SODA SPRINGS - Joseph Richard (Dick) Torgesen, 90, a life-time resident of Soda Springs, died peacefully Monday, July 30, 2001.
He was born April 25, 1911, in Bancroft to Joseph Theodore and Rosetta Matilda Lau Torgesen. His mother had gone to the home of her sister, Annie Lau Dimick, for Dick's expected arrival as his father was in Walla Walla, Washington, working for the railroad express company. Dick was raised in Soda Springs, surrounded by his mother's brothers, who were all farmers and stockmen. At an early age, he went to work for his uncles, Dan and Joe Lau, putting up hay on the old Dr. Kackley Ranch and tending sheep on Mt. Sherman. He raised purebred Hampshire sheep with his brothers, King and John.
Dick attended the Agricultural College in Logan, Utah and after four quarters, his dad became ill and Dick went home to help his mother with her schoolteacher boarders. On July 5, 1932, he married his childhood sweetheart, Arlene Tucker, and went to work for his cousin, Milton Horsley, at Horsley Brothers' Lumber. This was during the depression and Arlene and Dick subsisted by hanging wallpaper, painting houses, driving the school bus and making all night runs to the Grays Lake area delivering lumber to the forest service. After a short time, they decided they were going nowhere, and that Dick needed to get into his great love of farming.
In 1937 Dick bought his first dry farm, 400 acres north of the China Hat mountain for $6 an acre. With a C Case tractor and a two-bottom plow, he broke the ground from sagebrush and wheat grass. Arlene and three children lived in a little trailer house to be near him while he worked. As time went on, he added more land and a cattle operation. In his lifetime he saw the days of horses with a one-man plow on up to the huge Steiger tractors his ranch operates today. He prided himself on never having to pay interest to a bank for operating expenses. He stored grain in multiple granaries and kept enough cattle to supply is own operating cash.
Even before the government mandated conservation practices, Dick was using them. He used crop rotation and yellow-blossom clover to build soil nitrogen. In 1992 he was one of five to be inducted into the Eastern Idaho Agricultural Hall of Fame as a pioneer in dry land farming and land conservation. Farming was a wonderful way of life to Dick and Arlene.
Dick was chairman of the ASC committee, Farm Bureau president, Lion's Club president, and served on the Governor's Idaho Air Pollution Control Commission for five years as a member and then as vice chairman. He was dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America, serving as Scoutmaster, District Chairman of the Caribou District, and as a member of the Eagle Board of Review. In 1979 he and Arlene were both awarded the Silver Beaver - the first time in the Tendoy Area Council that a husband and wife received the award at the same time.
Dick was a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving as Sunday School superintendent, counselor to bishop Joe Christopherson and then bishop. In 1945 he and Arlene's marriage was solemnized in the Logan LDS Temple and they celebrated their Golden Anniversary with an old fashioned hoe-down on the lawn at the Cedar View Supper Club in 1982.
Dick felt that he was greatly privileged to spend his life in Soda Springs near his parents and Arlene's parents. He loved his life in this beautiful valley where he was born. He will be remembered by his family as an honest, hard-working and conservative man with a warm wit and strong opinions which he was always willing to share. He will be missed for his sage advice and counsel.
Dick was preceded in death by his wife, Arlene; a son, Richard Carroll; a sister, Elizabeth (Betty) Brown, and brothers, John, Kingsley, and Robert. He is survived by his children, Robert (Nedra) Torgesen, Soda Springs; Karen (Keller) Crane, Shoshone; Susan (Kevan) Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah; Kathleen (Don) Murdock, Pocatello; Greg (Irene) Torgesen, Soda Springs; and Christopher (Wendy) Torgesen, Chubbuck; also 26 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren.
Funeral services will be conducted on Friday, August 3, at 1 p.m. at the Soda Springs LDS 1st and 5th Ward Chapel, 361 South 3rd East. The family will meet friends Thursday evening at the Sims Funeral Home, 139 East Second South from 7-9 p.m. and on Friday at the Chapel from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Burial will be in the Fairview Cemetery in Soda Springs. Services are under the direction of the Sims Funeral Home.