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Nonagenarian Shirla Franz has done a lot of living
Courtesy of Shirla Franz
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When I visited with her in the summer of 2010, Shirla Franz said she thought she was the oldest person in Teton Valley. Over the winter I checked with several reliable sources, and learned that Shirla—who celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday in January 2011—does indeed appear to be the oldest full-time resident of the valley. I returned this past spring to tell her that she gets the “crown,” and that age is her claim to fame.
“It’s no honor being the oldest,” Shirla said. “You can’t do what you want. I have been married three times. I wore them out and put them all under.”
“Would you like me to line you up with some man?” I asked her.
“Not necessarily,” she quipped.
Shirla uses a walker to get around her home and she puts in her hearing aid if she needs to talk with anyone, but she still lives by herself. The Champlins, her neighbors of fifteen years, check on her every day. When I dropped in, their two youngest children, ages two-and-a-half and nine, were enjoying just being in Shirla’s front room, quietly watching TV and keeping her company. The Champlin toddler is her “pride and joy,” Shirla says; “she is smart, sharp, and a joy to watch. I couldn’t ask for anything better.” The Champlins named her Shirla Patricia Rose, in honor of the neighbor they all love like a grandmother.
When the children left, they both gave Shirla an affectionate hug and kiss, just like she was their grandmother.
It was a family affair when Shirla was born on January 6, 1914, in Teton, Idaho. Her mom did the pushing, her grandmother the pulling, and Shirla the crying. That was an era of true natural childbirth, when—wonder of wonders—babies could be born without the help of doctors, surgical lights, IVs, epidurals, and Pitocin injections.
Shirla’s parents, Ira and Louise Davis, lived on the flats above the old Green Canyon pool. Known as Pincock’s Hot Springs at the time, it was a recreation destination when the roads were negotiable. Shirla’s parents were farmers but, she said, “they did anything they could” to provide for her and her brothers. Until February 2011, she had one brother still living. She’d told me the previous summer that she would outlive him, and she was right.
Shirla says one of her earliest memories is that of attending grade school in the old rock schoolhouse out on Canyon Creek. The student body included three Browning children and Shirla and her three younger brothers. No overcrowding in that school. The family moved into Newdale for the winters. Childhood activities for the children consisted mostly of riding horses, playing in the dirt, and, for Shirla, caring for her brothers.
After graduating from high school in nearby Sugar City in 1933, Shirla went into nursing, training and working at the LDS hospital in Idaho Falls. In 1935 she said, “I do and I will” to Dick Pierson, and moved with him to Daniel, Wyoming, where he worked as a ranch hand for P.C. Hansen (father of the late Governor Clifford Hansen and great-grandfather of the current Wyoming governor, Matt Mead). When they first moved out to the ranch, Shirla says, she was aware of only one other man residing in the area. It was not until several months later, when she attended a party at Christmastime, that she learned there were actually quite a number of people living on neighboring ranches, spreads that often encompassed thousands of acres of range and meadow ground and thousands of head of cattle.
