Late on Thanksgiving morning, 1964, two cars ran into each other head-on during a snowstorm on the road north of Arbon toward Crystal and Mink Creek. One belonged to the Permanns of Arbon, the other to the Denny family of Pocatello. By the next morning eight people from the two cars were in a Pocatello hospital, and both cars were wrecks. Fifteen months later, on the very day a jury was due to hear the lawsuit and countersuit between the two families, word came that they had settled.
The Idaho State Journal carried the news on its front page on Friday, November 27. Vernon Permann and Clyde Denny were the drivers. James Hager, a state patrolman based in American Falls, investigated, and his account was that the cars met nose to nose while snow came down. It was 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 26. The 1964 report measured the distance from "the Arbon junction near Crystal": the crash was eight miles north of it, in Power County. When the paper came back to the story in 1966, it named the road as the Mink Creek Road and the place as eight miles north of Arbon. This was the valley's road over to Pocatello by way of Crystal and Mink Creek, the route whose early years are told in Mail, grain and the Mink Creek road to Pocatello, 1924–1929.
On Friday, Clyde Denny and his wife were patients at Bannock Memorial Hospital, as were the couple's daughters Jolynn and Laura Lee and their son Curtis. Vernon Permann and his wife were there as well, with their son, whose name came out as VoniDean in the 1964 paper and as Vaun Dean in the 1966 one. The paper said nothing about the cause beyond the snowstorm.
The Permanns were part of the valley's life that fall. On the eve of the crash, the Journal named Vern Permann as one of the directors of the Arbon Valley Protective Association, a group set up against stealing and vandalism, which had just kept Sod Williams on for another term as president. Mrs. Permann, unnamed in 1964, appears as Lorita in the 1966 report. She was very probably Lorita Sharlene Bolingbroke, born in 1938, a daughter of John Henry Bolingbroke Jr. and Lois Davis Bolingbroke, who grew up on the family farm in Arbon Valley and went to the Arbon school. Her obituary says she married Vern Permann in August 1956 and names their three children as John, Joni and Vaun, the same three children who joined the lawsuit. Her father's family is on the Bolingbroke family page and her mother's on the Davis family page. One detail does not match: the 1966 paper gives her husband as Vernon D. Permann, while her obituary gives his middle name as Haggard.
Each family held the other driver to blame. Five Permanns went to Fifth District court: Vernon, Lorita and the couple's three children, John Douglas, Joni Sue and Vaun Dean. Their complaint accused Clyde H. Denny of negligence, said the family had been badly hurt, and sought $75,000 in general damages along with $2,836.60 in special damages, the costs they could put a figure on. Denny answered with a claim of his own, putting the wreck down to Permann's driving and likewise asking $75,000 in general damages, plus $3,858.74 in special damages. Joining him on that claim were more members of his family, every one of them described as hurt, whose names the paper printed as "Elda Laurdie, Jo Lynn, Jean and Curtis Denny."
Judge Gus Carr Anderson was to hear the case with a jury on Thursday, February 10, 1966, but the trial never opened. The Journal of that Thursday said the two sides had come to terms without a trial, and it gave no details of the agreement. In that report the paper called both households Pocatello-area families.
Much is unknown. No court ever decided which driver was at fault, and the settlement's terms were never printed. The papers do not show the exact spot on the road. The 1964 list of the injured names only one Permann child, so it is not clear whether John and Joni were in the car. The Denny names differ between the two reports (Jolynn and Jo Lynn, Laura Lee and Laurdie), and Jean Denny, named in the counter-claim, is not on the 1964 hospital list. The 1966 paper printed no comma between Elda and Laurdie, so it is not certain whether they were two people. If they were, Elda was probably Mrs. Denny, since her name comes first, but neither paper says so. Several of the people named here may still be living, so for them this post keeps to what the papers printed.
On this site: Crystal's beginnings are told in Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, and other hard days in the valley are gathered in Stories: Tragedies.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, November 27, 1964, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
On the day after Thanksgiving, eight people from two families lay in Bannock Memorial Hospital at Pocatello, all of them hurt when two cars hit head-on in Arbon Valley on the holiday.
Vernon Permann was driving one car and Clyde Denny the other. Snow was falling in a storm when they hit nose to nose; that was the finding of the state patrolman on the case, James Hager of American Falls. It happened at 11:30 Thursday morning on a road in Power County, at a point the paper put eight miles north of "the Arbon junction near Crystal."
Five of the patients came from one Pocatello household, the Dennys. Besides Clyde and his wife, they were the couple's daughters Jolynn and Laura Lee and their son Curtis. Arbon accounted for the remaining three: Vernon Permann, his wife and a son, VoniDean.
As of Friday, the hospital rated the night as good for five of the patients and fair for the remaining three.
Neither car survived the impact.