DeLyle Phippen is not typical of Carey's pioneers. The 88-year-old son of Little Wood homesteaders has remained single his entire life, and for his uniqueness and importance in the largely Mormon community, Phippen has been chosen as this year's Pioneer Days grand marshal.
"He has just been a good friend to so many people," said Carey City Councilwoman Vonnie Olsen, one of the organizers of the annual celebration. "He has made the quality of life so much better."
Pioneer Days includes the parade featuring Phippen Saturday, July 23, and the community luncheon and afternoon games. The weekend also includes two days of rodeo at the Carey Fairgrounds Friday and Saturday, July 22 and 23.
"You praise me too much, Vonnie," said Phippen, a soft-spoken gentleman, who feels that people are making quite a fuss over him for no reason. However, his grandparents were some of the early missionaries who followed Brigham Young to Utah.
"I feel like I'm getting stared at like a monkey in a cage," he said, but he did admit that he gets along pretty well with people.
Phippen is known for his generosity, like taking children fishing, and for his knowledge about rifles and shotguns, although he claims much of his hunting has been about watching wildlife and rock hunting. Phippen sometimes returns home from his hunting jaunts in the hills behind his house on the road to the Little Wood Reservoir with more pieces of agate and petrified wood in his pack than fresh meat.
"I'm not very lucky with the elk," he said, acknowledging that he actually prefers deer meat and that anymore as a sportsman he spends more time fishing. "The hills have gotten steeper."
At his humble farm house Phippen showed off some of his better finds, spraying specimens with water to reveal the colors and tight rings of what was an ancient tree.
"It's fun for me to get out and find something like that," Phippen said, holding a particularly interesting piece of rock that looks like a chunk of a log.
Although he has lived among Craters of the Moon basalt his entire life, Phippen said the black rock does not move him as much as the colorful slabs he finds "sightseeing" in the sagebrush hills near his house.
Phippen disputes whether he really "took over" the farm ground his family broke out of sagebrush, where he raised hogs and grain until 1995 when he retired. But, with the help of his sister Eva, who returned in the 1970s from 30 years with the Bell Telephone Co., Phippen took care of his parents through their old age and then his sister, who died in 1996.
Phippen has only left Carey to visit California and Bryce and Zion national parks in Utah. He also left to serve for a summer in the Civilian Conservation Corps in northern Idaho, where he worked to help scrub out spores in streams and gooseberry bushes that were killing off white bark pine trees. CCC enlistees were credited with renewing decimated forests in the U.S. by planting an estimated three billion trees from 1933 to 1942. Phippen looks forward to returning one day to see how things have changed up north.
A ruptured appendix at age 21 kept Phippen out of World War II, but because he shares the same birthday as Adolf Hitler, the quiet man does have some strong opinions about the tragic history of his young adulthood. He particularly deplores Hitler's many crimes against humanity during World War II.
As much as Phippen enjoys being outdoors, another pleasure of his is keeping up with the world through media like his 30-year subscription to National Geographic.
"I've always been interested in people (around the world) and geographic formations," he said, reflecting on a recent National Geographic spot he saw recently about U.S. national parks. "You can pick up an old (National Geographic magazine) and get a lot out of it."
As a longtime witness to geographic changes in Carey, Phippen not only remembers when his hunting chaps marched off to war, but he also remembers when few acres of sagebrush were clear for farming. He is witness to the beginnings of flood irrigation preceding modern sprinkler technology and gives descriptions of the dryness of the land before construction of the Little Wood dam. Talking to Phippen, a person can get a good first-hand account of modern history in Carey from a man who has been watching more than just the rocks and the trees.
"I kind of like the old days," he said, talking about what he sees on his hikes that he enjoys. "Now, there are so many weekenders. ATVs (are) as thick as flies."
Phippen has an all-terrain vehicle, too, and a boat for the reservoir, but he admits that he is mostly troubled by the increased pressure on wildlife during hunting season. He also is concerned that many of the places where he used to walk freely are now blocked with padlocked gates, closed because private landowners have become "hard-boiled" over the nuisance of gates being left open.
"I can understand that," Phippen said, turning to happier subjects and beginning to share his enthusiasm for his role in the coming weekend of festivities.
Carey Pioneer Days Grand Marshal DeLyle Phippen lifts one of the slabs of petrified wood he found during his explorations of the sagebrush hills behind his Carey home. Express photo by Matt Furber
