The Potato Farmer From Idaho Who Moved 6,000 Miles to Follow Her Dreams
An Interview
By Walter Erickson
My grandma is one of the most inspiring people I know. She has lived her life to the fullest from the start. She moved from a small town in Idaho all the way to Guam to follow her dreams of teaching. There, she and her loving husband had two children. Together, they moved from Guam to Colorado and then to Wyoming, where she had her third kid. She was never scared to make the leap from one place to another. Even in her 80s, she still makes changes to her life, like adding pets to her house. She is never scared to make a change.
How did your parents shape your experience as a child?
They lived in a small town, which made it possible for me to do everything I wanted. My mother was a very strong woman. Maybe she shaped me to be strong. But she also had a sharp tongue that hurt people's feelings, and I didn't want to do that. If I have a sharp tongue, I'm real careful not to let it show.
What did you dream of when you were younger?
I had some goals. I wanted to get married, I wanted to travel, I wanted to teach school, and I wanted to have a family. I don't know exactly what shaped those goals, except that I was raised to have those goals. I accomplished all of them before I was thirty.
Who was the most influential person in your life growing up? How did they influence you?
I lived very close to my grandma, my mother's mother. I felt she had a love for me that was special. She had twenty-one grandchildren, but she had a special bond with me. She was very patient. She taught me. When I was little, I said some bad words in front of her. She explained to me that those were bad words, so I didn't say them anymore. She influenced me in a lot of ways. Every time I do something, I ask myself, “What would Grandma think?” I also had a few teachers in school who influenced me. One in particular thought that I was very good. She's the one who influenced my decision to become a teacher and what I majored in, just by her actions and the way she taught.
If you had to pick one major life event that impacted you the most, what would it be?
Marrying your grandpa. We both had kind of the same goals. If I hadn’t married him, I'd have gone some other way; I might be, I don't know, a farmer in Idaho. But I married him, so that's where my life went from. We traveled together and accomplished the things we wanted to do.
You moved often when you were raising your children. What challenges came with that?
I was lucky that Jason [my dad] and Kristen [my aunt] were so close in age, because when we moved to a different school, they at least had each other. They didn't have to go into that school all by themselves. As a parent, I had to make sure that we could adjust to the different houses, the different places, the different schools my kids had to go to. JP [my uncle] went all the way from elementary to high school here in Saratoga. Jason and Kristen went all the way from middle school through high school here. But before that, it was almost like they had immigrated here. They came from Guam, a territory. They even had a little bit of a Guamanian accent when we moved to Greeley [Colorado]. As a family, we had to learn to adjust to a culture different from Guam. Learning how to do that was difficult.
You’ve had a lot of pets throughout your life. What draws you to animals?
They love me. I've been thinking about that; I think back to my childhood a lot. I had a dog named Spike. I didn’t have him for very long because we lived on a highway, and he got run over by a car. But I still think about Spike. When I was about eight or nine years old, when things were going bad, I'd call Spike and we'd go for a walk. He'd follow me everywhere. He was just a good dog. All of my dogs have been kind of like that, although Edison [her current dog] doesn't follow me unless I have a leash on him. But they are there when you need them.
How do you plan to pass the lessons you've learned throughout your life on to your children and grandchildren?
My children have strong families; I'm hoping they learned that from the family they grew up in. They're all hardworking, good employees, good leaders. I don't know if they learned that from me or not, but that's what I'm proud of them for. I want to teach and love you guys, my grandchildren, like my grandma did for me, but you’re so much farther away. I don't know how I can pass that on to you.
What is a lesson that you learned as a child that you think is still important for children to learn today?
We learned to be polite. We learned that it was important to have manners – that’s saying please and thank you and treating other people with respect. Manners are still important, if people even know what manners are. It’s good to sit down at the table together, to ask to be excused when you’re finished. These are the simple rules in life that matter.
What is one hope for the future that you have? How do you plan to be a part of it?
I've only got about twenty years left. I just hope that we can all learn to get along. I wanna be part of that by being there when people need me and getting along with people. We are in a bad spot where people are arguing all the time and hating each other. I don't wanna be part of that. I wanna be on the other side of that.
