Vera Ormay Shirts lives with four generations of her family on two city lots on Spruce Street in old Hailey. Her daughter, Hailey librarian LeAnne Gelskey, and her family live next door in a house her father bought for $250 from Joe Fuld in the 1930s.
At various times in the past, the yard has been home to pet deer, moose and a bear. Fruit and vegetable peddlers used to work the streets in open trucks during summer when Ormay was a youngster. Mrs. Eberley, the Hailey train station manager's wife, kept track of birthdays and would deliver birthday cakes around town as a surprise.
"She was such a sweet lady," says Ormay, whose eyes light up when she tells a story.
"There wasn't any crime here. You could leave your house unlocked and go to Salt Lake and your neighbors would water your plants for you. We were poor, but we didn't know it because everyone else was too. Our mothers made our clothes. Not everybody had a car."
Ormay went to first grade in a one-room schoolhouse in Stanley, where her family camped in tents on her father, Bert's, mining claim during the summer. It took an entire day of driving in a canvas-top Buick to get to Stanley. Bert worked until it snowed, and then drove back to Hailey. He was later badly injured when a tunnel collapsed on him at the Triumph Mine in East Fork.
The Shirts family, like many others, put away hundreds of jars of peaches, beans, beets and other garden produce for the long winters. In 1950 it snowed 12 feet and Dr. E.W. Fox said he had never seen such cases of cabin fever. As the snow kept coming down, people put boards above their front doors and tunneled out of their homes into the street. Frank Scharp would unfreeze metal pipes around town with an electric "thawer" for $3.
"But if you didn't have the money he would do it anyway."
Trained as a beautician at Ray Marinello's Beauty School in Hailey, Ormay learned typesetting and wrote a few history columns at the Hailey Times newspaper for Berwin Burke in the 1940s. When she wasn't doing the hair of Ruth Purdy and other well-known local women, she also helped produce the Sun Valley Sun magazine, which was shipped around the world to Sun Valley Lodge guests, though back then few Haileyites spent time in Sun Valley. There was plenty of action in Hailey.
"My mother would never let me go to River Street because that was where the gamblers and ladies of the night were. You could tell who they were because they always wore high heels with anklets and bright red nail polish."
During World War II, Ormay's father celebrated her brothers' return from overseas by clearing all the furniture out of the house onto the front lawn and playing records so everyone could dance in the house. About 100 of the Shirts clan members would take over the family compound on the Fourth of July.
<
"I learned to dance with the Navy," Ormay says with a smile.
Every Friday night, photographer Bill Mallory would play drums and Mabel Walker would play piano at the Legion Hall on Main Street for the weekly teen dance. Ormay's generation learned to dance to Big Bands like Glenn Miller's—fox trots, waltzes, the samba and the rumba.
"'In the Mood' was my favorite song. I jitterbugged to that one. At the end of the night they would always play 'Good Night Sweetheart.'"
Ormay saw the original 1933 version of "King Kong" at the Liberty Theatre on Main Street. "It scared me to death," she said. On Wednesday nights, Sam Brooks held bingo night for 25 cents at the Liberty. If anyone made a sound he would drag them out by the ear.
"You had to behave. Things were completely different back then. You didn't push old people off the sidewalk with your skateboard."
But there was plenty of time for mischief. The Star Café on Main Street was owned by a Chinese man named Lem. Ormay and her pals would swap the sugar and salt on the tables.
Lem later returned to China. When the prominent Friedman family took a trip around the world in the 1950s, they visited Lem in China, photographed him, and later invited Ormay to see the photographs at their home on Second Avenue.
When Ormay's teenage daughter, Susan, was dumped by a blind date in Sun Valley, Susan asked a gentleman at the lodge if she could borrow a dime to call her father. He obliged and even offered to sit with her until he arrived from Hailey. His deep voice sounded familiar, so Susan asked his name."My name is Gregory Peck," he replied. When Bert Shirts arrived to pick up his daughter, she said to him, "Daddy, you owe Mr. Peck a dime."
Ormay's brother Rex brought the first television signals into Hailey by installing antennae and transmitters on the hills above town. They watched Jack Benny for the first time in Bert Shirts' living room. But Ormay thinks TV, and now the computer, has led to a loss of community. She laments the loss of the board games, church activities and the dances and music of her youth.
"It's too quiet now," she says.
This summer she will celebrate her 60th Hailey High School graduation anniversary with a few old friends. It took her until last year to figure out which of the boys in her class lit the wastepaper basket on fire and threw it out the window.
"I can't tell you who it is because he still has family around here."
Tony Evans: tevans@mtexpress.com
Vera Ormay Shirts
