Edwina Yearian Nichols was "allowed" to take the place of her deceased husband in 1940 at the Rotary Club of Salmon, Idaho, USA. An influential business woman of the day, Mrs. Nichols attended meetings for many years, though never legally a "member."

Mrs. Nichols also took control of her husband's local Ford Automobile dealership and found herself as the first women car dealer in the US. Salmon was a small town, but when phone numbers were assigned, her business the Pioneer Garage, was given phone #1. She was very proud of her association with Rotary. Most of the town's events were Rotary gatherings and the leaders of the community were the Rotarians.

 

(2013 March calendar courtesy of Norris-Banonis Group LLC(with special help from the Lemhi County Historical Society, Salmon, Idaho)

Her own mother, Emma Russell Yearian, was a leader among women, known as the Sheep Queen of Idaho and elected as the first woman of the Idaho legislature. After her own husband gave her two sheep, she turned that into an empire, producing wool for World War I.

 

Her daughter, Janet Nichols Moore recalls that her mother attended the club's meetings regularly and even told her grandson that she was a Rotarian. Rotary was an important part of her life in Salmon. The impression stuck with the grandson, Jack M. B. Selway, who sixty years later, founded Rotary Global History Fellowship.

 

 

The stories she told her grandson were right out of the Old West. At the funeral of the last of the Shoshone Indian chiefs, where no women of the tribe were allowed, she was the only "white" invited. She recalled that the chief was propped up and all those attending shook his hand. His dog and horse were buried, upside down (to be right side up on the "other side.")

 

Recollections from Jack M. B. Selway. As a role model, she was far more male, than female. She worked for what she wanted. I remember that she could tell me the price of every car she sold. "$2,114.05" for a new Ford in the early fifties. She was very lenient with me, probably because, prior to her husband's death, she mostly played bridge with her friends. A life of leisure and not much attention to her own two children, who were attended to by housekeepers and the like. Then there was the business of my father, Jack M. Brazelton, being killed in WWII, weeks before I was born, and then I was being abused by a series of step-fathers. So, I was allowed to do pretty much what ever I wanted. I had the run of her Ford dealership until one day a shop foreman had "enough," and after squirting grease on his men, they put me in a woman's dress and out on the street. I'm not sure that got my attention. I was, for decades, a rotten kid, but the apple of her eye.

She had a great mind. I remember one clear summer night when the two of us got out of her car and laid down in a meadow, looking at the stars and discussion how all of this could be part of one atom. A cosmic philosophy, but she was right there in that discussion.

I rarely saw her angry, even when I cut down all of the flowers around her great house. The one time I saw her anger was after a trip to the large family headquarters ranch, near Leadore. She had me stay in the car while she went to a family meeting to get a tractor for her son's ranch. They turned her down. Her language, on the way home, would have made a construction worker blush.

Her influence on me was profound. She was an example of a manager, a doer of things. She was the best Rotarian I'll ever meet.

 

Jack M. B. Selway, 2 July 2011.