's view, had raised the stakes. With Quemoy possibly facing an attack before the middle of April, he argued, people in Idaho had real work to do even though the trouble was far from home.
For the past two weeks he had been making the rounds of Pocatello groups with his films, and his argument at every stop was that a single spotter's warning could mean a million lives saved. Volunteers could reach him by card at general delivery, Pocatello, in care of the Ground Observer Corps. His office was a temporary one in building 513 at Phillips field; what he still lacked, and hoped a downtown office would lend him, was a desk.
The article named none of the Arbon or Fish Haven volunteers and gave no count for either place.