In the fall of 1976 the writer of a cooking column in a Brigham City, Utah, newspaper visited Jessie Hubbard, whose family had recently moved to Tremonton from Arbon Valley, Idaho. Alongside her recipes, she told the writer how the weather had ruled their life in the valley, and how her husband David had driven a school bus route through the winter months.
A visit from "Good Cooks"
The column was "Good Cooks," by Flo Munson, and it ran on page 5 of the Box Elder Journal of September 30, 1976, with a photograph captioned "Mrs. David Hubbard . . . loves new home." Mrs. David (Jessie Olsen) Hubbard, the column said, was a native of College Ward, in Cache Valley, a graduate of South Cache High School and the LDS seminary, and had worked in Cache Valley cafes before she married. Her husband owned and operated a dry farm in Arbon Valley, land worked on rainfall alone, without irrigation, and the family had lived there until recently.
They had found the house on the road. Driving through Tremonton, in northern Utah's Box Elder County, on their way to Salt Lake City, the Hubbards saw a Spanish-style house for sale. They later toured it and bought it. With the children growing up, Jessie explained, they had been looking for a home with good schools and churches close by.
The bus in winter
While they lived in the valley, the column went on, David ran a school bus route through the winter months, and Jessie took over driving the children to school in the spring and fall. Under the subheading "Governed by Weather," the column gave her words: "In Arbon Valley, life is governed by the weather." In winter David sometimes rode a horse six miles to the place where the snow forced him to leave the bus, and he had to "fight blizzards most of the way."
That is all the article says about it. It does not give the years David drove, the route, the school the children rode to, or where the bus waited for him. The site's Firsts page finds the valley's earliest school-bus driver on record in 1950 and remembers the high-school bus to American Falls in the years after. Jessie Hubbard's few sentences add a picture of what a winter route could ask of a driver in the years that followed.
Before and after
The Hubbards had six children, four daughters and two sons, who in 1976 ranged from thirteen years old down to two. Utah papers had noted the family now and then while they lived in Idaho. In July 1969 the Logan Herald Journal reported that Mrs. Jessie Hubbard and three little daughters of Arbon had been visiting her sister's family in Wellsville, Utah. In March 1975 a classified ad in the Tremonton Leader offered a heavy-duty John Deere disc and told buyers to call Dave Hubbard of Arbon, Idaho, probably David himself.
Moving to Tremonton did not mean giving up the farm. The column still spoke of it in the present tense, and Jessie said the most fun they had now was "traveling back to the farm to ride horses and have picnics." She had served as president of the Relief Society and been active in Sunday School, the column said, without saying where, and she and David enjoyed snowmobiling.
Her obituary, preserved on this site, fills in the rest. Jessie Olsen was born on December 11, 1937, in a log cabin in College Ward, and married David L. Hubbard in the Logan temple on September 12, 1958. They moved to Arbon Valley and had six children, and the obituary remembers that she, too, drove school bus and held many callings in the LDS branch at Arbon. After Tremonton the family lived in Pocatello and in Drummond, Idaho, and Jessie's last home was in Holbrook, Idaho. David Lamar Hubbard died before her. She died on October 3, 2016, and the obituary gave the Holbrook Cemetery as her place of burial.
The story as reported
Box Elder Journal, September 30, 1976, page 5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
TREMONTON, Utah — An Arbon Valley, Idaho, dry-farm family had moved into a new home in Tremonton, and Jessie Hubbard told a visiting columnist that winter in the valley had sometimes put her husband on horseback just to reach his school bus.
Mrs. David Hubbard, born Jessie Olsen, was the subject of the paper's "Good Cooks" feature by Flo Munson. A College Ward native, she held diplomas from South Cache High School and the LDS seminary, and until her marriage her jobs had been in Cache Valley cafes. Farming in the Idaho valley remained the family's livelihood, with David Hubbard as owner and operator of dryland acreage there.
The Hubbards came upon the house by chance. Their route to Salt Lake City took them through Tremonton, and from the road they saw that a Spanish-style home in Fridal Heights was up for sale. On a later visit they went through it, found it met every need they had, and became its owners. Good schools and churches within easy reach had been the goal, Mrs. Hubbard explained, now that the children were growing older. The home had six bedrooms, she said, and the family had taken to the people around them.
Winter driving on a school bus route had been David Hubbard's job while the family lived in Idaho; in autumn and spring, Jessie was the one who got the children to school. She said that in Arbon Valley "life is governed by the weather." When winter snow left the bus parked six miles away, her husband had to cover that distance on horseback, with blizzards blowing for much of the ride.
Four of the Hubbards' six children were girls and two were boys; the oldest was 13 and the youngest 2. These days, she said, nothing pleased the family more than return visits to the farm for picnics and horseback riding.
Her church record included a term leading the Relief Society and service in the Sunday School, and she was then the Relief Society's work director, responsible for the homemaking lesson. Snowmobiling was a pastime she and her husband shared, and in spare hours she crocheted and took up arts and crafts. Pastries were her favorite thing to make, and at holiday time she turned out a wide variety of candies; the column ended with a selection of her recipes.
On this site: Jessie Hubbard's obituary; the Firsts page on the valley's school buses; and the Stories entry on the spring floods of 1962, another season when the weather closed the valley's roads.