Joe and Edna Arbon: seventy years married, 1929–2000

On January 28, 2000, the Idaho State Journal printed the obituary of Joseph George Arbon, who had died the day before at 92. He was a grandson of George Arbon, the settler the valley was named for, and the son of Joseph N. Arbon, the Arbon Ward's first bishop. Weeks earlier, on December 26, 1999, he and his wife Edna had been married seventy years. The family account of Joseph George Arbon on this site tells their lives at length; this post gathers what the newspapers printed about them.

Two Arbon children

Joe's first home was a little log house in the valley, where he was born on August 2, 1907, when the valley still belonged to Oneida County. The papers first catch him at twelve. In May 1920 the Arbon column of the American Falls Press reported that Mr. and Mrs. Joe Arbon had a telegram from their daughter Della at Malad, saying that her brother was ill with pneumonia, "but not serious." The parents left for Malad that afternoon. The column's text gives the boy's name as "Jooy," probably Joey, and he was almost certainly Joe G.; Della was his sister Delta.

Edna Kerr Bailey was a daughter of James R. and Annie Kerr Bailey, whose own early years at Arbon are told in J. R. Bailey: ten cents, two cows and a greased pig. In June 1920 the Press listed her among the county's rural eighth-grade graduates. That September the Press reported that "Miss Edna Bailey left Saturday for Wellsville, Utah, where she will attend high school." Her brother Thomas left the same day to start college at Logan. The next June the paper had her home again from her year at Wellsville. By the fall of 1925 she was teaching. When the county superintendent, Mrs. Darling, inspected the valley's schools that autumn, she found District No. 11, the "Arbon valley school," "in charge of Miss Edna Bailey," and was well pleased with the interest both teacher and pupils showed. The school had no water and no barn, and the pupils' horses stood tied to the fence. The family account says Edna taught the one-room Valley View school, probably this same school, and had four terms behind her when she married.

Married at Christmas

On December 27, 1929, the Salt Lake papers listed a marriage license for Joseph Arbon and Edna Bailey, both of Arbon, Idaho. They had married the day before in Salt Lake City, over the school's Christmas break, according to the family account. Arbon had been home to both of them before the wedding and stayed home after it, the 1979 notice said; for about ten years they shared the ranch house with Joe's parents. Ronald was born in 1932, Robert in 1940 and JoAnn in 1946.

The papers of the middle years are harder to use: father and son were both called Joe Arbon and worked the same ranch, and a report seldom says which one it means. One item is clear: in March 1949, anyone planning to attend the Arbon Valley annual reunion and its Memorial hall banquet was told to reserve a place through Mrs. Joseph G. Arbon.

Leaving the ranch

The sale of the farm came in 1974, and the 2000 obituary puts their departure from the ranch in May of that year. Their next home was a Pocatello house already a quarter-century in their hands, according to the 1979 notice.

A December 1979 Journal notice invited friends to a golden-anniversary open house on December 29, held in the cultural hall of the Twenty-eighth Ward on South Fairway; the Arbons wanted no gifts. It noted that Joe's parents and Edna's had both been part of the valley's first wave of settlers. Edna, it said, had taken on auxiliary callings again and again in two wards, Arbon Valley and the Twelfth, and she belonged to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers' Portneuf camp. By then there were eleven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, and retirement, the notice said, suited them so well they urged it on others.

The sixtieth came ten years later. Family members gathered on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1989, at their son Dr. Ronald Arbon's house, where relatives presented a program for the couple. According to the Journal's notice of January 7, 1990, their travels had carried them to many countries, and they kept up with the football, soccer and hockey the family played. The same notice had Edna chairing quilting and counted her among the Portneuf camp's charter members.

Afterward

Edna's own obituary has not been found in the pages read for this post. The family account says she died in August 2000, the same year as Joe, and that both are buried at Mountainview Cemetery in Pocatello.

Their son Ronald's obituary, printed on January 1, 2019, adds one valley note. It called Joe and Edna "3rd generation farmers" in Arbon Valley. The obituary says Ronald grew up doing the farm's chores but, because of hay fever, could not make farming his career. Pressed by his father for another plan, he named medicine almost without thinking. He trained at the University of Oregon medical school and practiced in South Dakota and then for decades in Idaho Falls. He died on December 26, 2018, at 86, on what would have been his parents' 89th wedding anniversary, and was to be buried in Pocatello.

On this site: the accounts of Joseph N. Arbon and George Dennis Arbon, the story of Joe's father in Two men of 1875: the deaths of Joe Arbon and William Allard, the valley's schools and the Arbon area.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, January 28, 2000, page A5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Joseph George Arbon, born in Arbon Valley, died Thursday, January 27, 2000. He was 92.

The obituary called him a rancher "at heart." August 2, 1907, was his birthday, and a log house in the valley his birthplace. Joseph Nicholas and Elizabeth Davis Arbon were his parents, and George Dennis and Sarah Nicholas Arbon his grandparents. That ancestry, and a valley that carried its name, were a source of pride to him, according to the obituary.

His marriage to Edna Kerr Bailey Arbon had reached seventy years a month before he died; the wedding was in Salt Lake City on December 26, 1929. Home until May 1974 was the Arbon Valley ranch, with a Pocatello house for the winter months. According to the obituary, they shared both the labor and the fun of their life together. Harvest marked the start of their travel season, and over the years their trips reached much of the globe; no journey, though, kept them from a grandchild's big occasion.

Edna survived him, as did their three children: Ronald and his wife, Mary Ellen; Robert and his wife, Lillie; and JoAnn, married to Mike Swendsen. The obituary also named a brother, Harold Arbon of Salinas, California, and Harold's wife, Lael. Joe's descendants then numbered twelve grandchildren, sixteen great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson, who knew him as "Grandpa Joe." He had outlived his parents, his sister, Delta Harmon, and two grandsons.

Services were set for 2 p.m. Monday, January 31, at Colonial Funeral Home in Pocatello, with the family receiving friends for two hours beforehand. Burial in Mountainview Cemetery was planned after the service. The Journal printed the obituary again on January 30, and short notices of the service on January 29 and 31.