STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Grace Eakin grew up in a one-room schoolhouse four miles north of Gooding—her bedroom stuck in a cloakroom.
The school building resembled an early Forest Service lookout and the wind howled through the windows until someone put on new windows and asbestos siding on it.
Her father was a dairyman who raised Jersey cows, along with potatoes, and onion seeds. And he was deferred during the war, Grace recalls, because he was more valuable on the farm than in a uniform.
“Gooding just had the state school and the TB tuberculosis hospital then. And my aunt went to Gooding College, which was run by the Methodist Church. I remember my mom would get up at 5 in the morning to pick beans and peas because then she had all days to cook them.”
That was the first quarter of Eakin’s life.
In 1956 she met Jim Eakin at the 4H camp. She was recreational director for the camp, which was based at that time at Cathedral Pines, and he was agricultural agent for the University of Idaho. The two married in 1957 and settled down in the Wood River Valley where Grace has lived ever since.
The two immersed themselves in valley life, with Jim helping to build the 4H camp north of Ketchum and Grace starting a cooking clubs for boys in 4-H.
For this, Eakin was nominated to the 2017 Blaine County Historical Museum’s Heritage Court, which honors women for their role in building the Wood River Valley.
Eakin and three other women will be feted in a coronation ceremony for the 14th annual Heritage Court at 3 p.m. today—Sunday, June 11—in a celebration open to the community.
A graduate of the University of Idaho, Eakin taught high school English and home economics in what is now Hailey Elementary School But she quit before two years was up after she had her first son.
“He was too cute to leave!” she recollected.
She and Jim would have two more boys and four girls over the next eight years, a brood that shifted her focus to things like 4-H.
“The first county fair was in the gym of the old Carey School, and we tied livestock under the trees,” Eakin recalled. “When they built the new school, the county acquired the buildings and moved the fairgrounds to where it is now.”
The family lived in several different homes in Hailey and Bellevue before Jim took a job at the Cove Ranch in the Bellevue Triangle. At that time, they bought a ranch of their own near Highway 75.
“Someone forced us to put names on our roads about 20 years ago so someone named ours ‘Pero,’ which means dog in Spanish. When we moved here there was one TV station and we didn’t ski so we read a lot—I guess we were kind of boring,” said Grace, who has lived in the home for nearly a half-century, an Australian shepherd named Roby and a tabby cat named Tiger to keep her company.
As an agricultural extension agent, Jim Eakin was always experimenting with 50 head of registered Hereford he raised on the ranch. Grace and the kids took care of the irrigation and moved the cows on foot from pasture to pasture, sometimes stopping traffic on highway 75 when the cows would get out on it.
“The calves came bigger here than they did in Jerome—maybe because of our cool evenings which didn’t stress them as much as hot ones,” said Eakin. “Every year we’d take one cow for the family—they made fine hamburgers, roasts, stews. The best were those with very round butts—that’s where all the meat is--on the rear. That’s the end where round steaks come from.”
Eakin served as secretary for the Wood River Valley Irrigation District for 35 years and she currently serves as chaplain for the Upper Big Wood River Grange. She’s volunteered 14 years with the Bellevue Historical Museum.
When the kids had grown, Eakin began going into people’s homes and helping them with cleaning and meals before going to College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls to become a nurse’s aide.
After Jim died in 2004, she began traveling outside of the Wood River Valley, cruising the Amazon in Brazil and visiting places like Alaska, Hawaii and Europe, in addition to taking shorter trips to places like Boise, Nampa, Meridian and Spokane to see her children.
She’s filled the walls in her home with paintings and photographs she’s created after taking art classes at the Hailey College of Southern Idaho. She makes rag quilts for her children and nursing home residents and she gardens with the help of her daughter Pam Pierce and her husband Michael.
And she relishes her weekly walks with her Over 60 and Getting Fit Class, especially since she has a new knee to take her around the gym.
“I’m always up for a challenge,” she said.