In the spring of 1969 Mrs. Lettie Allard, a first-grade teacher at Lewis and Clark Elementary School in Pocatello, was finishing her last school year. Her husband was William Allard, who had taken up a homestead on the Knox Canyon Road at Arbon in 1909 and sat in the Idaho House for Power County in 1915 and again in 1919–20. On June 4, 1969, the Idaho State Journal gave her a long feature on page 2, written by Colette Wilde, a journalism student at Idaho State University, and ran a picture of her at the front of her class in mid-story. Most of it is about her classroom. One paragraph, though, is a rare glimpse of William Allard in his nineties, four years before his death.
Her career
Pocatello had been Lettie Allard's home since she was three months old, the article said, and she was a graduate of Pocatello High School. She traced her wish to teach back to the fourth grade, when she helped classmates with long division. Her first post, in 1923 when she was 19, was one of the two teaching jobs at a country school in Bannock County near Downey. Two years later she joined Emerson Elementary in Pocatello and remained on its staff for 28 years. She finished a bachelor's degree at San Jose in California in 1942 by going to summer school there seven summers. In 1953 she moved on to the school known by 1969 as Alameda Junior High; Lewis and Clark Elementary, new when she arrived, was where she ended her career. The article counted 47 years of teaching in all.
William Allard at 93
The paper said the two had married in 1951. William Allard's obituary in the Deseret News in 1973 gives the date as August 12, 1951, and her name before marriage as Lettie Rice. His first wife, Matilda Dundore, whom he had married at Perry, Iowa, in 1897, had died in 1951.
The 1969 article gives a short picture of his later years. He was 93. Farming at Arbon had been his work until a few years before. He had fallen ill in 1968, and from then on the Bannock Nursing Home looked after him on her working days, with Saturdays and Sundays spent at home. The writer also mentioned that he backed her career, and that her classroom had a playhouse and doll furniture he had built with her brother.
What we don't know
The family's own account, told on this site, has Allard's daughter Eleanor and her husband, J. D. Nuckols, farming the homestead from 1951, and their son Dan growing up there from 1951 to 1973. How the work on the place was shared between Allard and the younger family in those years, the papers do not say. The article does not name Mrs. Allard's brother, and it does not say where the couple's home was. It was printed just before the end of the school year, and no later report of her retirement has been found.
William Allard died on May 6, 1973, at 97, and his Deseret News obituary listed his widow among his survivors. No record of Lettie Allard's later life or death has turned up in the papers searched so far.
On this site: the story of William Allard's 1914 race for the Legislature; his death in Two men of 1875; the Stories entries on the first legislator from the valley, the Arbon Valley Grange he helped organize in 1933 and the old Allard homestead house; and his grandson Dan Nuckols's memories in Remembering Arbon.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 4, 1969, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Mrs. Lettie Allard, a first-grade teacher in Pocatello schools since 1925, was preparing to retire that spring after 47 years in the classroom, though she did not want to stop. In tears, she told a student reporter, "I cry every time I think of it."
A Pocatello High School graduate, Mrs. Allard had lived in the city since infancy. She took summer courses toward a provisional certificate at the school now known as Idaho State University before she was old enough to receive one. Her teaching began in 1923, when she was 19, at a country school near Downey with two teachers on staff. Her share was the lower grades, and her room held 20 children at the most. A board member who once doubted the school needed a second teacher later sought her out and tried to rehire her.
Once she had the two years of experience Pocatello required, she accepted lower pay to join Emerson Elementary in 1925, at $1,200 a year. Her first principal at Emerson was the same person who had been her teacher in the first grade. Emerson kept her 28 years; in 1953 she went over to the school that the 1969 article called Alameda Junior High, and after that to Lewis and Clark Elementary, which had just been built. She received her bachelor's degree from San Jose Teachers College in 1942 and held an Idaho life certificate.
The article also described her husband, William Allard, whom she had married in 1951. At 93 he no longer worked his Arbon farm, though he had run it until a few years before. Since falling ill in 1968 he had stayed at the Bannock Nursing Home while she was at school, going home for weekends. The writer noted his support for her work: together with her brother, he had made the playhouse and doll furniture she used with her pupils.
Reading was the subject she liked best to teach, because it made children independent. She had worked in a speech-improvement program, summer kindergarten and Head Start. She recalled a Head Start pupil who, after a dairy tour that ended with red punch, decided the punch came from the cows.
Nobody had yet broken the news of her retirement to her class. "I'm going to miss the children most," she said.