Town reunion gathers old friends
Dick Boerger snickered like an 18-year-old when conversation turned to Friday nights.
His graying hair and middle-age spread disappeared, and the rowdy kid who worked summers in Avery emerged every time Boerger laughed over the weekend with friends he hadn’t seen in 35 years.
“Remember Friday nights?” he asked friends Dave Woodring and Bruce McCrory , knowing, of course, that they did. “We’d go to Coeur d’Alene to hustle women, but by the time we got there, there’d be an inch of dirt on our faces from the road, and no one would talk to us.”
Ah, good times in Avery, a town beloved by its residents past and present and misunderstood by the rest of the population.
That resident-love attracted nearly 300 people from all over the nation to Avery over the weekend. David “Norgy” Asleson, a retired U.S. Forest Service worker, organized a reunion of everyone who had lived in Avery. Asleson spent 19 years in the town, which lies an hour from St. Maries, up the St. Joe River. Reassignment in 1985 sent him to Priest Lake, but his heart stayed in Avery.
He planned his retirement party this year in Avery, but the party grew until Asleson hit the Internet to help locate as many past Averyites as possible. Hundreds of men had worked for the Forest Service fighting fires, cutting trees and replanting since it built its first ranger station in the area in 1905. Hundreds had worked for the Milwaukee Railroad since it set up camp in Avery in 1908 and left 66 years later.
Asleson put out the word about a reunion, and it spread like the fires that leveled the town a few times.
“Dick (Boerger) called me out of the blue,” Woodring said as he printed names next to photos from various decades posted on the community center’s walls. “I last saw him in 1974.”
Boerger, who lives in Austin, Minn., heard about the reunion from McCrory, who lives in Kent, Wash. The three men worked on the same Forest Service crew in Avery in 1969 and 1970, then they scattered to start their adult lives. Woodring, who lives in Killbuck, Ohio, knew Boerger’s voice the moment he heard it on the other end of his phone.
“I said, ‘Woody, who is the greatest firefighter you ever knew in your life?’ ” Boerger said, grinning. “It wasn’t hard to talk him into coming.”
People came to the reunion in the sportsman’s paradise because their parents or grandparents had homesteaded there. They came because their husbands or grandfathers had worked for the Milwaukee Railroad. They came because they’d planted the white pine trees that now stretch two stories into the sky. Mostly they came because they loved the friends they made in Avery.
Asleson was 18 and fresh from Minnesota in 1966 when he took a summer job with the Forest Service. He wasn’t impressed when he arrived. The working town in the St. Joe Forest already was 70 years old and feeling its age. It was shrinking and out of sorts.
“I didn’t care for it,” he said, as he handed nametags to reunion participants. “But it grew on me.”
He fell in love with Avery because the town continued to shrink until the remaining townspeople drew together like a big family. They worked and played together, supported each other’s businesses and treated neighbors’ children as their own. Asleson met and married his wife, Teresa, in Avery. He co-authored a book, “Up the Swiftwater,” about history in the Upper St. Joe River country, including a healthy chapter on Avery.
As Asleson explains in the book, settlers first founded Avery in 1894, but the town didn’t adopt its name until the Milwaukee Railroad arrived a dozen years later. Avery was the name of railroad director William Rockefeller’s grandson. Between the railroad, abundant cedar and white pine forests and a healthy supply of wildlife to hunt, Avery boomed like a California gold town. By 1918, the town had 1,100 residents.
It survived floods, fires and the 1918 flu. It even avoided most of the Great Depression, which apparently couldn’t negotiate the rough dirt roads to the remote town. Whatever reached Avery arrived by train mostly, until the Milwaukee Railroad took its tracks out of town forever. It began the exodus in 1959, packed a major blow in 1961 with the end of its passenger service to Avery, then left the town gasping in 1974 when it moved its Avery operation to St. Maries.
“It’s quieter now but busier in the summer,” said Kathy Herrell, who’s had family in town since the 1960s. She owns the Avery Gift Shop and stocked up on Milwaukee Railroad hats, T-shirts, whistles, signs, postcards and stickers for the weekend reunion. She treasures the hat railroad workers on the last train out of Avery gave her aunt, who owned the local bar. She’s not selling the hat.
Sheila Cottier whipped Avery into shape for the reunion. She’s relatively new to town. She and her husband, Gordon, moved from Rathdrum to Avery in 1995, attracted by the hunting, fishing and camping. Sheila quickly fell in love with the people, too.
“You get up here and people need something, it’s easy to get involved,” she said. “You get attached to everyone.”
Cottier led the Avery Citizens Committee’s renovation of the old Milwaukee Railroad depot built in 1909. The committee raised money for the depot’s new foundation, fresh siding, paint, floors and heating system. The orange and brown depot is vital to the town of 50 year-round residents. It serves as the community center, post office, museum, library, meeting hall, even Bingo room. A 1948 Milwaukee Railroad car the citizens committee is trying to renovate drew plenty of past residents up its metal stairs over the weekend.
Much of North Idaho believes Avery no longer exists, but the woodsy town merely has matured. Boerger, McCrory and Woodring discovered at Avery’s reunion that the same thing also had happened to them.
They were fresh out of high schools from around the country when they met in Spokane for the ride to Avery in 1969. They shared a bunkhouse, and Boerger and McCrory laughed at Woodring’s fidelity to his girlfriend – now his wife. They sweated all day at work in the woods and danced on a cedar stump during nights in Avery’s bar while Woodring sang. Boerger became a U.S. Bank president, McCrory became a landscape architect and Woodring a forestries teacher.
But before they settled down, they grew up in Avery.
“Avery was on the edge of wilderness then. We came of age here,” Boerger said. “Everything we did was hard. We worked hard, slept hard, played hard. It’s the best memories of my life.”