IDAHO FALLS – For Marilyn Hoff Hansen, sculpting and painting is a passion that has earned her recognition across the country.
The 94-year-old Idaho Falls woman has been sculpting since she was old enough to hold clay in her hands. She’s had work displayed at universities and galleries nationwide, including at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., and has won numerous awards.
She specializes in sculpting figures, like people and animals. Horses are featured in her most prominent pieces.
“I grew up on a horse,” Hansen tells EastIdahoNews.com.
Much of her art was made in an old milk barn on the family farm near the Old Butte Soccer Complex. The building had been converted into a studio decades earlier and houses many of her unfinished projects to this day.
Although retired from doing commissioned work, Hansen still spends time on creative projects in her home.
Of all the work she’s created through the years, Hansen counts her depiction of Billy Coleman and his dogs from the book “Where the Red Fern Grows” as one of her favorites. The sculpture sits on the northeast side of the Idaho Falls Public Library and was created over the course of several months back in the 1990s.
Hansen recalls how the project came about.
“The principal at Temple View Elementary asked me if I’d do a memorial for Wilson Rawls (the author of ‘Where the Red Fern Grows’). The fifth grade is reading that book, he said, and how many cookies would it take (for me to make a sculpture),” says Hansen.
Rawls lived in Idaho Falls when he wrote the book, and they wanted a memorial paying tribute to him.
Hansen recalls initially making a small model of the current statue for the school. It “toured around town for a year” before the city got involved.
“The city got behind that and said they’d like to have me do that piece,” says Hansen.
The models for the dogs were a pair of red tick hounds in Blackfoot. She used multiple grandchildren as the model for Billy, one of whom is her granddaughter, Amanda Ward, who now works as an Idaho State Police trooper.
During that time, busloads of students, teachers and librarians watched her make the sculpture.
“I gave each person a little wad of clay and said, ‘You can put this anywhere you like. You know I’ll have to move your clay, but you’ll know your clay is in this sculpture.’ I never worried about vandalism because they owned that piece,” Hansen says.
The statue was installed in front of the library in 1999. A dedication ceremony was held on Aug. 12, 1999, according to the Museum of Idaho. Hansen says it was well-attended by the community.
A memorial placard is on the back side of Marilyn Hoff Hansen’s sculpture. (Photo: Rett Nelson, EastIdahoNews.com)They knew him before he was famous
Decades before Hansen constructed her memorial, Rawls had come to Idaho seeking work for what was then the Atomic Energy Commission on the Arco desert. He lived in Idaho Falls and would take a bus to Arco. He eventually tired of the long bus ride and got a job working for Jimmy Stewart, a sheep rancher in Monteview.
Before coming to Idaho, Rawls had spent some time in prison — twice in Oklahoma and once in New Mexico. The “Bear Grease” podcast reports that in 1933, Rawls was convicted of stealing chickens and served 18 months in prison. Seven years later in New Mexico, he was sentenced to two to three years for breaking and entering.
He spent time writing during this time.
Stewart died last year at age 95, but his daughter, Karen Stoddart, shared her memories of Rawls’ time on the family farm in an interview with EastIdahoNews.com last year.
“He came in the summers with the threshing crew,” Stoddart says. “He lived and worked in Arizona part of the year. He was a carpenter by trade. He (helped harvest) our second hay crop and grain and built many of our wooden head gates.”
Rawls worked at the Stewart farm every summer for about six years. The house he lived in during that time still exists.
Wilson Rawls lived in the house pictured while working on the Stewart farm. (Photo: Mud Lake Museum)
After several summers, Stoddart’s mom introduced Rawls to Sophie Styczinski, a family friend and who eventually became his wife.
Rawls had previously written the story that became “Where the Red Fern Grows” before coming to Idaho. It had been Rawls’ dream to be a writer since reading “Call of the Wild” as a kid, but he had a limited education. At 16, Rawls left home to find work to support his family during the Great Depression.
Rawls worked all over the country and returned home to Oklahoma “each fall to hunt and work with his family,” says a written history about Rawls obtained from the Mud Lake Museum. “He took the stories he had written and locked them in an old trunk.”
As Rawls worked on the Stewart farm, Stoddart’s mom heard about his manuscript, which reportedly had numerous grammatical and other errors. Stoddart recalls her mom reading it and providing corrections.
Rawls and Styczinski were married at the First Presbyterian Church in Idaho Falls. Stewart was Rawls’ best man, according to Stoddart.
Embarrassed by his lack of education, Rawls had burned his manuscript days before the wedding and given up on his dream. When he confided in Styczinski about it, she helped him rewrite it, edit it and get it published.
The story was originally published in 1961 for The Saturday Evening Post. It was printed in three installments under the title, “The Hounds of Youth” before being released as a novel later that year. It didn’t become popular until it was marketed to teachers and schools.
Rawls’ second and last book, “Summer of the Monkeys,” was also written in Idaho Falls.
Rawls was 71 when he died on Dec. 16, 1984.
Read the full story at EastIdahoNews.com.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.