Married 66 years, Kuna couple died three months apart, leaving a rich Idaho legacy | Opinion

Lavar and Wilma Thornton embodied the Idaho Way.

They were hard-working, soft-spoken, charitable, reverent, generous, family-oriented and community-minded.

They were also devoted to each other.

The Kuna couple were married for 66 years.

Wilma died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 90. Lavar followed on April 8, also at the age of 90.

“I have had a good life,” Wilma wrote about her life, according to her obituary. “I always wanted to go to college and to be a teacher and a stay-at-home wife and mother. Marrying a farmer was ‘icing on the cake.’ And, Lavar was that icing piled high.”

When my wife and I moved to Kuna in 2006 to buy and run the Kuna Melba News, there were many people who welcomed us, supported us and rooted for our success, as they knew our success was the community’s success.

Perhaps no one represented that spirit more than Wilma and Lavar Thornton.

Even though we were outsiders from “back East,” Wilma and Lavar welcomed us to the community, and Lavar patiently helped me to learn how things worked in the arid West.

How many times did he lean over the seats behind me at a Kuna City Council meeting to explain something to this city slicker who didn’t even know how irrigation water worked?

I can still see that confounded, disbelieving smile and sideways glance he gave me when I told him I didn’t know what a pivot was. He teased me good-naturedly about it but then explained in painstaking detail how it worked.

How many times did he come into the newspaper office ostensibly to pay a bill or place an announcement, only to clear his throat and linger long enough for me to know that he wanted to give me a scoop, like the time he told me in 2009 that farmers in the area were getting letters from Idaho Power asking permission to survey their land so the utility could put a 500,000-volt transmission line along the Kuna Butte.

At Lavar’s funeral Monday, one of the couple’s sons, Brad, said one of Lavar’s lessons was to never badmouth a ballplayer while watching a baseball game, because you just might be sitting next to his parents.

I unfortunately learned a version of that lesson when I badmouthed someone in the community in front of Lavar. Turned out that person was a relation of Wilma’s. Lavar forgave me, but I learned to be careful in a small town.

Wilma and Lavar met at Kuna High School, where Lavar was a transfer from Nampa his junior year and where Wilma was editor of the yearbook and later valedictorian of their class of 1950. Wilma went on to study at Oregon State University and became a teacher before raising their family.

They both grew up on farms in and around Kuna, where they learned their work ethic.

Brad talked about how Lavar would roust the boys out of bed on Saturday mornings, telling them he had already put in a half-day’s work while they were sleeping.

Wilma and Lavar were also world travelers, perhaps sparked by Lavar’s exploration of Europe on furloughs while he was stationed with the Army in the 1950s in Salzburg, Austria.

I remember one year, I hadn’t seen Lavar for a couple of weeks at council meetings and had begun to worry whether he was in poor health. When he finally returned to a meeting, I asked him where he’d been.

He informed me that he and Wilma had just gotten back from a tour of the Mediterranean coast, and he regaled me with all that he had learned on their visit to the Vatican.

There was much more to this man who was sitting before me in his usual sweat-stained truckers hat, nylon windbreaker, and dirt-streaked and faded jeans.

From their travels, Lavar developed one of his “Lavarisms”: “Wherever you go, someone calls that place home.”

If Wilma and Lavar embodied the Idaho Way, they also embodied Kuna through and through.

They were lifelong supporters of Kuna FFA and 4-H programs. Wilma was a Kuna teacher for a couple of years and later served on the school board for many years, including as board chair. In 2016, they donated 100 acres of land to the Kuna school district for a new school.

I saw them all the time at school and community functions, as well as youth and high school sporting events, where their grandchildren competed.

One of their biggest goals later in life was to bring a Boys and Girls Club to Kuna, something that’s been in the works for a long time. For the past 10 years, they volunteered on the club’s local steering committee to make sure that dream wouldn’t die.

They didn’t quite make it long enough to see the groundbreaking, scheduled for June 30, for the Kuna Boys and Girls Club, but they knew it was close.

I can’t help but think of the notion of legacy when I think about the Thorntons. Of course, they leave a tremendous legacy of family: their four children — Brad, Anne, Layne and Connie — are all a testament to the kind of parents Wilma and Lavar were, and they had 13 grandchildren and their 29 great-grandchildren.

But making the Boys and Girls Club a reality, I think, was also a way to leave a legacy for all of Kuna, a club to make the growing town a better place and to help make a better life for thousands of Kuna children and families for years to come.

It’s fitting, then, that their wishes in their obituaries were to make a donation to the Kuna Boys and Girls Club-Capital Campaign. You can send those to B&G Club of Ada County, 610 E. 42nd St., Garden City, ID 83714.

Or click on “Capital Campaigns” at adaclubs.org.

It’s a small way to honor their legacy, their love for one another and their dedication to the place they called home for 90 years.