From the Bailey ranch to the county agent's office: Mary Renberg

On Sunday, March 5, 1967, the Idaho Sunday Journal in Pocatello ran a portrait and a long column on Mrs. Charles Renberg, who had kept the office of the Bannock County agricultural extension agents for more than thirty-three years. The writer, Ernie Stites, wrote mostly about her work, but he also told a good deal about her family. She had been Mary Bailey, a daughter of James R. and Annie Kerr Bailey, whose ranch lay near the middle of Arbon Valley. The paper put the Baileys among the valley's first six homesteading families.

Growing up at Arbon

Mary was born on February 28, 1905, at Logan, Utah, and was the ninth of thirteen children. The family's own history on James R. Bailey's page gives the same birthplace and lists the thirteen children with Mary ninth. The 1967 article dates her father's homestead claim to about 1894; he enlarged the place with land he bought later, and running it took work from every one of the children. Raising wheat without irrigation depended on the weather. The paper put figures on it: during a string of poor years twenty bushels an acre was about the best a grower could hope for, and only after deeper plowing and other improved methods arrived did yields climb to thirty-five, a figure the paper called excellent.

Mary took music lessons three miles from home and rode to them once a week; all the Bailey children were good riders. She also earned some of her own clothing money by working at times for other families. School meant a walk of a mile and a half each way, a distance the family history also gives, and on winter mornings the children frequently made the trip over the crusted drifts.

The papers of her girlhood bear her out. On January 1, 1918, the American Falls Press printed a report from the Arbon Central School. Its list of thirteen pupils "neither tardy nor absent" began with five Bailey sisters: Elizabeth, Mary, Edna, Thressa and Mearl. In June 1919 the county superintendent listed thirty-two eighth-grade graduates of the county schools, and under District No. 12, very probably the Arbon district, where J. R. Bailey sat on the school board, were "Mary Bailey and Paul Ripley."

Her first visit to Pocatello came when she was ten, while a carnival was in town. The children took to the merry-go-round, and as she put it, "dad could hardly get us off to eat."

Pocatello, Butte and back

After the Arbon school she went to Pocatello High School and then, in 1921 and 1922, to the Idaho Technical Institute in Pocatello. The Press's Arbon column of September 23, 1921, recorded the move:

Miss Mary Bailey went into Pocatello Saturday. Miss Bailey will attend the Idaho Tech. this term. The Misses Edna, Thresea and Merle Bailey went to Pocatello to attened school this term.

On October 5, 1922, the Press reported that Miss Mary Bailey had been appointed postmistress at Arbon, a story told in who kept the Arbon post office. The papers read here do not show that she ever took charge, and the 1967 article says nothing about it. That December the Arbon column said that Mary, "who has been attending school in Pocatello," was home in place of her mother, who was with Elizabeth, ill with pneumonia at St. Anthony's hospital in Pocatello.

In 1922 the Underwood Typewriter Company took her on at $60 a month, a job the 1967 article traced to the secretarial courses she had taken at the institute; Idaho Power and Pocatello Title came next. On August 4, 1924, she married Charles Erin Renberg at Pocatello. At the time Charles strung line for the Oregon Short Line and was posted at Dillon, Montana, until that job ended. The couple then moved to Butte, where the Anaconda company hired him. The family history recalls that in 1928 James and Annie went to Butte by train to visit Mary's family, a trip they talked about for the rest of their lives. The Depression reached Butte in 1929 and emptied one mine after another; his own office held out only until June 1930. The Renbergs came home to Pocatello that year and found jobs hard to come by. They put their names on the employment office's list, took whatever turned up, and in August 1933 a call for a stenographer, meant to last three days, became the job she would hold for thirty-three years.

The family in 1952 and 1967

Her brother Melvin Kerr Bailey, an Arbon farmer and stockman, died in May 1952. His obituary in the Idaho Sunday Journal listed Mrs. Mary Renberg of Pocatello among his sisters, with Edna Arbon and Teresa Swenson still at Arbon. The 1967 article named her surviving brothers and sisters: Charles Bailey of Clifton, Thomas Bailey of Moses Lake, Washington, Mrs. Joseph (Edna) Arbon and Mrs. Royal (Teresa) Swenson of Pocatello, and Mrs. Foren (Merle) Christensen of Malad. Her son Charles, once a Pocatello Tribune newsboy, was by then the county extension agent at Blackfoot.

On this site: the Bailey family, the J. R. Baileys of Arbon, the Lusk brothers and the Bailey sisters, which tells of Melvin's death, Joseph George Arbon, Edna's husband, the valley's schools, and the first settlers entry on the competing claims to the first homesteads.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, March 5, 1967, page 13. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Mrs. Charles Renberg of Pocatello was honored in early 1967 for more than thirty-three years as secretary of the Bannock County agricultural extension office. The job began on August 8, 1933. She and her husband, short of work, had registered at the employment office, and when the office got a request for someone to take dictation for roughly three days, it sent her. Those few days grew into a part-time arrangement and before long into a permanent full-time post. She summed it up in the article's opening line: "Three days stretched into 33 1-2 years."

In that time six county agents, six home economists and twelve 4-H club agents passed through the office, and every year she also served as secretary of the weed control program. Duties multiplied during the war, when the county agent took charge of many wartime programs, and some nights she stayed at her desk until midnight yet still came in at the regular hour next day. Each year's heaviest stretch came with the county's two fairs, North Bannock at Pocatello and South Bannock at Downey, when she helped compile both catalogs and kept the records of what was entered and who took prizes.

When the agent was tied up, she sometimes took over the county hog pool sales herself. The bidding was keen, and people on both sides of those sales offered her nylons and chocolates for any clue to how it stood. The offers were declined: by the article's account, rayon stayed on her legs, and any chocolate she ate she paid for herself.

She named filing as her least favorite chore, because the office kept papers on farming, home economics and 4-H touching on nearly every subject, and a filing code did not keep every one from being misplaced. Cutting stencils was another matter; she enjoyed it, and over the years she ran several mimeographs into the ground. The 4-H work gave her particular pleasure. She had seen young members begin with plain hemmed pieces such as aprons and dish towels and later turn out suits, coats and party dresses, and she expected to miss the leaders and members.

About a week before the article ran, she was honored at two parties. One, at the Hotel Bannock, drew several hundred people; the other was held in the county commissioners' office. The county agents she had served included C. W. Daigh, A. E. Duke, Dean Boyle, Drew Dunn and Al Mylroie.

Born at Logan in 1905 to James R. and Annie Kerr Bailey, she grew up on the family ranch at Arbon. She attended Pocatello High School and the Idaho Tech, and she married Charles Erin Renberg in 1924. Throughout her years at the extension office he had held a night job with Pacific Fruit Express, twenty-three years in all; he expected to retire March 1, 1968, and the two of them meant to spend some of that time traveling.