Tributes: Life not easy, but still satisfying

In 1910, a widowed sheep rancher in South Dakota who had three children to raise wrote to friends back home in Yugoslavia. He remembered their little titian-haired daughter and proposed a marriage. The offer was accepted, and she came to America to a new world. In November of the following year, Nic and Pauline Lale (pronounced lah-lee) had a baby girl named Helen Alice, known to her family and friends as Nellie.

It is hard for those who have not experienced it to comprehend how harsh ranch life can be. It either builds strong people or it kills them. Childhood didn’t last long, as there was work to be done. The Lale ranch spanned 5,800 acres, and by the time Nellie was 8, she was herding sheep and mowing hay. She learned early not to expect God or man to smooth her path and developed the courage she would need to see life through, come what may.

She was shepherding one day, when she was only 8, and noticed a mangy coyote harassing the herd. She had no weapon, so she hobbled her horse and removed the reins with their heavy metal rings from the bridle. With courage born of necessity she first subdued, then killed the coyote with those reins.

Another experience she had as a child sent her flying off the hay mower when the team spooked and ran. By the time they stopped running, and she caught up to them the mower was in shambles, but despite her own injuries she looked to the animals and equipment as best she could before heading back home.

Nellie always worked outside alongside the men and was treated as such even as she grew to be a lovely young woman.

In 1930 she met and married a hired hand from a nearby ranch, Bob Guindon. A veteran of WWI, he was a victim of mustard gas and had been told to seek outdoor work to strengthen his lungs.

They farmed at Newell, S.D., and had four sons and a baby daughter.

In the early ‘40s Bob’s health began to fail, so they sold out and caravanned a car, pickup, and two wagons the 900 miles to Payette, Idaho, where it was hoped the winters might not be quite so harsh.

Within six months Helen was widowed with five young children to raise.

Typically, she found the best helping hands were at the ends of her own two arms and went to work. She took over a failing restaurant and soon had it hopping.

Her years of feeding ranch and farm crews paid off as she brought the customers in for her good home cooking.

The owners decided they wanted the business back and with no legal lease she had no choice but to relinquish it. She wasted no time whining about it and proceeded to find her own place, The Percolator.

Her customers followed; she bought a house and taught her kids to work alongside her.

When they weren’t at the cafe, she and her children were preserving or selling the products of her gardens and fruit trees.

Her second marriage, to Gene Harder in 1953, brought the family to Post Falls. Gene worked as a millwright, and Helen cooked at the Falls Cafe.

Her strident voice as she received and gave orders could be heard throughout the restaurant, and her acerbic wit was soon well established. She said what she thought and it didn’t matter who heard her say it – she didn’t back down from anybody or anything.

Gene taught her to fish, a pleasure she had never known in South Dakota.

Her daughter, Mary Ann, remembers the first time she caught a little fish, Nellie was shouting “I caught one, I caught one!” She was so excited you’d have thought her 5-inch trophy was a record-breaker.

Regardless of her fear of water, she loved fishing Kelso Lake from their little rowboat, and usually out-fished her companions. She never learned to swim, but boy could she fish.

Gene was a veteran of WWII, and the couple thoroughly enjoyed their activities with the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

They made many friends playing pinochle and attending dances. In the ranch country of her youth, grange hall dances had been the social highlight of the month, and the Lale family didn’t miss one.

Nellie, with her strong, active build, was a favorite dance partner then and throughout her life – “smooth as silk,” Mary Ann says. An evening of laughing, dancing and downing her favorite “ditch” (whiskey and water) with friends was a good end to a busy week.

For some time before Gene died she would go to the VA hospital in Spokane and read to the patients, keep them company, and see to their needs. Maybe once in awhile she let her softer side show.

Eventually she took another partner, Junior Thomas, many years a friend from the VFW in Post Falls.

They had 20 years together before he too, passed on.

She saw three spouses through their work and final illnesses and never bowed. She bore the grief of her youngest brother’s murder in 1989, and the loss of two sons, a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law, and kept on with what needed done.

The love she had for her ranch life never left her. Well into her 80s she would return to the ranch of her youth to help with lambing or shearing.

None of this sitting around in a rocking chair and letting others do all the work. To her, that ranch with its isolation, mosquitoes, sage brush, wind, cactus, blowing sand and dust, brutal winters and scorching summers, was heaven.

As she aged, her spunk and zest for life showed more in her colorful language than anywhere else, and a lot of folks liked her company and her jolly, irascible, irreverent personality. She kept to her own home right up until the final week of her life and met death with the same pragmatism that marked her life.

At 95-and-a-half years, she said she saw visitors in her hospital room, people who had died long ago.

Her daughter assured her she would soon be able to reunite with them, and perhaps for the first time, Nellie began to think there might be another heaven.

On May 28, she left this world to find out for herself.