Cottonwood couple to celebrate 75th anniversary

Color photo by Paul Robeson, composite designed by Anthony Higgins.

May 5 will mark the 75th wedding anniversary for Stacy and Ellen Woods of Cottonwood.

Stacy was born June 7, 1912, and his bride, the former Ellen Smith, was born Jan. 24, 1915. They were wed in Alva, Okla., in 1933.

Talking about their lives together, Stacy Woods explained how he was the “middle man” in his family. He had three brothers and a sister older than he and three brothers and one sister younger. Ellen also came from a big family with two brothers and five sisters.

Stacy reminisced about the dairy farm and having 16 horses. He said they had 14 to pull a road grading machine, and two to herd the cattle. After their chores were finished, Stacy said they would ride the horses. If one of his brothers started acting up, someone would invariably toss that boy’s straw hat into the well. Retrieval meant lowering one of the younger and smaller boys down on the bucket attached to a rope.

Stacy attended college in Alva and taught school in Oklahoma prior to moving to the Fullerton area of Southern California.

“We worked are way up the valley looking for our dream place,” said Ellen.

They found 80 acres across from the Lone Tree School in Cottonwood for their ranch. Stacy started teaching at the Sacramento River School, north of Dersch Road on Deschutes in Palo Cedro for the 1946-47 school year. For the next several years, he was the teacher-principal at the Anderson Cascade School, “just below the high school,” he recalled.

Torn between dairy farming and teaching, Stacy and Ellen decided to return to Oklahoma where they spent the next 18 years. They moved back to a Bowman Road home in 1986 to live next to their daughter, Anna May Dawson, and her husband, Gordon. The couple has a second daughter, Rita Kolander, but their son, Eugene, died some years back.

The couple will be honored at an open house on Saturday, May 3.