On Sunday, January 25, 1981, the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello printed two photographs of Willard and Mamie Andersen under the caption "50 Years Ago and Today." With them ran a golden-wedding notice. The party, set for the next Saturday, was the work of their children and grandchildren, who asked friends and relatives to come and share in it. In a few paragraphs the notice gave an outline of two lives, most of them tied to a dry farm in Arbon Valley.
The boy from the dry farm
Willard was born on July 16, 1907, in Mendon, Utah, the eldest child of John C. and DeSena Andersen, one of the families that had homesteaded at Arbon. Arbon was home through his boyhood, and that is where he went to school. The old papers very likely catch him twice as a boy, though neither item names his parents. In May 1918 the teacher of the Valley View school, Mrs. Mary L. Barker, sent the American Falls Press an account of her pupils' war work, part of the valley's Red Cross effort. The children had made 1,400 gun wipers, and the paper added that "Willard Anderson and his sister, Ada, led the school in purchasing War Savings Stamps." Ada was the next of John and DeSena's children.
In June 1922 the Press printed the names of the eighth-grade graduates of Power County, and "Willard Anderson" was one of the three listed from District No. 11 at Arbon. The family page says he finished the eighth grade at thirteen and worked on the farm from then on; he was fourteen when the 1922 list was printed.
According to the 1981 notice, he went twice into the mission field for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: to the Southern States from 1925 to 1927, and to the East Central States across 1928 and 1929. The family account tells only of the first one, which he began at seventeen. No other paper read for this post mentions the second.
Mamie Haney
Mamie Edrie Haney's parents, William Crayton and Julia K. Harvey Haney, had a small farm near Westminster, South Carolina, and she was born there on March 2, 1912. Except for some years in Greenville, starting at age two, her girlhood belonged to that farm. Westminster's class of 1930 included her, and not long afterward she was in Pocatello.
Her family seems to have come west about the same time. In August 1937 the Pocatello Tribune reported the death of Julian Haney, fifteen, who was thrown under a runaway team from a hayrack he was driving on a ranch near Fort Hall. He had been born at Westminster in 1922 and had come to Idaho six years before, and the paper said Mrs. Haney had died about a year earlier. Among his five sisters the paper listed Mrs. Willard Anderson of Arbon. The paper doesn't name Mamie, but the family name, the hometown and the timing make it very likely that this was her younger brother.
On January 28, 1931, the two were married in the Salt Lake Temple. A short wedding trip to Cache Valley came next, and then they set up housekeeping on the Andersen farm at Arbon. Her own memory of the deep snow they crossed on the way out to be married is on the family page.
Counselor and bishop
The notice runs through Willard's church callings one after another. He sat on the Curlew Stake high council; he spent a decade as counselor to "Bishop Arbon" in the Arbon Ward; he presided over that ward himself for nine and a half years; and he later returned to a high council, this time in the West Pocatello Stake. "Bishop Arbon" was almost certainly Joseph N. Arbon, the ward's first bishop, who began a second term in 1925.
Other records support the notice. A badly scanned funeral notice of July 1940 seems to call Willard the Arbon bishop. In January 1949 the Salt Lake Telegram named Willard Anderson, bishop of the Arbon Ward, as the man who would conduct the Pocatello funeral of Lester William Evans. The ward was discontinued in 1951, as told in Between stakes. The arithmetic is only rough: if he was already bishop in 1940, he served nearer eleven years than nine and a half.
The family account on this site describes the same years a little differently. It says he was first counselor to Branch President Joe Arbon and then branch president himself. After 1951 the Latter-day Saints at Arbon met as a branch, and the site's records, gathered in Branch or ward?, name him among its presidents. Both may be true. The 1981 notice, written while he was living, and the 1949 paper both call him bishop of the ward.
Pocatello in winter
Town schooling for the children explains the Pocatello house: the notice says it was bought in 1944, and from then on the family wintered there. By the family's account Willard kept the farm and went back and forth. Six children were born to the couple: Elmo Jack, Patsy Grace (Mrs. Clark), David Revell, Allen Ray, Julia Dee and Willard Lynn. By 1981 Lynn was at Arbon, where he took over the farm, and there were twenty-one grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Willard died on August 1, 1996, and Mamie in October 2005. Both are buried in the Arbon Cemetery.
On this site: Willard and Mamie Andersen, the Andersen family and the Arbon history.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, January 25, 1981, page 30 (section C, page 12). The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Willard and Mamie Andersen of Pocatello, married in January 1931, were to mark fifty years together with a celebration on Saturday, January 31, from 7 to 9:30 in the evening. The couple's children and grandchildren planned the party for the cultural hall of the Thirty-first LDS Ward, at Chubbuck and Hawthorne, and the notice served as an open invitation to friends and family.
Mendon, Utah, was Willard's birthplace, and July 16, 1907, his birthday. His parents, John Christian and Desena Sorensen Andersen, were placed by the notice among the Arbon Valley's early settlers and described as widely known. His boyhood was spent on a dry farm at Arbon, and his schooling took place there too.
The notice stressed his activity in the LDS Church. His missions took him to the Southern States between 1925 and 1927 and then, over 1928 and 1929, to the East Central States. In the Curlew Stake he was a member of the high council. In the Arbon Ward he was a counselor to Bishop Arbon for ten years and then its bishop for nine and a half. Later the West Pocatello Stake called him to its high council.
Mrs. Andersen, the former Mamie Edrie Haney, was a South Carolinian, the daughter of William Crayton and Julia K. Harvey Haney. Her birthplace, on March 2, 1912, was a small farm outside Westminster. Apart from a spell in Greenville that began when she was two, her childhood was spent on that farm. She graduated at Westminster in 1930, and Pocatello became her home soon after.
The Salt Lake Temple was the scene of their marriage on January 28, 1931. Once a short honeymoon in Cache Valley was over, the couple made the Andersen farm at Arbon their home. A change came in 1944, when the family bought a Pocatello house; the children could then go to high school in town, and the winters were spent there.
The six children were Elmo Jack, Patsy Grace Clark, David Revell, Allen Ray, Julia Dee and Willard Lynn. Twenty-one grandchildren and two great-grandchildren had since joined the family, and the notice closed by naming children and descendants alike as what pleased the couple more than anything.