Corner of Park & Locust

Recently I was contacted by a sweet young mother regarding a post I'd made back in August 2011 about the history of my hometown, Shelley ID.

I'd posted a picture from the North Bingham County District Library of a home on the corner of Park and Locust Streets where I'd lived for a time as a child.  And though it's changed drastically since then, she recognized it as the home she and her husband had just purchased to begin raising their family.

Photo credit:  North Bingham County District Library

This is how the home looked when I lived there around 1969.  I've written a couple of times that it was divided into two apartments and that I lived with my parents on the main floor while my Grandma Clarke was upstairs.

Sometime after we moved, it was remodeled into a single family home and the outside entrance to upstairs was removed.  But otherwise, the house's appearance remained much the same.

Time marches on...

And so do ideas about remodeling a home and keeping it in good repair and current for today's lifestyles.  This is how the same home looks today!

Photo credit:  Chrissy Hill-Secrist

Isn't that an amazing transformation?

I hope her family has a wonderful experience living there!  I sure have good memories of adventures with many of the neighbor kids.  It seems that we were surrounded by families with kids my age so I always had a playmate.

So glad that I could share some of the history with its newest family!

Welcome home Secrists!!

Clover Club Potato Chips

Everybody knows that potato chips have earned a spot on that list of foods we should all avoid because they are so very unhealthy for us but we all eat them anyway.

How can you not?  They just taste so good!

As a kid growing up in Southeast Idaho, Clover Club was the brand of potato chips that we bought for an occasional snack.  Besides being a wonderful salty snack, I loved the story about how the company came to be that was printed on the back of every bag alongside little caricatures of the founders, Hod and Clover Sanders.  The company was located in Kaysville, Utah so it was practically a tale of a local family done good.

Photo credit:  blessthismessplease.com

And I lived in the land of potatoes.  I'd be willing to put money down on a bet some of the potatoes grown around Shelley ended up in Clover Club bags.  It's important to support the local economy and so we did buy potato chips from time to time.

The story from the chip bag, courtesy of The Deseret News, goes like this:  "We live in a quiet little country town of Kaysville, Utah, about 17 miles north of Salt Lake City. Almost all the folks here have some cooking specialty like homemade chili sauce, apple pie and chokecherry jelly. Clover always made the best potato chips in town - or in the world, for that matter..."  The D-News article says they took this off a 1973 vintage bag that sold for 37 cents so it was a little more recent than the one pictured.  But still, it is really indicative of the small town rural Idaho experience I had as a child.  The women in town did have specialty foods they made.  They proudly brought their signature dish to every community event and heaven help anyone who tried to challenge them by making the same dish!

I'm not exactly sure why it's been on my mind lately but this old brand of chips has made it to the forefront of my consciousness a few times in recent days so that's what I'm sharing tonight.  I have two very specific memories involving these chips.

One is my Grandma Clarke's Potato Chip Casserole.  Yes, you read that right.  She made a casserole from potato chips.  Ok, so it was really a tuna casserole with crushed potato chips stirred in AND as a topping.  Don't judge - to my childish taste buds it was the food of the gods!  Sadly, it's a recipe she didn't leave written record of though I did come up with a pretty reasonable facsimile a few years ago.  Some night when I'm home alone I'll have to think to make it again.  Me and the boys would love it, Derek not so much.  So I'll just make it on a night that he's working and avoid the yucky faces at the thought of actually eating tuna.

GRANDMA'S POTATO CHIP CASSEROLE

1 can cream of chicken soup
1/2 cup milk
1 can water-packed tuna, drained
1 1/4 cups frozen peas
4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1/2 - 3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 1/2 cups coarsely crushed plain potato chips (divided into 1 cup and 1/2 cup measures)

Gently mix all but the last 1/2 cup potato chips in a casserole dish.  Bake at 375F for 20-25 minutes.  Top with remaining chips and bake 5 minutes longer until they start to brown slightly.


My other memory is probably even a little more on the weird side.  I had a bit of a food obsession when I was a kid... anyway that's the simplest way to explain that I can think of.  Not that I was allowed to over-indulge in it but there was something that I was just focused on and constantly craving.  And that was Clover Club's Green Goddess Chip Dip.  It came in a small foil packet from a display hooked right to the front of the rack holding all the chips and you just mixed it into a carton of sour cream.

The whole rest of my life, the passing thought of this chip dip would make me involuntarily start to drool even though I was never able to replicate the taste with any other product I tried.  And I tried just about everything that carried the moniker 'Green Goddess' on its label.  Most of it was gross and disgusting, getting its color and flavor from green bell peppers...  And then, in a moment of what I like to flatter myself was sheer genius, I got the right combination of ingredients in my chip dip and sent my taste buds soaring with happiness and delight!

GREEN GODDESS CHIP DIP

To a 16 oz container of regular sour cream add 1/2 packet of Ranch Dressing/Dip Mix (I used Hidden Valley brand) and 3 Tbl of Bertolli Pesto (you could use your own just as well).  It's best if you can let it sit for the flavors to marry for several hours in your refrigerator.  Stir well before serving with plain crinkle cut potato chips.

Yup, all those years I wondered what made it so good...  It was basil.  Basil is the green in green goddess and the mystery flavor that I couldn't identify as a child.

Seriously!  Just the addition of the pesto ratchets the dip's taste up about 20 notches on the flavor scale!!

And I already LOVED ranch!

Shelley Idaho Memories

An old neighbor and high school classmate recently shared a digital library of photos and information about Shelley, Idaho... the community where I grew up.  This is an image from that library that brings back memories.  It's the old Shelley First Ward Chapel.  I remember going with my mom to Relief Society quilting bees and laying on my back under the quilt watching the needles create their designs.  And I remember being so sad, almost violated, and crying when the building was torn down and replaced with a newer model of chapel.

Other classmates shared more pictures of old Shelley:

An aerial shot of the Shelley City Park circa 1960.  The roadway along the right edge of the picture is the highway that went into Idaho Falls northward and Blackfoot going south.  For the few blocks of downtown Shelley, it was also Main Street.

From the northwest corner of the park, just off center in the photo at the end of that long line of Cottonwood trees, you can see my old house on Oak Street.  The white one on the corner belonged to Edith Hanks.  We lived in the next one, also white, until I was 8.

And the old library in the log cabin at the park... one of my favorite places in the whole world!  There were tables and chairs just the right size for kids painted a green somewhere between lime and mint in my memory.  Books were checked out by noting the titles on a steno pad and during summer break from school there was a reading contest.

The merry-go-round in the foreground was another source of fun times.  You could get on when it was at a dead standstill and "pump" by leaning in and out to get it going.  Pretty soon it was creaking like crazy and going so fast that gravity nearly pulled you off!  I also remember trying to stand in the center while it whirled round and round.  All of the playground equipment was in a line along this edge of the park and it was all metal equipment set right into the grass.  Next was a slide where, in the heat of a summer's sun, many of us kids left burned off skin from the backs of our legs.  Then a swing set where we'd dare each other to swing the highest and jump from the swing at the peak of the arc.  I also remember the monkey bars and a big fire pit.  Sadly, I understand that all of this is gone now.

Before the house on Oak Street, I lived in this one.  It was a school house (first one maybe in Shelley) converted into 2 living quarters.  We lived downstairs and my grandma Clarke lived upstairs.  I remember helping her make Potato Chip Casserole and Peanut Butter Cookies in that little kitchen.

Shelley has a history of schools burning.  The old Junior High burned during the last week of school the year before I started there.  Conveniently, the school board was in the process of deciding what to do with it as the new building was nearing completion in the field behind.  Years later, after the schools had been shuffled and the building where I attended High School was being used as a Junior High, it also burned at the same time the school board was meeting to decide what to do with it because a new building had been erected.  Surely an odd coincidence of timing for that happen twice in such similar circumstances.

And while this last photo was taken a bit before my time, that is very much the way I remember Main Street.

They say you can never go home.  In some ways that's true.  Shelley has changed very much from the nostalgic, almost Saturday Evening Post illustration worthy, place of my childhood.  But finding this treasure of old photos and remembering makes me feel like I've gone home.

Photo credits:  First Ward Chapel, Old Frame School and Spud Day in the 1950s from the North Bingham County District Library collection as presented on the digital collections from the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.  Aerial view of Shelley City Park from private collection of Dana Mallard.  Log Cabin Library from private collection of Val Carson Darrington.  Junior High Fire scanned clipping from The Shelley Pioneer.