Senior Spotlight: Melva Welty of Plains

Melva Arnold was born in June of 1929 in Wisconsin. "I was born at home," she recalls, "as most people were back then." Melva moved to Plains when she was in the sixth grade. Her father had been in the U.S. Navy.

"I was the only girl born right in the middle of eight brothers," Welty said. "Mom said she wished I had been twins until one day I lipped off at her. I was 13. She was rolling my hair in rags to curl it to look like Shirley Temple. I didn't like it. I thought she was going to slap me. She had me against the wall. I lied to my dad about what had happened and I felt guilty," Welty said.

Right after graduating from Plains High School, Melva married Richard Welty, whose family also moved to Plains from out of state. "His mother didn't like me calling him Rich instead of Richard. He was an only child," Welty said.

One of Welty's greatest memories is the time they went to Hebgen Lake in southwest Montana. It was in 1959, the year the earthquake hit the lake. Welty said they were staying there when rocks started sliding and shaking. "We were by the water. My oldest son was in his own tent below us. My 1910 saucer survived the quake," Welty recalls. At 5 a.m. Welty said it was raining and they needed to get out of there. "We called my brother who lived about 20 miles away. We went to his place."

The Weltys were married in 1949. Richard had been working at a Plains hardware store that they later bought and renamed Western Hardware. B.B. Owens was the original owner of the store located on west Lynch Street. That was in 1959, according to Welty and daughter Christine Cockrell. "We had a sign made for the store by a man in Hot Springs," she said.

In the late 1970s the store caught on fire. "The boys were fixing chainsaws out back on a windy day," Welty said. The store had a broad supply of appliances, farming equipment and International Harvester parts and mowers. "We had a little tractor out front that didn't burn," she said. "We ended up giving a lot of things away," Welty recalls. "The druggist got the tractor. And the sign survived the fire," she added. A supplier from Spokane brought a delivery and said "I thought you had a little fire."

There was time for some recreation in her life. Welty recalls her first time bowling at the lanes located in the basement of the VFW next to their hardware store. "I got a 57 my first time bowling on the summer league," she recalls clearly.

Melva Welty has other sadder stories regarding her youngest daughter, Ricki Lynn, who lived in Libby with her husband for a while and later passed away. Melva's husband Rich, who had bone marrow cancer, passed away. " I had a girl, a boy, a girl and another boy," Welty said proudly of her daughter who she calls Chrissy, son Stephen, daughter Ricki Lynn, and son Greg. "Girls are always the firstborn in our family."