BY ROBERT L. BAKER
Times Shamrock Writer

For nearly two-thirds of a century, Bette Farr has supplied readers of Tunkhannock’s weekly newspaper with a regular column about a two-mile stretch of road atop Nimble Hill in a remote part of Mehoopany Township in Wyoming County.

When she started out, there were fewer than a dozen residences of mostly people minding their own business.

That changed July 1, 1948, when Farr’s first ‘Nimble’ column appeared making their business her business, as well as that of readers of the Tunkhannock Republican and New Age, which today is known as the Wyoming County Press Examiner.

Want to know who’s got a birthday or anniversary coming up, or who just got released from the hospital?
Her column is your lifeline to the people who once lived there, have moved away, or still live there.

She started out when the county had more cows than people, but in her 67 years at the task never thought to write about the four-legged critters, even though her farmer husband Edward Farr had a herd of 30 of them.

However, if a bear molested somebody’s bird feeder, God help the bear.

Welcome to Bette’s world.

A 1944 graduate of Springville High School who was born in Endicott, N.Y., before moving to Meshoppen and later Lymanville while a student at SHS, Farr said she couldn’t get enough of writing, including a stint on the high school yearbook.

So, after graduation, she went to Scranton Business College (a forerunner to today’s Lackawanna College) and took a business course of studies.

A year after marrying Mr. Farr, and deciding that there was more to life than driving a tractor to help her husband’s family out, she thought writing a weekly column would be a good way to get to know her in-laws – whom she had moved in with – and her neighbors; and then when neighbor Bessie Place egged her on because Bessie was sure she had the only typewriter on the hill, she recalled this past Sunday the call was irresistible.

And still is.

“I can’t really put my finger on it,” she said. “I just like to know what’s going on, and write it up.”
Farr said in the early years she’d gather her news the old-fashioned way, calling each of her neighbors on a rotary telephone on Sunday nights.

And given that she was on a party-line in those early years – while most didn’t seem to mind talking to her – there was usually one “pain in the butt” neighbor who wanted her to give her gums a rest so they could use the phone for other purposes.

“I don’t want you to put anything about my family in that paper either,” she would recall occasionally hearing from a disgruntled neighbor, who thought the community already knew too much about her family.

Across the 67 years, she got along fine with all the editors who processed her work, with the exception of 2003, when the immediate predecessor of the present editor decided that neighborhood columns had no place in modern journalism.

There was a collective gasp for about six months when nine neighborhood columnists who could tell you what was “really” happening around the county were silenced allegedly because of a marketing study, and it didn’t change until the new editor came on board in 2004.

The north end of Nimble Hill sits less than a mile south of the giant Procter & Gamble Mehoopany plant where Pampers’ diapers and Charmin toilet tissue are among the products manufactured, and Farr recalled the plant’s locating nearby back in the mid-1960s caused local property values to skyrocket.

But the neighbors were still neighbors, Farr said, and knowing who was on the honor roll, or whose Holstein showed well at the County Fair or what to expect at a church supper all contributed to a sense of neighborliness, and what was really important.

Farr spent 22 years working in personnel at P&G, and another 16 as the Mehoopany Twp. tax collector, so, in a sense, yes, she also had been around the block, and kept up the column while holding down a full-time job that also included raising four kids.

Around 30 years ago, a new business- the Mehoopany Pet Lodge- brought those who needed to board their pets an appreciation for Nimble Hill beyond Farr’s column.

Around 20 years ago, Gary and Ellie Toczko decided Nimble would be a nice place to raise a family, and in the last decade they also gave birth to a vineyard, which today has made Nimble Hill Winery and Brewing Company a household name across the region.

Look across the landscape, and you’ll also spot up and down Nimble Hill Road three Chesapeake Energy Marcellus gas well pads where pasture once stood.

She noted this week: “If you happen to be on Nimble Hill, you will see miles of black pipe throughout the fields, as the gas company is setting up temporary water lines to go from gas pad to gas pad. So be cautious and be on the watch out for slow-moving vehicles.”

Farr asked, “Who would have ever imagined?”

At 88, Farr admits that the vagaries of aging have steadily crept up on her, and her daughter, Ginger Howell, has used the computer to keep her mom in touch with neighbors who live up and down the road, and the column as lively as it ever was.

When will she call it quits?

“Probably not until I die,” Farr said with a wink. “Not until I die.”