Pocatello's annual Farm-City Week, a Chamber of Commerce event, opened on Tuesday, June 22, 1965, with an early-morning breakfast in Mink Creek Canyon. Over a hundred people, townsmen and farmers together, ate at Sportsmen's Park before heading into Arbon Valley for a tour. The Idaho State Journal reported the outing that afternoon. Eight days later a reader's letter took the paper to task for what its story had left out.
Planning the morning
The Chamber's agriculture committee arranged the breakfast. On June 17 the Journal printed a photograph of three of its men with a coffee pot: Everett Cole, the committee's chairman; Sam Briscoe, who chaired the farm-city subcommittee; and Elmer Terry, the breakfast chairman. The notice explained that each farmer would be matched with a city resident for the morning, the idea being that the two would come to see each other's problems more clearly.
On Sunday, June 20, a large advertisement paid for by Pocatello firms, from Bannock Machinery and Pocatello Flour Mills to Idaho Power and Kraft Foods, welcomed the farmers and ranchers and printed the schedule. According to the advertisement, buses were to pull out from the Bannock Hotel at 6:30 a.m. and head up the Mink Creek road to breakfast, and the tour of Arbon Valley and Mink Creek would start as soon as everyone had eaten. The June 17 notice had put breakfast at 6:30; the advertisement said 6:45. The week's main event was set for Thursday, June 24: a banquet in the hotel's Cosmopolitan Room with Charles B. Shuman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, as speaker. The road up Mink Creek and over the divide was an old way between Pocatello and the valley; in the 1920s it carried the Arbon mail.
The tour
Sunshine held for the morning, and Cole, for his part, was pleased with how the breakfast turned out. From the canyon the party drove into Arbon Valley, where Sod Williams's ranch was the first stop. Two sentences were all the Journal gave him: his cattle made money, and his quarter horses put him near the top of the breeders in the region. He was almost certainly Donald Thayne "Sod" Williams of Arbon; no 1965 report gives his full name, but the nickname, the Arbon Valley ranch and the quarter horses all match the man whom this site follows through the Utah horse shows of 1956 to 1966 and, with his wife Nelda and their family, in the arena. Nelda was a daughter of Elmer and Susan Ward of the Ward family.
Bannock Creek came next. A dam had been proposed there, and at the spot itself the visitors were walked through the arguments in its favor. The paper did not say where the site was, who had proposed the dam or who spoke there, and this site has found no other report of the plan. By about noon the outing was over. The Journal made a point of the business turnout, which was larger than in past years.
The Chamber's tours were not new. Back in July 1958 the yearly outing had started at the top of the Mink Creek divide, crossed part of the Arbon country and gone on to Bannock Creek. The Journal's 1960 Progress Edition, looking back on 1959, said the agriculture committee had dropped the farm tours that year, mostly because they no longer seemed to serve much purpose. By 1965 the tour was back.
A letter to Ing
On June 30 the Journal's editorial-page column, "Buzz of the Burg," signed Ing, printed a letter from Ed Walter, who had clipped the front-page story and sent it in. In his view the story gave the paper away: no one from the Journal had been on the tour. He complained that it said nothing whatever about the first stop, which he said had taught him the most. The letter does not name that stop. The paper had named the Williams ranch as the first stop but said nothing of what was shown or said there, so he may have meant the ranch; but its reporter never went on the tour, so the stop he meant could have been one the paper did not mention at all. By his own account Walter was a guest that morning and a newcomer among Pocatello businessmen, though a farm boy by upbringing, and he had high praise for one presentation given along the way. He called the omission "a brazen, ill-mannered oversight." Had he been one of the farmers who labored over the tour, he added, he would have refused to help stage another for the businessmen. The paper, he wrote, should make amends to the farmers of Arbon Valley.
Answering in the same column, Ing said he had tried and failed to track Walter down: the telephone company, Idaho Power, the Chamber and the agriculture committee were all asked, and none could say where he was. Ing had sat on the committee for years and usually went on the tours, but had been out of town this time. The day's coverage had come from a reporter who stayed for the breakfast and then had to hurry back to the office to get the story into that day's paper, which meant he missed the tour. The column owned up to the lapse and noted the irony that the paper had long chided Pocatello businessmen for staying away from these tours. It promised that future farm tours would get closer attention.
What is not known
No report found says what the visitors saw or heard at the Williams ranch, who gave the presentation Walter praised, which Arbon Valley farmers helped put on the tour, or what became of the Bannock Creek dam. If the Journal ever printed a fuller account, it has not been found. Who Ed Walter was is unknown; the paper itself could not find him.
On this site: Arbon Valley's communities, and contour strips and hillside combines on the valley's dry-farm slopes in the same years.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 22, 1965, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Arbon Valley was the destination Tuesday, June 22, for more than 100 townsmen and farmers who opened the city's Farm-City Week by eating breakfast together up Mink Creek Canyon.
When the plates were cleared, the tour headed for the place most of the farmers at the tables called home: Arbon Valley. Sod Williams's ranch was first on the route. The paper's sketch of him was short: a cattleman whose ranch paid its way, and a quarter horse breeder ranked near the top in the region. From there the group went on to Bannock Creek. A dam had been proposed for the creek, and at the site the businessmen were told what good it would do. The whole morning's program, breakfast and tour, ran until about noon.
The day had started at the Bannock Hotel, where buses and cars picked up the Pocatello contingent at about 6:30 a.m. Food was waiting at Sportsmen's Park when they pulled in. Skies were clear. The paper thought eating outdoors in the trees gave the gathering the relaxed air it needed. Everett Cole, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce agriculture committee, called the morning "very encouraging."
The paper singled out one figure as the real news: the count of businessmen on the farm tour, considerably higher this year than in others.
The paper also looked ahead to Thursday evening, June 24, when Charles B. Shuman, who headed the American Farm Bureau Federation, was due at the Bannock Hotel at 7 p.m. to speak on "Agriculture and the Business Community." Coming from a trip through Oklahoma, Shuman would spend only Thursday night in Pocatello and then head home to Chicago. The speech was drawing interest well beyond Pocatello, with farm leaders from the upper Snake River country, Malad and the Magic Valley holding reservations.