Bill Norman

Bill Norman, 87, was born in Chadron, Nebraska during the Great Depression. His parents, Lynn and Deward Norman, were doing whatever they could to survive the time, Norman said. His father trained as a boilermaker at the Chadron Roundhouse, but had been laid off and was working for the Works Progress Administration as a concrete finisher when Bill was born.

Bill thought his mother was a homemaker, taking care of him and his older brother, because she was always at home when he was. But Bill learned later that she had been working nights as a cook at a lunch counter.

The family moved many times during the next years, always seeking a better life: his dad found work in Washington State as a boilermaker during the war years, he worked on ranches and farms, eventually returning to Nebraska to work on a ranch in time for Bill to graduate from Valentine High School in 1950.

Bill graduated just in time to serve in the Korean War.

“I looked at all the different outfits and decided the Marine Corps was the one I wanted to go to,” he said.

He spent three years in the service as a radio relay repairman, mustering out in 1954. His family had since moved again, this time to California where his older brother worked. When Bill got out of the service he followed them. He worked nights for the Burke Rubber Company and went to school at San Jose Junior College studying electronics during the day.

“It was kind of neat,” he said. “I went one semester and when the semester grades came out IBM called me up and told me to come to work in San Jose.”

While in San Jose he met his wife Regina Bohlin. The couple met because a friend asked Bill to do him a favor and take his cousin to the nurse’s training school ball. Bill agreed but wanted a “test run” first, so he and his friend and their two dates went to a sorority dance.

That went real well, Bill said. The couple married when Regina graduated from college with her nursing degree in 1955. Over the years they had three children, Michael (now in Sublimity), Patricia (now in Princeton), and Tim (in Lewiston, Idaho).

Regina passed away in 1990.

Bill remained with IBM for nearly 10 years. While there he confided to a buddy that he wanted to get back to ranching and the buddy showed him a real estate ad in the paper, placed by Ted Hays Sr.

He and Regina came to Wallowa County and pretty much saw the whole county end to end and side to side — “We saw probably 30 places,” Bill said.

They chose a farm up the river from Lostine and Bill invited his aged parents to come live with him for the rest of their lives and he would support them.

He got a job at the Wallowa Mill and when it closed he began 31 years of “crawling around the floor” with his floor covering business.

He retired from that in 1995 and then he really went to work — taking the grandkids up to Alaska fishing.

Bill has been living at Wallowa Valley Senior Living for about a year following a fall he suffered during a hunting trip, combined with the damage to his lungs that 31 years of working with flooring caused.

What has Wallowa County taught you?

It kind of taught me to relax. That I could do anything. And to enjoy nature.

Can you recall a book you read as a kid that really had an impact on you? And can you recommend a book you’ve read recently?.

I was probably in fifth grade when I read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I liked the different adventures, travels and customs Odysseus experienced. I like to travel.

A recent book was one of Louis L’Amour’s books. I have a library of those. I’ve read quite a few of those. I enjoy them because they’re pretty much like things were back then. They’re interesting and fast-moving.