Kelley named 2025 Weiser Valley Roundup grand marshal

A 1953 Weiser Valley Roundup second princess, Marilyn Kelley, will be buzzing the Fred Hust Arena one more time as the 2025 WVR Grand Marshal during Saturday’s, July 12 rodeo performance. 

 Now at the age of 90, Kelley told the Signal American she will be riding inside the cab of a shiny new, air conditioned pickup, joined by her two daughters, Karen and Kim, both former WVR queens themselves, and every one of them an outstanding horsewoman.

 Looking back to 1953, Kelley said the first princess in the court was Shirley Hemenway Shirmang.

 “She competed and did a very good job,” Kelley said. “And my future sister-in-law, Maxine Kelley, was queen that year.”

 A cutline under the Signal American’s archives photo picturing a young woman who could have passed for a movie starlet of the era read: Miss Marilyn Barton, one of two princesses chosen as attendants to the queen for the 1953 Weiser Valley Roundup, is a resident of West Weiser Flat. She is a graduate of Weiser High School this year and has been riding a horse ever since she can remember. Blonde, blue-eyed, and 5 feet 7 inches tall.

 An only child growing up on her parents’ farm located on the south side of Olds Ferry Road, Kelley said she had loved horses from the beginning. 

 “My folks had a work team, Nig and Pet, and Pet was the one I could ride, with the work bridle, bareback,” she said. “And we lived over here where Grant Amano lives, and it was a long driveway into where the old house was and a hillside where the barn was.”

 After the place was sold, the ground was leveled and the hillside with it. The original 40-acre farm was expanded into a larger operation.

 She said she didn’t get her own first horse until she was 12.

 “And my first bicycle when I was 12,” she laughed. “And don’t ask me why, I was the only child. You’d have thought Mom and Dad would have had both of those for me.

 “Hale School was right down the road and I lived over where Grant lives,” she said. “I went through all eight grades at Hale. Adelia Parks was my big room teacher, and Miss Roland was my little room teacher in the two-room school. 

 “I remember the school bus took me to school in the mornings after I walked down to the corner of Pringle,” she added. “It was a gravel road, and in the winter the McMullens had their bands of sheep just above the canal. Their hay stacks were down here on the Flat, and they had iron wheeled wagons pulled by horses.

 “They would go down our gravel roads with the loaded wagons, and up to where the sheep were, and the ruts they left, you could hardly get through part of the time,” Kelley said. “The soil is dense out here, not any sand.”

 Living on her 35-acre place on Indianhead Road since 1963, Kelley said she continues to rent her ground to a local grower. 

 “Vernon and I farmed raised alfalfa ourselves for a short time,” she said. “Then we rented it to Grant after he finished high school and knew he wanted to farm. After he retired I rented to another good farmer, Ernie Chandler.”

 For over 50 years, for at least six weeks every fall Kelley worked at the Amalgamated sugar beet storage site and a good amount of that time alongside Joe Malay.

 “We used to have 2,000 acres of beets every fall,” she said. “Joe said there’s less than 700 acres of beets, because there are houses on all of the beet ground. There just isn’t the farm ground down here anymore.”

 Her first marriage ended after seven years, but she came out of it with three sons. After returning to Weiser, she met and married Vernon Kelley, and the couple added their daughters, Karen and Kim to the family.

 Marilyn taught both girls to ride horses, and sewed all of their outfits for them, as well as giving her boys and Vernon haircuts at home. DIY in those times was called “home economics.”

 “We pony carted together, too,” she said. “I had ponies that I had broken to the cart. I kind of miss that now. The pony cart is parked in the carport.”

 She said she appreciates her Grand Marshal honor, but laughed about her own response when Malay announced it at her 90th birthday party. 

 “I said, ‘you’ve got to be kidding, I can’t do that, it’ll be 110 degrees and I can’t be out in that hot weather,’” she said. “But, when you’re riding in an air conditioned pickup, and we practiced in the Fiddle Parade, it will be okay.”