BY PAT FARNELLI
Times-Shamrock Correspondent

The writer of one of the region’s neighborhood columns will be celebrating her 90th birthday on Thursday, March 5, and intends to continue keeping a finger on the pulse of Dimock, as she has for three decades.

LeJune Ely, while not a native of Dimock, settled there as a young wife and mother. Her husband Jerald had family in the area, and the Elys owned property in Brooklyn Township on what was then known as South Pond, now called Lake Ely, on the grounds of the present Girl Scout Camp Archbald.

She took up her pen writing about the rural crossroads about 30 years ago.

“Louise Stevens wrote the Dimock column, and when she gave it up she asked me to do it,” LeJune said. “I took notes at church and talking to friends, typed it on a manual, pre-electric typewriter, made a carbon copy, and drove it to Montrose.”

She said that these days, using a computer, putting three newspaper web addresses into the email, and hitting send is very, very easy.

LeJune Pier was raised in McKean County in western Pennsylvania, the eldest of six.

“LeJune is a different name,” she said. “My mom was a teacher, and she would often have three Catherines, three Beverlys, three Elizabeths in a class, so she wanted to give me a more distinctive name.”

A friend of her grandmother was named LeJune Rose. “LeJune sounds like the French word for “young woman,” but is spelled something like the Marine base Camp LeJeune in North Carolina,” she said. Friends and family usually called her June or Junie.

“My parents inspired me a lot: they were a big influence on how I turned out,” she said.

After graduating as the valedictorian in a class of only 18, she went to Lock Haven Teacher’s College.

“My father had worked his way through college, and I intended to do that myself. During World War II, I worked in the kitchen, mainly washing dishes. One of the boys’ dorms was empty, so the building was used to house Navy Cub Pilots learning to fly the Piper Cub airplanes. When the big girls would go home for the weekends, I would wait tables,” she remembered. “At that time, students ate in the dining hall seated at tables of eight, and they were waited on. When I served breakfast, there was one cub pilot that would ask me to carry his bowl of shredded wheat to the kitchen and pour boiling water on the shredded wheat biscuit, then drain it, then bring it back to him so he could fix it with milk and sugar.”

After she graduated, Junie got a job teaching kindergarten in Bradford, and there was a young industrial arts teacher who looked familiar, “But I couldn’t place him,” she said. “We struck up an acquaintance, dated, and fell in love. We got married, and on the honeymoon, he said to me, “Honey, could you take my shredded wheat and pour boiling water on it?” “And then I found out that I had married ‘That One,'” she laughed. “Of all the cute Cub pilots, I had to pick that one.”

Before they married, Jerald became interested in beekeeping.

“He was asked to help in Mansfield: a family friend was a beekeeper, and his beeyard flooded, and the high waters washed his equipment away. He retrieved, cleaned and rebuilt hives with his friend, and that was how he got into beekeeping.”

LeJune and Jerald married in 1948. The couple lived in a cottage at Ely Lake, and spent winters in a rental in either Dimock or Montrose. “As soon as it was spring we moved back into the cottage,” she said.

“Jerald was a handyman at Camp Archbald in Brooklyn Township when he was 16, and working summers there paid for his college education. We both loved it there.”

The pair carried in water and wood, and cooked on a woodstove. “We had electricity, but that was all,” she said. “We had our first child in nine months; had two children before moving to Dimock.”

In all, they had six children: Kristin Henshaw of Bainbridge Island; Kenneth Ely of Brooklyn Township, PA; Douglas Ely of South Montrose; Jeralyn Adams of Dimock; Stewart Ely of Pelican, Alaska; and Jean Grube of Trucksville.

Jerald’s family owned Lake Ely, and the Girl Scouts bought two thirds of the lakefront property in 1924. The Ely families kept summer cottages which were passed down in the family.

“I wanted to live at the lake,” she said, so when Jerald decided to buy property and build a house in Dimock, I was absolutely no help.”

“He built the basement and we moved in. We lived in the subfloor, with no siding, and built the first and second floors later,” she said.

She was a stay-at-home mom, and the family did a lot of camping and canoeing.

“We did canoe camping in the Adirondacks as a family, so the church asked if we would do it for church,” she said.
The devoted member of the Dimock Community Church knew what she had to do.

Then, the United Methodist Church camp at Sky Lake asked them if they could lead a canoe camp, which the couple did for six years.

Junie, by herself, then directed Junior High camp at Sky Lake for 20 years, with 60 kids at a time.
Through it all, she was also a keen observer of local happenings and noted that Dimock has changed a great deal over the years.

“We moved here in 1951 when the Bendix factory moved into South Montrose, and moved their foremen and work force from Sidney, N,Y. A lot of nice new families with children moved into that area. Those six houses on our side of SR29, near where the Cabot headquarters are now, were called Bendixville. They brought the heads of departments down, and they lived there.”

“Dairy farms were all over then,” she said.

She noted that there was a railroad track near the Dimock Camp meeting, which brought grain to the feed mill, and it took passengers.

The railroad track crossed the Dimock to Elk Lake Road at right angles with the road, and Benninger Lumber was on the left. There were about six houses from the post office to the railroad, and there used to be a creamery there somewhere, where farmers shipped out their milk.”

But, that all disappeared by the 1960s, and most of the rails were pulled up.

These days, LeJune keeps busy keeping up with Dimock residents’ school activities, awards, marriages, and hospital stays. Her column functions as a local almanac, with suggestions on when to plant seeds, turn back clocks, and look for migratory birds. There are regular sightings of bald eagles, black bears, bobcats, and wildflowers.
Her hobbies include swimming, water aerobics, gardening, canning, and cooking. She is always interested in wildlife, especially birds and mammals, and keeps up with beekeeping news and local gas well development.

While raising children, she helped raise others in the community by being a Sunday school teacher and youth group leader at her church. Through her column, she has publicized the various workings of the church in the community, including free soup dinners, care packages for college students, special music and services, and many different outreaches.

She also noted that her husband belonged to the Rotary Club in Montrose, which was a leader in getting the Rotary exchange club started.

“We hosted 13 exchange students over the years, and they stayed in our house, much to the delight of our own children,” she recalled. “Little children love the attention they get from students, when they are learning the language. My youngest daughter was endlessly patient, answering the same questions over and over.”

After the children were grown, Jerald joined a government program called Volunteers in Overseas Cooperative Assistance, to help those in Third World countries learn modern ways of beekeeping.

“The government paid Jerry’s way, but I would pay my way,” she said.

“I kept records. We went to Egypt, to Belarus twice, then Moldova near Romania, where we stayed in village homes. Usually, they were six week assignments.”

Egypt was a wonderful experience, she said. “When we were there, the Muslim and Coptic Christian beekeepers all worked together well, both at Al Mansoura in the Delta, where the Israelites worked while in Egypt, and in Alexandria on the Mediterranean Coast.” She said that Alexandria was a very modern city.

The Egyptians used the wooden hives like ours, just not as many supers. They also sometimes kept bees in mud tubes or pipes”.

They paid for us to stay in a big hotel on the fourth or fifth floor. I was worried, because we saw no fire companies.

Jerald said, “Honey, they don’t have any wood here, this is a marble and stone hotel.”
Now, LeJune enjoys the visits of her neighbors, her children, 19 grandchildren, and 18 great grandchildren, with at least one more on the way. She is thankful that since her macular degeneration, an eye condition, has taken away her car driving privileges, she has been able to rely on family and neighbors, who cheerily offer her rides anywhere she might want to go.

“I’m blessed,” she said. “I have learned to be content with what I have, and enjoy what I’ve been given.”