On the afternoon of Thursday, November 13, 1952, Twayne Austin of Pocatello was killed when the tank truck he was driving crashed on Highway 37. He had been delivering oil products in Arbon Valley and was on his way back to town. Austin was connected to the valley in two ways. He was the Pocatello agent for the Continental Oil Company, and since 1945 he had been president of the West Pocatello Stake, the group of Latter-day Saint congregations that included Arbon's.
A stake that reached to Arbon
Arbon's ward had belonged to the Malad Stake and, from 1915, the Curlew Stake. When the Curlew Stake was dissolved in February 1940, the ward passed to the Pocatello Stake. From 1945 it was part of the new West Pocatello Stake, as the history of the Arbon family records. Through at least the first years of Austin's presidency, Arbon's bishop was Willard J. Andersen, who was bishop by July 1940 and still in January 1949 (see the Andersen family).
In September 1951 the Deseret News ran a profile of Austin in a series introducing stake presidents. Asked about his stake, he named six Pocatello wards, the First, Third, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh, "and one ward at Arbon." Every other unit on his list was in the city. The remark is a small puzzle. The Church History Library's unit records, as the site cites them, say the Arbon Ward was disorganized in April 1951 and carried on as a branch, yet five months later Austin still spoke of a ward.
The profile tells Austin's life mostly in his own words. He was born in April 1902 at Sharon, a small community in Bear Lake County, Idaho. He graduated from the Fielding Academy at Paris in 1921 and from Brigham Young University in 1925. He worked as a bank teller and then as a salesman of musical instruments in Idaho Falls. From 1931 he spent nine years as an insurance agent in Pocatello, and by 1951 he had been Continental Oil's agent there for about eleven years. In the church he had taught Sunday School, served as stake Sunday School superintendent, as a bishop's counselor and as a counselor in the stake presidency. When the West Pocatello Stake was formed from part of the Pocatello Stake, he was sustained as its president. The paper also described his work to rid Pocatello of slot machines and his part in local, state and national politics, which, as far as the scrambled text can be read, included serving as a delegate to two national conventions. He had married in 1925, and he and his wife had one son and, by then, three grandchildren.
November 13, 1952
The Deseret News carried the report from Pocatello the next day. Austin had been making deliveries of oil products in Arbon Valley and was returning to Pocatello. On Highway 37, "about seven miles south of" a place whose name is lost in the scanned page, the tank truck went out of control and rolled down an embankment. He was pinned beneath the roof of the cab. He was taken to Bannock Memorial Hospital in Pocatello, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The state patrolman who investigated said he had apparently been "killed almost instantly." The paper called him a Pocatello businessman and a civic and church leader, and a prominent Republican.
On November 15 the paper's editorial page gave him a short tribute. It said he had "died in the wreckage of his truck" while returning home from Arbon Valley. It recalled that he had led the West Pocatello Stake since 1945 and had held many positions of responsibility in church, business and civic life. It described him as "modest and unassuming by nature," with a gift for leadership and for getting things done. The paper extended its condolences to his family and associates.
What the papers leave out
The reports do not say which farms or businesses he had been delivering to, whether he made the trip often, or why the truck left the road. The digitized text of these pages is badly scrambled. The November 14 report points to further details on another page, which has not been found, and no Pocatello report of the accident or of his funeral has turned up.
The highway number probably points to the road through the valley. In 1948 the state called for bids to surface State Highway 37 between Holbrook summit and Buist, at the valley's south end, as the entry on the first oiled road describes. Exactly where along the road the truck left it is not recorded in what survives.
On this site: the history of the Arbon family, which follows the ward from its founding through its stakes to its change to a branch; the Arbon area history, which marks the ward's beginnings under the Malad Stake and its change to a branch; the Andersen family; and the first oiled road.