Late in November 1962, while the National 4-H Club Congress was meeting in Chicago, the Idaho State Journal told its readers that one of the young people there was a 16-year-old Arbon Valley girl, sent as the winner of a sectional 4-H forestry award. The paper gave her full name, Loretta M. Johnson, and her nickname, Bunnie. Her story, and that of the 4-H forestry club she belonged to, can be put together from four short reports in the Pocatello papers between September 1961 and January 1963.
A forest in miniature
The club first turns up at the Eastern Idaho State Fair in Blackfoot in September 1961. In a column written after the fair closed, Grace Hoster, a Journal correspondent, listed the exhibits that the state leader had singled out from more than 10,000 entries. Two of them came from Arbon. One was Steve Lusk's homemade reel for winding up a garden hose or an extension cord: he had mounted an old car rim on a steel stand and given it a turning handle. The other was the work of the Gray Sage Foresters, an Arbon club led by J. D. Nuckols, and in the column's words their forestry exhibit "ranked with college achievement." The members had pressed and mounted 170 plants, all of them collected in the Arbon Valley, and had built a small-scale model of forest and rangeland, with livestock and working parts that showed what went on there.
The leader
J. D. Nuckols farmed in the Arbon Valley. On January 22, 1962, the Journal covered his visit to the Pocatello Home Economists, where his subject was wild food: what a person could eat from plants growing no more than 20 miles away. The account says something about the man. The paper noted his forestry degree and his several years with the Forest Service, and said he had spent the last six years as a 4-H leader, teaching forestry and range management. His imagined dinner began with grouse or trout. Cattail or bulrush roots stood in for potatoes, and the greens were dandelion or shepherd's purse. Bracken fern, clover and rose petals, seasoned with wild onion, made a salad; bread root made the rolls, with rose-hip jelly to spread on them; and the cup at the end held chicory coffee or balsam-needle tea. He also passed on some tests for telling dangerous plants from safe ones, picked out the death camas as one to know on sight, and showed slides of native wildflowers and of his own trips into the Aberdeen ice caves.
On this site J. D. Nuckols is known as the husband of William Allard's daughter Eleanor. From about 1951 the couple farmed the old Allard homestead on the Knox Canyon Road, and their son Dan later wrote down his memories of growing up there (My Two Bits, Remembering Arbon; see also Joe Arbon and William Allard).
Bunnie's award
The November report, retold below, credits Bunnie Johnson with five years of 4-H forestry by the fall of 1962 and counts her among the Grey Sage Foresters at Arbon. The spelling differs from 1961, but it is plainly the same club, so the display that impressed the state leader was her club's work. That J. D. Nuckols was her leader is very likely, though neither report says so in as many words.
The Idaho Sunday Journal caught up with her in January 1963, once she was back in Arbon, and printed her photograph on its farm page with some further details. Now 17, she had also won the state forestry competition. The national program had named six sectional winners, she was one of them, and that is what sent her to Chicago for five days, November 25 to 29, 1962, in a crowd of about 2,000 delegates and guests. American Forest Products Industries, which sponsored the program's awards, paid for the trip. She had run through every regular Idaho forestry project by 1960; from then on Vernon Burlison, extension forester at the University of Idaho, kept her supplied with special projects, which she carried out on her parents' 2,610-acre farm. The paper went so far as to liken her to Paul Bunyan.
Her family
The 1963 report names her parents as Mr. and Mrs. Frank L. Johnson. Arbon has had several unrelated Johnson families, but this Frank L. Johnson is probably Frank Lynden Johnson, Maurice Poppie's stepson, who farmed in the valley and died in 2013 (his memorial notice; his Army enlistment in 1942 is noted in Arbon Valley men in uniform). His wife was Loretta B. Johnson (celebration of life, 2018), so the daughter would have shared her mother's first name.
The papers do not say what Bunnie's advanced projects were, what became of the miniature forest and range, or how long the Gray Sage Foresters went on. In April 1980 the Journal, reporting a light plane that came down in the Arbon Valley area, placed the crash on "the Bunnie Johnson farm," which suggests that she was farming in the valley by then.
On this site: the earliest 4-H club found in the valley, at Pauline in 1932, is in Stories: valley firsts, and the community of Arbon has its own page at Arbon.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 28, 1962, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
On November 28, 1962, the Idaho State Journal carried word that a sectional 4-H forestry award had gone to someone from the Arbon Valley. The prize came from American Forest Products Industries, Inc., and it included the cost of a trip to Chicago for the 41st National 4-H Club Congress, which was meeting there as the item went to press.
Bunnie was the name she answered to; the paper printed it as Loretta M. Johnson, age 16. Her father and mother appeared only as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Johnson, of the Arbon Valley.
Five years of 4-H forestry lay behind the award, long enough for her to exhaust every regular unit the Idaho program had to give. So Vernon Burlison, extension forester at the University of Idaho, wrote a more advanced project just for her, and it was that project which earned her the prize.
Forestry was not her only club. Besides the Grey Sage Foresters at Arbon, the paper said, she belonged to the Arbon Cooking Club, a Home Improvement Club, and a rock collectors' group called the Arbon Pebble Pup Club.
The report was a short item on page 2, printed alongside the obituaries, the market news and the municipal court report.