Ross and Margie Meet

Ross Butler and Margie Werry met in Eden, Idaho in November 1933. They were both seventeen year old high school juniors.  Margie's family had been living in Eden since she was a ten year old fourth grader. But Ross' family had only recently moved to a rented farm three miles out of town.

Ross remembers, “at the age of seventeen we moved to Eden, Jerome County, Idaho onto an 80 acre farm owned by H. C. Gettert, three miles west of Eden. We moved the thirty-five miles by wagon, and I drove several wagon loads of furniture and machinery and the derrick* logs to Eden stopping overnight at farms along the way. I entered the Eden High School in November 1933 as a junior. There were fifteen in my class with about a hundred in high school. I immediately started to school and found they did not offer all the courses I'd been taking in Hollister, so had to make some changes. I went out for basketball but couldn't make the squad.”

The previous year, fall of 1932, Ross had to drop out of school at Hollister, Idaho.  His family needed him to go to work twenty-five miles away at Buhl, Idaho for E. J. Hunt & Sons to pay a debt that his father owed. The depression of October 1929 compounded by a severe drout and shortage of irrigation water had created hardship for his family. 

In Ross' words, “I quit after football season and worked all winter for $1 a day and my board (food and room) and was their best paid man for the other three employees got $1 a day and had to board themselves. The reason I was paid so well was that the $1 a day was applied to the debt (my father owed) and they had to feed me to keep me alive! This was farm work, feeding livestock: cattle, horses and sheep and breaking horses and mules to work as teams. I also took the Hunt children to and from school in a bobsled. That was a long cold winter and I became very miserable and cold for I did not have adequate clothes. I'll never forget how thankful I was for an old discarded army coat that was given to me.”

The year 1933 was the worst year of the great depression in America with 25% of people out of work. The American dream had become a nightmare. Tens of thousands of people traveled the roads and railways looking for work. The family garden was paramount to feeding families who had little or no money. A loaf of bread cost seven cents and a pound of hamburger meat cost eleven cents, but even that was too expensive when a person literally had no money.

John and Bertha Butler, Ross' parents, very much wanted their children to have educations so in September 1933 Ross went back to school.  Ross continues, “I had been president of my Freshman and Sophomore classes and before dropping out of school had been voted president of the Hollister Junior class.” When he returned to school in Hollister in the fall of 1933 he was with a new group of kids a year younger than himself but they still voted him as their class president.

However, circumstances forced the familys move to Eden in November of that year. In Eden, Ross joined with the junior class “although I should have been a senior” and continued his schooling. Always interested in scouting, Ross posted a notice on the bulletin board asking all boys interested in scouting to sign.  He remembers, "I think every boy in high school signed, about 45 boys. I then took the sheet to the Snake River Council in Twin Falls and asked them to provide us with a scout troop. They informed me that I must find a sponsor. Since the Hollister school had sponsored a troop, I went to the Eden School Board, but they refused me.”

Ross, Glenn and Don Butler in Eden, Idaho 1934

Ross and Margie were two of a class of fifteen juniors that fall at 1933 at Eden High School, nine girls and six boys. This group was a close-knit bunch. Ross says “they were a choice group of youth and I enjoyed school activities with them. We had something going all the time.”

Dot remembers the day Margie came home from school and announced that she had met the man she was going to marry.  It was Ross Butler, the new student in her junior class.

“At the age of 17, I was beginning to notice the girls.” Ross says it took “only a short time to set my sights on courting this talented girl (Margie).” On one occasion he “walked Margie home from school” less than a block to the north of the school “and visited with her under the shelter of the trees. It was raining, and Dot (Margie's mother) came out to ask if they didn't know any better than to come in out of the rain.” Years later in 1962 when Dot was living with them in Ontario, Oregon, Ross and Margie were outside when it started to rain. Dot went to the front door and hollered out, “Don't you know any better than to come in out of the rain?” Ross and Margie laughed remembering when that question was asked almost thirty years before in a similar situation.

Concerning Margie, Ross wrote, “Margie Werry attracted me as being the outstanding girl in Eden High School. She had a partial Mormon background and wasn't adverse to attending our Church. She was very attractive, always neat and clean, captain of the basketball team (senior year) and a champion sprinter. She played the piano for all school functions and had a beautiful alto voice. She could give outstanding readings, was an excellent swimmer and loved outdoor activities. In fact, she was an all around ideal girl.”

Margie Werry 1934