The Glue that Bonds: Civic Groups that Make Communities Work

Last Tuesday night, our local Rotary Club treated a group of Wallowa High School Rotarians
(called “Interactors”) to Pizza in Lostine. About a dozen of them had served an
international dinner for us this winter, and their dinner tips helped finance a spring break trip to Belize. The pizza feed got we Rotarians a slide show and talk on their trip.

Our international dinner featured a Rotary Peace Fellow from Palestine. We had 75 for dinner, so the students earned their tips and also got a start on their international education. That education—and the idea of community service—continued in Belize. They enjoyed ziplining and howler monkeys, snorkeling with sharks, and introductions to some exotic birds. They also found time and opportunity to do trash pickup on local beaches.

I know you have plenty of community groups that look after people and places on the wet side of the mountains, but thought I would chronicle a few of ours, if nothing else to encourage you to join in and/or thank your own doers of good community deeds. Rotary gives scholarships to graduating high school students, but so do the Soroptimists, the Lions, PEO, Cattlemen, retired teacher organizations, and many more.

But the Soroptimists are a very special kind of local charity organization. Their 70 members run a big thrift store, and at last count will be giving about $50,000 in local scholarships this year. That includes some for women returning to higher education after timeouts for family and making a living.

Soroptimists dole out money to other community enterprises, but their primary “gift” might be the thrift shop itself. Decades ago, the wife of a legendary local women’s clothing store dealer, Harold Haller of “Harold’s Women’s Apparel,” gathered up unsold items and enlisted women friends in opening the thrift shop. Today hundreds of local shoppers are regulars—my favorite story is of a dad who gave his two young children a dollar each and told them to go shopping. You can still buy a lot for a dollar, and when there is a fire or flood or other local tragedy, the Soroptimists step up with clothing, dishes, tools, books, and pictures to hang on the wall for no dollars at all.

I could fill this column with Soroptimist stories, but that wouldn’t be fair to the local Lion’s
Club for one. Again, decades ago, in the 1930s, local skiers with their leather boots and long wooden skis with bear-trap bindings would pack lunches and drive to some nearby hill, where they would hike up and ski down for the day. Eventually the Eagle Cap Ski Club put together a ramshackle rope tow on the east side of the east moraine, powered at first by an old Ford engine. When I arrived in the early 1970s it was a Dodge engine.

The hill got too small, and a bunch of locals found a way to buy 280 acres toward McCully
Creek. Before my time, wise skiing investors had picked up a used T-bar from a Spokane area resort, and soon we had the old rope tow reinstalled at “Ferguson Ridge” (Fergi), and sometime in the 1980s towers and cable for the T-bar. Gardner Locke, a one-time Hanford nuclear physicist turned Wallowa County cattle rancher, led us through all of this, engineering the towers, overseeing the logging that cleared the runs, and shepherding the purchasers to form our own organization, “10-280” — ten investors in the 280 acres. We then “leased” the land to the now separate ski club for a dollar a year as we paid down the original debt with some from our own shallow pockets.

We eventually decided that more was needed, at which point someone found a Lions Club sponsoring a similar project elsewhere in the West. So “Fergi” is now fully in the hands of a revitalized local Lions Club, staffed entirely by volunteers, running on land now deeded over by 10-280 to the County for the benefit of “Wallowa County youth.” The ski run is now insured by Lions Clubs Intenational.

In fact, the Lions have found another local youth program as a summer user. Back in the 1960s, a few local ranchers and an Episcopal minister enlisted others in forming a summer day camp for then-isolated Wallowa County kids. They brought in professors from Idaho, Eugene, and Reed, built kites, did modern dance, and even explored Shakespeare. Chief Joseph Summer Seminars lived on a local ranch that had once been a dude ranch for decades, but a few years ago relocated—to Fergi!

It would be hard to catalog all of the organizations that volunteer their ways to programs that benefit the whole community, impossible to remember all the people who put together the Grange programs, 4-H programs, Little Leagues, and Brownie Troops that make living here what it is.

This column also appears in Hells Canyon Journal