‘Mountain Man’ Bob O’Neely Has Even More Time For Kids Now

FROM VALLEY VOICE page V5 (Thursday, March 27, 1997): Correction Bob O’Neel, subject of the March 22 “Saturday’s People” profile, worked at Greenacres Junior High before retiring last week. His name was misspelled and his place of work. misidentified in Saturday’s Voice.

For the past 25 years, Bob O’Neely has worked with children in the Central Valley School District.

On Thursday, he retired so he could spend more time with children.

“Since I was 24 years old, every job I’ve had involved kids,” said O’Neely, 62, a Valley resident for nearly five decades.

O’Neely spent his first 16 years with the school district as a bus driver. He has been a custodian the past nine years, six of them at Evergreen Junior High school.

Now, he’s trading his broom and mop for a musket and a fox-skin cap - both props for the mountain-man passion he has shared with hundreds of children.

A burly man with a scraggly silver beard, O’Neely looks the part of the mountain man.

He proudly displays the elk-skin duds he sewed himself. And like a child rummaging through his toy box, O’Neely paws through boxes filled with knives, beaded necklaces, elk-horn buttons, and other things he’s gathered as a commander of the Royal Rangers, a youth group similar to the Boy Scouts.

“Back in the fur-trading era, which is what we represent, the bourgeois wore stove-top hats,” O’Neely said plopping a black hat atop his balding head.

A few minutes later he was back digging in one of his treasure chests.

“I scare the kids with these,” O’Neely said, holding up two tufts of hair.

Retirement allows O’Neely to devote more time to the Royal Rangers, and a spin-off group, the Black Powder Club. He plans to travel to the youth groups’ regional meetings and continue attending weekend campouts and monthly meetings.

O’Neely’s pastor at Assembly of God Church got him started in the Royal Rangers nine years ago. He looks forward to each gathering, where he swaps stories about fur-traders and teaches boys how to sew clothes out of elk skin and wool, fire a musket, track a deer, and bead a necklace.

“My first love is working with the boys,” said O’Neely, the father of six grown daughters.

He won’t be able to limit his time to the boys in the youth groups, however. Six Valley schools also have asked O’Neely to roll out his mountain man gadgets and erect his 30-foot tepee for frontier days demonstrations during the upcoming months.

That’s a request O’Neely used to take vacation time to fill. A black scrapbook O’Neely keeps holds pictures of students sitting in a circle inside his tepee during previous exhibitions.

Inside the tepee, students snack on buffalo stew while O’Neely tells them about a time when fur trappers trekked into the snowy mountains to trap beavers. The pelts were then traded for food, blankets and clothing when the fur traders reappeared.

In no way was it a glamorous lifestyle, he tells them, but it was a way of life.

“If you got to be 25 as a fur trader, you were an old man,” O’Neely says.

Born in Nebraska, O’Neely was raised on the lore of the mountain-man era. His father, also a mountain-man fanatic, moved the family to the Northwest when O’Neely was 14.

O’Neely says he would have welcomed the life of a mountain man.

“I was born 100 years too late,” he says with a smile.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo