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Idaho Falls Chapter
Idaho Writers' League
Lifetime Service Award
2006
Writer of the Year
2005
Seventy-eight years ago, nine-year-old Merle Gleason entered her first writing contest by submitting a poem to the Oakland Tribune. Her creation won first place and appeared in the newspaper, and forever marked the little girl as a published author. The prize: a gold Eversharp pencil. She decided her future was set-someday she would be famous. “And,” she said, “I've been writing ever since. Although,” pausing with a grimace, “when I look back, some of my teenage poems were mushy and sentimental.” After hearing Merle's story, I Googled Eversharp pencils and located an antique gold-filled model made in the 1920s. The asking price? $100.
Last September, dreams came true for Merle Gleason Kearsley, now 87, when she was named IWL's 2005 Writer of the Year at the Pocatello conference. Although Merle suffered a reversal in health last winter, members of the Idaho Falls chapter were successful in coaxing her to the Saturday night awards banquet. When her name was announced as Writer of the Year, an involuntary “Oh!” escaped as she arose to modestly accept the award.
Since Merle joined IWL fifteen years ago, she's never missed a yearly conference, often attending as a delegate, even in 2004 when she made the trip all the way to Coeur d'Alene for four days. She has won a variety of IWL contests, in both cash prizes and honorable mentions. For two years, she served as president of the Idaho Falls chapter, and still hosts a weekly critique group in her home every Wednesday night.
Her publishing history includes two children's books about kids and dogs. The first was Ralph, a picture book illustrated by her son-in-law Gary Brogan and based on a true incident when the Kearsleys lived in Montana. Ralph was completed when Merle's daughter Yvonne challenged her mother to finish the work by Christmas for the grandchildren. A second book, Finnigan, soon followed.
Merle was born to Elbert Merrill Gleason and Rose Lofthouse in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1918, and she had two younger brothers. Her father was a streetcar motorman, with a distinguished ancestry. His grandfather, John Streeter Gleason, trekked in Brigham Young's vanguard company, the first pioneers to enter the Salt Lake Valley on July 23, 1847.
The family moved to Berkeley, California when Merle was six; she grew to maturity there and graduated from Berkeley High School. She went to work as a telephone operator, and met Everett Kearsley at a dance. They fell in love and were married four months later on January 8, 1938 in her mother's parlor.
World War II broke out, and Ev, who had been in the service before their wedding, re-entered the Army Air Corps. It became his lifetime career, and they moved many times as military families do, to such places as Keflevik, Iceland, Bavaria in Germany, various cities in Arizona, Montana, Texas, California, and Oregon. After Ev's retirement, the Kearsleys settled in Shoup, Idaho, where Merle was postmaster and he worked for the Forest Service. They spent one summer on lookout duty on the top of Oreana Mountain, thirty-five miles southwest of Salmon, and lived seventeen years on the Salmon River near North Fork, Idaho. Seven of those years she lived alone in that remote area after Ev's death in 1985, and has been a widow now for more than twenty years.
At last count, Merle is proud grandmother to sixteen, great-grandmother to thirty-nine, and great-great-grandmother of two. Merle and Everett Kearsley started it all with four exceptional daughters: Yvonne, Leanna, Linda, and Karen. Further sadness came to Merle, however, when Karen, a practical nurse and mother of three, was stricken with hepatitis C. Her illness proved fatal.
About fifteen years ago, Merle's daughter Leanna and her husband George Peterson invited Merle to leave North Fork and come to Idaho Falls to live in and manage a four-plex they owned on Walnut Street. Merle enjoyed this arrangement for five years. It was while living there that she heard about bi-monthly meetings of the Idaho Writers League, within convenient walking distance at the public library.
She decided to put to use her many years of remarkable adventures and began writing folksy anecdotes for the benefit of her extended posterity. Merle notes, “I enjoy non-fiction writing in first person since this is what my friends and family have requested. They think I should chronicle my experiences and I've compiled a lot of them in a booklet I call 'Snippets from the Past'.” She tells tales typical of a frontier woman as well as a world traveler: cutting up a deer with her cookbook for a guide; cooking, tasting, then spitting out her first bite of bear roast (the dog didn't like it either); bathing in a tin tub just as company arrived; killing, dressing and freezing thirty-nine squawking chickens in one day; and backhanding the face of a cheeky soldier in Iceland. She has even built a better mousetrap, making ingenious use of plaster of Paris.
That one goes like this: After unsuccessfully trying every tip to trap mice under her kitchen floor, Merle experienced a moment of revelation while working on a craft project. She placed dry oatmeal in a pie tin close to the mouse den, with a bowl of water nearby. On top of the oatmeal, she sprinkled a generous helping of dry plaster. When the mice devoured the tasty treat then drank their fill, the goo hardened in their stomachs, and the little housewife swept up eleven dead mice.
At least ten of her stories have been published by the Post Register in a column entitled, “Voices from the Valley,” and five have appeared in Idaho magazine. Indeed, to friends, family, and members of Idaho Writers League, Merle certainly has become a successful author. She is uniquely fresh in her outlook, and exceptionally talented in telling the tales of her experiences in Idaho and many remote spots around the world.
Updated: October 15, 2006
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