Iva June Kennady Kelley

June 13, 1923- March 16, 2005

Iva June Kennaday Kelley was born to Mabel (Pearce) and Frank Kennaday in Saratoga, Wyoming (a small western town). With a population of around 800. It was built at the foothills of the Snowy Range Mountains. The town had just one main street and all the business were there. We had Movie house, drugstore, hardware store grocery, saloon, undertaker’s parlor and restaurant. Part of the town was built on the south side of the Platte River and the main part of the town was on the North side. On the south side on one hill there was a lumber mill on another hill there was a cemetery. My grand parents on my father’s side, my mother, her mother, and two of my father’s brothers were buried in this cemetery. Grandfather used to ride the old Chisholm Trail on the stage coach as a guard. In his younger days before he started ranching in Saratoga, Wyoming.My father’s brother Jack Kennaday had a small ranch at the foot of the mountains. He was responsible for the Forest Ranger Station being built in the mountains above Lake Marie and in later years the mountain was named Kennady Peak. Uncle Jack had three sons Jim, Logan and Faye. When Faye Kennady was twelve years old he killed a black bear with a 22 cal rifle. They made a rug from the bear skin and also had a stuffed cub bear at their house. Once when their house was on fire Faye skied down the mountain from the ranger station to help his mother put the fire out. I remember going to their ranch and helping my aunt churn butter.   In recalling events the home we finally bought in very hard times  was a two story farm house. It was near an irrigation ditch and had a cut through the hills for a road. We learned to swim there and also thought our mother how to swim. My father never did learn to swim. It was a struggle to keep all us kids fed and clothed. Mother made many of the girl’s clothes and sometimes other people would give us some very nice things and we really appreciated them. There was a lot of love in our family and we all went to church together and sang in the choirs and attended young peoples meetings we learned as a family unit to do many things together.The children’s bedroom was upstairs. We had an outlet in the floor to let the heat come up to warm our rooms. It could get 40 below zero in the winter. We had a pot bellied stove in the living room and burned coal as we were near a town where they mined coal.  We would build a fire for the night time and stirred up the embers to get it going next morning. We had a kitchen range that used coal or wood. You could keep things warm on the edge of stove. It had a warming oven, burners and a reservoir for water. Our restroom was outside. My dad made a nice home by stucco on the outside lowering high ceilings and making a porch into a kitchen. We only had an ice box and dad cut blocks of ice in the winter and put them in saw dust for the summer. That way we didn’t buy ice and could make our own ice cream. We didn’t buy much meat as dad always killed a deer or elk for meat.  One time when someone killed a mother bear Dad brought home two cubs and we played with them. We gave them to a gas station and they were put in a cage for a long time. They finally had to take them back to the mountains as they smelled bad caged up.I remember on my sixth birthday. It was a rule that if you could hide and no one found you would not be spanked. We lived across the street from an old man who had lots of bushes growing around his place. I hid back under them but they found me anyway. We were always a little afraid the old man would catch us around his bushes because we would slip over and get some of the berries to eat.When I was old enough for school our house was across a vacant lot from the school and all I had to do was walk across the vacant lot.One of the fondest memories of my childhood is the time we traveled to Oregon in the old two seated touring car and carried tents and poles on the fenders... We stopped at a place called Ranch of a Thousand Springs for gas, it was famous for the thousand springs that flowed down the near-by Mountains. I went to the out- side bathroom they had.  My parents got all ready to leave and with six children they didn’t know I was still in the bathroom. They left without me and when I came out I started crying and the man from the filling station came out and took my hand and walked down the road a little ways with me. I looked up and saw the touring car with the tents on the fender-running boards and I was really glad to see they had come back for me.     One Christmas I got a doll with a little trunk full of clothes. My sister and Dude Stockwell twisted her legs around until they broke off. I always loved skating and we skated with skates you had to fasten to your shoes. I wanted a pair of shoe skates which were just being made but it took me about four years before I finally got them. There was a small pond near home that we skated on. We would clear the snow off of it with an old coal shovel. We used to take mothers potatoes out and lay them in the fire we built at the edge of the pond. One of our neighbors was the Ramsey family and I remember a little boy about five who used to smoke cigars. When we didn’t have sleds to ride down the hill with we would use old cardboard boxes or sometimes we would use the coal shovel,      We had an old victrola and Mother and Father taught to round dance and square dance. Sometimes we even had a little dancing party at home with my brother Tom and Uncle Harry playing the music. Tom played the guitar and moutharp, Uncle Harry played the violin, Uncle Fred played the fiddle and Mother played the madaloin. Tom was a real good singer and sang a lot of Jimmy Rodgers songs. Mother had a beautiful voice and sang Irish and folk songs and one song I liked springtime in the Rockies. We also had a piano that we all got a chance at some lessons because we let a Mrs. Allen teach others on it and she gave us all lessons. Rose was the only one that ever really learned to play well. Of course Tom played ever musical instrument by ear. Our radio was run by battery. I enjoyed music a lot and would play the wind up victrola whenever I could.      When there was a dance held in town the whole family would go. We attended lots of dances back then as people lived far distances apart and this was a way for people to get together and becoming acquainted. As a youngster I don’t remember seeing anyone drinking and acting drunk. It was more of a family thing with all the children there too.  My father was a great waltzer and I learned to dance with him. We also would square dance.       When we had parties at home we would make taffy and have taffy pull. And sometimes Tom would play an old trombone he got a hold of and the older children would dance. My older brother and sister often had friends get together and for fun they would play spin the bottle and post office. A milk bottle was used to play spin the bottle with. A circle was formed and whoever the bottle pointed to had to kiss the one spinning it. When we played post office you called a boy or girl in and asked if they wanted to be stamped if they said yes you could either kiss them or stamp on their foot.    When we were small we had a Shetland pony that we loved to ride. My brother and a friend of his would get sticks and play Polo using our neighbor’s chickens for the balls they really got into trouble for this... We used to play cowboy and Indians with the pony and someone else’s donkey. We rode the pony until all our legs got too long and we could ride it no longer. The pony finally died. In the summer we took long walks into the countryside. Our town was small so we could go almost anywhere walking. The Platte River divided the town and we had a special place under the railroad bridge that we used for a swimming hole.On the fourth of July everyone went to the rodeo most participants were just regular every day cowboys. My father won a pair of silver spurs for calf roping. People in the west didn’t like to be called by their last name ( as: Mr. or Mrs.) they liked for you to use their first name and you never knew if they were rich or not because all the ranchers wore blue jeans and regular shirts.     Every summer our parents took us camping in the Snowy Range Mountains and we would spend about two weeks there. We slept in tents and cooked over a campfire and we smaller children would have a little pole with a string and hook on it to fish with. We caught mostly trout in the mountains. We played games at night around the campfire. You could hear the coyotes howling so we didn’t stray far from camp.We used to sometimes spend the summer with Dad’s sister Emma and her husband Logan. At that time they had Logan’s son Teets and they ran a dairy ranch and we used to help bring in the cows. My father often worked on ranches although he was a carpenter and could do that also. He was a good carpenter he could cut out the wood studs and all wood for a house before he started and than just put it together. He could make cabinets or just about anything out of wood. Once he made a bed out of scrap limber.  There were times that he wasn’t home when he was away doing ranch work. My Dad one time had a business of bailing hay for the local farmers and made good money until everybody else started doing it.  Tom and Gladys were married first as he was the oldest and then Florence and Earl and that left three of us girls at home. Since we were all close to the same ages we did most things together and even dated in a kind of group. We got to go to dances as most of the times our parents went too. There was a lodge at the foot of the mountains that had dances and they would dance until daylight. One of my very dearest friends Laura Purdin was always with us three girls. She seemed more like a sister than a friend. She had a nice singing voice and I loved to hear her sing Red Sails in the Sunset.   We lived next door to the Presbyterian preacher and the church was on the corner. I used to clean the church for $1 a week and in the winter I would stoke the furnace. My mother was a Sunday school teacher and we went to all church things as a family. We kids corrupted the minister’s son by playing cards with him. He was only allowed to play old maid but we taught him all of the games. We never played for money just for fun. Our church always held its annual picnic at Lake Marie in the mountains. They are on a highway that goes from Saratoga, Wy. To Laranie, Wy.. It was called Snowy Range Highway. It has many beautiful lakes and scenery and a lodge that had lots of get together going on. There they have a picture of my cousin Faye Kennady and the bear he killed when he was 12 years old. We used to have to come home from school and help our mother with the laundry. That was when she was doing the laundry on a wash board. My Mother wasn’t really healthy and when I was sixteen she died after she had gale bladder surgery.  We had a pond near our house where we ice skated in the winter. We would build a fire to warm our feet and we took potatoes from home and roast them in the fire. We had hills near by that we played on in the winter. We didn’t always have a sled so we used boxes or anything we could ride on even an old coal shovel which was pretty big. We had a summer swimming pool in the river. There also was a natural hot springs in town along the edge of the river. The CCC camps men made a pool fenced from the river where we could soak. Something like a hot tub today. The town now has a building with pools for tourists plus a golf course. There is also swimming pool near the river that is free to people living in the town. We also had a nice shelter house that the CCC men built. You could have family functions any time there. The CCC camps were built during the depression when young men couldn’t find jobs and they did a lot of conservation projects especially in the west. At one time my brother who was married and had children even joined it because work was so scarce. As we grew older we dated boys from the CCC camp and went to dances. They all came to church on Sunday. Sometimes we would pile into my friend Laura’s model A ford and drive to dances or up in the mountains to picnic. Laura’s mother was deceased so we would go home with her to her father’s ranch and sleep in the hay loft for fun. Laura had to cook for the ranch hands and one day we made a bowel of potato salad for lunch and we ate it all before they came in to eat. We had a telephone on a party line and you had to crank it to get the operator. Mom and Dad had friends that would come over to play cards. Their name was Armstrong and in the summer they worked at Yellowstone Park. Our school had a basketball and baseball team. There were a boys and a girl’s team. When we played basketball in different towns the girls played an opening game. All of the Kennaday’s girls played as they were all tall. Our brothers also played Forest Kennady was all state player one year. My brother Tom was good at Pole Vaulting. We never played Football. I never got back into church until I had married and moved to Carlisle, Ky. I regret not bringing my two children up in the church, but no one approached to ask me to go. After my children were married I decided to go to church. So I had been Presbyterian I look up a church and went one Sunday morning. It was really very hard to just walk into the church and not be acquainted with anyone. I was really welcomed by all I even taught a class for a while. When you teach a class you really learn more than the ones in you teach. We had a group of ladies who formed a sort of club. We would have people in need and maybe on welfare and provide nurseries for the children and teach them crafts to make their homes nice. We had a hair care class. The one that impressed me was the sewing classes. There was a middle age person about 30 of some mental disability that became so proud when she made an apron. We always had a snack and drinks for them and their family. When the families brought their children with them and having baby sitters we could give them a real social outing. The county attorney and his wife were members at the church. They had a disabled girl who looked at catalogs or books when the services were going. One time at a Christmas evening for children she got up on the piano bench and played Christmas songs. The county attorney gave me a good reference to get a job after I lost my husband. Once when my son was driving and was getting tickets he was instrumental in helping him keep his license. One time the judge was going to take his license and I talked to him and it seamed like he was going to. I went home and prayed about it asking God to soften his heart and the next day he came to my house and said he would change the charge so it wouldn’t go against his license.