STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Pat Barker didn’t know a lot of girls growing up, considering there were just 50 students at the old Bellevue School in what is now Bellevue Park.
But it felt right when he slipped an engagement ring on the finger of Faye Hatch, who was one grade behind him, as she entered her senior year.
It stuck. Pat and Faye have been married 53 years, carving out a niche for themselves on a patch of ground along Gannett Road that once was part of the family sheep ranch.
“I wrote ‘A diamond is a girl’s best friend’ in my high school yearbook,” Faye said, pulling the Growler yearbook from a shelf in her living room as evidence.
While Pat trekked through the mountain each summer with the family sheep, Faye stayed home raising the couple’s three children, and working in local post offices while volunteering in a number of activities that. All that earned her an invite to become part of the 2018 Blaine County Museum Heritage Court.
The court, which will involve a coronation ceremony on June 10 at the Liberty Theatre, honors women who have made a significant contribution to the Wood River Valley’s history and heritage.
Faye was born at the old Hailey hospital when it was in the building that now houses the Hailey Public Library.
Her father Hobart “Hobe” Hatch had moved here from the Midwest at age 17, meeting his brother at the train station in Shoshone. He worked on ranches in Jerome and out Rock Creek west of Hailey before buying his own ranch on Baseline Road and moving his family to a house two blocks from the current Bellevue post office.
Faye’s mother, Inez Hatch worked in the Bellevue School cafeteria, serving up homemade fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, bread and biscuits.
“That school had the best damn hot lunch program in the whole world,” enthused Pat. “And Faye’s mother was such a good cook. She could bake cookies that never got hard but always stayed gooey.”
The old Bellevue School, located in what is now the Bellevue Memorial Park, featured a gymnasium in the basement, elementary school classrooms on the first floor and middle and high school classes upstairs.
With so few students, Faye had the opportunity to participate in everything from cheerleader, drill team, basketball and even something called “home nursing,” perhaps the forerunner of home economics classes.
“It was great having the small classes. Our teacher would teach our class, then another. So I learned to study and do things on my own,” she recalled.
While Faye finished out her senior year, Pat joined the Marines. He had grown up on his family’s 22-acre sheep ranch along Gannett Road
“They called our land ‘China Gardens Ranch’ because the Chinese used to raise vegetables and sell them in Bellevue,” he said.
After graduating with 10 classmates in the Class of 1962, Faye attended business school in Twin Falls. She was living with her brother and working for a bank in Winnemucca when Pat invited her to meet him in Las Vegas. When she got there she found he had arranged for a church wedding, even lining up witnesses to stand up for them.
“I was tickled,” Faye said. “I had wanted a big wedding, but I knew that would be a long way down the line.”
The couple had their first son while living in Santa Ana, Calif., where Pat was stationed. They moved back to the Bellevue when Pat left the Marines in 1965.
They bought lodgepole pine harvested near Island Park for $2,600 and Pat poured concrete for basement before hauling in rock from the desert south of Carey to build a home on five acres of his father’s land.
Faye got a job with the Bellevue Post office, which was then located in what later became the Full Moon restaurant. She went above and beyond her job description as she and Pat would drive around town in their green motor home on Christmas Eve delivering packages that had not been picked up.
And she got some surprises that most postal clerks across the nation probably wouldn’t have to worry about.
“One time I stopped by to tie up the mail and some boy had put a snake in the slot where people drop the mail,” she recalled. “It was just a water snake but I didn’t know that. I got pretty excited.”
In search of more hours, Faye began working weekdays at the Ketchum Post office, situated then in an A-frame building on Main Street, while tending to the Bellevue office on Saturdays.
“Bellevue had maybe 500 people then so we knew everybody,” she said. “Ketchum was a busy, busy place. And I hated driving up there—the highway was two lanes then and there was a steady line of traffic.”
Barker worked for the post office for 31 years, retiring at 55 when loss of hearing affected her ability to work.
She got a cochlear implant, which made a world of difference, even though she believes that the anesthesia involved in the operation triggered Parkinson’s Disease.
“We were sitting in the living room and she said, ‘What’s that?’ It was the clock ticking. And I said, ‘This is going to work,’ ” recounted Pat.
Fourteen years ago, Pat volunteered as secretary of the 1806 Bellevue Cemetery, walking around the cemetery cataloging each of the 1,335 headstones, which she then entered into the computer.
“The law said they needed three bodies in order to start a cemetery so the story is they killed three Chinamen,” said Pat. “The Chinese were treated pretty bad.”
The couple also volunteered with the Labor Day Barbecue, wrapping thousands of free sandwiches every year for those who swarmed into the Bellevue Memorial Park from as far away as Boise. The event started when the city park was behind Mahoney’s Bar and Grill.
Pat would donate 10 lambs some years while others provided beef. They would cook the meat in pits in the ground covered with burning wood they’d harvested from the forests. And, when they weren’t babysitting the fires at night, they shucked hundreds of ears of corn donated by farmers near Twin Falls.
“We had a good time with that because we could see everyone as we made sandwiches,” said Faye. We had to shut it down because they said it wasn’t sanitary enough, even though we wore rubber gloves. Plus, Wagon Days moved from August to Labor Day and, when they moved, they took our clientele.”
Pat would be gone all winter, watching over sheep in the deserts near Mountain Home, Bruneau and Grandview. He would return home in spring, then take his sheep from the desert near Richfield up the North Fork of the Lost River to pasture near the East Fork of the Salmon River, 4th of July Creek and Fisher Creek.
“My dad couldn’t speak Basque so he didn’t hire Basque sheepherders,” said Pat, who would kill as many as nine bears a summer to protect his sheep. “He said, ‘I could speak English when I was 2—those guys are 40.’ So we did it ourselves. It was wonderful as I loved the mountains. I’d take the sheep in with a pack string of horses. They always said you can’t teach horses until they’re tired. The mountains would tire them out and I could teach them all the way to camp.”
At 72 and 75, Faye and Pat winter in the desert 60 miles east of Yuma, Ariz., where they’ve built their own desert golf course with no grass or greens.
Their son Curtis and his wife Vicki live in Bellevue, as do daughter Cindy and her husband Don Karst. And daughter Crystal and her husband Dirk Helder live in Boise.
They have four children and recently celebrated birth of their first great-grandchild.
“I love going to all the grandkids’ stuff,” said Faye. “Devin, for instance, is involved in everything from playing saxophone in the school band to singing with the B Tones and doing shot put and disc. And Hayden plays soccer...”
CORONATION TIME
Faye Hatch Barker will be crowned at 3 p.m. Sunday June 10 in a coronation ceremony at the Liberty Theater. Light refreshments will be served.
Joining her will be April MacLeod of Hailey, JoAnn Levy of Sun Valley and LaVon Olsen of Carey.