Janet Celebrates Her 75th Anniversary in the Park

The summer of 2014 marked 75 years since author Janet Chapple first spent a summer season in Yellowstone. To celebrate, YellowstoneTreasures.com serialized excerpts from her memoirs of her experiences from 1939 to 1942 on her blog. Here we collect them all for your convenience.

• Living within sight of Old Faithful Geyser. “Residing in Billings, Montana, my parents both made their livings as music teachers when I was a small child. . . .”
• The Ladies’ Ensemble. “In the summer of 1939, Mother (Margaret Inabnit Orvis) played in a small musical group they called the Ladies’ Ensemble. . . .”
• Calling Old Faithful Inn our home. “During the summers of 1940, 1941, and 1942, we stayed in a room in the bunkhouse. . . .”
• Old Faithful Museum. “My sister Joan was a life-long games person, becoming a fine contract bridge player and a tournament Scrabble player in her later years, besides making games out of every chore in her life . . .”
• Geysers. “The bunkhouse room we slept in faced Old Faithful Geyser. Of course, we watched it often, but we rarely went close. . . .”

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The full article “Celebrating an Old Faithful Area Seventieth Anniversary,” was published in August 2009 in The Geyser Gazer Sput, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 5-8.

Janet wrote a longer version of these memoirs at the instigation of Park Historian Lee Whittlesey, and they are now preserved in the library of the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Gardiner, Montana.