Document Star_doc_671a497dae

Historic Star Idaho A history through its residents. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Jack and Betha Goodwin Foster April 5, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at the Foster’s home at 25584 Birdie Drive (in Middleton School District but with a Caldwell Post Office) Prelude Jack and Betha Foster came to Idaho in the 1940s from Wyoming and Missouri and lived in various places before settling down on a farm in Star, where they lived for 36 years and raised their family. In 2005 they moved to Middleton, where they found a view that would not change with a lot of development. ---PAGE BREAK--- Betha: I was born in Torrington, Wyoming, in 1937. I came to Idaho when I was six. In 1955 I married Jack. I graduated from Meridian High School back when there was one high school for the area. Jack: I was born in Cape Fair, Missouri, actually out in the country, not in the town. I keep telling my kids that I want my obituary to read that I was born in Log Cabin, which I was. We moved to Eagle, Idaho, when I was 11 and we lived around Eagle for a few years and until all the folks went back to Missouri when I was a junior in high school. I didn’t go. I stayed with an uncle until I finished school. He moved away, and then I was on my own. In 1961 I got married and moved to Star. We lived on First Street in Star, just west of Star Road. We bought that house from Mary Foster and her first husband Jim; she is Mary Kolsky now. We lived there for a couple years and, and I was going back to school in Ohio, where we ended up selling a place there. We moved to Boise for a few years and then in 1969 bought the place out on Highway 44 west of Star, where we lived until 2005 . We sold that place and moved where we are now near the golf course in Middleton. It sounds confusing because we lived in five places in two years in our early days in Star. Our kids went to five different schools those two years. We went back to the farm on Highway 44, where we stayed until we moved to Middleton. Betha: I had two brothers, who are no longer living. Jack: I had two brothers and had three sisters. Only one sister is still living. Some of my sisters and brothers moved back here. Betha: I was born in my grandmother’s homestead in Wyoming. My folks moved to Meridian in 1943 with my brothers at that time who were older than I. I went through school in Meridian. My brothers went their separate ways. One lived in Meridian; the other one lived in Idaho Falls. My father lived into his late eighties. My mother was in her nineties. My father knew all the farm ground around Meridian. ---PAGE BREAK--- In the old days, the Star Merc was different than today. We went in through the front door that faced Highway 44.The Merc sold appliances along with everything else. Most of us did all our shopping there. It was a good local place. We all knew the Kirtleys who owned it. The old post office was across the street on the west side from the Merc in the old bank building. Star built the new post office east of the Merc. In those days you weren’t afraid of things. Our children were quite small. Our oldest attended a kindergarten out at the Jess Berry Farm, which was about a mile and a half west of Star. I had to drive out there to kindergarten. Our other children later went in town to the Star Friends Church, which had a kindergarten before the public schools did. Jack was a volunteer at the Fire Department then. Jack: Where the Merc’s gas pumps are right now was a Chevron service station, owned by Eldon Ross (father of Mark, who has an oral history in this exhibit) and his cousin Guy Marcus for many years. The Volunteer Fire Department was directly across the street from the gas station. When we first moved to Star, I worked in Boise for National Cash Register Company. I was going to Ohio to school for that company. I quit NCR in 1977 because I had worked long enough. I started farming and later worked for the ditch companies. I farmed until we moved to Middleton. Betha: I had different jobs off and on but mainly stayed at home. I worked in a kitchen store some and was a meter maid in downtown Boise for a year. I became secretary for three ditch companies, including Canyon County Water, Flake Ditch, and Pioneer Ditch Company, where Jack was a ditch rider for 20 some years. Jack: Water comes out of the river at the Star Bridge and runs to Channel Lane on the west end of Middleton. All the laterals that come down there everything basically on the south side of the Highway 44 and north of the river. That’s Canyon County Water. And then Little Pioneer comes out just west of Linder, basically running to Star Road. That’s a lot of territory. Most of the farmers took care of the ditch work through their place, but that doesn’t happen anymore because a lot of farms are now gone, replaced by subdivisions and all they know is ‘gimme my water’. Years ago, our fun in Star were the big dances in the school. We also got together to play Pinochle cards. After we moved to the farm, we were too busy farming and doing the ditch work. We rented ground that is now in subdivisions. Our children went to school in Middleton because we were barely in Canyon County. We have one daughter that just retired after 33 years from the school district; she lives at home. Another daughter lives in Oregon. Our third daughter lives outside of town and is still working. Our son lives in Pocatello. ---PAGE BREAK--- Our four children were involved in 4-H. They showed cows, horses, and sheep. One daughter rode in the Bareback Riding Club and our other daughter did barrel racing in rodeos. They used to ride where they no longer can because of all the homes in the foothills. They would take off in the mornings and I’d see them in the evenings when they got home. They knew to be home by sunset. Star is growing so fast that now they wouldn’t be able to go out and ride like they used to. Betha: Jack was busy farming so I took the kids and their horses in the trailer to their events. That was our life. They also played sports in Middleton because we were just across the county line, so we couldn’t go to Star. They went to first grade in Star. But that’s when we lived in town. With Jack being in farming and the Ditch Rider, he met many people and has seen many changes. He knew the big farmers that were where the Heron River subdivision is now. We raised corn, grain, mint, sugar beets, and cows. The kids also worked on the farm. We have seen a lot of changes living in Star. I’ve got video of the neighbor kids riding their four-wheelers down the middle of Highway 44 and rearing up. You couldn’t do that kind of thing today. You can’t even get out of your driveway now. Other changes I don’t like is where kids have to go to high school. The building on the corner of State Street and Star Road was called the ‘Gymnasium” in the days when the girls played basketball and auctions were held there. We went to the auctions on Saturday nights, and there always were big crowds. We miss our neighbors. Many moved away. We used to go to the Merc and you’d always meet somebody that you knew in there. Now you don’t anyone because of all the newcomers. I miss seeing people I know. Jack: One of the reasons I bought our present home next to a school is so that our view out back wouldn’t change. When we left farming we were trying to scrape a living out of it and it was pretty tough. Developers came along and offered us more money than it was worth. So we just sold the thing and, and moved out and, but when we were looking for another place to live, we knew we needed to find something that was on one level, And I didn’t want to be in a subdivision that you couldn’t see out the back window. Betha: We still stay in touch with Mary Kolsky. Her first husband Jim died; Jack worked with him, so we knew them since the fifties. When we moved to the farm, we had the farm friends and we’re still in touch with all them. Jack: The one neighbor that lived next to us on the farm is the guy I still fish with. He moved to Oregon, so I just buy an Oregon license . Betha: The Pioneer Ditch company furnishes much water in Star. It was incorporated in 1909 and has rights before that. Our daughters wanted a milk cow. When we first moved out to the farm in 1972 we bought them a milk cow and a Shorthorn cow, so they could have milk and beef together. That winter was the coldest on record. The milking machine froze up every morning; I’d have to go out with a torch and thaw it out so they could go out and milk their cows. After that they wanted to dry the cows up and I said, no. We made ‘em milk the cows until they went dry and they never ever wanted another milk cow! Star was a good place to raise a family. On the farm you knew where your kids were, they had their chores, and we drove them to whatever they had to go to. Country living was much better than the city to raise kids. We have grandkids now. One grandson is close by but the others are scattered in Texas, Wyoming, and Oregon. Jack: One more memory The old trolley that once made a loop from Boise to Star out to Caldwell and back to Boise ran pretty close to our Star place. I used to find spikes in the area of the old inner-urban line. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Jane Raynor February 10, 2022 By Lynn Davis at Jane’s Star home on 186 N. Main Street Prelude Jane Raynor is one of Star’s longest residents, having moved to Star with her family in 1946. She has seen the transition of America from a Christian nation of hard-working, sacrificing people with shared values of patriotism to a rudderless nation in 2022 that seems to have lost its way after more than two years of the world-wide Covid virus pandemic. She has also seen the transition in recent years of a rural, farm town near Idaho’s capitol city of Boise to the fastest growing area in America! Jane’s legacy of serving her community and others inspires all of us and is a role model how to age with Grace. ---PAGE BREAK--- I was born Margaret Jane Shreffler in Nebraska, where we lived on a farm near Edgar, a tiny town about 20 miles from Hastings. We sold our farm during the Dust Bowl and spent Christmas of 1938 with the family and then moved to Caldwell, Idaho. We were the first in our extended family to leave Nebraska. I was 8 years old. We moved to a farm in Caldwell, Idaho, in January of 1939. My brother and I rode horseback to school from the farm. Two years later we moved to Ustick and lived there a couple of years and then moved to Middleton when I was in 7th grade. Later we moved to Kingsbury Lane nearby. My Middleton High School graduation was the school’s smallest graduation, so they did not have a yearbook. But we got the school to display our class photos on the school walls. In 1946 Dad bought an 80-acre farm on Chinden between Star Road and McDermot on the south side. I worked on the farm, milking cows, putting up hay, and doing other farm chores. We started going to church in 1946 at Star Christian, which was the forerunner of today’s LifeSpring Church. We had no indoor plumbing until we moved to the Chinden farm in 1946. Dad never made any money until then. We lived frugally and simply, like everyone else. I remember people driving and coasting down a hill in their cars with a foot off the accelerator to save gas and money. Dad was able to put money away because he lived frugally, so he left his wife in good shape when he passed away. Growing up, I had a friend across the road and we used to walk a couple of miles away to Star to the Café or just to walk around town. This is how I met my husband, Junior Lee Raynor. He and his friend were driving down the road to Star one day and picked us up and then brought us back home. I married Junior in October of 1950. At the time I was working as a truck driver hauling beets. In 1951 we bought the house on Main Street in Star where I have lived ever since. Junior’s father and two brothers built the house. It was just a two-bedroom house and then in spring of 1959 we built an addition with another bedroom and a dining room. Junior worked for Idaho Power, 10 days on and then was home four days. So I pretty much did the work around here. In 1968 I went to work for the Star Sewer and Water District, where I worked 29 years. When computers came in I quit! When the sewers were installed around town, on weekends Junior and I used to drive around in his truck with a big tank and flush the lines. We knew everyone in town. We had two boys and two girls. Today my oldest son lives in Boise; the girls are in Kansas, and son Tracy is in Alaska. Everything in my house is old including me! And everything we bought was used. Like the electric stove we bought in 1962 when Tracy was a baby. It still works!! Our refrigerator came from a former minister’s son and daughter-in-law. Not much went on in Star. It was a quiet town. ---PAGE BREAK--- I was active in church as a greeter and in Bible studies. The Barn in the cluster of big trees on Star Road, now part of the Friends Church, held revivals in the olden days, and I would go in my teenage years. My folks moved into Star, and I started to look after them. They lived down on South Main and later next door to us. I also looked after an aunt in Nampa. And we also looked after Junior’s sister and brother-in-law until they died. My mother lived with me for a year before she passed away. My mother lived to be 104, so maybe I have her good genes since I am 92. I had two brothers and three sisters. I was the middle child. Both of my brothers are still living. I am the oldest living family member, after losing my three older sisters. I also took care of my neighbor for several years until she died. Her granddaughter inherited the house and after she had it appraised, she let us buy it for half the appraised price in 1978. I used it for a rental before and after my folks had been living there. Before Covid came in 2019, I walked a mile several times a week to Star Elementary School, where I helped out at the library. One of my Star memories is serving as Grand Marshall for Star’s wonderful Fourth of July Parade in 2018. For my 80th birthday my family gave me a surprise birthday party at the Senior Center. The center asked me to come down and get it unlocked for use and when I did, there was all my family shouting Happy Birthday! I was speechless. Star used to be rural and now we are having huge changes with all our tremendous growth. Star has a new Fire Station and City Hall is expanding. Star Rec , where I still exercise regularly, has moved to the newly re-done Star River House. So many things I have forgotten, but what I liked the most about Star was the quietness and that I knew everyone. Now a whole new generation of people who have moved here. When I worked for Star Water and Sewer, subdivisions were just starting and now we have subdivisions everywhere. It used to be farm ground all around the little old town. No more. It is kind of sad, when you think about how things have changed. It used to be all we had was one or two grocery stores. There was a little one down on the corner besides the Star Merc down Main Street from me. Now we have five stores ---PAGE BREAK--- that sell food. I think the first to come in was Maverick, and then it started to boom after 2010. I don’t get out like I used to. I pretty much stayed at home. I wasn’t a goer. But I have always been an outside person. I don’t care much for housework! Besides taking care of family members, I took care of my yard people have said I kept a beautiful yard of flowers over the years. I like being outside pulling weeds or whatever needs to be done. I don’t know what 2023 will bring because I am slowing down. David and Renee from my Star Rec Fit and Fall exercise program mowed my yard in recent years, and now I have a young college student in town to help me with yard maintenance. I have lived in my Star house on Main Street for 73 years! For many years I took care of the garden at the Senior Center but I had to give that up when I turned 89 because I could not keep up with it all! There have been to many changes in recent years. I worry about our country and pray for it every day and that God would raise up good leaders. So many of our leaders are power hungry. America needs leaders who will serve the people. I wish people would not be so selfish and greedy. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Mark Ross February 10, 2022 By Dean Hagerman at Mark’s Star home on 428 S Main Street Prelude In 1943 I was born in Boise. My dad moved out to Star in 1945 and went to work for Harry Hoffman, who ran the Hoffman Chevron Station across from the Merc on the south side of State Street. I went to grade school at Star. I had an aunt and uncle that lived in a big colonial type house across from the grade school. The house is still there and on the Historical Register. We went out in the streets to play ball, roller skate, or find something else to do. Star had about 300 people; now we’re pushing over 12,000. The apartment we lived in was right behind the Hoffman station, which is now kind of a social bar. My parents were early Star residents. ---PAGE BREAK--- Sports were a part of my life when I was going to school. We went to Junior High in Eagle. I rode horses a lot. My dad had three or four head of horses, so I spent hours out in the foothills where Hillsdale is and north of CanAda Lane. We chased jack rabbits. When I was about 11-years-old I got involved in Boy Scouts in the early fifties and eventually got an Eagle Scout award. My dad was instrumental in starting the Star Fire Department. He was the first chief and pretty much put that whole thing together and I sometimes helped him out there. Later on, he saw the need to create a sewer system and put together the Star Sewer System, which is expanded great quite a bit now. As irrigation was developed to take care of all the farms, he was on the irrigation board for a long time. I had one sister two years younger than I. Then my birth mother passed away around 1948, and my dad remarried and they had two boys. One of them became active in the fire department with dad and eventually became the Fire Chief in Boise for 25 or 30 years. In junior high I played basketball and baseball; soccer wasn’t around then. In high school I played a little tennis and tried to play basketball, at school, but I wasn’t tall so I played a lot of church basketball and softball. When I was growing up and it snowed long enough, we would take a car and put a tube behind it and go up and down the roads and foothills between here and Emmett. We had tubing parties and all kinds of things like that. In the spring we played baseball wherever we could find a place to set up a field, usually in my dad’s pasture. Where Herron River is there used to be a forest, where I would chase deer on my horse. We had scout outings there and also where a city building is now that had an artesian well. Star was a great place to grow up because there were all kinds of things to do and not too many people to bother you. ---PAGE BREAK--- My Dad worked for Harry Hoffman for a couple years, then he purchased the station and one of his cousins helped him run it for about 33 years. Dad also accumulated cattle to the north of my house and bought more parcels of land. He kept busy with cattle and farming after he retired from the gas station. He raised corn and a lot of mint and hay once in a while. I don’t ever remember putting up hay for him. I worked for a lot of farmers. Mint was a big cash crop. A lot of people here farmed mint. It’s kind of funny because when I grew up, farmers were making a living off of a 60 or 80-acre farm. They had cattle and chicken and pigs and a little bit of ground. Most of their income came from milk but that eventually went away as bigger outfits came in and took over. Milk trucks were running all over the place. Doug Willis’ Dad had a 30,000 chicken farm right in the middle of town, behind where he now lives with his daughter. I worked for him three summers. When I wasn’t there I was usually out hauling hay for some farm or fixing fence and cleaning ditches. Used to be that each spring everyone on a water ditch had to come and help clean it, starting at one end and going to the other end. None of that happens anymore because there are too many subdivisions that foul things up. I’ve been working ever since I was about 10 years old. Still working now as a SW Idaho Class D Drivers License skills tester! There used to be a little Conoco station in town, a food store, and a motel behind that. All the roads were gravel, both north and south. My Dad liked to elk hunt, so every year he, his brother, and some friends would take a load of horses to Grangeville for a week and hunt elk. They usually were successful. I was involved in a lot of church sports after work each day. A big bank building used to be across the road from Dad’s business and had the post office in it. One of my aunt’s daughters was post mistress. Dad helped her out when he retired. He and Mom also helped out Kay Helmick when she served as Star post mistress for many years. She was a great lady. I went to high school at Meridian; now that building is Cole Christian School. When I went to the University of Idaho to be a forest ranger, I found out you had to take chemistry classes, so I came home. Mom said I was good about organizing things for people, so I looked into being a history and Phys Ed teacher. I went back to the University of Idaho and got a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees, one of ---PAGE BREAK--- which was in administration. I ended up in athletic administration eventually and did that for about 35 years. I coached high school basketball and tennis and helped with football. I also refereed basketball for high school and college for about 20 years. In my third year at college in Moscow, I got married to Marvene. She grew up in Malad City, Idaho, and her dad was a dairy farmer. We had four kids, two boys and two girls. Two were born in Moscow and two in Pendleton. I met her at the University of Idaho. She was staying with a sister who lived there to help her out at a café, where I met her. After college I spent eight years in a little town called Pilot Rock, Oregon, just south of Pendleton. That’s where my first job was. And that’s where I was a high school basketball and tennis coach and assistant football coach. My junior high principal had been at Eagle and kept trying to get me back to work for him. So in 1975 I decided it was time to come back. I taught drivers training for three years with three other guys in junior highs in the Meridian area. There used to be a driving range there. We had eight cars on the range and all kinds of highway markings so students could learn. One person directed cars from the tower over through the radio. One of us was in the classroom, and two people were out on the highway. We would rotate positions. One year I’m walking down the hall at Lowell Scott and the principal says, “how’d you like to be head of the PE department here?” I said, ‘I’d love it’. He got me started being an athletic director and I went on to have a super career in athletics for about 35 years. I was involved in state athletics and on the national board of directors for three years and a bunch of different committees and eventually was put into the Athletic Hall of Fame. The secret is out that Star is great place to live and raise kids. It didn’t grow much until recent years, and now it is solid houses. I never thought we’d have a McDonald’s or Albertsons grocery. Now Burger King’s getting ready to build a store by Albertson’s along with a big huge truck and car wash. We came back here in 1975 and rented a house on Star Road before building the house we have lived in since 1976. Along with Charlene Phillips and Jane Raynor, I am among the oldest people here. Dad deeded me an acre of land, and I’ve added a little more. Behind my house is now a big subdivision all the way to the river. Dad put in an artesian well about 350 feet deep. I sold his place and bought the little chunk of land to run my home off that well because it is the best water in town with natural pressure. I really hate to see the little rural community of Star disappear. We all fought against sidewalks being put along our rural road but that was one of those battles we did not win. Up on Star Road there’s a Quaker Friends church, which now owns a big pavilion building that looks like a barn. There used to be Christian Camp Meetings there in the old days, and now weddings and special events take place there. Across the street from the Friends Church is the site of Idaho’s first Christian Church. Three church buildings have been there with lots of activities over the years. LifeSpring Christian is there now. South east of town is the old Grange Hall, where Saturday night dances took place. The hall was remodeled back around 2007. They updated the electricity, replaced the beams that supported the roof, put in a furnace, and laid wood floors. Moyle’s Mink Ranch was near there but now it’s all storage buildings. Butch and Jack Kirtley who own the Merc grew up in what we call the Diamond House on State Street. Their folks lived in that big house with the point- up rails near the store their grandparents started. The grandparents’ house was between theirs and the car wash. Star used to have a little rodeo club on the west side of Joplin just before you start up the little hill. A big pond is there now where a rodeo rink and café once were for weekend rodeos. I love Sunday drives, and I’ve probably been at least 300 miles every direction out of town. My dad was too busy working to do that. I like to take my grandchildren on adventures. ---PAGE BREAK--- Some of our relatives in Routt County, Colorado, where I was born, made a mass migration to Western Oregon when I was eight-years-old. Dad was tired of “nine months winter.” His father was a well-known rancher in Colorado and had died several years before we moved. My school teacher mother had come from Missouri back to Colorado after spending most of her life in Missouri. There was a job waiting for him in Oregon and to us three kids that state was heaven. But Dad did not like Western Oregon, so in the spring of 1945 he moved his family to a rental house and Dad went to work for the railroad in Glenns Ferry. He later bought a farm in Middleton that would have irrigation. He was pretty excited about showing us our new house with electricity and a bathroom, by far the nicest house we had ever had. Dad had his little dairy farm and raised alfalfa and clover seed. I started the fourth grade in Middleton, went to Star School for Junior High in 1949, and then back to Middleton for High School. We had good teachers. Everybody knew everybody and what was going on. As I’ve grown older I realize what a charmed life I have led. My sister and I were valedictorians, but I resisted all the urgings to go to college and make use of my mind. I thought I was already using my mind! I later had three kids that were at genius level, valedictorians of very large classes, and National Merit Scholars. In high school I played basketball and was captain of the volleyball team and a cheerleader. My friends and I liked roller skating, and we sometimes Interview with Mary Kolsky February 10, 2022 By Dean Hagerman at Mary’s Star home on 809 S. Main Street Prelude Mary Elizabeth Rockhill Foster Kolsky is a long-time resident of Star. She was the youngest of three children born in Routt County, Colorado, which is 8000 feet in elevation and may be the reason she says, she is so healthy (that and modern medicine)! My father moved us to Western Oregon, but he didn’t like it so we moved to the Middleton area of Idaho.” And so began Mary’s eventual journey to Star, where she has lived for 65 years. ---PAGE BREAK--- skipped school and went ice skating with clamp on ice skates. We had a 4-H Club in Middleton and one of our 4-H members called the Square Dances. We went around and gave floor shows for people who requested them. I also liked horseback riding with my father. I loved being with him; he taught me so much. I raked hay with our mule team but Dad always did the mowing with the tractor. In the extra snowy winter of 1948, everybody was snowed in but we were from snow country, and Dad had the mule team and knew how to get around in snow. Lots of neighbors got pulled out with that team. In 4-H I took sewing and later went on to make every article of clothing my family wore, including winter coats for my daughter and suits for my husband. buildings were ancient and not worth repairing so after we had paid off the place we tore down the old house and lived in the garage while building a new home. The locals were mostly farmers. Everyone knew their neighbors, and there was a lot of trading work with each other. It was a cohesive group. We all liked to go to the dances at the Grange Hall. Bill and Hazel Kirtley started the Star Merc, and in the early days Hazel raised and dressed the chickens herself. She was a character and a hard worker. The Merc itself was a regular old time country store with appliances and fabric and hardware as well as frozen food lockers in the back. I don’t know if it is true, but I heard this story more than once in the When I was 19, I married Jim Foster, a boy ahead of me in High School. We lived in an old house “over town,” which meant “in Star,” for five years. Jim’s grandparents were Idaho pioneers who settled on the Idaho side of Jordan Valley. The town of Star at that time was served by two artesian wells: the Co-Op and one owned by the Wilhite family. We were on the Wilhite well and somebody came by occasionally to collect a modest bill. The pressure was very low but we got used to it. It was better than carrying water from the spring. I was looking all the time for a farmstead, just enough to keep me busy with what I wanted and finally found this 10-acre parcel on Main Street. The ---PAGE BREAK--- early days. Before Star was a town, there was a prominent outhouse that had as a ventilation space a star and people used that as a directional indicator. People would say “ Go as far as the outhouse with the star and then…..” Eldon Ross and his cousin Guy Marquiss ran the Chevron Service station in Star, and Eldon’s wife Lorraine became one of my best friends. Eldon was the force behind the volunteer fire department, one of the best community things that happened. The little fire department with its truck was across the street from the Chevron station. If a fire call came, Eldon would cross the street and turn on the siren that could be heard for a mile, and then you could see the fire truck head out with a string of cars and pickups following it. Jim was sure that if I could drive all the things I drove that I could drive the fire truck, so we had a few lessons and he was right, I could drive the fire truck. Luckily I never had to. The fire department financed its operations and equipment with a yearly dance and a live band that was well attended. Star’s biggest event was the yearly Pheasant Hunter’s Breakfast. The breakfast line would be several blocks long. I love my Star community and am sad to see it all change from farm land to subdivisions. Our community used to be so close. One of two most remarkable houses in Star is what we always referred to as the “Hall House” because it was built in 1905 by Dr. Hall, the town doctor. My granddaughter and her family live there now. The other house now belongs to Ralph and Marly Cosgrove, who have done such a remarkable job of restoring it that it is on the list of historic homes. One sad thing about the early days of Star is that we have lost things we can no longer see: mule deer walking down the riverbank and in the meadows, bobwhites, pheasants, deer, snakes, toads, frogs, tomato and potato bugs, monarch butterflies, and June bugs. When we moved to Main Street, it was a little dirt road. I raised my three daughters and son on milk from our cow and sold milk to all the neighbors and grew our own vegetables. Jim died of colon cancer when he was 45. I was a widow the day before my 43rd birthday. My divorced sister had remarried and her husband Fred worked on the railroad. After Jim died, Fred found out one of his railroad buddies, Darrell, had lost his wife to a heart attack. He got us together, and we ended up marrying. Now Darrell is 94 and I am 88. He had three grown kids when we married and all of them have predeceased him. My youngest son was only 13 when we married and they have always been close. I have four granddaughters who live nearby and are married to wonderful ---PAGE BREAK--- guys who are the best dads ever. I have eight great-grandsons and two great- granddaughters. I lost one son soon after birth, twin girls at birth, and my oldest daughter three years ago. Star was a very small community when we first moved here in 1955. I have seen a lot of changes. They put the sidewalk in a few years ago, and somebody asked me how I felt about the sidewalk and I said, “You’re looking at the lady who didn’t even want the road paved.” Main Street then led to a bridge abutment at the end, where a bridge before my time had crossed the Boise River. Now it is where all the kids from the surrounding area dive off into the river in the summertime. Many of us old timers live in the past and wish things were like they used to be. Some of the changes are good though, like having a Subway and Ridley’s Grocery nearby. I still like to go to the library book club. In my early years I worked two years at Boise Cascade, which was then Boise Payette. When Jim and I first got married, I worked for Caldwell Lumber. I miss the area being rural. We had kerosene lamps when I was little. Now I wonder why does everybody has to light up the outside of their houses. There used to be a mint still on Star Road and an egg farm right in the middle of town. We had a manure spreader truck when we were farming 80 acres down on Blessenger Lane. The chicken farm would call me when the truck was full and I would go spread it. I would tell my husband if you call and I’m not home it’s because I’m stuck in the muck in the chicken poop truck. I don’t miss that. I also worked some on the Moyle’s mink farm right outside of town. I would “flesh” the mink pelts --taking the fat off the hides with a cone-shaped machine that vacuumed the fat into barrels. In the spring I bred mink. The Moyle family has been in the mink business in different locations for a long time. The farm was run by Rod Moyle, and I worked for him. He didn’t have any children so his nephew, Joe Moyle, moved to Star and took over the business. That was over 50 years ago. Joe and Lynn Moyle are the parents of Mike Moyle, who is in the state legislature and their oldest child. My other odd jobs included helping to gather eggs for Willis’ egg farm if he got short-handed. My fruit room had 600 jars that I had put up, and I provided the meat, milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables by staying home. And that is exactly what I wanted to do. That was my choice and I was so fortunate to live the life I wanted. ---PAGE BREAK--- fire truck. Luckily I never had to. The fire department financed its operations and equipment with a yearly dance and a live band that was well attended. Star’s biggest event was the yearly Pheasant Hunter’s Breakfast. The breakfast line would be several blocks long. I love my Star community and am sad to see it all change from farm land to subdivisions. Our community used to be so close. One of two most remarkable houses in Star is what we always referred to as the “Hall House” because it was built in 1905 by Dr. Hall, the town doctor. My granddaughter and her family live there now. The other house now belongs to Ralph and Marly Cosgrove, who have done such a remarkable job of restoring it that it is on the list of historic homes. One sad thing about the early days of Star is that we have lost things we can no longer see: mule deer walking down the riverbank and in the meadows, bobwhites, pheasants, deer, snakes, toads, frogs, tomato and potato bugs, monarch butterflies, and June bugs. When we moved to Main Street, it was a little dirt road. I raised my three daughters and son on milk from our cow and sold milk to all the neighbors and grew our own vegetables. Jim died of colon cancer when he was 45. I was a widow the day before my 43rd birthday. My divorced sister had remarried and her husband Fred worked on the railroad. After Jim died, Fred found out one of his railroad buddies, Darrell, had lost his wife to a heart attack. He got us together, and we ended up marrying. Now Darrell is 94 and I am 88. He had three grown kids when we married and all of them have predeceased him. My youngest son was only 13 when we married and they have always been close. I have four granddaughters who live nearby and are married to wonderful guys who are the best dads ever. I have eight great-grandsons and two great- granddaughters. I lost one son soon after birth, twin girls at birth, and my oldest daughter three years ago. Star was a very small community when we first moved here in 1955. I have seen a lot of changes. They put the sidewalk in a few years ago, and somebody asked me how I felt about the sidewalk and I said, “You’re looking at the lady who didn’t even want the road paved.” Main Street then led to a bridge abutment at the end, where a bridge before my time had crossed the Boise River. Now it is where all the kids from the surrounding area dive off into the river in the summertime. Many of us old timers live in the past and wish things were like they used to be. Some of the changes are good though, like having a Subway and Ridley’s Grocery nearby. I still like to go to the library book club. In my early years I worked two years at Boise Cascade, which was then Boise Payette. When Jim and I first got married, I worked for Caldwell Lumber. I miss the area being rural. We had kerosene lamps when I was little. Now I wonder why does everybody has to light up the outside of their houses. There used to be a mint still on Star Road and an egg farm right in the middle of town. We had a manure spreader truck when we were ---PAGE BREAK--- farming 80 acres down on Blessenger Lane. The chicken farm would call me when the truck was full and I would go spread it. I would tell my husband if you call and I’m not home it’s because I’m stuck in the muck in the chicken poop truck. I don’t miss that. I also worked some on the Moyle’s mink farm right outside of town. I would “flesh” the mink pelts --taking the fat off the hides with a cone-shaped machine that vacuumed the fat into barrels. In the spring I bred mink. The Moyle family has been in the mink business in different locations for a long time. The farm was run by Rod Moyle, and I worked for him. He didn’t have any children so his nephew, Joe Moyle, moved to Star and took over the business. That was over 50 years ago. Joe and Lynn Moyle are the parents of Mike Moyle, who is in the state legislature and their oldest child. My other odd jobs included helping to gather eggs for Willis’ egg farm if he got short-handed. My fruit room had 600 jars that I had put up, and I provided the meat, milk, butter, eggs, and vegetables by staying home. And that is exactly what I wanted to do. That was my choice and I was so fortunate to live the life I wanted. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Charlene Stillwell Phillips April 12, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Charlene’s home on 7830 N Star Road (with Meridian ID post office) Prelude Charlene’s pioneer grandparents settled in the Boise Valley in the 1890s. An old map shows a segment of the Oregon Trail cutting through her homestead along the Boise River’s south side near Joplin Road. Her sons Flip (Frank III) who lives across Star Road from her and Mark, who lives down the road from her, continue large-scale ranching. Charlene came to her house she lives in right after her hospital birth. Her parents, Charlie and Mary Stillwell, were born and raised in Eagle. They bravely purchased the Star property in 1928 during the Depression. ---PAGE BREAK--- My grandmother came to the Boise Valley on the Oregon Trail. The Conway Ditch is named after my grandfather on my maternal side. Our family oral history says he was the first white child to be born in the city of Boise. I was married to the late Frank Phillips Jr. (Bud) for 60 years. Frank was a smoke jumper and Bogus Bason ski instructor, who also worked for Etna helicopters, on the Bruneau missile site, and for Simplot Cattle and Texas International Cattle. Frank was instrumental in the Boise Airport becoming an international airport. He loved his Star/Middleton ranch and was proud if his brand, 7P left rib. My grandfather Stillwell was born in 1906 in Oliver, Missouri. When he was 9, he came on the Oregon Trail, but he walked because he was a boy. My grandmother came when she was 12, and she got to ride in a wagon on the Oregon Trail. They were true pioneers. Both are buried at Dry Creek. My great-grandfather and grandmother are also buried there, but I know nothing about them. I have four grandchildren: Patxi, who is an attorney; Argia, who works remotely from Caldwell for a California company; Brock, Mark’s son who is a junior at the University of Idaho studying agricultural business – we really do need his help in the business end; and Blake, who is 22 and the oldest and works on the farm and ranch, which he loves. Flip is basically in charge of the cattle and the ranching part. Mark does the farming of a thousand-some acres in this area. My father was a livestock/rancher person. We had a great life. I was my father’s son that he didn’t have. I ran the errands as I was older. My older sister helped my mother, who cooked for huge numbers of people. My sister walked to Lower Fairview School, which is now extinct; it was about two miles south of here. I rode the bus to Star grade school and then to Nampa Middle School. I actually graduated from the 8th grade in Sweet, Idaho, because a flood of the Boise River had forced us to temporally relocate for 6 weeks. The Boise River surrounded our house in 1943. We moved everything cats, dogs, pigs, and cows. They moved the piano, however, up to the second floor! We returned to a mess. The yard was covered with wood from everyone’s wood stoves. It took several years to get the property cleaned up. We have a ranch between Sweet and Ola, and for years would drive our cattle from Star to there for 6 weeks, and then we would go into Cascade. I rode horseback several times on the cattle drives. It took four days to get there, and another four days to reach Cascade. It was a long camping trip. My sister would stay in Star, as she was in college. But my mother and I moved the cattle during the flood in 1943, which was the middle of World War II. I remember during the war I once looked out the backyard and saw a group of 6 men, German war prisoners, cleaning the irrigation ditches with two armed guards overseeing them. Most people did not know that Idaho held German prisoners in a labor camp located on Franklin Road that goes into ---PAGE BREAK--- Nampa. My father was a friend of the prison warden. My mother and I would go to the prison and pick up people to work. We had to work harder on the farm because our hired laborers were serving in the military. We had family gathers at Easter and enjoyed rodeos nearby on Joplin Road. There was not much to do in Star, but we did go to area dances. There were inter-denominational tent revivals at what is now the old Friends’ Barn. In the summers they would do their baptisms and colorful services at the river. In those days Star only had 300 people. I went to Boise Junior College for two years, and then I went to work for California Packing Company. I liked studying economics. I knew my husband Bud a long time before we ever dated. When we married we went to California for a year because he was a student at the Northrop Institute of Technology working on helicopters. He worked for the Forest Service in Northern California for the summer. Then we came home. He did smoke jumping out of the McCall unit. We are farming mint, winter wheat, corn, grain onions, sugar beets, and hay for the cows. You can only grow mint for so many years. Most farmers are phasing that out now and going towards the onions and sugar beets. Our land shrank when the Star Road and new bridge were put in. We also lost ground when Star Road went from gravel to hard surface. That is what growth has done to us. The abutment where the kids jump off into the river is what is left over from the old bridge. The story is that the Kirtley family would come to the river and cut ice blocks that’s how they refrigerated things when the river froze over. Jack Kirtley’s grandparents had the nicest house in Star. During the Depression I think they filled their house with grain and lived in a just a little area. The people in the Depression era were very innovative in figuring out to survive. In high school I was in 4-H and once won a prize at the Western Idaho Fair for a gelatin demonstration. I received a commemorative watch for food preparation, which is kind of a joke because I’m not really a great cook. All my grandkids participated in FFA and 4-H; my daughter-in-law, Flip’s wife, Susie, has been a leader of 4-H for 20 plus years. She was recently recognized by the governor for her work. My mother did do some dairy farming and sold milk during the Depression, because they almost lost the ranch. They had purchased the ranch in 1928 and had five years to pay it off during a time that there were no banks ---PAGE BREAK--- to loan you money. In their last year of payment they did not have the money to pay that last payment and almost lost the ranch. A very nice man came to my father and said, I will loan you the money. We only needed the money for six weeks and that saved him. There is always someone out there that’s helpful and good. Mr. Blair, a friend of my father’s was not a farmer. He owned the Plymouth Auto Dealership in Emmett. He was also the friend to the people that held our debt. He didn’t think that was fair for them to take our farm so close to the end of our loan. Star has been a good place to raise a family. Children stay busy and are achievers. They learn to set goals and be successful. I remember gypsies coming to our farm land near the river in springtime to spend summer here. I remember a medicine man with his wagon living along the river. And during World War II there were the Malones – a single lady with her three young children and a disabled brother-in-law, who had no money. My father took them to Cascade, where they kept our land there irrigated and worked for us and took care of our cattle in the summertime. And I remember people coming to the door asking for food, and my mother would always feed them on the backstep. After the war everyone was very poor and they were really struggling for food and shelter at that time. I have lived a great life and am proud of my family. What I now miss the most is being able to drive out of my driveway onto Star Road, which is now dangerously over trafficked. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Delbert “Del” Stevens April 24, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Del’s home on 797 N Plummer Road in Star Prelude Del currently has 10 ½ acres, which remains from his family’s legendary 240-acre Star Quarter Ranch in Star, where most everyone on farms used to own and ride horses. Few knew more about horses than Del. He was born in Star, April 23, 1949, and lived his life there. He summarizes the changes: “When we were kids, we used to walk a quarter of a mile to the highway to catch the bus. We could stand there for 30 minutes, and no more than 10 cars would ever pass us. Now you stand there for 30 minutes and 400 cars go by. Star has changed a lot.” ---PAGE BREAK--- My folks were hard working farmers and good people. We raised corn, hay, grain, beets ,and mint. Roy, my dad, had a mint still that kept us going around the clock at times. We also raised 250 head of Angus. We four boys and one sister knew what it was to work. It’s one of those things that when you live on a farm, you WORK! I asked my dad once for an allowance, and he laughed at me and he says, as long as you have a plate in front of you and a roof over your head, you will work. Period. He was a hard man, but he was fair. I went to Star grade school. From there, I went to Eagle Junior High, and then from there to Meridian High School, and graduated there in 1968. The funny thing about a small town is that everyone knows what you did before you get home. You knew everybody when you walked into the cafe. Now If you know one person, you’re doing good because most of us old timers are gone. One year my dad was voted Farmer of the Year. Once he started raising mint, all the farmers around here thought, well, if Roy’s gonna be raising mint, there’s gotta be money in it somewhere. Dad wasn’t a horseman, but I was. Once it’s in your blood, it always is. When I was three my mom put me on a horse called Tony. We had a small pasture between the house and the barn. We would go out to milk. When I got bored, I’d just grab the mane and slide off and go watch the milking. When I got ready to go back to the horse, he’d be grazing. I’d climb up his back and ride the horse out. I was breaking colts at age 10. We had ponies, work horses, all kinds of horses. My parents had a Studebaker buggy – a doctor’s buggy. So mom bought a horse. We broke the horse to the buggy and then she would drive the buggy down to the store to pick up groceries. All the kids wanted a ride, so she’d have to take them for a ride. I went to a horse sale years later and bought a mare for $5,000. Mom said, ‘nice mare, how much did it cost?’ I said I didn’t want to talk about it. And she never said anymore. Three days later, ---PAGE BREAK--- she said, ‘I figured how much you paid for that mare. You left with $5,000. You came home broke. If you’re gonna stay in this business, you gotta spend money to make money.’ I bred that mare for 16 years to my Palomino stud. I would come home after school, do my chores, crawl on a horse and ride till one o’clock. When I finished school and went to work, I would come home and take care of our horses. And then I would go out riding until late. My dad had Alzheimers and mom had a bad heart. I was up the next morning at five and had to go back to work. So I didn’t get a lot of sleep, but I had fun. I did a lot of roping where our cattle were at the junction. I was more at home on a horse than I was anywhere else. Eagle wasn’t much bigger than Star. In the old days the Star Merc faced State Street. The Kirtleys owned that and most of Star. They still have a bunch of houses. People worked at the store over the years to pay their rent of those houses. The Kirtleys had two sons and a daughter. Today son Jack runs the store. The other son Butch mostly does construction. The sister Jill lives part time in Arizona; she and her husband ran a business in Boise. Dale Blake started the horse trailer outfit next to the Merc. Now his son-in-law runs it. The Iva Jeans Cafe used to be on the east side of the store; a bar was behind it. Charlie Stillwell lived on the south side of the Boise Bridge on Star Road, and he was an old time cattleman. He ran a lot of cattle with a feed lot there. When he passed away, he didn’t leave it to his two daughters but to his two grandsons, who incorporated it. The Phillips now have land everywhere. I’ve been here a lot of years and didn’t think I’d make it to 60. I figured a horse would fall on me. I’m very fortunate. I went through cancer and beat it. So I live one day at a time. I was the oldest in the family. My sister Irene is in Florida. Next is my brother Pete, who lives in Meridian. Adrian is in Challis, and Leland is in Twin Falls. I have built cabinets, framed houses, poured concrete, roofed, been a parts runner, worked in warehouses, and shod horses. I have had 50 horses. In the horse business you are always selling some. ---PAGE BREAK--- People buy horses for roping, sometimes for barrel racing, sometimes for 4-H. You used to be able to buy a regular horse for $300. I have kids come asking for horses. I tell them I’ll give them a horse if you work for me for one year. You pay half the board. You learn how to trim a horse, how to do veterinarian work, how to handle horses, how to handle a stud. And if you have been here for the whole year, I’ll give you the horse papers and horse. If you quit, you walk away with nothing. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, and I’ve only had 10 people that ever quit. If anyone says they know everything about a horse, they better get out of the business because you learn something new every day. Anyone who says they’ve never been bucked off a horse, hasn’t ridden very many horses. I have shod horses since I was 17 and I’ve gotten banged up over the years. I love horses. I love the way they move. I love their personality. Every one is different. I have had some Grand Champions at various horse shows. I rode in the Snake River Stampede in Nampa. I have seen Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter and all the famous quarter horse riders. My daughter’s mother and I never got married, but I stepped up, paid the child support, and raised my daughter. We are close. I taught her how to drive a tractor, a pickup, and what work was all about. She’s a good daughter. I taught her how to ride and share her horse. She’s got dumped a few times. I made her get back on the horse. And she had to learn how to take care of her own horse. My dad believed in the moon book, which told farmers when to plant and what the weather would be. So he did everything by the moon book. One spring he told mom, he needed to get 65 acres ready for corn planting. They spent the whole weekend getting it ready. They came in about 12 o’clock on Sunday night with the field all ready to plant. Come Monday morning, dad sat down, looked at the moon book. You’re not gonna like me he tells her. We aren’t supposed to plant until next weekend. So they had to do the preparation all over. Mom could have shot him. Once in the middle of July, all I had on was a pair of pants and shoes, no shirt. And it snowed three inches. I was huddled underneath the tractor until it quit snowing. Then I got back on the tractor and went back to work. That’s just the way it was. We raised two kinds of mint: peppermint and spearmint, which is less fragrant. When you are working with mint, the smell is strong. Mint is used for candles, medicines, and other things. When corn shucking time came, mom would have a dozen workers show up at the lunch table. Farmers helped each other. And the women showed up to help cook for them. Before the region’s dams were built, the Boise River flooded all the way to the foothills. Mom and dad told us stories of when they had to take a rowboat from the foothills and come back down to the farm to take care of the cows and farm. Star has a lot of artesian wells. I’ve seen the river flood all the way up nearly to town. I’ve seen a log jam at the Boise Bridge on Star Road that officials had to blow up to get the jam unclogged. Officials need to cut out some trees and snags, so the public can have a safe river to enjoy. I think every kid ought to be raised on a farm or a ranch. Today’s kids don’t know what it is to work. They’ve never been taught to work. My daughter knows work. Anything can happen on a farm. I’ve had a horse drop a foal in the middle of the afternoon and 14 cars line up along the road just to see the colt being born. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Ginny Scrivner Krug April 21, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Ginny’s home on 12016 W Floating Feather Road in Star Prelude Ginny grew up next to the Liberty Grange Hall, where her grandfather W. A. Robertson gifted the land for the Grange for its meeting building near the corner of Highways 16 and 44. She lived all her life in Star and is sad to see the farms giving way to development. The land was good and there was good water. She was close friends with Jill Kirtley, whose family owned the Star Merc; their parents were also close friends. She was born March 21, 1948, and now lives with her husband Dennis on 2.88 acres near a subdivision. ---PAGE BREAK--- My great-grandfather bought our home property in 1912. We had lived with him because my mom took care of him. I was very lucky to get to know my great-grandfather because not that many people get to know their grandparents. It was special to have him stick up for me! It was good times. It was hard times. Star was small enough that you didn’t do too many things wrong because it was probably gonna get back to your folks before you got back home. We used to swim as kids, and when we got old enough, we girls would swim in the Mill Slough. The Mosmans had three girls and we would meet at two o’clock to go swimming. Sally, the oldest one, when she got her driver’s license, would bring the old Ford tractor down and we would all pile on, and she would take us down to go swimming. Before that, we all got on the old horse and rode the horse down and put him under the shade tree. There was a crab apple tree and I loved those crab apples when they got sweet. We had to be home by four o’clock, because that’s when American Bandstand started and we could watch it and do our dancing. Roddy, the Mosman girls’ cousin, lived where the mill slough was. It was funny when he would get mad at us girls, he would say ‘you’ve gotta go and watch your rumple,’ as he called the dancing. He was the only boy out of all of us neighborhood kids. Our original family property was much bigger than the ten acres my family ended with. Many acres had been sold off due to health reasons. Dad farmed the ten acres and mom was a housewife for a long time. She worked at the telephone company when she was younger. I can remember her going back to work when I was small because she called one night to talk to me. That was super special to talk to mom on the phone. Dad ran a few cows and we had hay and at times grain. He would rotate the crops and milk a few cows. We sent the milk to the Dairy Gold Creamery at Caldwell. He made a cart so that he could take the cans out to the road, where they would be picked up. He wet down gunny sacks during the summer when it was hot so the milk wouldn’t spoil. We didn’t watch TV growing up. We didn’t even get a TV until I was in first or second grade. The only reason we got a TV was because of Grandad (some called him Grandad or Grand Pappy). He ---PAGE BREAK--- had a Model A Ford. I got to ride with Grandad when he took me with him to have a part made for that old car. We went down to the blacksmith shop in Star, where the part was made. He passed away in March 1958 when I was in the fifth grade, and I was home sick with flu. That was not my good year. Dad’s mom passed away that January. Mom had started working at the Star school lunch. Grandad always went to his sons during the winter in Los Angele. He had just come home and was having trouble with his heart. He was 85 at the time. Mom was at work. He and I had lunch and he went into the living room, sat in his chair, and I think he was watching TV. All of a sudden I looked at him and his eyes were rolling back and he was grasping for breath. He kind of come out of it and I said, Grandad, are you okay? And he says I’m fine. I’m fine. Then he gasped again, and the only thing I could think of was to call Elaine Mosman, who was a nurse. We had the old party lines and she happened to be on the phone. I said, Elaine, come quick. Something’s wrong with Grandad. She was down there in a flash but he had passed away by the time she arrived. Jill Kirtley and I and our folks were very good friends. Sometimes I would go to her house in Star and we would play and wait for skating to open on Friday nights. A man brought skates from the Roller Drome in Nampa and we could skate in the old school hall in Star Our parents ran around together, played cards, and went dancing at the Liberty Grange Hall. Parents took their young kids with them. I would get tired and ended up sleeping on coats on the stage until they went home. I remember dancing on my dad’s feet! There was a one room schoolhouse across Highway 16 called Liberty school. The area was known as the Liberty community. My grandmother and great-uncle went to that school when they were young. Uncle Bud talked about when the boys, who did not like their mean man teacher, tipped the bell up and filled it full of water – so when the teacher rang the bell, he got wet! Mom talked about winters when there was a lot of snow they would take the horse team and hook up the sleigh. That’s how they got places when there was a lot of snow. And she said her mom would heat rocks to put ‘em in the bottom of the sleigh with blankets and that would heat their feet so they wouldn’t get too cold. A gym was built in 1958, and my sixth grade class at Star grade school was the first to use it. One time I stepped in a fresh cow patty going through a pasture. Roddy was with us at that time, and he made fun of me. He told me my feet were gonna grow now. ---PAGE BREAK--- We had a lot of family that would come to our house for a hamburger fry. Mom would make a kind chili sauce that got labeled the goop. My great-granddad was a machinist and he worked over at the PFE for the railroad as a machinist at Nampa. When he retired, he would take his own model A and take off for the Owyhees area to collect rocks of all kind for his collection in our trailer house. When my mom and dad first got married, that’s where they lived. It was a square little shed type thing. It had a sink and a cupboard, no bathroom. And it had two chairs, a little kitchen table, bed, and dresser. He fixed it up in later years he ended up covering that whole building with concrete blocks that he had made and placed rocks in the forms. Mom always kept refrigerator cookies, a recipe she had gotten from the Betty Kirtley . You could freeze the cookie dough for whenever you needed to serve them. Mom would catch my eye and I would go and get my instructions: Get a roll of cookie dough out of the freezer and turn the oven on to 350. I soon learned to slice the dough and bake those fresh cookies that smelled so good. I was a dad’s girl, and so I really didn’t want to be in the house doing the domestic thing. I wanted to be outside with dad doing things. I worked for the state for years in law enforcement and at the driver’s license department. After I had my kids, I stayed home for a while and then my marriage fell apart. I tried to go back to the state, but my mom needed me close. She had become paralyzed. I had the opportunity to be the custodian at Star School and did that for 23 years. God works in our lives and leads us places that we’re supposed to be. And that’s where I was supposed to be evidently. They were good years. I watched the old school building be torn down and that was hard. I miss the serenity of old Star. The traffic is awful now. We lost our son to Covid in 2021. My daughter has been a first-grade teacher at Chaparral in Meridian for 25 plus years. She lives in Middleton and is raising her kids in the same environment I raised mine in Star. My son worked for Idaho Concrete for 10 years and then in the Aleutian Islands where Dennis used to work. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Margaret Grace Hadley Hiskey April 24, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Star home of Margaret’s friend Jane Raynor Prelude Margaret worked for 43 years at the Star Merc. Her grandfather Arthur Hadley owned Hadley Hardware, a farm implements store on the north corner of where the Merc’s parking lot is now. Her father was on the Star School Board that angered parents when it voted to send Star High School kids to the Meridian HS. This move explains why some of the Star history interviewees, including Margaret, said they attended Meridian HS. Margaret went to grade school in Star and junior high in Eagle. Her great-grandparents came from a Kansas Friends/Quakers community to a New Hope community that was in the North Star area. The Quakers were some of Star’s earliest settlers. Their original church was moved to where the newer Friends Church is today. The current Friends Church bought what is known as the iconic “Barn” on Star Road. A group of churches, the Holiness Association, owned the tabernacle, which was used for Camp Meetings to spread the Gospel. ---PAGE BREAK--- I was born January 26, 1950, the youngest of five to Harold and Bertha Hadley. I remember my dad talking about the day I was to come home. Mom was in the hospital and I was supposed to come home but it was too cold. The water pipes had frozen and dad had to thaw them out before he could bring us home. Dad was born in Star to parents Arthur and Grace Pickard Hadley. His grandparents came out from Kansas. Arthur’s parents were Maddie and William Hadley. Arthur had two sisters, Pearl and Arlene. My great-grandparents came from the Kansas Yearly Meeting of Friends to help establish a Friends church here. It started in the New Hope area north of Star, and then they moved the church down into Star at a later date. The church building was moved with a team of horses. My great-grandpa William was the part- time pastor. My dad and his two sisters, Aunts Lucille and were born to Arthur and Grace. Aunt Pearl’s sons Merle and Calvin Reed worked at the hardware store. My grandpa sold the hardware store to Art Holland in 1950, and shortly afterwards the store burned down. Arthur and Grace owned three homes and farms that were all connected on Floating Feather and Munger Roads. My dad farmed these farms all his life. He milked cows, raised chickens, and sold eggs. I remember helping clean the eggs down in the basement, looking for double yolks, weighing and selling the eggs. He had 80 acres. When dad retired, my brother Warren took over the farm. Whenever Warren would go out and bale hay at night, dad would go out there with him in case he had a problem. Even in his eighties, nineties, dad was out there checking on him, making sure everything went ok. I had a sister Janette and brothers Melvin, Floyd, and Warren. My sister married and lived and worked in Boise. My oldest brother Melvin farmed for several years. He farmed the land, which would be where the brick house (which was moved from Boise to Star by Lucile Hadley Mylander) is now on Floating Feather. He then decided to become a Boise fireman. My middle brother was a mechanic. My youngest brother ended up farming but in the end he sold his farm and dad also sold his farm. All of us helped my dad on the farm. I always liked to be out in the barn helping dad milk the cows. My mother didn’t like that very well because she thought I would become a tomboy. I fed the calves, drove a tractor when they were hauling hay, helped stack hay by driving the tractor operating the derrick, and did other farm chores. I always wanted a horse, so as a child I rode a stick broom around. Finally in high school, my dad did get me a horse. We went to church, played with cousins and friends, did youth activities at church and, and other fun things together. During high school, I attended the Youth for Christ program in Boise, which was part of a nation-wide program. Our YFC group did crazy funny stuff. I helped do a movie in Anne Morrison Park with my brother Warren. I met my husband at a church night at the roller rink in Nampa. My cousin Barbara Scott was a year ahead of me in school and we did a lot of things together, including riding horses. Her grandma, Fern McCown, was a sister to my Grandma Grace Hadley. Dad and his sisters graduated from the long gone Star High School. Dad graduated in 1931. Through the years he served on many boards, including the Foothill Ditch Board and Star Cemetery Board. I remember him telling me he served on the school district board when they decided to send the students from Star to Meridian High School. There was quite a bit of controversy, but apparently the high cost forced them to do that. ---PAGE BREAK--- Our daughters were involved in 4-H with their horses and did FFA in high school. Our 4-H group was called the Floating Feather 4-H. They did a lot of speech training, demonstrations, and record-keeping, and learned a lot of different things. They also did horse judging. They even went to the national competitions. They broke and trained their horses. In her senior year, our daughter Sheri played every sport available to her, including volleyball basketball, and track. Daughter Jaimie also was an outstanding volleyball player and a valedictorian at the new Eagle High School. All three played in the high school band but sometimes they had to choose between sports and band. Our daughters are Sandy, Sheri, and Jaimie. We now have grandkids! We used to have a lot of family get-togethers with a lot of extended cousins and relatives. I miss that. My mom taught me how to cook meals for hay crews when you started the meat, when you started the potatoes, when you started the vegetables, so it all came out at the right time. Harry Talbot lived down on the river south of Star and had a team of horses. He would come and buy hay from dad, and I just loved it when he would let me ride up on the wagon with him: he’d stop at the house, I’d get on the wagon and then he’d drive the team in and get hay and then he’d drop me back off at the house. When we lived up on the two-story house on Munger when I was growing up, Sam Cousins lived across the way. Our driveways were directly just across from each other. It was a dirt, gravel road then. I would get on my bike and I would race back and forth over to their driveway, then turn around, come back, race back there again. I did that all the time for something to do. I quit doing that when I was almost run over one time. I also remember the old party phone lines. I don’t remember what our ring was, but I know Grandma’s was like two shorts and a long or something like that. It was interesting because when I was at Grandma’s, if somebody else’s phone would ring, grandma would go over and pick up the phone and very carefully lift the button so they wouldn’t hear her picking it up. She liked to listen to know what was going on. Invariably her chime clock would go off and then she would slam the phone down. It was always funny. ---PAGE BREAK--- When I finished high school, I married my husband Sam Hiskey in May 1969. I was a stay at home mom most of the time. I did deliver Statesmen newspapers for about two years and worked in the Sears catalog department. Later I worked for the Boise School District for a year. Then I talked with Butch Kirtley at the Star Merc, and he hired me in the fall of 1979. I worked there till February 2023! I always tried to learn people’s names from the checks they wrote so I could call them by name. Now you can’t do that because they don’t write checks much anymore. I liked meeting the people and interchanging with them. When I started there, we used the old-fashioned manual cash registers. Then the state brought in the sales tax, and I had to put that in to get the total. The next change over to computers was quite a challenge. I didn’t even know how to run a computer. My daughter had one when she was in college, so I went to her house and played games so I could learn to run the mouse and do all that stuff so I could actually run the computer for the store. Then I moved to the back office as store manager and did the bookkeeping, pricing, helping with the vendors and getting the price changes down from Associated. Because Star now plants houses rather than crops, my husband of 54 years and I with my father moved to New Plymouth, which is rural like Star used to be. All of dad’s place in Star is totally gone – all the rich farm ground is gone. It’s all houses and you can’t even tell where we used to live because they’ve cut the hill down. It’s totally changed. The life I grew up with has gone and it was a really good life. Where we are now I can still smell fresh cut hay! ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Dortha Sexton April 24, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Dortha Sexton home at 6820 W Joplin Rd (southside on Boise River with Meridian Post Office but geographically in Star) Prelude “We call the place we love, Ranch,” says Dortha. “My son who still lived in San Diego first started calling it the ‘ranch’. We feel very fortunate to have this beautiful land. It has been a great place to live and raise a family. I love it here. I was born in Oklahoma, lived there till I was nine years old, and then I moved to San Diego. My grandparents lived in a small town near Bakersfield and I spent a lot of time there every summer. When we moved here, it reminded me of my grandparents’ place. We loved the small-town feeling of Star and how the community supported the school with the fundraisers and other activities. On Halloween the parents would come watch the children parade in their costumes. Every summer the city had a parade, and we would throw candy from our ’55 Chevy. ---PAGE BREAK--- When I came to Star in 1977, I was 44 and this August I will be 90! We moved here from San Diego, California. I have four sons and three daughters, but only three of the sons were still at home when we moved here. Two of my daughters have passed on. My husband was a plumber and he had a friend that owned a plumbing company here and wanted him to come and work for him. So we did. We had spent six weeks of vacation a couple of years before and traveled all over the Northwest, up the coast and into Canada and back through Montana and Idaho. We liked Idaho, so we were glad to move here. We lived in Boise for a few months until we were lucky enough to find this place with 40 acres on the Boise River. Part of our acreage was leased to a farmer raising mint. When he became ill and could no longer works, we found ourselves farming mint! There were barns and corrals, so we bought some cows and horses and raised alfalfa. Our boys learned to take of it all. We have loved it here ever since. My youngest son was in the fourth grade, and he went to Star Elementary. The other two boys went to Lowell Scott Junior High. I had always volunteered at school, so I volunteered with my son at Star Elementary. I became friends with all the teachers and they encouraged me to be a substitute teacher. I didn’t have a teaching certificate, but they told me I did not need it. So I subbed in the district for eight years, and then I ended up at Star Elementary as a full-time teacher assistant. Twenty-five years later I retired! Our house had only one bedroom but when plans to add on failed, we ended up taking an old milk barn next to our house and making a bunk house for the boys. It had a large semi-divided room so each of the boys had their own space. There was a room for doing homework and hobbies and also a bathroom. Over the years it provided a temporary home for friends in need. We also built a patio that we kept enlarging, and that is where we spend a lot of time. We let our children go to the river, which is on the northern end of our property, to fish and hunt, and they enjoyed that. The boys used to work during the summer on the different farms, bailing hay, moving irrigation pipes, and doing different things. We went camping a lot and explored every weekend. We’d drive somewhere different so they could fish or hunt and learn more of beautiful Idaho. Two of our sons were in Future Farmers of America. Denny, the oldest of the boys, helped build their bunk house for his FFA project. He got an award. Scott liked to trap muskrats, minks, or whatever he could. That kept them busy and they loved it. They loved having their friends here and, and one of the sons rodeoed as a bull rider. I spent a lot of time at rodeos; his friend’s mother and I would sit in the stands cheering loudly. We had so much fun and really enjoyed that. My son did ride on a circuit for a while after he got out of high school but decided he really couldn’t afford the days off from getting hurt over the weekend. His sons did football and baseball instead. With four sons and one daughter, all living close by with 13 grandkids and seven great grandkids, we have lots of good family gatherings on the patio. We were very happy when our daughter, her husband, and their three sons moved close to us. One granddaughter lives in Oregon with her husband, who is a Marine, and two daughters. Otherwise, the rest of them are all here. We have a lot of family gatherings on the patio, which has a partition so we can use it all winter. We have Thanksgiving and sometimes Christmas here with 25 or 30 family members. Only one year, 2017, have we had flooding. The pond in front came up almost to the road and it flooded the field next to us. A slough runs between here and the river and sometimes gets the field wet in the back corner. Now I lease 34 acres of the farmland and live on the rest. Since my husband died seven years ago, My kids are so good to help me take care of the place. When we moved here two of the boys were in junior high and then high school. They loved cruising every Friday night in Boise, so we had to up their curfew to 1 a.m., or no one would invite them to go. Then they would come back with their friends to hang out at Star Car Wash. When they built the subdivision, the owner didn’t want anybody to be able to build a house close to us, so he built the nice pond on their property that is in front of our home; he said we could have lifetime access to this pond and treat it like our own. The kids, grandkids, and now the great-grandkids all come over and swim and spend the day outside just being kids. During Turkey season some of the boys have friends that have teenagers who like to come and hunt. We’ve always enjoyed giving kids opportunities to spend time in the outdoors. There are only 13 10-acre lots and nine houses spread out in the subdivision so I don’t feel crowded. When we first moved here, Joplin Road was a dirt road, and I got stuck in the mud a few times, and once in the snow. We don’t have a lot of traffic so I still feel like I’m in the country. ---PAGE BREAK--- In the spring when the trees are in blossom, the olive trees have a nice smell. And the locust tree, too. I watch the touch of color every day increase until all of a sudden, oh, it’s green again. We have had fruit trees and different gardening areas. I used to have a huge strawberry patch, but as you get older, you think those weeds just keep growing too fast, so I’ve given up most of my gardening except for some flowers. There was corn all around us and a dairy farm next to us, when we moved here. I was shocked when this guy from Simplot came and told my husband what he needed to fertilize and spray. He gave us a bill and said we needed to pay it then, so we did. That’s when we took over farming the mint and learned how much hard work goes with farming. When you harvest and sell your mint oil, then you get your money. The kids wanted to raise a few cows, and they took care of them mostly. But if on winter days when they were in school, my husband was at work and the water trough would be frozen, I was out there chopping the ice and would think this was not fun. Now I have only two apple trees and a pear tree. We used to have plums, apples, and cherries. We had about 12 trees. My husband had big plans to extend the garage where I parked my car. In 2008 when the market dropped, we had to scrap those plans. I learned how to cook the game the family brought home, but I made them clean it. My husband learned to cook game better than I did. The whole family had a learning curve coming to Idaho. Some of my granddaughters love to fish and hunt. Being on a farm, you have to be entrepreneurial. I’ve always heard that there’s always something to be done on a farm. You have to get ready for winter and winterize everything, take care of the sprinklers, and all that. In the spring you have to hook up the water again and start planting, deciding when to plant a garden. Old timers told us not plant until all the snow has gone off of Bogus Mountain. The kids would ride their bikes into town and to the Merc, if they wanted something. We always have enjoyed Star Café and the small town feel. The old original road into Star came down our lane and ran parallel to the Boise River before crossing the river where an old abutment remains. Part of the Oregon Trail crossed near the entrance to our lane. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Doug Willis April 12, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Doug’s home on 11228 W 2nd Street in Star Prelude Douglas Dwayne Willis was born August 30, 1947, in Emmett, Idaho. His parents owned a hotel in downtown Boise and moved to Star in 1955, where they operated Willis Egg Farm. Doug’s daughter Sarah, who lives with her son and husband several doors down from Doug in her grandparents’ house, took ballet lessons at the Grange Hall. When she was about 7, as a Girl Scout she remembers putting some things into a time capsule at the old grade school. All three of Doug’s daughters – Sarah, April, and Deanna grew up in Star. ---PAGE BREAK--- My (Doug’s) mom was from Kansas, and her parents moved to New Plymouth, Idaho, because of the Dust Bowl. Dad (Sherman), who was from Tennessee, was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War 11. I was their only child. My parents moved to Emmett and then to Boise, where they lived on State Street and owned a downtown hotel and then a barbershop. He went to school to become a barber and then moved to a pink house in Star on Second and Union Streets, where I was raised and where we had a 40,000 chicken egg farm for 20 years. We had an Army barracks for one chicken house, and then we bought the Christian Church’s three-story building across Star Road and moved it over to our side of the street. We had three stories of chickens there. We built two other buildings, which were different types where we had to go through the buildings and pick up the eggs. We had another building on the other side that was the incubator, where we put chickens we would buy from friends at Mountain Home. I worked and worked collecting eggs, rating and weighing them. I put them in a cooler to be delivered later all over Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Eagle, Star, and Emmett. I started delivering eggs when I was about 19 after coming back in 1976 from Weber State College, where I majored in broadcasting and minored in photography. One funny story about our customers was that one of our customers, the Holiday Inn by the airport, called 20 years after our business had closed to ask if we could deliver them some eggs! For school I went to Star Elementary, then to Eagle Junior High and to Meridian High School, where I was in the FFA (Future Farmers of America) and even got a coat with the logo and my name on it. I enjoyed egg farming and working with the chickens. Our egg cartons had our Willis Egg Farm name on them. We used to deliver all over the Treasure Valley to restaurants, schools, grocery stores, and other places. And we furnished the eggs for Star’s celebrations and special breakfasts, including the Firemen’s Pheasant Hunters Breakfast that was so popular. My mom was part of the Womens Auxilliary, which assisted the firemen with their fundraisers. Eldon Ross, Mark Ross Sr’s dad, ran the early Fire Station and got my grandparents to dig a pond to use for water in case a fire ever started in the chicken houses. When our egg delivery truck did catch fire, I had to borrow a truck from other chicken farms. I still think of our egg farm when I go by some of the places I used to deliver to. I was a Christian and use to go to the tent revivals that the Inter- Denominational Association had at what is now the Friends’ Barn. When I went to Weber State, I met my late wife Jana, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so I joined the Mormon Church. She recently passed away in January of 2023. There used to be a gas station where the Subway now is. There was another gas station across from the Star Merc. My dad’s barbershop was where the Merc’s parking lot is today. Another gas station was down by the Post Office and where Steve’s automotive place now is. The Moyles had the mink farm east of town. We had mint farms all over Star. A new elementary school was built. Where Jacksons is coming in 2023 on the northwest corner of State Street used to be the site of my grandmother’s trailer house. Star has had a lot of changes and now the traffic is awful. Spring was my favorite season because as kids we could get to play outside. Summer was too hot in the chicken houses. I went into broadcasting in Chicago. But I came back to Star to help out Mom and Dad. I worked at Micron in 1996 and then at the Plexus electronics place in Nampa. Now I have been working at O’Reilly’s, doing the hub work and driving all over – I like to see the memories of old while driving around. My middle daughter is April, who lives in Star and works from home; her husband ironically works for Sysco the big company that came into Star and under bid the Willis Egg Farm, driving us out of business. My mother was buying a million dollars of chicken feed and couldn’t compete against their economies of scale. My oldest daughter Sarah has an MBA and homeschools. My youngest daughter Deanna has two kids; they live the farthest away in nearby Middleton. She works at the Star Speech and Occupational Therapy as a speech language pathologist. My late wife used to teach the grandkids here in our home, when she was not working as an RN at West Valley Medical Center. We are a close family. My daughters make sure I get fed and we do Monday through Thursday meals at my house. Sarah cooks on Fridays. April lives on the other side of Star. She makes dinner on Saturdays and I deliver to everybody. I have 6 grandkids who keep me busy. Star has been a great place to raise kids. In the early 1980s we decided to sell the chickens and purchase the eggs from Merrills Egg Farm in Eagle. We had employed many individuals from Star and because of feed prices felt it would be cheaper to just resell. Campbells Soup came and took all the chickens for their soups. We downsized employees and I delivered eggs Monday through Friday, and my dad delivered eggs on Tuesday and ---PAGE BREAK--- Wednesday. My mom did the books and it really was a family operation. As my girls got older, they worked at the farm selling eggs, taking orders, and doing anything else that needed to be done. In 1995 my delivery truck caught fire and we decided it was time to close the business. My parents were getting older and Sysco had come to town out bidding us because of their buying power. Our business was a part of star and we enjoyed the locals who came right to the farm house to buy eggs. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Gary Enzminger April 24, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Star City Hall Prelude Gary was born in 1946, and his family moved from Eagle to Star around 1951. He lived in Star until after he got married to Judy Marshall and then moved back for a number of years. In 2023 he and his wife moved to nearby Eagle after working for 39 years at Overhead Doors in Boise. “We hated to leave Star, but the, the house we had was just too much to take care of. Now we have a little house and yard.” ---PAGE BREAK--- My parents dairy-farmed north of where I started Star grade school and went through sixth grade. Our home was the first place just north of the school. We had about 80 acres. There were seven of us children. My two older sisters were college age and were already gone. We milked 20 head of cows and my mother could milk ‘em by herself if she had to. Two older brothers helped, and I was pretty little, but I did feed the calves and the pigs. While the silo is still setting out there, now the land is all under houses. As kids, we had a riding club, 4-H, and the FFA Club. We met at the school to practice with our horses. I remember going down there and Irene Turner was a great quarter horse person. She had beautiful, well-trained horses, and Irene would let me ride her horse. And same with the Rosses, I was friends with the Ross boys, who also had quarter horses. Jimmy Ross would let me ride his horse around, so I got to ride some real good quarter horses even though I was just a little twerp. We moved off that farm into Star to a smaller farm on First Street after selling everything --the machinery, cows, and more. My dad worked at the Meridian Creamery, and that’s why I say my mother could do the milking, because she sometimes had to do it by herself. My dad worked at night, so my mother did most of the work. After the sixth grade, I went to Eagle Junior High. And then onto Meridian High School, riding a bus. As kids we went swimming either north to the Mill Slough or south to the Boise River, where we jumped off that old bridge. Some of the kids stayed overnight in a little cabin that older kids had built near the river. On hot days we’d do a lot of swimming. In fact, we’d probably run home and do chores or whatever. Then we’d come back to the Mill Slough, build a fire, and swim some more. A friend of mine, Dick McDonald, had and we built a little track on the other side of the river. We’d spend hours and days down there just going around that track. Back in my days there were not many sports until we got to Eagle Junior High. Now they start you really young. I actually didn’t touch a basketball until junior high. After practice we would just walk out on the highway and hitchhike a ride in no time at all – with no problem or fear we beat the bus home. Around the farm we had to take care of the calves and all the kinds of farm work that always had to be done. You never could get caught up. When I got married, I left Star a few years, and then we moved to Star about 18 years ago, and then in 2023 we downsized and moved to Eagle to get away from the farm work. As a little guy, I remember the Star Christian Church was so beautiful with an old type steeple and all hardwood floors. The church was moved across the street to the Willis Egg Farm, and Sherm Willis made a two-story chicken barn out of it. The church was rebuilt with cinder block. In junior and senior high schools, I worked for the Willis Egg Farm and did some building for him and other things. Willis built a couple of new chicken barns. We built the roosts and nests. It was a pretty good job back in those days; having a job was good. We were paid a dollar an hour. Sometimes at night Sherm Willis would hire all the high school kids that he could to take hundreds of chickens out of one barn and put in another. The kids would help Willis vaccinate ---PAGE BREAK--- the chickens. We also helped him catch chickens they’d hand you five chickens in one hand, five in the other hand. You would walk over to where they would cut off the top beak and vaccinate them. It took several hours to move all their chickens. That was all done at night. I got on working weekends with him, building stuff around the place. The work was hot in the summer and pretty messy. After they moved the chickens, they clean out the barns and that was a bad job. The ammonia smell was awful. I quit the chicken farm one summer when in high school. My coach suggested I go haul hay, so I did. The mint fields around Star, however, had a good smell . I remember the Hadley Hardware Store burning down. We were out milking cows and saw all that smoke in the sky. It looked like all of Star was on fire! Hadley’s Hardware Store had wooden sidewalks, everything was wooden, and everything caught on fire. We finished milking the cows and my sisters and I walked up to Star and watched the store burn down completely. After that a Hoffman Service Station came in where the bar is today. Guy Marquiss and Eldon Ross bought the Hoffman Standard Station. They later had to move across the street and built a new station where the Merc pumps are today.. Then a Texaco Station came in, which now is the Star Café. That was in the 1960s when all that happened. Other changes occurred down the street where our gym was. We played basketball and on Friday nights roller skated there. The Star grade school also had Christmas plays there that were special. The building on the corner of Star Road and State Street is still there. Today it houses an antique store, real estate business, and beauty salon. Later an auctioneer bought the building and tore down other buildings that adjoined it. People would bring in their stuff, and he would auction it off. The same guy from Boise who brought out roller skates for skaters to rent, also brought out his music rig for dances. Near present-day City Hall was a lumber yard across from Star Merc. They had old coal bins back in the day because people used coal to burn with, and they had bins of coal in different sizes. The barbershop was on the west side of the Merc building. We kids hung out there. It was kind of a meeting place. I did get haircuts there. They’d shave you and put that smelly stuff on you and put it on your hair. And you smelled pretty good for a day or two. Some of the younger farmers would also come in there just to talk. I don’t know how the barber made any money because he charged a dollar for a haircut. He jumped up to a dollar and a quarter, I think, at one time. Ma Bell also had a building back there, called Rocky Mountain Telephone Company. There was a bar between the barbershop and the Star Merc called Time for Five. There were some other stores around there. They were vacant as long as I could remember. And then when they remodeled they tore all that out. Now it is the Star Merc, which they extended and remodeled. Iva Jean’s Cafe was next to the store on the east side; it had a cafe and in the back was a bar. The building was torn down later. Beside the cafe was an old blacksmith shop right across the street. An old boy did blacksmith work there. I remember driving my bicycle through his place. His name was Hutcheson, and he was an old-timer from way back. ---PAGE BREAK--- Glen and Iva who ran the bar adopted a little boy named Chuck Sackett, who actually grew up in the bar, but ended up going to Bible college and became a professor – a neat story of a really sharp kid who came out of a bar and went into the ministry. There used to be the Interurban Line, the Old Street car, that had stopped running before my time, but the rails ran through town. I remember the trolley sitting out here on the other side of town on a vacant lot for many years. The old depot was probably where the trolley sat. The Boise Bus line (Greyhound) came to Eagle and Star and brought our mail, and then picked up whomever wanted to go to Boise; the bus later returned us to Star. We kids would go to a new movie in Boise and have lunch. It was lots of fun. Some of my friends and longtime families are still in Star – Karen Pool Shields and Russ Pool, whose father was a plumber and they had a big family. Sandy Taylor Overton, whose dad was Guy Marquiss who co-owned the gas stations. The Fosters, Kirtleys, Jim Ross and his family, the Kellers, and Kuenzlis. I used to know all the farmers and can tell you whose land belonged to whom back in the 1950s and 1960s. Those lands have all changed several times. Bud and Mae Kuenzli owned the welding shop in Star, which was located where the tire business is today on Star Road. Mae drove the school bus for us kids for years. Their daughter-in-law Marie Kuenzli and grandson Lonnie have the legendary ‘Pumpkin Patch’ on Star Road each year. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Keith “Bud” & Kay Lawrence Helmick April 12, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at the Helmick’s home on 6283 Bud Lane in Star Prelude Originally from Emmett, Idaho, Kay was the long-running post mistress of Star until 1998, so she knew a lot of folks because everyone came to the Post Office. She saw many changes over the years. She and Bud, now 91 years old, moved to Star in the late 1960s. ---PAGE BREAK--- the postmaster in Star retired I went there and I had one little lady who had one little rural route in Star. and that was it. We had a small office and all the people that lived close in town had to just rent a post office box. When I retired over 30 years ago with only two carriers, they started to build a larger post office. The last time I was in the post office they said they had 8 rural routes! Probably more now. I have a niece that lives in Alaska and she called me three years ago to say she heard on the news that Star, Idaho, was the fastest growing city in the United States. Bud: I was logging in those days and later graduated to a long hauler flatbed truck. Most of the roads around Star were dirt roads in 1987. Kay: Star was out in the country back then. Now we have dangerous traffic on Highway 44 with stoplights because of all the development that has been taking place. Bud: Dean Quenzer lives across Bent Lane from us and is one of the few big farmers left. I miss the farmland we sold, and now run cows on the little land I have left. I started driving pick-ups and tractors when I was young on my dad’s farm in Emmett. Star Merc was the center piece of the whole town because the post office was right next to it. The immigrants who came to work in the area cashed their paychecks at the Merc because a Mexican worked there and spoke their language. They would then take their cash to get a money order at the post office to send to their family back home. Kay: Our grandson Tyler built his house next to ours. But after he got divorced, some nice Californians bought his place. Our oldest grandson Dustin built the bigger house closer to Bud’s shop he used in trucking. He is one of the troubleshooters for Idaho Power. His wife is a nurse for the VA hospital. They Nelda Kay Lawrence recounts she was born February 5, 1937, in southern Missouri When my father went into the Naval Service in World War ii, he was stationed in Idaho for Naval training out by Lake Pondera. And after he finished his service, he came back home and he said he planned to farm in Missouri one more year. If we didn’t have a good year farming, he was gonna go to Idaho and cut timber. I was in the fifth grade. We first moved to Gooding but ended up in Emmett when I was in the eighth grade. I finished high school in Emmett in 1955 and was in the National Honor Society. Bud says – “I was born December 11, 1931, in Emmett. My father and mother had 13 children, seven boys and six girls. My sister Beulah was killed in a car wreck. I was next to the oldest and helped my father a lot to keep the family going. He kept us busy. We knew the whole country in the Emmett area because we’d trail 3,000 sheep and cows all the way to Cascade. I joined the Army before finishing high school because I was about to be drafted. Kay: All four of my children were in school and my husband was trucking most of the time. I would watch the kids get on the school bus and go back in the house wondering what I should do. My sister said, well, maybe you should go to work. And I said, well, where should I go? She said, go take a test or something, see what you can do. I took a postal exam and I passed it immediately. The post office in Boise called me and told me to come to work in Boise so I did. There was only one other woman that worked there. Every time they had something new to do, the men sent me to do it. They made me a clerk supervisor, then a carrier supervisor over 30 some routes, even though I had never carried any mail. They kept moving me around to see if I was gonna stick through it. And when have two little girls, but none of our other children liver near us. We get our water from a drilled well, but Star made our grandchildren hook up to Star city water. When we first moved here, Star had a small grade school but later enlarged the elementary school and built a middle school as the population grew. Bud: Before we moved to Bud Lane, we lived in Boise on Pierce Park Lane. Our kids walked three-quarters a mile to school every day. Then we moved towards Mayfield and the kids went to school in Mountain Home. A farmer’s wife worked in the courthouse in Mountain Home, so she transported them back and forth to school. One son stayed at Mayfield after buying property along the freeway. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Hank Day April 21 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Star City Sewer and Water District on 10831 State Street Prelude Hank’s family moved to Star when sunflowers were blooming in July of 1960. They lived where Sully’s is now, in the middle of town. He said, “Our rent was $30 a month. But pay wasn’t much in those days. My mother only made a couple hundred dollars a year, so $30 was quite a bit. There were eight of us kids in the house. I had five older brothers, an older sister, and a younger brother. We lived in that house for a week before we got all those sunflowers cut down. We found that one of the old rail cars used to run on the rail line here in Star was out in the backyard. There didn’t have any chassis under there. It was just the frame of the car!” Hank went on to work for Star’s start-up sewer department and today he measures Star’s burgeoning growth by its increased sewer flows! ---PAGE BREAK--- We kids would go down to the Boise River, jump off the old ledge and play in the river all day long. Nobody cared where we were. If you did that with the kids today, oh man, the health and welfare department would be on you thinking you’re neglecting your children. We camped overnight sometimes down by the river. Neighbors would watch out for you. They’d call your parents if you got in trouble. In the wintertime we would have snowball fights. I was teaching people how to drive cars when I was 12 years old. I’d take ‘em out in the foothills in my brothers’ pickups to teach them how to drive. My brothers had this old 58 or 59 pink Cadillac. I could drive it from our house down to the Chevron, fill it full of gas. My reward was driving the car down there, but I had to wash the car. I lived with a brother in the summertime on his farm. We had horses and we had a great time. We lived there until I was 18 years old, so I ran the streets of Star from the time I was six. We were mischievous, you know, but we didn’t drive, we didn’t get cross that line too much because my mother didn’t care whose kids you were. She would turn you over her knee and spank you just as if you were her own. There was never a needy child in the neighborhood that she wouldn’t take in and feed them, and repair their clothes. A lot of my brothers’ friends called my mother ‘Maw.’ We grew up with the Kirtleys next door. I met Jack when he was five and his brother Butch. We used to have BB gun wars. I know you’d get in trouble for doing that now. My little brother got killed September 4, 1970, in front of the Star Merc. We were catching the school bus and he was crossing the crosswalk when a car hit him. I was trying to be macho but Bill Kirtley came out of the store and told me to go home. Mary Foster Kolsky gave me a ride. All my brothers and mother have now died; I have one sister left, along with my son, nieces, and nephews. Around 1965, Star’s first sewer line was put in. Star’s sewer district was established in 1966. I have the records of the first flows of sewer water coming into the treatment plant. And I have all those ledgers. They would only look at it once a week. And we had five miles of sewer line back in the day. They did it with levels method like they have today. And I have those books and the original town plat of the sewer lines. In 2023 we have over a hundred miles of sewer line. Flows in the early days were a couple hundred gallons a day. Now we have over a million gallons a day and its runs higher each passing year. Star has changed a lot. People complain about the growth that we have now. They were complaining in the sixties that the growth was too much in Star! There was nothing here but farm ground and a few houses. The west end of town had a coffee shop on the on the north side of State Street Bobby ---PAGE BREAK--- Jeans, now with a new owner and name changed to Border Town Coffee. It used to be the old rail station. When I was a kid, the rail station was on Highway 16 and 44. Kurt Wilkin moved it to the west of town to put in a retail shop but someone bought it and put in the coffee shop. The current Star Sewer and Water Department building used to be the old Payette Lumber. Then it became Hadley’s Hardware and Farm Implement Store that sold international tractors. It became a other lumber yard, which was owned by the Kirtleys, who later moved it over to their Merc store. They built this building in 1985 and later sold it to the fire department, which built this station. Their old fire station is Steve’s Auto Repair. When I was a kid, the fire station had two stalls and then another stall was added to park the old truck in. Years later, they added on a boardroom for firemen to have meetings in the back. Ren Ross was a fireman, and they added living quarters. Sam’s Saloon used to be two apartments and an upholstery shop. Before that it was Hoffman’s gas station. When the old Hoffman station was taken over by Eldon Ross and Guy Marquiss, Eldon did more of the bookwork and pumping gas and Guy Marcus was a great mechanic. I knew all my teachers at Star grade school. You went through the sixth grade, then you went to Eagle Junior High. Then you went to Meridian High School. Star was considered poor white trash. We were the bottom of the barrel we’re at the very edge of Ada County and we weren’t as good as the kids in Eagle. That’s how Eagle treated us. And but it was funny because once we went to Meridian, Eagle was considered no better than Star. The town had a lot of kids. I’ve known Charlene Phillips’ sons across the river since we were all kids. She calls me Hanky. Growing up I worked on a lot of farms around here, helping the guys. Gary Olson, another friend of mine, grew up just south of Star here, right there on Joplin. And there was Larry Kuenzli, the nine Knudsen kids, the 13 Pearson kids, and the eight in my family. There were only 10 families in Star then. I met my wife in first grade. I have a picture of us sitting side by side together in the first grade. She didn’t want anything to do with me then, and I didn’t want anything to do with her. She lived outside of town. I lived in town and she was nice. After she finished school, she worked with my sister and my sister kept bugging me to take her out. So finally I took her out three months later. We ended up marrying and have been married 45 years with no regrets! My son Nathan lives in the house on CanAda where my wife grew up. Her dad’s uncle, Frank McGrath, was Star’s last constable. Nathan has his badge and has the sap that cops used to carry. My father-in-law used to play baseball for the ---PAGE BREAK--- Denver Braves. Nathan has his uniform in a shadow box. Nathan has a lot of history on Star because he likes to collect everything in the world. He has hung his old photographs in the Star Merc. Where Blake Trailers were, there was an old machine shop run by Bud Kuensli. He worked on all the farmers’ equipment, doing welding and sharpening chopper blades. His son Larry actually quit school when he was 16 to work for his dad. That guy can weld anything and build anything out of steel. Another friend was Dell Stephens, son of Leroy, on Plummer Road. His younger brother Clifford was my best man and I was his best man. We’ve known each other since he was in the first grade. We used to work with his father, Frank Rowe, and a bunch of other guys leveling most of the dirt roads here in town or the fields. The Star Sewer and Water sells permits so I have to deal with contractors, developers, engineers. I treat them all the same. An acre in Star now costs $200 an acre or more; when I was a kid you could get Foothills ground out for $25 an acre. Star used to have about eight or 10 artesian wells in here. Different people had those wells. The biggest water line in town in the old days was two-and-a -half inches, maybe a three-inch line with 10- 12 pounds of pressure. The old lines are still there but not active. In the old days with those small lines you couldn’t get water upstairs if neighbors was running water because there wasn’t enough pressure to get to the second floor. And when you went to do laundry, you asked the neighbors to shut off their water. Now we have a good 75-80 pounds of water pressure in Star and another hundred miles of water lines and tanks. We have a million-and-half gallon tank and six wells. We recently did a 30-million upgrade to Star’s wastewater’s system. I always listen to the farmers about the land and ditches and where the water runs here because they know a lot more than the engineers. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Herbert Windsor Quenzer April 23 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Herb’s home on 6236 Quenzer Lane in Star Prelude One of Star’s few big ranchers still operating in 2023, Herb moved to Star in 1959 and has farmed 70 years of his life of 91 years. He farmed in Kuna, Idaho, when he first got married. His father was a dairyman “whose banker loaned my dad money to help me. So that helped me buy 110 acres in Star for $35,000. Then I added another 29 acres, another 80, 50, and 50. Besides cattle, I raised chickens, sugar beets, and other crops, everything to keep alive!” ---PAGE BREAK--- My kids grew up here and they helped feed the calves milk. They all had calves themselves and had to get up in the morning for school and go feed their calves. They sold ‘em and, and kept the money. mean, That kept them interested. I made them work for their money and that was the way I brought ‘em up. The kids went to school in Middleton and Meridian. For grade school they went to Star and Central Park, a two-room schoolhouse. People live in the building now. For fun we jet skied, swam a lot, and got a cabin up in Cascade. We snowmobiled nearly 25 years until I had open heart surgery. I was on the Mill Slough Ditch Board for 25 years, and also on the Mint Commission and a member of the Dairymen’s Creamery. My brother and I were Farmers of the Year one time. I grew up on my parents’ farm on the corner I had milk cows giving 2,500 pounds of milk a day. I put up a great barn and bulk shipping tank before I put in the milk pens, and hauled milk to Caldwell Creamery seven days a week. My first home on the property was to the west of my present home. It rained inside! It was actually a pair of chicken coops we put together will old barn door windows, which would square with putty around the windows. The putty fell off and the wind blew in. While we had running water from an outside 20-foot- deep well with a valve on the bottom to keep pressure in it, electricity, and telephone, we did have an outdoor privy. My cattle used water from the well and it is still running. The well water had to be inspected to be clean water from bacteria. It still pumps good water. It’s better water than the one I got 200-feet down; and then I got an artesian well right beside that smells like sulfur and it’s 500 some feet. That goes out to the duck pond to keep the water high. of Victory and the Eagle Road. My dad bought his 80 acres for $7,000. When World War II broke out the Army drafted my two older brothers, so I and my younger brother and mother helped dad with his farm because he had back and heart trouble. He sold his 80 head of cows down to where we could handle it. I got up at five in the morning, put my shoes on, and the rest of my clothes, went out in the barn, opened the barn door and turned the lights on so the cows would come so I could bring ‘em all in the holding pen. Then we milked for two hours, then my wife cleaned the barn up, and I went out and fed the cattle. Then I come in and ate breakfast. Then I hauled the milk to the creamery. I jumped in the pickup and took 25 cans of milk to Caldwell and I put ‘em on the milk track 80 pounds of milk and 30 pounds of can. I came home and if it were summertime, I set water and probably hauled away corn. There was always ---PAGE BREAK--- something to do on the land. October when harvest was over, you hung your boots and the shovel on the wall and forgot it all until April. To keep grade A for the milk, I had to keep the holding pens clean of manure. If a cow wasn’t getting her calf out, I had to reach in and put a set of chains on the front legs and around the neck to pull the calf out. That was usually twice a week. And there usually was a sick calf you had to tend to. When you have a hundred and some milk cows, you have to dry them up two to three months, then they come fresh to milk. You can’t keep milking them; they have to have some down time. Sometimes I did have to have a vet come. You always lost the best cow! Sometimes they would just lay down in the ditch and die. Everybody had a few cows, about 20, 25. I can name ‘em: Bob Sample, Clayton Cope, Sherwin Hansen, me, and my brother. I hired guys to concrete my canal ditches. I just leveled the ground so there would be about an inch to a hundred feet of fall for the water to go for the men to pour the cement in. I leveled it and made big fields. It took money to do it, so I did it in stages. Canyon County and the government helped pay for half of the cement. I concreted the ditches on all 130 acres and then did my other place. I had to wait for dry weather to do the cementing. Mint was a good crop when it started in Star. But you had to play your cues right and not get greedy. I always made a contract to cover my expenses and pay the banker back what I owed him. And the rest was mine. My brother and I had mint on Black Cat Road. He has three boys and I had my daughter, Connie working together. We did custom mint one year on 1300 acres. We had a 300-horse-power boiler and eight mint tubs made out of steel iron. You blow the mint in through pipes in the bottom and you hook the steam up to it. Mint oil comes up through it into the condensers, which is full of little copper tubes that separates the oil. The oil goes over in the receiver and there’s water in the bottom and the oil stays on top. And then we siphon over the galvanized mint barrels that don’t rust. Mint lasts forever. It’s hard work. But it was good paying some years. Some years the banker wanted his money and mint dealers wouldn’t buy our oil. So we got off the high horse pretty quick. Sugar beets were real good to me. Me and my brother had close to 500 acres together, and we had trucks to harvest the good cash crop. It was a lot of work. We start the beets in March and they come out in October. I also raise feed corn and wheat, which are fast and easy because you don’t have ‘set water.’ In the summer we do have to chase water, spray weeds, ---PAGE BREAK--- clean ditch, always something. My wife and I set the tubes. And then Connie, my youngest daughter, went to work for Albertsons, which she thought was a piece of cake. But she’d come back and help me. We farmed together and used to do a lot of corn cutting. We have had a lot of changes with farmers selling out to developers. Now CanAda Road is paved. When it was dirt, I had to stay out of the ruts hauling milk to Caldwell. I wished the Highway Department would have graded it more often when it became like a wash board. I guess they didn’t have the help or the equipment. I don’t blame the farmers for selling their land and making some money. When you get a chance to make some money without working, do it. Uncle Sam takes a big share. I have sold my land but it’s still being farmed until it gets built on, and Corey Barton bought all my other land. Star has grown outrageous. Newcomers got angry when I sold my land because they said they moved out here to have it free. I looked at ‘em and said, ‘you know what? I moved out here to have it free and you’re here.’ They also complain about the canal ditches. They don’t realize the water comes from Arrowrock, Lucky Peak, and Anderson Ranch for not only the farmers but also their own irrigation. And they don’t realize the ditches have to be cleaned. Star is one of the best places ever. I raised my family here and they worked here. They weren’t in some college where they got shot at. They were home here every night. And I took care of ‘em. And they got married, they got a family and they’re living. When I grew up, the crazy stuff happening today didn’t happen. We kept kids busy we’d go pick cherries, or prune for McBernie’s orchard. We helped farmers. You can’t get a child to help today because the Labor Law says kids need to be over 16. I was married 58 years and recently lost my wife. I built this house for her when I sold 50 acres. She lived in it two years. So sad. And it makes me just sick to see what’s going on, what my forefathers worked for and what we worked for. The money I paid for taxes and stuff that all went into the mess our country is now in. It’s not human to kill innocent people. Animals aren’t cruel. Animals have respect for themselves. And God made us with a mind to talk and see and to take care of each other. Even animals know how far to go and what to do. A daughter and granddaughter live near me, and the others are around. The grandkids too are within walking distance. We did the best we could with nothing. I’m telling you, with nothing. Married, with nothing and worked all those years. You had to work. You didn’t get this for nothing. Nobody handed me the money. So I hope there will be changes in America for the better. I want my grandkids to have a good life too in America. ---PAGE BREAK--- Interview with Jack Kirtley April 12, 2023 By Dean Hagerman at Jack’s Star Merc, corner of State Street and Main in Star Prelude Jack’s family, which started the town’s iconic Mercantile Store, has been in Star for three generations. Early Star was a quiet town of farmers. Idaho was a relatively rural state until 30 years ago. And Star was even more rural than the rest of the Boise Valley. Eagle had a different feeling. “The growth of the community came after I put in the water system,” says Jack. “After that our growth went nuts. Now Star is the fastest growing town in Idaho.” ---PAGE BREAK--- house. My brother and I slept in the vault in the old bank. A string went out from the vault to the outside door for turning the light off and on. My grandmother lived across the street from the Merc. I pretty much lived with her because Dad was always here at the store. We didn’t have a junior high on this side of the river, so we ended up having to go to Eagle and that was different because Eagle kind of shunned Star and gave us the feeling that we didn’t have the ability to go to their school. Our store had charge accounts for all the farmers, who couldn’t pay their bills until once a year when they finally got income from their plantings and cattle. We still have some of those old accounts on our books. We used to go roller skating on the corner of Star Road and Highway 44. Auctions took place there and were a big deal. Cars lined up on both sides of the road, all the way through town waiting for the weekly auction. Star Elementary School had a basketball court, which my uncle had donated. The school district always said they were going to build another school on our side of the river. We ended up having to go to other schools after elementary school. We played a game we called ‘ditch ‘em’. It was tag on bicycles with limits on where you could go in town. The Star Lumber Company, which used to be called Boise PA Lumber Company, was where the Star Water and Sewer office is now. I oversaw the lumber yard. We ended up moving the lumber yard behind the Merc. We had cold storage lockers in the back of the Merc, which Grandpa had started years ago. The walls in that part of that old cold storage locker still have redwood sawdust in them for insulation. We had about 300 My grandmother was born on CanAda Road and her family was here before that. Her dad was Moses Hughes. My Dad was born in Star. I was born here, and my kids were too. Five generations. In 1908 my grandfather started the Mercantile Store. I went to the Star Elementary. Star was a small town. Not much here only 300 people , but the town was incorporated years ago. Then when I was a child, it was unincorporated. We were in some ways considered the armpit of Ada County. Everybody would say, ‘you’d get outta prison and end up going to Star and renting a house from my family’. Star basically was a farming community. Over the years my family acquired different businesses; otherwise, I probably wouldn’t even be here if we hadn’t had the store, which was pretty much the only thing that was here. There’s been a lot of changes. Like that building across from my store, where Sam’s Saloon is. Somebody asked me the other day what that building used to be. It has been Cottage’s Furniture Store, a leather shop, and a gas station back in the early Fifties. The Blake’s Trailer business once was a Conoco gas station across the street where Sam’s is. Sam was a good man. Star Cafe once was a Texaco station. There was another gas station down on the south side of Star Road. Across the street was a real estate building and another gas station. Down the road where First Street ends is now where the new Albertson’s is. Adobe Hacienda Hotel used to be near there at the west end of town. All of these gas stations had rooms for rent and then they were turned into apartments. And they slowly disappeared later. Farmers Bank used to be where the trailers were located, west of the Merc. Star’s first Post Office was in that building. Our family lived there for years until it caught on fire and we ended up moving to another lockers. I think the funniest story about the lockers was my grandfather used to hide our cash at night inside the cold storage locker. As he got older, he forgot which locker he put it in one night. That is when he started to retire. My uncle and Dad said, ‘okay, he’s gotta go’. We had a self-serve meat stand and would custom- cut meat for people and put the meat in the lockers for three bucks a month. We eventually took the lockers out. My brother and dad started off cutting meat mostly, and then I got into cutting meat. Butch and I started the Café. Over the years we ended up acquiring quite a few of the older houses when older people asked us to buy their houses so they could move to retirement centers. That’s how we ended up with many rentals in town. Nathan, our lead guy at the store, his dad Hank, and I met when Nathan was six years old when his family moved to Star. Hank and I hung around for years and still hang around. He oversees the maintenance on Star’s Water and Sewer department, where I’ve been the chairman for more than 40 years. We owned the old water system, which included four artesian wells and had about 12 pounds of pressure. Since we were unincorporated and couldn’t control our own future, I had to go the before the Idaho Legislature and plead for seed money in 1965 to start the water system we have today. Grandma went to elementary school here and had some crazy stories she heard when she was a little girl. She said the Indians would come to Star periodically from the little town of Pearl in Gem County, Idaho. She and her friends skated almost to Eagle on the Boise River before the dams were built. She and her girlfriend once went to a dance in Eagle and they took their surrey ---PAGE BREAK--- and a horse of their dad’s and hooked him up and rode to the dance. When they came home that night, the sheriff from Eagle showed up. Apparently they had taken his carriage inadvertently! Star was a close-knit town. We used to have a place across street behind where the Cafe is now. It was called Rebecca’s, where a group of ladies would put quilts together. Every holiday and Thanksgiving, the whole community showed up there to eat holiday dinners put together by the Fire Department. The Fireman’s ball every year down at the elementary school or at the old Grange Hall was a big deal. There used to be five hotels here but I think they stayed mostly empty. My father told me stories about when they first built things and paved Highway 44 coming through town. I don’t even think they ever took the tracks out from the old inner-urban trolley. The tracks are still into the asphalt somewhere. The trolley made a loop from Boise to Eagle, Star, Middleton, Caldwell, Nampa, Meridian, and then back to Boise. The loop took all day. We didn’t go to Boise that much because it was much closer going the other direction. I think Star got its name because the town was in the center of everywhere. The Oregon Trail passed nearby. My grandmother used to talk about guys selling stuff up and down the Oregon Trail and about one guy who was a crook. The Oregon Trail has markers over there on Highway 16 and back in the foothills. We used to shoot squirrels over there. Raising mint was a big thing and to the east of Star was the mink farm. We worked in the mint and at the mink farm, which smelled terrible. Workers would come for lunch to the store and bring the smells with them. On Highway 16 behind the hog farm was a feed lot. Whenever the wind changed direction, everybody always complained how bad it stunk. We always said it smells like money to us. I used to live across from the Willis Egg Farm. Flies were so bad. An old church building that was the first Christian Church in Idaho was turned into chicken coops. The Willis family sold their eggs to us, along with everybody else who had chickens. Eggs were 12 cents a dozen. In the Thirties there were a lot of concrete silos for corn, but those either have been either torn down or painted over. The sink upstairs where we lived in the apartments over the bank building was about five-feet long. About 20 years ago, I found out there was a mortuary up there, so that sink used to be the embalming station where we did the dishes. Our living room had a big marble slab over in it. And that was the viewing area. The old Quaker Church was once the Interdenominational Holiness Association where all the churches used to meet for revivals. And I can remember going down there as a kid and running around from tent to tent of the various churches. Most of us in Star learned to drive equipment at an early age on farms before driving cars, which was a recreational activity! Kids all had bikes and it was nothing to ride a bike from the store here to the cemetery out of town and to our fishing and swimming down at the river’s ledge. The ledge was where the old bridge used to go cross the Boise River. It had an abutment that we’d dive off of. Dad used to tell me stories about when that bridge caved in because one of the old farmers ran too many cows across it. He used to swim down there himself, and they’re still swimming down there . We’d be gone for days and we never even told our parents where we were going. We’d catch fish and cook and eat ‘em and sleep in bags. It’s been a long time ago since kids could do that. The thing I hated the most growing up was sorting pop bottles back when they had a refund on them. There were nasty things. After high school I worked for a crop dusting company for a few years. My brother Butch is retired from the store. My sister Jill lives in Arizona six months of the year. She never really was here at the store. We had a bunch of little businesses. Dad always came up with some sort of scheme. One was called Classified Unlimited. He also loaned quite a bit of money to the farmers.