About

From Michael

My family roots grow deep in the soil of the Snake River Valley.

My grandfather Frank Gribbin was born in Iowa in 1876 and moved to Weiser in 1900 at age 24, along with his sister Josephine, age 26.

In 1903 he became a landowner when he homesteaded a 160 acre parcel about 3 miles south of Weiser on Dead Ox Flat.

He became a Weiser Merchant in the 1930s and 40s plus served on the Weiser City Council.

I graduated from WHS in 1963, married in 1967 to a fellow student that I met at Treasure Valley Community College, better known as TVCC, spent our honeymoon on a fire lookout tower  in the high Wallowa Mountains overlooking the Snake River, in Northeast Oregon, then took some classes at WSU and moved to Seattle to be a programmer, only coming back to Weiser for a few visits.

My parents, Harold and Thelma Gribbin, who had started farming grandfathers property in 1936, retired in 1964, sold the farm in 1970 and moved away, my sisters were living in Boise and California, so I really didn’t have any reason to return until 1982 for my father’s funeral and 1988 for my mother’s funeral. They are both buried at  Fairview Cemetery on the Oregon Side of the Snake River next to the Weiser / Ontario / Huntington junction.

As we go through our daily lives, it’s easy to think that the History and Memories of everything around us will always be there, just waiting for us to pay attention.

But often that is not the case, with a loss of that information when someone passes away or loses their memory, and it hasn’t been written down.

I know that when I was younger I didn’t know, or care, to look around and cherish what I had, I was always looking forward to the next big enjoyable event in my life.

Now 60 years after I graduated from WHS, I wish I had paid more attention, so now I want to know how and why Weiser has changed to become the town it currently is.

This project is helping me to recapture some of that knowledge

They say “you can’t go home,” but I would like to do the next best thing – learn about it first hand from the residents that actually lived it, and then add it to the Searchable, Alphabetized Archive so all can enjoy.

I follow the Weiser Museum Facebook posts with much interest but sometimes they create more questions than answers, and when I go back to look for older articles, they’re really hard to find (or not find.)

Out of frustration I’ve decided to create my own Weiser Area Memories Facebook group, as use it as a companion piece to the website.

Now when I learn new “old stuff,” I can pass it on to the members so they can visit the site. 

Things like the Intermountain Institute, which I didn’t even know existed when I attended WHS, spending 4 years in Hooker Hall looking out of the windows without noticing any of the history I was surrounded with,

Although now, because of this website, I check on their Facebook group everyday and often ask questions – and immediately plug their answers into this archive. There is so much history to be learned from that group – too much good stuff, too little time.

I’m now retired from programming but still building websites, so creating one for Weiser Area Memories has been easy and fun to do, plus I now have the free time to do the needed research and keep the site updated .

 – Email Me with any questions, comments, suggestions or just to say Hi!

Michael Gribbin – WHS Class of 1963