Legacy of Ladies
2007 Heritage Court
The Blaine County Museum will honor a quartet of ladies as its fourth annual Heritage Court. Each lady was chosen for her longevity and commitment to her town. The new court will be honored from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, June 24, at the Liberty Theatre, in Hailey. This year, the entertainment at the coronation will include host Chris Millspaugh and performances by Company of Fools, singer Cheryl Morrell and Footlight Dance Centre. There will be a reception after the event, at which the ladies will "hold court" to meet their public.
After the coronation, special docent tours will be offered of the Blaine County Museum, which just received the governor's "Take Pride In Idaho" award for its dedication to historic preservation.
The four ladies will ride in a vintage carriage in Hailey's Days of the Old West Fourth of July Parade, Carey's Pioneer Days Parade, Ketchum's Big Hitch Wagon Days Parade and Bellevue's Labor Day Parade.
First in a series of four stories on the 2007 Heritage Court.
There's a good chance you've never heard of one of basketball's all-time great performances. Before Air Jordan and Larry Legend there was Ora Lee Disbennett, who, in 1948, scored 23 points to help lead her Bellevue High School team to a one-point victory for the district championship.
Representing Bellevue in the Blaine County Museum's Heritage Court 2007, Ora Lee has since traded her basketball shoes for gardening tools and paintbrushes, but has fond memories of growing up in an area that has been dramatically transformed in the past 60 years.
"We had no running water and no power, but we had a lot of fun," Ora Lee said in an interview Monday, June 4.
Ora Lee's family was a band of early pioneers in the Wood River Valley. Her great-grandparents, the Fowlers, owned a dairy farm south of Ketchum near the current site of St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center. Her parents, Bud and Maude Myers, raised their three daughters and one son on a 230-acre ranch about a mile and a half south of Bellevue.
Ora Lee, born July 11, 1931, was a self-professed tomboy, always at her father's side and helping herd sheep and cattle, as well as milking cows and tending to chickens.
"To this day, I can plow a straight furrow, but can't sew a straight seam," she said.
Looking over the spectacular vista behind her house, Ora Lee waved her hand over the uninterrupted farmland that runs west to the foothills of a string of mountains.
"That used to be all timber and we'd run through it like Indians," she said.
When she married Otis "Tinker" Disbennett in 1949, Ora Lee moved to Bellevue. The couple purchased a house for $3,000 while construction began on their current house.
"We poured the cement for the basement before Tinker went into the service and lived in the basement when he got back," she said with a smile.
After Tinker finished his two-year stint in the Army, they moved back to the family ranch, onto a plot of land they bought from Ora Lee's mother for $25 per acre.
"There were no houses anywhere and you could see all over," Ora Lee said, wistfully describing the lack of development. "It's still pretty, though. They haven't moved the mountains."
Together, Ora Lee and her husband ran Tinker's Service Station for 18 years and a grocery store, located in The Bank building in Bellevue, for another 10 years.
More recently, Ora Lee spent 15 years working at Blaine Manor senior center as a certified nursing assistant and winning a number of awards for cross-stitching at the Blaine County Fair.
Her dedication to gardening is evident from the copious amount of flowers that surround the house and the sizable vegetable garden that runs along its northern side.
Despite her obvious qualifications, Ora Lee expressed surprise about her nomination by the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce to the Heritage Court 2007.
"I've never been so shocked in my life," she said. "After all, I'm just a lowly farm girl."
Top: Ora Lee Desbennett, Bellevue?s representative in Blaine County Museum?s Heritage Court 2007, sits among a small portion of the flowers that surround her house. Her property, located a mile and a half south of Bellevue, has been in her family since 1899.
Bottom: Ora Lee Disbennett rests on her family?s Hudson in the summer of 1948. ?I pushed that car more than I ever rode in it,? said Disbennett.
