Yellowstone Treasures Blog

Born and raised in Billings, Montana, I was the second daughter of musician parents: my mother gave piano lessons for most of her life, and my father taught piano, organ, and voice until the World War II years, when he became a teller and later an officer in a bank.

My association with Yellowstone goes back to very early childhood, when both parents worked in Old Faithful Inn in 1939 and my father worked further summers as transportation agent. I trace my love of Yellowstone Park to memories of wonderful times with my sister Joan: waiting for geysers to erupt, visiting with rangers, attending slide shows and sing-alongs in the amphitheater, playing hide-and-seek in the inn, and watching as my father assigned passengers to the big yellow tour buses.

After college at Stanford, U. of Washington, and U. of Southern California, I married Bill Chapple, who was also from Billings. He took all his degrees at Caltech in geology, later becoming a professor of structural geology at Brown University. While raising three daughters, I worked as a professional performer and teacher of cello and spent over forty years in Rhode Island. 

In 1981 I lost Bill to a very rare form of cancer. In the next few years I sold my house, lived about a year and a half in a graduate dorm at Indiana University, and received my Master of Music degree in cello performance. Then in 1984 I married Bruno Giletti, a geology department colleague of Bill and a good family friend for over twenty years. This increased the count of daughters to five--and now the count of grandchildren has risen to six.

In 1995 I began work on the guidebook that became Yellowstone Treasures in 2002, and by 2000 I had retired from teaching cello and from the musical groups I played with. That's also the year I formed my own publishing company, Granite Peak Publications. 

Since all our daughters had long since left New England, Bruno and I decided to enjoy our later years in a year-round pleasant climate, and we both favored the San Francisco Bay Area for that and for its beauty and cultural attractions. So 2004 found us buying a condo in the area, choosing to be near friends Bruno had known since high school. We kept up a bi-coastal existence until late October of 2005, when we condensed our life from nine rooms in Pawtucket to five-and-a-half in Menlo Park.

Janet