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."