Jack and Stella Price, married at Arbon in 1913, mark sixty years

A photograph of Mr. and Mrs. John D. (Jack) Price of Pocatello ran in the Idaho State Journal in late July 1973, along with word that their sixtieth anniversary would be marked at the Holiday Inn on August 4 and that friends and relatives were welcome to come. Sixty years before, in December 1913, the two had been married at Arbon, in the earliest wedding yet found that took place in the valley itself. The American Falls Press and a 1939 notice fill in the years between.

Two valley families

David John and Mary Sophia Bowen were Stella's parents, and she was born Stella Bowen on November 28, 1895, at Samaria, Idaho. Her father was D. J. Bowen, one of the settlers of 1892 and Arbon's first postmaster, whose later years are told in another post in this series. Her first schooling was at Arbon. The death of her mother in 1905 took her to Logan for a time, until the Bowens eventually made their way back to the valley.

Jack was a Malad City boy, the child of Thomas E. and Jennette Maria Daniels Price, born there on October 1, 1892. Malad was where he went to school, but summer meant the Price ranch out in the valley. His mother's family, the Daniels, took up land on the West Fork of Bannock Creek, and in March 1901 Jennett Daniels Price made the first homestead entry recorded for the West Fork township. She is probably the "Mrs. Jennie Price of Arbon" who ran for Oneida County treasurer in 1910. By 1922 she had remarried: that March the Press reported Mrs. Dan E. Jones of Malad visiting "her son Jack Price."

The wedding took place in the Bowen house on December 17, 1913, and the man who performed it was Bishop Joseph N. Arbon. The Arbon correspondent's holiday letter in the Press of January 8, 1914, called it "a very pretty wedding" (see Christmas 1913 at Arbon's Central school).

Crystal and the West Fork

They began on a homestead. In the Power County draft registration list printed in July 1917 he appears as "John D. Price, Crystal," and the government patent for his land, on the Crystal side of the valley, appeared in the county recorder's list printed in August 1921. At the Crystal Fourth of July dance of 1918 the Press reported the free-for-all prize waltz, "Mr. and Mrs. Jack Price winning first prize."

In 1920 they settled on the West Fork, on land the Price family already ranched, and for the next thirty-one years, until 1951, stock-raising was their living. Stella spent the winter of 1920–21 at Malad, and the Arbon column of January 14, 1921, announced that a girl had been born to the Prices. In March the Press reported that she and the children had returned "to their home in West Fork." In March 1922 her brother Brig Bowen visited the family, who were all down with the flu. The Press of May 25 reported that Henry and Tom Price of Malad had spent the weekend at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Price on the West Fork; the item does not say how they were related to Jack. On May 23 or 24 Brig died at Arbon (see the Stories entry). In November 1923 "John Bowen spent the week end with his daughter and family Mrs. Jack Price on West Fork." In February 1924 "John D. Price, Pauline, Idaho" advertised for a second-hand gang plow, preferably a John Deere.

Elaine

Elaine, the first of the Prices' children, arrived on October 15, 1914, at Malad City. In 1924 the Pauline schoolchildren wrote their own news for the Press (see Valley schoolchildren write the news), and a girl named Elaine Price, almost certainly she, appears twice. When a letter came to the school from a Mr. Barber, "In our reading circle Elaine Price read it to us." Another week the children told how Mrs. Jack Price had sent her bread to Mrs. Smith's to be baked, and how Pearl Daniels and Elaine went to fetch it and Pearl asked whether it was cooked:

Mrs. Smith said it wasn't cooked but it was baked. And we laughed.

Her high-school years were spent in Pocatello, the city where she became Allen D. Roper's wife on November 18, 1932. Death came to her at 24, on the morning of Saturday, March 18, 1939, at the American Falls hospital. The next morning's Sunday Tribune-Journal reported it on its front page. She left her husband, of Rockland; a four-year-old daughter, Jacqueline; her parents at Arbon; three brothers, Boyd, Dean and Jay Dee, also at Arbon; her sister, Mrs. Lois Clark; and her grandfather, D. J. Bowen. Plans called for services at the Pocatello First Ward chapel on the Tuesday after, and a grave in Mountain View cemetery. Neither notice gives the cause of her death, and nothing read here says whether Allen Roper was kin to the Roper family of Pauline.

Later years

In the church, Stella's service ran through the ward's Sunday school, its Primary and its Relief Society. Jack's public work put him on the local school board and on the board that oversaw Power County's third highway district; in 1940 he also sat with the Arbon–Crystal program planning board, whose members sorted the district's land by kind and advised on its best uses. The ranch years ended in 1951 with a move to Pocatello, and Jack spent the time until his 1968 retirement in real estate with Key Realty. In 1954 Stella's father, D. J. Bowen, then 92, was living with them there.

On this site: Pauline and West Fork, the Bowen family album, and Joseph N. Arbon, who married them.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, July 29, 1973, section C, page 8. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Sixty years of marriage for Mr. and Mrs. John D. (Jack) Price of Pocatello were to be celebrated on August 4, 1973. According to the Journal, anyone among their friends and relatives could drop in at the Holiday Inn from 6 to 9 that evening, and the couple asked that nobody bring gifts.

The paper noted that both were Latter-day Saints, and that it was Bishop Joseph N. Arbon who had joined them, on December 17, 1913, in the house of the bride's father. Homesteading and farming filled their first years together. From 1920 their home was Jack's family's ranch along the West Fork of Bannock Creek, where they kept livestock until 1951.

The couple had five children, every one born in the valley and every one taught through the elementary grades at Arbon. Four were living in 1973: J. Boyd Price of Manzini, Swaziland; Lois, Mrs. Jack Clark, of Bellingham, Washington; Dean B. Price of Pocatello; and Jay Dee Price of Boise. The family had lost Elaine, the oldest, in 1939; she was Mrs. Allen Roper and just 24 when she died on March 18 of that year. Elaine's only child, Jacqueline Fae, was by 1973 Mrs. John Kildew of Rockland. Grandchildren numbered 15, and great-grandchildren 14.

Pocatello became home in 1951. Mr. Price took up real estate there with Key Realty, work that lasted until his retirement in 1968. The paper listed public and church work for each of them. For him it named terms on the school board and on the board of Power County's third highway district. Hers had been in the Sunday school, the Primary and the Relief Society, and in 1973 she remained a Relief Society worker in their Pocatello congregation, the Seventeenth LDS Ward.

The article closed with the couple's beginnings. Thomas E. and Jennette Maria Daniels Price were the groom's parents; Malad City was his birthplace, on October 1, 1892, and its schools taught him, while the family ranch at Arbon claimed his summers. Stella Bowen, the daughter of David John and Mary Sophia Bowen, had come into the world at Samaria on November 28, 1895. Arbon gave her her first schooling, Logan became home after her mother's death in 1905, and it was only after the Bowens came back to the valley that she and Jack met.