Jack Alvaro Dunn

Jack Alvaro Dunn, Boise, Idaho, was within sight of reaching 100 years when he headed to the last round-up on Nov. 23, 2024 at 99 years, nine months of age.

He was born to Three Creek, Idaho ranchers Thomas Alvaro “Al” Dunn and Opal (Butler) Dunn Feb. 23, 1925 at the Twin Falls (Idaho) Memorial Hospital where, in the 1950s, his three children would be born – Deborah Jane, Rob Roy, and Kevin Alvaro; and in the 1990s, his sole grandchild, Cameron Michael Dunn.

Jack’s grandparents, Samuel Crandell, “S.C.,” and Martha (Stewart) Dunn owned and operated the 7U at Three Creek. It consisted of several scattered ranches on creek meadows in the isolated high desert 70 miles southwest of Twin Falls, near the Nevada border. S.C. and Martha lived at “The Home Ranch” and the families of their sons at the other ranches. The family of their youngest son, Al, grew to include Betty (Dunn) Walton, born the year after Jack; and Colleen (Dunn) Lowe, trailing Jack by seven years.

At the 7U, the Dunns rode seven-eighths thoroughbred horses as they worked horned Hereford cattle between the Jarbidge river canyon and summer range in Nevada’s tall, rugged, and remote Jarbidge Mountains. “We stocked up with those horses,” Jack said. “They were built for speed.”

For first through eighth grades, the Dunn children attended local one-room schools: sometimes the Three Creek School in Owyhee County, other times, the House Creek School across the Twin Falls County line, depending on which of the 7U ranches each family was stationed to hay cattle in winter.

Jack started school at five. Under the leadership of an ambitious teacher, he and several classmates completed fifth and sixth grade school work in one year, making him two years younger than his classmates at Kimberly (Idaho) High School. In order to go to high school, he lived with the family of his Aunt Vera (Opal’s sister) more than 70 miles from home. Jack played the baritone horn in the marching band. He faithfully attended Kimberly’s all-school reunions until he became the lone representative of the Class of 1941.

After high school, Jack worked at the family ranch, where summer haying was accomplished with buck rakes, derricks, and work horses. He briefly attended Albion State Normal School, a small regional college.

Like most of his peers, Jack was inspired by the attack on Pearl Harbor to aim at serving his country. He enlisted at the state capitol, and was sworn in with two strangers who became friends: George H. “Sunny” Emerson, a farm boy from Meridian, Idaho; and Ramon J. “Ray” Mansisidor, an accordion-playing Basque sheep rancher from Homedale, Idaho. The three got to know each other on a troop train departing Boise Feb. 20, 1944, three days before Jack’s 19th birthday. After the sorting-out at Fort Douglas, Utah, they traveled together again by train to the Texas panhandle’s Amarillo Army Air Field. His pals nicknamed him “Three Creek” before they went their separate ways. Each eventually supported aerial combat. They wouldn’t meet again for more than 60 years.

In the Army Air Corps that later became the U.S. Air Force, “Three Creek” was training to load ammunition onto aircraft when the war ended. He was honorably discharged as a U.S. Army Air Corps Corporal.

Back home, he once tried riding saddle bronc in a local rodeo, but harsh weather posed a greater challenge the winter of 1948-1949 – the coldest on record at Three Creek. The gravel road running 45 miles from the westmost Dunn ranch at Flat Creek to the highway at Rogerson, Idaho was snowed in early. Jack was by himself with the pregnant stock cattle at Flat Creek for two months while the rest of his family was stranded in Twin Falls. Despite suffering frost-bitten ears, Jack got the cattle through the bitter winter with a little hay to spare.

Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he studied law at the University of Montana, Missoula. A fellow member of his Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity was fiery college newspaper editor and future actor, Carroll O’Connor. Before completing his coursework, Jack was called home to help with the family cattle business.

Colleen brought a college classmate to visit the ranch. Vivian Jeanne Lancaster had grown up on a Filer, Idaho farm. Sparks flew, and in December 1952 Jack and Vivian married and moved into a mile high log cabin built in the 1920s at Cherry Creek. The absence of electricity, plumbing, and running water was balanced by an abundance of sage-scented fresh air, expansive bright skies, and a horizon edged with jagged, snow-capped peaks. There, they welcomed their first two children, Debbie and Rob.

After leaving the ranch, Jack worked for the Lincoln Sheep Company with his brother-in-law, Sam Lancaster, earning $5 a day, plus lunch cooked by Sam over a sagebrush fire. Once, in a single day, these strapping young men repaired and rebuilt a whole mile of sheep fence along Highway 93 between Twin Falls and Jackpot, Nev.

Son Kevin was born the fall of 1958, when Jack was working for the U.S. Forest Service at Rock Creek, Idaho.

Jack next worked for his uncle, Fred Hoops, husband of Opal’s other sister, Ruby, and founder of the Hoops Construction Company that became the largest privately owned road construction company in the West, building many Idaho and Nevada roads. Jack, Vivian, and the kids moved to Middleton, Idaho in 1960, where Jack helped build the freeway between Middleton and Fruitland. Following construction season, Jack credited his winter job with Boise’s Graybar Electric for teaching him how to handle business paperwork, a skill contributing to his 1961 hiring by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

As new “BLM’ers,” the family moved to Shoshone, Idaho, where they built a house and made many enduring friendships. Jack’s community outreach included serving on the school board, and the finance committee of the Methodist Church. On Thanksgiving weekend, 1968, a government transfer took the family across the snowy Cascade mountains to Salem, Ore. They next lived in Newberg, Ore. while Jack worked in Portland. In the summer of 1972, they moved back across the state to Malheur County’s Vale, Ore.

Jack served on the Head Start Board of Directors, and once organized the Vale Fourth of July Rodeo Parade and the Toastmasters-sponsored Tall Tale Contest where storytellers spun their yarns in front of a vintage manure spreader. He was a member of the Toastmasters, Elks Lodge, and the Vale American Legion, which honored him this year for 50 years of membership and being their last living WWII veteran.

Jack maintained an extensive Christmas card list, the source of a beloved tradition: each year, he found an endearing holiday story to include with the cards.

While at Vale, the children left home for college and careers, and Vivian became a Licensed Practical Nurse.

After an early retirement from the BLM, Jack rounded out his working years with Flying Realty, Vale, while he cared for Vivian through her illness and 1992 death from breast cancer.

As a widower with adult children living elsewhere, he became re-acquainted with Wanda (Johnson) Pierson, from Shoshone, then living and working in Boise. “It’s as much fun being in love at 70 as it was at 20,” he said while preparing for their 1996 wedding in Shoshone’s historic lava rock Methodist church.

The couple made their home on an acre in northwest Boise. They enjoyed family, friends, their home, antiquing, movies, concerts, and travel. Jack kept horses that he and Debbie rode in the nearby desert hills, often under morning skies dotted with hot air balloons. Afterward, they enjoyed Wanda’s full-course homemade breakfasts. Throughout their years together, including 2024, they hosted annual Easter egg hunts often drawing more than 40 children, teens, and adults from both of their families to find eggs and eat a potluck brunch.

Jack took pleasure in distributing charity as a volunteer agricultural promoter. Every autumn, he traveled to an Ontario, Ore. onion warehouse, loading his truck with nine 50-pound sacks of onions, a signature Malheur County crop. Back in Boise, large bags went to a neighbor, the Boise Mission, The Good Samaritan Home, his church, and two to the food bank, He packed the remaining 150 pounds into 10 and 15-pound boxes for family, friends, and neighbors. “I was quite the Onion Man,” he recalled. “I love doing things like that for people.”

Travels took Jack and Wanda to the four corners of the USA: Seattle, Wash. to see friends and family; Palm Springs, Calif. visiting Wanda’s sister, Margie; Boston, Mass., departure point for their tour of Nova Scotia; and Miami, Fla. for two Caribbean cruises with Rob. On the second cruise in 2011, Jack satisfied his wish to explore Mayan ruins. They visited Kentucky’s famous horse racing tracks and stables on their first trip together. On autumn treks to the Oregon Coast, Jack continued his ongoing quest to find the best clam chowder. In 2006, Debbie and Rob took Jack on his “trip of a lifetime” to Scotland, where Dunn roots go back to the ancient Picts and their ties to the MacGregors. They walked Edinburgh’s Royal Mile; visited The Isle of Skye; and ferried to the Orkney Islands where they trod the circle of ancient standing stones at the Ring of Brogdar. Afterward, Jack joined Clan Gregor, and regularly attended Boise Scottish Festivals.

After being out-of-touch for more than 60 years, Jack read an article about Ray Mansisidor and made contact. Ray introduced “Three Creek” and “Sunny” to another local veteran, Glen “Ace” Nielsen, a Nampa, Idaho dairy farmer. From 2008 through 2018, “Ace” hosted annual reunions for these members of “The Greatest Generation.”

In 2013, Jack was selected for an expense-paid Idaho Honor Flight to the WWII Memorial at the National Mall, Washington D.C. His Warhawk Air Museum interview is online, as is an interview with Mansisidor, who trained pilots and navigators in the war. The museum also features both Emerson, a tail gunner who endured three months in a German prisoner of war camp; and Nielsen, a Navy pilot with an ability to land planes precisely on ocean carriers.

Jack was preceded in death by his grandparents, parents, sisters, first wife Vivian (Lancaster) Dunn, son Rob Roy Dunn, uncles, aunts, cousins, a nephew, in-laws, and many dear friends, including his army buddies.

He is survived by his wife, Wanda, Boise; children Deborah Dunn, Richland, Wash., and Kevin Dunn (Crystal), Middleton; grandson, Cameron Dunn (Sierra), Spokane, Wash.; great-grandchildren Lily Dunn, Nampa, and Aizleigh and Jameson Dunn, Spokane; nieces Kathy Walton, Kimberly, and Karen (Walton) Brose (Brian), Waxahachie, Tex.; and nephew Ritchie Lowe, Twin Falls.

Throughout their marriage, “Grandpa Jack” and “Grandma Wanda” enjoyed many family gatherings with Jack’s step-children, their children, and grandchildren: Diane (Pierson) Atkinson, Boise; Donna (Griffin) Gabbitas, Boise; Julie (Pierson) Hebdon (Lynn), Finley, Wash.; and Dan Pierson (Debbie), Shoshone.

Other treasured people active in his life in recent years include Three Creek native, Erma (Faucett) Akey, of Boise; Linda (Reukauf) deBoer, Ontario; Penny Dunn, Boise; Shoshone friends Bill and Wynoma Froscher, now of Meridian, Idaho; Don Griffin, Boise; Jim and Brenda Johnson, Nampa; Rosemary Lancaster, Twin Falls; Sam Lancaster, Twin Falls; Mary (Lancaster) and Larry Lundin, Midvale, Idaho; and Dunn family relatives: Aubrey Buchanan, Paul, Idaho; Ronald Buchanan, Las Vegas, Nev.; Chris Dunn, Salem, Utah; Sam Dunn, Salt Lake City, Utah; Jenny (Buchanan) Miller (Mark), Boise; Marcia Pratt, Ammon, Idaho; and Soni C. (Dunn) Shaw (Harry), Burley, Idaho.

Jack A. Dunn’s life will be celebrated with one last birthday party on his 100th birthday anniversary Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025 at 2 p.m. at the Riverside Hotel, 2900 Chinden Blvd., Boise. His ashes will be buried the next day at noon. Cremation was by Bowman Funeral Parlor, which has posted his obituary online. Inurnment of ashes will be Monday, Feb. 24 at noon in the Parkview Section of Dry Creek Cemetery, 9600 Hill Road, Boise, with access also from N. Horseshoe Bend Road, which intersects State Street. Rev. Mike Benischek, Meridian United Methodist Church, is officiating at the Celebration of Life and Inurnment. The Middleton American Legion Post 39 is providing military honors at the cemetery.