STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK AND JANE DETWILER

Diana Fassino’s Sun Dancers were a fixture on Elkhorn Road for 20 years.

Outfitted in everything from cowboy spurs to a wedding dress, they waved to passersby. And, always, they brought a smile to the faces of those who spotted them—people who  often responded by beeping on their car horn or stopping to take photographs.

The Sun Dancers dressed for the occasion when wedding season in Sun Valley rolled around.

Diana Fassino, who used a chain saw to carve these supersized 200-pound creations from the straight-grained white wood of a linden tree, passed away during the latter part weeks of 2025—a few days after her 94th birthday.

But she left an uncommon legacy for all those who were privileged enough to have lived in Sun Valley or who visited Sun Valley during the years she dressed up her famous Sun Dancers.

“Originally, they were supposed to be stick figures standing in the sun—'sun dancers,’ I called them. I was going to have them stare out curious-like, kind of like scarecrows. Then I added joints and nuts and bolts so they could move and they got silly,” Fassino told a reporter years ago in her jaunty British accent.

Within days the wooden figures started taking on a life of their own. People started leaving them scarves to stead them against the cold. One passerby brought Harold a hat. Another brought Maude a purse.

Diana Fassino carved this door depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

In turn, Fassino got into the spirit of dressing them, using clothes from the Gold Mine Thrift Store, even though their size made it difficult to find clothing that would fit them. Come spring, she’d outfit them with tennis racquets and golf clubs. A few weeks later, she’d switch to hiking shorts.

During summer she’d dress Maude in a wedding dress and veil, and then she’d doll the couple up for a honeymoon to Hawaii. The cowboy spurs and 10-gallon hats came out for Wagon Days and the orange and black for Halloween. When December rolled around, the two would pull on their ski bibs, just like the rest of us.

“They got shabby quite quickly standing out as they did in the sprinklers and all sorts of weather,” she said. “So, they needed a change of clothing quite frequently.”

The first thing many second homeowners did upon arriving in town was to drive by and see what the characters were up to. Others took out-of-town guests by to see them.

The Wabi Sabi Cabin is full of tiny items inside.

When Fassino was called away before she could finish dressing them once, she awoke the next morning to find Harold with a towel wrapped around his waist and Maude wearing a nightgown.

Another time she hung a tinfoil fish from Harold’s fishing rod only to find it had been replaced the next day with a beautiful wooden trout and a card that said, “With love, Neptune.”

Over the years she pulled into her driveway to find Valentine chocolates for the hound and an Easter basket with a note from the bus driver, “Thanks for making us smile all winter.”

When Diana and her husband Dick downsized from their Elkhorn Road home to a home in Hailey, the Sun Dancers went to the home of Diana’s daughter Jane Dettwiler, who lives near Woodside Boulevard.

Dick Fassino arranged some of Diana’s art, including a wood carving of herself as a young woman on horseback and a menagerie of her beloved dogs, over Christmas.

But they continued to dress them up. When Russia invaded Ukraine, for instance, they cloaked them in the blue and yellow of Ukraine, adding Ukraine’s national flower--the sunflower—to the mix.

Fassino knew of the horrors of war, having grown up during World War II in the 17th century Edwinstowe House, situated on acres of formal English gardens near Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest.

Her first book, “When the Cat Had My Tongue,” offered hilarious insights into her upper class life where, she said, you practically needed a passport to travel from the nursery wing where she was raised by nannies and governesses to the drawing room.

The memoir told of a time when children used scratchy toilet paper printed with cartoons of Hitler; when dark-eyed gypsy women came to the kitchen door to sell handmade wooden clothes pegs or read tea leaves in the maids’ tea cups; when night meant rubber hot water bottles slid between elegantly monogrammed but icily cold linen sheets; when delivery boys brought fish, meat or bread covered in white cloth in the big baskets on the handlebars of their bicycles, and when girls ate crumbs to make their hair curly.

Her second book, “The Late Starters’ Club,” described how she divorced her Swiss husband after her children were grown and left home with a backpack. A 10-day visit to Hawaii turned into three years. Her knight in shining armor arrived in her life just after the marina she ran in the Turks and Caicos Islands burned to the ground.

“I didn’t own a single thing that wouldn’t go in my backpack,” she recalled. “When I met Dick Fassino, a financial controller for Exxon, he bought me a pair of shoes and my first thought was,, ‘I can’t fit those in my backpack.’ ”

The couple moved to Sun Valley where Fassino wrote short stories, an advice column in the Wood River Journal and penned letters to the editor railing against the easy availability of assault weapons and the lack of action regarding climate change.

She carved handsome wooden doors carved with intricate reliefs of raptors, wolves and other animals that found their way into many a Sun Valley home. She decorated a children’s chair with Richard the Lionheart’s coat of arms, Robin Hood’s Maid Marian and a tree hollow with a 1,000-year-old oak where Robin Hood used to hide for a Sun Valley Center for the Arts fundraiser to raise money for art education.

She sculpted a mutt for an Animal Shelter of the Wood River Valley fundraiser. And she created a dazzling Rhinestone Cowgirl with sprayed silver hair, white rhinestone boots from the Gold Mine thrift store, a bold ornamental belt and a white denim jacket that she embroidered with rhinestone jewels on behalf of Swiftsure Ranch’s Cowboy Ball.

Even today her home is filled with the many things she created--from a totem pole lampstand she carved to the Wabi Sabi Cabin dollhouse, its name reflecting the Japanese philosophy she lived by that finds beauty in imperfection.

The outside is adorned with vines and flower planters; the inside with sagging book shelves, a golden-haired lass descending a ladder from the loft, beds with quilts and pillows and even bathroom fixtures.

Fassino passed away with her husband Dick, children Jane and Steve Dettwiler and her two precious dogs by her side. As Dick tells it, an exceptionally colorful sunset appeared in the skies overhead within an hour.

“She always said, ‘I do not want to die regretting or not exploring the things that I could have done and didn’t.’ She lived life to the fullest,” Dick said. “We had a display of the Northern Lights on the day Diana turned 94 and over the next few days we marveled at the beautiful and unusual displays of lights all over the world. I am such a lucky man to have met and lived with this extraordinary woman.”