◆ Some three generations of 4-H students learned under tutelage of Elvina Thornock.

Can’t or shouldn’t aren’t much in Elvina Thornock’s vocabulary. “What needs doing” and “just watch me” are more apt.

And after a century of living – doing everything from ranching to guiding hunters in the hills near Cokeville – she has friends and family finally getting it. “Help me or stand aside.”

Having celebrated her 100th birthday on April 21 – during a pandemic, nonetheless – she is remembered by myriad loved ones for not only her years of learning and doing, but also of serving. Just ask three generations of 4H students from around Cokeville. For more than 40 years she taught all she knew – cooking, canning, gardening and sewing.

In other words, Elvina passed on the gift of self-reliance. With every recipe, every bottle, every stitch, the 5-foot-2 once dark-haired woman shared a little bit of herself. And never seems to stand still.
“I like the outside better than inside. I know that,” she recalled in an interview last week. “I outlived my family. I’m over 100 years old. I was out working on the ranch with different people. I was getting the exercise I needed.”

To honor one of Star Valley region’s most celebrated residents – she was grand marshal of the 1998 Pioneer Day parade – SVI Media talked with Elvina on the telephone at her residence at Beyond Home assisted living in Afton.

Because of COVID-19 public health orders, her birthday celebration on April 21 wasn’t what her friends and family had hoped for. But the staff and friends of her assisted living residence in Afton, Beyond Home, honored her with cake, a paper crown and three big gold balloons – 1, 0, 0.

“I had quite a birthday date,” as she described it. “I was 100 years old. They had a ‘hundred’ across the room we were in.”

“We” includes the staff of Beyond Home – including owners Cache and Gretchen Kennington.
“Elvina is feisty,” Gretchen said with endearment. “You never know what she’s going to do. That makes things fun. She’s very active.”

And tell Elvina to just hang out while Gretchen goes to get the monthly grocery supplies? That’s not happening.

“We buy in bulk. She comes with her walker and she takes them in [on the seat of her walker],” Gretchen related, laughing.

Recently, she sent a photo of Elvina to her son, Wayne Johnson and his wife Debbie, who live in Kentucky. Elvina was pushing a case of bottled water on her walker.

“I’m very fortunate, very lucky,” Wayne Johnson told SVI during a telephone chat. “That’s the way I look at it. She’s still getting around well. She walks every day. She’s out and going.”

Johnson, who is 72, is the last living of Elvina’s four children: Carol, Wayne, Jolene and Billy. She is a grandmother to eight and great-grandmother to seven. She’s outlived her parents, seven brothers and sisters and two husbands.

“She’s lived a long time by herself,” Johnson said, who calls his mother each Sunday evening and visits often when COVID-19 restrictions aren’t in place. Retired from the U.S. Air Force, he’s had his mother come for visits in Michigan, Maine, Alaska and Spain.

Her colorful life began on a ranch near Wilson, in Teton County, to parents Faye and Clara Swensen Goodrick. The family plot with seven dairy cows was small, her son related, but to prepare for Wyoming winters took hard work for this family of 10.

“I worked on the ranch with my dad,” Elvina related. Five years older than her oldest brother, she often was out with the animals while younger sisters helped a hard-working ranch mother. Elvina became a master gardener in frost-prone country.

“When I graduated from high school, I left home, period,” she said. “I went out and done the things I wanted to do.”

World War II broke out, so she headed to Denver, Colorado, and went to work in a defense plant. It was there she met a cook, William Paul Johnson, married him and started a family. When the war ended, the family moved to Kemmerer, where they opened a café, then finally to Cokeville where William Johnson worked in the phosphate mines and then for the railroad.

Finally, they bought a small home in town for $3,500. “That’s where Mom was living” when she finally had to move to Beyond Home after decades of gardening, 4H, church fellowship and helping younger neighbors, Wayne Johnson said.

“She was always helping people out. There were other poor people in town and when she raised a garden, she shared with anybody who needed it. She shared everything.”

Then, in 1960, her husband suddenly died – and her legacy as a hunters guide was born. To sustain her family, she got a hunting guide license and began leading out-of-state hunters into the foothills of Cokeville.

At first, “they laughed at me,” Elvina remembered of locals when the petite woman got her license and laced up her boots. “You can’t shoot anything, so how the heck can you [guide]?” they asked her.
“I don’t have to shoot,” she responded. And she didn’t. In fact, Elvina has never fired a gun.

But she knows how to clean and dress a deer. For almost a decade, she traipsed all over the foothills leading hunters. Then, as they sat and regaled themselves with their prowess, she’d dress the deer. One hunter had metal hips and couldn’t climb the hill to claim his prey. Elvina carried it down.

“She was a firecracker,” Wayne Johnson recalled, who quickly learned in his youth to respect his mother, with or without a father. One day in high school, he announced he was taking the car for a date. Elvina said, “No, you’re not.”

Johnson related he said he was and went to shower. Later, he walked out dressed for his date. The car and his mother were gone. She drove to Jackson to see her parents. He never demanded the car again.
In his childhood, Elvina always drove him and other local children to weekday Primary. “One day on the way home, a trooper stopped her. Said he needed to see her license.”
She asked the officer, “What’s that?”
“You don’t have a license?” he asked her.
“No, I know how to drive,” she replied. He chuckled, went to his car and got out a drivers manual, gave her an oral test and issued her a license on the roadside.

Then one day, after years of driving Primary kids to weekday class, the bishop called her to be a Primary teacher. “Well, don’t you think I should be a member of the church first?” she asked him.

No one knew she had never been baptized through years of church activity. So they baptized her, and she became a Primary teacher for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Later in life, she enjoyed trips to the Logan Utah Temple and when visiting her son, trips to the temple in Anchorage, Alaska.
For a short time in the late 1960s, Elvina remarried to Ross Thornock, who passed away just two years later. But Elvina never was short on friends. Including one very notable woman in Cokeville – Minerva Teichert, famed artist with paintings adorning the walls of the Conference Center in Salt Lake City for the church.

“She used to go down and visit with Minerva all the time,” her son related. “I can remember as a young boy, Minerva’s art studio was on the top floor. I used to sit up there, and there were paintings all over the place.”

Today, the Teichert family and Johnson family still have ties. For years in Cokeville, Briant Teichert, Minerva’s grandson, was Elvina’s home teacher. He and his wife, Clyda, are frequent visitors to Elvina at Beyond Home.

“She was our backdoor neighbor and was a great help to my wife in helping her learn to garden here. Elvina was very good to us,” Briant Teichert related in an email to SVI Media. He recalled how in the 3rd grade, Elvina came to his elementary school class in Cokeville to introduce the 4H program.

His wife, Clyda, added: “I have found such delight in knowing her. She was my gardening mentor and fostered the love of gardening that I still have today.”

Fostering love – of gardening, of the land, of ethics, of self-reliance, of people. Her son said, “She believed if you do something, do it right the first time. You don’t have to redo anything.”

Gretchen Kennington related: “She inspires everyone to go out and walk. She’s the oldest, but she inspires them to go out and move.”

And Briant Teichert chuckles when he thinks of his own 101-year-old mother. “Elvina would reply with the fact that she knew how old my mother was because [my mother] was one year older.”

Elvina puts it more simply when asked about not sitting still at 100 years old. “I’m still here.”