Three of a kind

The Willmore triplets came into the world together, but they’re preparing to leave it one by one.

Marva Winterbottom and her identical sisters Mary Koeper and Martha Goodman, were born March 4, 1937, in Rexburg, Idaho, joining seven brothers and sisters in a devout Mormon family headed by their father, County Assessor Ephraim Willmore.

“Because of the size of our family, we were known in town as ‘The Tribe of Ephraim,’ ” laughs Winterbottom.

Laughter comes easily to these women, even in the face of death, as Winterbottom explains matter-of-factly that she’s under hospice care and that her inoperable pancreatic cancer will kill her, probably within two months.

“But that’s no reason for sadness,” she says, explaining that she looks forward to reuniting with her deceased family members and meeting her grandparents who had died before the triplets were born.

She explains that she’s looking for a domed casket, “Because I want my size 10 feet to be in a proper position, not squished down like they would be in a low-profile casket.”

That elicits more laughs from her sisters.

The girls’ arrival was a major event in their small southern Idaho town. They were delivered, two months’ premature, by a physician uncle. Weighing less than 4 pounds each, they were placed in hand-made incubators consisting of cotton-lined shoe boxes warmed by light bulbs.

Yellowed newspaper clippings in their scrapbooks portray their public debut a year later. Crowds of curious country and town folks pressed up to the front window of the local J.C. Penney store where, to protect them from airborne diseases, the children were put on view behind glass by their folks.

Koeper, a widow, and Winterbottom, a divorcée, live in a cozy Post Falls home with Goodman and her husband Daniel, who describes the ladies as “lots of fun,” and says he appreciates their bond.

It’s virtually impossible to tell them apart, and that’s been true since their births, they say, claiming that even their parents had a difficult time.

“And that got us out of a few spankings since dad didn’t know which of us had misbehaved,” according to Koeper.

Raised on a farm, they say they learned early to work hard, and if one of them had a date but hadn’t finished her chores, a sister took her place.

They giggle at the memory. “And the boys never caught on.”

While growing up, they even shared a single driver’s license. But one seeming advantage of their identical appearances has turned out to be a minor detriment, they say.

“We’d take tests for each other,” Goodman explains. “One would study real hard for the English exam, another for the math test, and so on. As a result, each of us is strong in a certain area, but weak in others.”

Their thought patterns are so similar that interviewing the three is like talking to a single individual. They pick up on each other’s sentences, one finishing neatly the thoughts begun by a sister.

After graduating from high school, the girls married and left Rexburg. Koeper and Goodman moved to Lewiston, then Goodman went on to Alaska. Winterbottom lived in Europe and several states with her then-husband, a serviceman.

They lived apart until reuniting in Post Falls two years ago but, on comparing notes, found that all three had the same dish and glassware patterns and they’d each selected the same wallpaper and paints for their homes.

Koeper and Winterbottom have three children each, Goodman has two, and between them they have 17 grandchildren and two great-grandkids.

Even their children and grandchildren have had problems telling them apart.

Koeper explains that, “They’d come up to me and say, ‘Are you my mother?’ And sometimes one would say, ‘Hey, grandma,’ and another would say, ‘No, that’s my grandma.’ “

One advantage of their extended family – there were 329 relatives at a reunion in Rexburg last year – is that the ladies have a huge support network.

Winterbottom says that, in her last illness, relatives and friends from Idaho, Utah, California, Arizona and Washington are praying for her, including some who are offering up special prayers in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City.

“My life has been beautiful,” she said, “and I know death will be, too. I’m just moving on.”