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New: 12 Oct 2006

Note: The following is an article submitted by Rachel Cary which had been received from Janet VanderStappen.   The photographs were scanned (with very little success) from the article and used here. We do not have the name or date of the Newspaper this article came from. ,
If we can find the original photos for this article we will insert them in place of the xerox copies.

Friends and Neighbors

Evelyn Scott Cherry:
Driving with the best of ‘em
By Jeanne Anderson


Neat, well-marked photo albums full of black and white memories - Evelyn Scott Cherry of Victor has seen much in her 88 years.

The stories flow out as she turns the pages. First day of school - a little girl in pig-tailed braids and high-topped boots carrying a lunch pail; a sleigh covered with canvas called a gandy wagon; men - “That’s my dad there - “ hauling a giant metal gas tank down Teton Pass; the log cabin where snow had to be dug away from the windows after nearly every storm.

The Scott place at the top of Teton Pass included a big house and old shed, and a barn for both heavy freight horses and the faster gandy horses, she remembers.

“My dad ran freight an mail. Mother had the bus line from Victor to Jackson to Moran. They kept a hotel in Wilson, but lived at the top of the pass in the winter.”

Cherry’s father, Harry Scott, always wore a ten-gallon hat, and he insisted his teams be matched sets. His antics provided the inspiration for the song, “Harry Had a Pontiac,” written by Victor musician Ben Winship.

“We used horses in the snow, trucks and mother's outfit - a seven-passenger open Hudson with two jump seats - when the weather was good,” she said. “In the winter, mother would cook.”

Once a movie was filmed up there, and the set designers covered the building with unbleached muslin and then recreated the structures with new paint for the camera.

“We left Jackson early in the morning, because the train left Victor at 2 p.m., then we made the round trip. We changed horses at the top of the hill.”

buss
She graduated from Victor High in 1925 and played the fiddle in the church orchestra-another memory captured in a photograph.

She started to drive, just to help her mother once in a while, she notes. But hauling passengers became second nature for Cherry, who eventually drove buses out of Teton Valley for both Teton Transportation (later Stage Lines) and Glitette buss company.

By the age of 41, she’d been driving for a dozen years without a single wreck. That year, the Post Register carried her photo with the overline, “Working in a man’s world.” The yellowed clipping hangs framed in her house.

She drove large sedan-type vehicles called “stretch jobs” made by Ford which had two extra seats between the front an back doors with a rack on the top for luggage. One is pictured above, heading down the Jackson side of Teton Pass.

Later, she became adept at maneuvering bigger “push type” busses with the motor in the back. The buses rand to Idaho Falls every day, including Sundays.

“Yep, I worked virtually my whole life,” Cherry admitted with..... [see CHERRY B4]

Evelyn

Evelyn Cherry showing her photo album

The article evidently continues, but we do not have the continuation.

short line

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