Clarice Frostenson Remembers

This article first appeared in the Camas Courier Apr. 9.

CLARICE FROSTENSON REMEMBERS THE OLD DAYS AT WILLOW CREEK

By Amy Ballard

Willow Creek in pioneer times was not nearly as populous as it is now, Clarice Frostenson recalled in an interview April 31^st. Her family used to take the buggy to Sunday school at the Elk Creek Schoolhouse. Mr. Martin, who lived near there, led the group and handed out a weekly Christian paper called Little Friends. “That was the only time we saw our neighbors!” Clarice said.

Some of the Moodys’ neighbors were the Gaskills. “Mae and I were about the same age and we always got along well,” Clarice said. “We got married the same year.”

“Things have certainly changed,” she said. “It used to be I knew just about everybody, but now I know very few people.”

Clarice was born in “the house on the hill” at Willow Creek in 1912 to pioneer parents, Early and Robie Shonk Moody. Transplanted from Illinois in 1909, the Moodys kept livestock and managed the horses at one of four stage stops on the prairie. Her father, whose real name was Earl, was “just a farmer,” she said. He and the ranch owner, Mr. Bringar, would hitch fresh horses to the stagecoaches at the big barn. From the Willow Creek station, the coaches would travel through the canyon to Hailey.

Clarice’s mother, Robie, was postmistress at Blaine, a small town on the Malad. In summer, she drove a buggy every day from Willow Creek to the depot in Blaine, and in the winter the family would move to the lodgings above the depot.

On the Moodys’ road was an Indian camp the children would visit on their way to the Willow Creek schoolhouse for summer school. The Indians used deer hides from a hunter neighbor’s stock to make gloves and moccasins. Clarice remembers her mother was a bit afraid of Indians, but the children kind of enjoyed them.

The schoolteacher shared Robie’s nervousness. “Every time the Indians came, she’d make us get down on the floor,” she said.

When the four Moody girls were in high school, Robie moved to Fairfield with them in the winter because there were no open roads.

Clarice was in the class of 1930, the second class to graduate from the new high school. It was a big class with 25 students. “We had a football team that could whip Gooding,” she said, “and Gooding didn’t like it.”

For graduation, the boys wore suits and the girls wore pastel voile dresses. Clarice still has her yellow one.

Like her sister Evelyn before her, Clarice attended Albion Normal School and received a lifetime teaching certificate, which, she confirmed, is still valid. She taught at Crichton and Corral as well as other places around the prairie. During WWII she was the only certified teacher on the prairie who wasn’t teaching, so she was called on to substitute in Fairfield during a teacher shortage.

When she had been teaching for two or three years, Sten Frostenson, whom Clarice knew from high school, began to court her. “He asked me to the prom that year and so we went, and from then on we courted,” she said. “We courted for three years. That was how he could afford to build me a house.”

When they married in 1937, he was 27 and she, 25. The wedding, conducted by Rev. Fryer, took place in the house Sten built, which is Clarice’s home to this day. She wore a white satin gown with a train and held a big bouquet of flowers. Practical Clarice didn’t keep the dress: “I didn’t think I’d wear it again!” she said. Her sister Esther was the maid of honor.

The Sten Frostensons kept some 200 head of cattle and farmed their land. Sten helped create Soldier Mountain Ski Area where Clarice helped out by selling tickets and working in the kitchen.

Sten passed away in 1982, but Clarice kept the cattle operation for some time. “I really miss my cattle,” she said, “but they were a lot of work in winter.”