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HomeMy Public PortalAboutWatkins, Ray and Bea,/4 44f 4 ,9-,1 //Ari ,zs; / j7g (pF Portrait of a distinguished citizen Ray Watkins Many adults who attempt to learn to ski ex- perience the ultimate athletic humiliation. You're shuddering in your boots at the top of what looks like a cliff when a pint-sized figure flashes by and disappears with a yelp of joy. It was a Mitey-Mite, and nobody is more re- sponsible for the winning tradition of Idaho's Mitey-Mite ski racers than Ray Watkins. The Mitey-Mite programis for ski racers 12 and younger. Operated by professional and volunteer adults, ` the organization has pro- duced some of the Northwest's finest skiers. Idaho has had its share, due inlarge part to t he efforts of people like Watkins, a man who devoted his spare time to generations of Mc- Fall Mitey-Mites. Watkins was born in Barber in 1926. His family moved to McCall when he was small. He graduated from high school there, served in the Navy during World War II and re- turned to Idaho" to go to school. He went to the University of Idaho and Boise Junior Col- lege, where he played football' and was an in- structor for The Statesman Ski School. In 1952, Watkins returned to McCall and began coaching Mitey-Mites. It was a labor of love. After working eight hours a day in the local sawmill, he came home for a quick dinner and was off to the slopes to teach young skiers. It was that way every year; five or six nights a week, for 26 years. Some of the chil- dren he taught to race are now middle-aged. The McCall Mitey-Mites lost their longtime coach in 1977, when Watkins was forced to move to Cascade as a result of the closure of the .'McCall mill.- The same year, he was chosen by the McCall Area Chamber of Com- merce to be grand marshal of the winter car- nival, a great honor for a McCall resident. Hewas named McCall's Outstanding Citi- zen of the Year in 1974. The award was given by the McCall Area Jaycees for his outstand- ing work with the Mitey-Mite program. "He's pure human," said Shirley Allen, a longtime friend of the Watkins family. "He's spent so much time on the (ski) hill yelling at the kids that we joke he has one leg longer than the other. He's a patient man and an ex- cellent teacher who really has a feeling for kids. He's coached hundreds of _ them and. there aren't hardly any who wouldn't have something wonderful to say about him:" p'yl ) l/et( OrGftvoGGrh - /////1 e73 pafp it of Z Paps Ray and Bea Watkins have seen the changes Ray Stout The Long Valley Advocate MCCALL — Out of the laughter, the remi- niscing aloud and her telling him he's talking too fast, there emerges the message that for Ray and Bea Watkins, Long Valley has been a congenial home for more than forty years. And for Ray, the years number 65. "I guess that makes me pretty much a native," he says. Born in Barber — "It was a sawmill right out of Boise there, but I've been in McCall ever since I was two" — he went to work for Brown's Tie and Lumber as a high-school student in McCall. It would be one of only three places he would work during his entire career. "How do you spell Barber, Beulah?" he asks his wife. "I should know, and I don't," says Bea, 69. "That's Bea — B-E-A," she says, smiling. "He calls me Beulah, and I don't like Beulah." "Ray's dad was the head sawfiler when Brown's was in McCall." "And I worked for him then," Ray adds quick- ly. "Then I took over as head filer when Boise Cascade bought Brown's and moved to Cascade in — I don't know `78." For most of his own days in the mill, he says, his father could be found in the same place. "Most of my life he worked in the filing room. In my life, he was there all the time," he said. After high school, when Ray worked at the mill for Warren Brown "just doing everything," he went off to study business at the University of Idaho, then transferred to the vo-tech auto body program at Boise Junior College, now Boise State University. In his only job away from the mills, he hired on as a "body -thinner man" for Chamberlain Chevrolet in Weiser for two years before returning to McCall in '51. "Just Chamberlain's, Brown's and Boise Cascade — that's all I've ever worked for," he says. McCall, however, may seem to have changed a little more in those 65 years. The biggest change I know of is I used to know every- body by their first name in town," Ray says. "It was one big happy family," says Bea. "Yeah it was." "Any time somebody was in trouble, somebody else was there to help you." Having lived in McCall since she came with her husband in `51, Bea knows something about change. After she was born in Colorado, her family moved to Hood River, Ore., then to Ontario where she spent seventh grade through high school. Later, in Boise, she worked for Gowen Field Air Base, "one of the main air bases in Boise, before they had Mountain Home," says Ray. When Gowen Field deactivat- ed, she moved on to the Boise Veteran's Hospital, met Ray, and later moved to the Boise branch of Prudential Life Insurance. They married in 1949. Their three sons — Ron and David, who work for Hewlett-Packard, and Ernie, who works for West One Bank — all now live in Boise. Among the things they did with the boys were fishing, hunting and camping. "Actually, your camp- sites or whatever are as good as ever — except that there are so many people using them now," says Ray. "The people in charge of them do a nice job keeping them up. ,, Ray himself has made contri- butions toward the progressive- ness of the community. As a ski instructor of the five- to 12-year- old Mitey-mites for more than L o�y 1�%1� c/rdcce }-� ///;�1 y3 Ca4P,42 of 2r/agvs twenty years, says Bea, "He used to come home and change his clothes and run up to the Little Ski Hill." "We had some pretty good skiers before we ever had Brundage," says Ray. "Whenever you've got kids on the Little Hill, you've got `ern right under you're thumb then — you know, they're not off gettin' candy or something," he says with a grin. But Ray did his share of going off to get goodies when he was a kid. Silver ones. "When I was a kid, a dollar bill was a rarity because they were silver dol- lars," he says. And in McCall, a town with revenues from logging, mining and tourism ready to be gambled away or dropped. "Everywhere that was a sidewalk was a boardwalk that you could crawl undemeath. We'd walk away with our pockets full of silver dollars." Although most of the tempo- rary visitors back then were Boiseans rather than out -of -staters, Bea says, they did keep summer homes near the lake. But on the east side, says Ray, there were mainly "church camps, Boy Scout camps, Girl Scout camps —there were hardly any homes on that side of the lake, see. "I remember ; ou' d go out on the peninsula — hell, you'd be in the wilderness." And it was often right in that vicinity where Ray would get a bit wild. Where the road leads in to Ponderosa State Park, there used to be a race -horse track. "That's were us kids Teamed to drive," he says. "We'd steal my old man's truck (he knew we had it) and go drive it around the track. "That's the sort of way we learned to drive — no one else was around. Heck, we learned to drive when we were 10 years old." "Didn't you count the bars along the south shore one time to be about 13 or 15?" asks Bea. "Yeah, something like that," he replies. Ray and Bea Watkins That was about the time when Northwest Passage , a motion pic- ture starring Spencer Tracy, was filmed in the area around the lake. How old was he then? "Hell, we was still playing kick - the -can," he says. While filing the teeth of the lumber saws hasn't changed much from when he started doing it for a living, he says, putting the teeth onto the saws has. "It's all automatic now, isn't it?" asks Bea. "Yeah, it's done with machines." "There's not many men left from McCall down there now, is there?" "Oh yeah, there's some, there's a little bit of everybody there now. They wish a little bit more of Warren Brown and his family were memorialized in the community. "The Brown family did more than anybody else for this area and there's not one park named after `ern," says Ray. "They were good to work for and just good people." One of the things Brown did, Bea says, was maintain an afford- able price for kids to ski on the property he owned at Little Hill. As a member of the first class at McCall -Donnelly in the old schoolhouse which stood near where Medley Sports is today, he regrets that the towns don't consolidate their schools with Cascade's now. Along with a strong sense of unity, he says cautiously, "I think they could get more education for their dollar." At the drug store's soda foun- tain on Main Street, however, it didn't cost a dollar to get educated in the way of prescription preparation while enjoying a milk shake. "The druggist would have this glass deal with handles and this bowl he'd munch stuff in. They had to really know what they were doing," says Ray. "They'd fix up salves and poultices and every- thing else. "Now it's all in pills. I don't think they'd let `ern put their own medicine together now. "There's probably a federal law against it, or something," Bea says. But as kids, they'd have fun tampering with things less sensi- tive than medical prescriptions, thanks largely to the lady who had the first refrigerator they knew of in town, the kind that made its own ice. "Us kids used to get one or two flour sacks and fill `ern up with ice cubes," Ray says. "We'd dump in trays of ice and take the sacks home. "That's the difference between kids then and now — it didn't take much to make us happy." But a lot of silver dollars would still make them happy. Ray remem- bers the dance hall with the big hardwood floor at the present site of Shaver's parking lot. "Didn't they have potlucks and socials there?" says Bea. "No, not that I know of — just dances and basketball. We'd go down there in the spring, after the snow was gone, and pick up all these dollars — it's the God's- honest truth," he says, grinning. "Oh, I know — I've heard all these stories before."