This is the story of the life of Nellie Evaline Koehler Moore as given at her funeral December 17, 2001. She was born January 14, 1911 in Arlington, Kingsbury County, South Dakota in the home of her grandparents, George and Evaline Walters. This was the home that her grandfather built when he first moved his family out from Illinois to the Dakota’s. Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1898, her parents, Alvin and Evelyn Koehler were married in that same house.
Her other grandfather had heard about land being given for homesteading in Montana, and so went out and homesteaded a place near Ryegate, which is on the Muscle Shell River about 75 miles northwest of Billings. Nellie’s sister, Lola, was born in 1902, and a few years later they moved out to Montana to be with her grandfather and have a homestead of their own.
When it was time for Nellie to be born, her mother had to travel back to Arlington to her folks because there was no doctor in that section of Montana at that time. When Nellie was about 3 weeks old, her mother returned with her to Montana, but ended up having to race back to Arlington again because she got a serious case of the whooping cough. The doctor treated her and almost lost her. She ended up losing all the lining in her intestines and so her mother had to be very careful what she gave her to eat. She eventually pulled through and they went back to Montana again.
While she was still a little girl, her mother used to sell eggs in town. One day her mother had a crate of eggs set out on the porch and she had Nellie all cleaned up and she sat her down beside the eggs while she went in to get the rest of her things and when she came out, Nellie had broken half the eggs in her lap because she liked to see the pretty yellow centers. It took her mother a while to clean that mess up.
The farm consisted of about 500 acres that her father used to plant wheat and alfalfa. They also raised horses, cows, pigs and chickens. They raised most of their own vegetables and her mother had a section for growing flowers. The farmhouse itself was a long building. On one end was the kitchen and on the other end was one large room with some beds around the side. They spent most of their time in the kitchen, which had a large round table where the family would gather in the evening. For light they used either a kerosene lamp or a gasoline lantern. That is where Nellie learned her ABC’s from boxes they had or sacks or cans.
During World War I, hired help was hard to find, so one time her father fixed the header box up so Nellie could drive it along side the heading machine which her mother drove, and that way they managed to harvest their crop. She was only 5 or 6 at the time.
By the time Nellie was school aged there was a school in Ryegate. Her father built a little 3-room house with a customary outhouse in town that they stayed at when they weren’t working on the farm. Her mother stayed in for the school year for her to go to school. She also made hats to earn extra money and was quite good at it.
For second grade Nellie and her mother traveled to Medford, Oregon on the train and spent the entire school year with her grandparents while she attended Oakdale School. This was during the War and Nellie remembered cutting up little snips of material to stuff pillows with for the soldiers. She also knitted a scarf for a soldier.
Her grandfather used to take her to school in a horse and buggy every day and told her to wait for him at the library across the street. She realized afterwards that he purposely had her stay there after school every day so she would get in the habit of reading. She picked the habit up very well and loved to read. She became very close with her grandfather and loved him very much and spent many enjoyable hours sitting and talking with him.
Nellie and her mother returned to Montana for her third grade school year. That year was a particularly bad year. One day they were out working on the farm and her mother looked up in the sky and there was a whole black cloud coming towards them. It turned out to be grasshoppers – millions of them! They ate everything. The wheat in the field one day was green and beautiful, then two days later it looked like it had just been plowed. The two previous years hailstorms had destroyed the crops, too. This made three crop failures in a row. The family didn’t have enough money to pull through again. At the end of the school year they left Montana with the last $800 they had. Her father fixed the old Model T Ford by cutting down the back of the front seat on each side and putting hinges on so they could let it down to form a bed with the back seat. They had a little tent made where they could do the cooking.
They eventually reached Medford, Oregon where her father got a job in a wholesale grocery store and her mother opened up a hat shop. While living there, Nellie met Betty James and started a friendship that continued throughout her life.
While going to school with Betty, Nellie took on the lead role of Sicily in a little operetta called, “Sicily and the Bears”.
Not long after that, her family changed location and she attended a different school the following year. While there, the family met a couple named George and Gertrude Bailey. George worked at the same grocery store her father worked at and they became great friends. They ended up sharing a large house with them; the Bailey’s had one part and Nellie’s family had the other.
By the end of her 5th grade year, George Bailey had taken them over to a place called Ft. Jones in California, which was a little town in the Scott Valley in Siskiyou County, which didn’t have a railway. Her mother and father decided they’d like to go into business there with a dry goods store. That’s where Nellie attended 6th grade.
Ft. Jones turned out to be quite a hangout for the Indians. In the back yard there was a barn that they would frequently come and stay overnight in. This upset her mother, so one night she grabbed her gun, rested it on her shoulder and proceeded to stomp out to the barn to chase them off. She told them in no uncertain terms to “GET OUT,” that they were on private property and couldn’t stay there. She marched the whole bunch of them up the alley, single file, with the gun poked into the last guy’s back, until they were well off the premises.
After a while they became close friends with the Indians and often the squaws would bring Nellie little dresses for her doll or just little gifts for her and her mother.
She attended 7th and 8th grades in Ft. Jones, which were both held in the same room at the same time. In Nellie’s own words, “There was a boy who used to tease me on my way to school. I put up with him just so long and I finally knocked him flat. I was little, but mighty! Nobody ever thought I was as strong as I was. He tried telling my mother what I’d done, but she defended me and said he’d asked for it!”
After one year of high school, they moved back to Medford because the schools were better there. Nellie was again reunited with her friend Betty James. She came to visit Nellie one night and put on Nellie’s mother’s fur coat. In her own words, “She went for a ride on some fella’s bike and fell in the mud with it. I lost consciousness after that…”
Nellie was quite popular in high school. She was also very pretty. She said of herself, “I was pretty, probably the prettiest girl in school…which tells you something about the school right there!” She always got excellent grades, particularly in art classes, and eventually earned a full scholarship at the Institute of Art in Chicago. Her and her mother set off on the trip together, but didn’t get very far. Her mother started hemorrhaging and they had to turn back. She ended up having to get a hysterectomy, which meant that Nellie was needed to take over her shop while she recuperated. Nellie never made it to art school.
She did, however, marry Heine Hjertager, a boy she had gone to school with. A year later they gave birth to a son, Larry, while Heine was going to school. When Larry was about 3 years old, Heine got Pneumonia and died. That was extremely hard for Nellie. Eventually she went to beauty school in San Francisco. After that she attended business school, which prepared her for the life of business that she was headed for.
After Nellie worked for many years for her mother, she went into business for herself and began her own beauty salon on the main street of Palo Alto, University Ave, “The Personality Salon” in California. She was in business there for over 25 years. When Larry was about 5, she met Abbott Brady and eventually married him. They had two girls, Darlene and Sheri. They later divorced, leaving Nellie alone with 3 children to raise. About 3 years later she had an accident with a fellow coming out of a parking place. Ironically, they started dating and “settled out of court”. This was Roy Moore. He was a very caring person and assumed the role of father to the children. They were married in November of 1948. A few years later they received word that her son, Larry, had had a heart attack and drowned in Germany while he was serving in the Army. He was 24.
Wanting to be able to stay at home, but also be a little more self sufficient, Nellie got a job working for World Book Encyclopedia. She worked on and off for them for over 35 years. She became a District Manager and Regional Representative, but in between she managed to get her Real Estate license, her Insurance license and several other credentials to lean back on while she continued to survive. With her help, both Darlene and Sheri were able to go to college and on missions for the LDS church.
As the girls were growing up, Nellie made sure they both had lessons in every imaginable thing they wanted to try: baton, piano, ballet, tap, drums, accordion, acrobatics, voice. And she didn’t have just “anybody” teach them. They took baton lessons from the best, and twirled for the 49’ER football team. They took voice and dance from Mason and Conn who taught the choreography for the San Francisco Ice Follies. Special classes were taken from people who taught celebrities on the Lawrence Welk show. She did her homework in everything she did. And even though she did all that, when Sheri was offered a contract with MGM to have a child career, she turned it down with a great deal of wisdom behind her. Sheri, of course, was mad at her for years for that decision, but she knew what she was doing.
In 1960 she and her mother joined the LDS church. After being basically “anti-mormon” by faith, she studied everything to prove them wrong and ironically received answers to her prayers that she should join the church. Darlene joined soon after, followed by Sheri a few years later.
She loved and supported her children in whatever they did. According to Sheri, “Everywhere we performed, she followed us. I don’t remember many times I ever performed anywhere that she wasn’t there. Even when I was going to Ricks College and was in a musical and only had a small part, she and my Grandma Koehler drove clear up there to see it and went to all 3 performances. She did the same for Darlene when she was in an operetta at BYU one summer. Even up to the last, as often as she could come to anything where I was either giving a lesson or the kids were in something or receiving an award, she’d drive the distance up to Holbrook from Mesa.”
Her other grandfather had heard about land being given for homesteading in Montana, and so went out and homesteaded a place near Ryegate, which is on the Muscle Shell River about 75 miles northwest of Billings. Nellie’s sister, Lola, was born in 1902, and a few years later they moved out to Montana to be with her grandfather and have a homestead of their own.
When it was time for Nellie to be born, her mother had to travel back to Arlington to her folks because there was no doctor in that section of Montana at that time. When Nellie was about 3 weeks old, her mother returned with her to Montana, but ended up having to race back to Arlington again because she got a serious case of the whooping cough. The doctor treated her and almost lost her. She ended up losing all the lining in her intestines and so her mother had to be very careful what she gave her to eat. She eventually pulled through and they went back to Montana again.
While she was still a little girl, her mother used to sell eggs in town. One day her mother had a crate of eggs set out on the porch and she had Nellie all cleaned up and she sat her down beside the eggs while she went in to get the rest of her things and when she came out, Nellie had broken half the eggs in her lap because she liked to see the pretty yellow centers. It took her mother a while to clean that mess up.
The farm consisted of about 500 acres that her father used to plant wheat and alfalfa. They also raised horses, cows, pigs and chickens. They raised most of their own vegetables and her mother had a section for growing flowers. The farmhouse itself was a long building. On one end was the kitchen and on the other end was one large room with some beds around the side. They spent most of their time in the kitchen, which had a large round table where the family would gather in the evening. For light they used either a kerosene lamp or a gasoline lantern. That is where Nellie learned her ABC’s from boxes they had or sacks or cans.
During World War I, hired help was hard to find, so one time her father fixed the header box up so Nellie could drive it along side the heading machine which her mother drove, and that way they managed to harvest their crop. She was only 5 or 6 at the time.
By the time Nellie was school aged there was a school in Ryegate. Her father built a little 3-room house with a customary outhouse in town that they stayed at when they weren’t working on the farm. Her mother stayed in for the school year for her to go to school. She also made hats to earn extra money and was quite good at it.
For second grade Nellie and her mother traveled to Medford, Oregon on the train and spent the entire school year with her grandparents while she attended Oakdale School. This was during the War and Nellie remembered cutting up little snips of material to stuff pillows with for the soldiers. She also knitted a scarf for a soldier.
Her grandfather used to take her to school in a horse and buggy every day and told her to wait for him at the library across the street. She realized afterwards that he purposely had her stay there after school every day so she would get in the habit of reading. She picked the habit up very well and loved to read. She became very close with her grandfather and loved him very much and spent many enjoyable hours sitting and talking with him.
Nellie and her mother returned to Montana for her third grade school year. That year was a particularly bad year. One day they were out working on the farm and her mother looked up in the sky and there was a whole black cloud coming towards them. It turned out to be grasshoppers – millions of them! They ate everything. The wheat in the field one day was green and beautiful, then two days later it looked like it had just been plowed. The two previous years hailstorms had destroyed the crops, too. This made three crop failures in a row. The family didn’t have enough money to pull through again. At the end of the school year they left Montana with the last $800 they had. Her father fixed the old Model T Ford by cutting down the back of the front seat on each side and putting hinges on so they could let it down to form a bed with the back seat. They had a little tent made where they could do the cooking.
They eventually reached Medford, Oregon where her father got a job in a wholesale grocery store and her mother opened up a hat shop. While living there, Nellie met Betty James and started a friendship that continued throughout her life.
While going to school with Betty, Nellie took on the lead role of Sicily in a little operetta called, “Sicily and the Bears”.
Not long after that, her family changed location and she attended a different school the following year. While there, the family met a couple named George and Gertrude Bailey. George worked at the same grocery store her father worked at and they became great friends. They ended up sharing a large house with them; the Bailey’s had one part and Nellie’s family had the other.
By the end of her 5th grade year, George Bailey had taken them over to a place called Ft. Jones in California, which was a little town in the Scott Valley in Siskiyou County, which didn’t have a railway. Her mother and father decided they’d like to go into business there with a dry goods store. That’s where Nellie attended 6th grade.
Ft. Jones turned out to be quite a hangout for the Indians. In the back yard there was a barn that they would frequently come and stay overnight in. This upset her mother, so one night she grabbed her gun, rested it on her shoulder and proceeded to stomp out to the barn to chase them off. She told them in no uncertain terms to “GET OUT,” that they were on private property and couldn’t stay there. She marched the whole bunch of them up the alley, single file, with the gun poked into the last guy’s back, until they were well off the premises.
After a while they became close friends with the Indians and often the squaws would bring Nellie little dresses for her doll or just little gifts for her and her mother.
She attended 7th and 8th grades in Ft. Jones, which were both held in the same room at the same time. In Nellie’s own words, “There was a boy who used to tease me on my way to school. I put up with him just so long and I finally knocked him flat. I was little, but mighty! Nobody ever thought I was as strong as I was. He tried telling my mother what I’d done, but she defended me and said he’d asked for it!”
After one year of high school, they moved back to Medford because the schools were better there. Nellie was again reunited with her friend Betty James. She came to visit Nellie one night and put on Nellie’s mother’s fur coat. In her own words, “She went for a ride on some fella’s bike and fell in the mud with it. I lost consciousness after that…”
Nellie was quite popular in high school. She was also very pretty. She said of herself, “I was pretty, probably the prettiest girl in school…which tells you something about the school right there!” She always got excellent grades, particularly in art classes, and eventually earned a full scholarship at the Institute of Art in Chicago. Her and her mother set off on the trip together, but didn’t get very far. Her mother started hemorrhaging and they had to turn back. She ended up having to get a hysterectomy, which meant that Nellie was needed to take over her shop while she recuperated. Nellie never made it to art school.
She did, however, marry Heine Hjertager, a boy she had gone to school with. A year later they gave birth to a son, Larry, while Heine was going to school. When Larry was about 3 years old, Heine got Pneumonia and died. That was extremely hard for Nellie. Eventually she went to beauty school in San Francisco. After that she attended business school, which prepared her for the life of business that she was headed for.
After Nellie worked for many years for her mother, she went into business for herself and began her own beauty salon on the main street of Palo Alto, University Ave, “The Personality Salon” in California. She was in business there for over 25 years. When Larry was about 5, she met Abbott Brady and eventually married him. They had two girls, Darlene and Sheri. They later divorced, leaving Nellie alone with 3 children to raise. About 3 years later she had an accident with a fellow coming out of a parking place. Ironically, they started dating and “settled out of court”. This was Roy Moore. He was a very caring person and assumed the role of father to the children. They were married in November of 1948. A few years later they received word that her son, Larry, had had a heart attack and drowned in Germany while he was serving in the Army. He was 24.
Wanting to be able to stay at home, but also be a little more self sufficient, Nellie got a job working for World Book Encyclopedia. She worked on and off for them for over 35 years. She became a District Manager and Regional Representative, but in between she managed to get her Real Estate license, her Insurance license and several other credentials to lean back on while she continued to survive. With her help, both Darlene and Sheri were able to go to college and on missions for the LDS church.
As the girls were growing up, Nellie made sure they both had lessons in every imaginable thing they wanted to try: baton, piano, ballet, tap, drums, accordion, acrobatics, voice. And she didn’t have just “anybody” teach them. They took baton lessons from the best, and twirled for the 49’ER football team. They took voice and dance from Mason and Conn who taught the choreography for the San Francisco Ice Follies. Special classes were taken from people who taught celebrities on the Lawrence Welk show. She did her homework in everything she did. And even though she did all that, when Sheri was offered a contract with MGM to have a child career, she turned it down with a great deal of wisdom behind her. Sheri, of course, was mad at her for years for that decision, but she knew what she was doing.
In 1960 she and her mother joined the LDS church. After being basically “anti-mormon” by faith, she studied everything to prove them wrong and ironically received answers to her prayers that she should join the church. Darlene joined soon after, followed by Sheri a few years later.
She loved and supported her children in whatever they did. According to Sheri, “Everywhere we performed, she followed us. I don’t remember many times I ever performed anywhere that she wasn’t there. Even when I was going to Ricks College and was in a musical and only had a small part, she and my Grandma Koehler drove clear up there to see it and went to all 3 performances. She did the same for Darlene when she was in an operetta at BYU one summer. Even up to the last, as often as she could come to anything where I was either giving a lesson or the kids were in something or receiving an award, she’d drive the distance up to Holbrook from Mesa.”
