Pamela Ann Leedy Robson McCue told me more than once that when she died, she did not want an obituary. What follows is not an obituary, but a love story by JG McCue III about myself and my Friend, Lover, Wife, and Teacher for almost 63 years.

Pam loved movies, especially a couple she used in her classes and watched more than 100 times each, in particular, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Quiet Man, but her all-time favorite had to be The Black Stallion. If you've seen it, you remember the scene where the young boy has just tamed the stallion and rides bareback through the surf, waving his arms like wings.

Pam and her best friend, Suzy, would have sleepovers where they would sneak out of the house in the middle of the night, cross the street to the horse barn, and ride bareback through Tautphaus Park. I can't tell you how many times I wished I had seen that in real life. As it is, since we are mountain people instead of surfer folk, I put my own spin on it and imagine Pam riding her fabulous wind horse, Penny, over the high mountain passes of my mind, her hooves barely touching as they fly along.

Pam's hoodie says, "Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It's Where My Story Began". Indeed, it was there on October 23, 1947, that she was born into the family of Langdon Lee Leedy and Marjorie Jewell Leedy and their two sons, Richard and David.

In 1953, Langdon's employer, Phillips Petroleum, sent him to the sagebrush desert of Idaho to help carve a high-tech hub of the new Atomic Age called the National Reactor Testing Station, NRTS for short.

(Composite photo in gallery) We're both about 5 years old in this composite, which means they were taken a couple of years apart. We both still lived in the towns in which we were born, she in Bartlesville, OK, and I in Winfield, KS, about 90 miles apart. We were both about to embark for Idaho Falls, about 1,300 miles away. Pam took the direct route by train. I had a two-year layover at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, WY, during the Korean War, waiting for her until we could both show up in The Falls in 1953.

It was not uncommon for youngsters, especially girls, in our neighborhood next to Tautphaus Park to have horses. Her father made it clear that if Pam wanted one, she had to earn the money to buy it. She got right to work babysitting and doing other odd jobs. When she thought she had enough money, they went shopping. There was an obvious choice as soon as she saw what was available, but it was more money than she had. Fortunately, her dad made up the $20 she was short on one condition—he could pick the horse's name, Penny, for her shiny coloring.

Pam boarded Penny in one of the Tautphaus Park barns right across the street in winter and with a farmer on Park Road in the summer. Not only did Penny take Pam around the Park with the other kids, but on long picnic rides out Sunnyside Road and other wild places south of town. They were a tremendous barrel-racing team, and Pam had the scars to show for it.

Penny was a surprisingly fast quarter-horse. When she went into the starting gate, instead of prancing around and being nervous like so many horses, she walked right in, seeming bored and oblivious to her surroundings until she exploded from the gate and won the race. As she always did.

Since the War Bonnet Roundup, the oldest rodeo in Idaho, was held in Tautphaus Park in those days, it was a major attraction to that young horsey set, and Pam and Penny were flag bearers in the Junior Posse and rode in the opening ceremonies each night.

Meanwhile, I was "the scrawny kid", as her mother described me, who lived eight houses down the street and went religiously to the rodeo each night. One night in 1962, I noticed a high-spirited girl on a high-spirited horse. I was never going to have a horse of my own. I would have had to buy it myself like she did, but I had other things to spend my money on, like car insurance and 10 cents per driven mile when I wasn't driving Betsy, whose speedometer I could unscrew to get a discount. Besides, there are advantages to riding double.

After complimenting the Pam and Penny team on their horsewomanship, watching the bronc and bull riding and those fabulous clowns, and walking Penny back to her pasture, we went with another couple down to the forebay of the Snake River to watch the submarine races. Not being able to get a good view since the subs race underwater, a single kiss was exchanged, and things were never the same again.

About a month later, on the first day of Mr. Knotts' debate class at Idaho Falls High School, he recognized her name and told her she had some big shoes to fill since her brother Richard had been Idaho State Debate Champion in 1960. And fill them she did in 1965.

During the 1964-65 school year, Pam was also President of the IFHS Debate Club, as I, her debate partner and boyfriend, had been in the 1962-63 school year. Unlike myself, who took on the job as a bit of a lark, she actually took the job seriously and, among other things, spoke at the Jr. High to recruit future debaters from their ranks, and generally helped to improve the program.

On December 22, 1964, I took Pam to her Senior Ball. Neither of us had a clue that night it would be 35 years to the day before we would finally get married. (photo in the gallery)

The next year, Pam's college education began at the University of Idaho, moved to William Woods College in Fulton, MO. The next year, she took a gap year starting during the late Summer of Love in San Francisco and capped it off with a couple of years at the University of Utah and a teaching credential.

Pam taught for several years in California, during which time she married William G. (Bill) Robson from Idaho Falls, whom she had known since high school, and they had two children, Matthew and Dylan. After the birth of Dylan, the family moved back to Idaho Falls when Bill got work at what was then called the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL).

At that time, there were no openings at IFHS in English, so Pam took a position at Bonneville High School. A year or so later, the Debate Coach at IF left, and Pam replaced her and taught English as well.

Coaching debate is a wonderful, but intense and exhausting job, and, after several successful years during which Pam's Debaters earned her a Diamond Key, the highest rating for coaches in the National Forensic League, she was ready for a change. Fortunately, her sister-in-law, Jeanie Robson McCoy, was able to transition gracefully into the position, and Pam was able to teach English and Speech.

One day, Pam was at a local pet shop in Idaho Falls where she saw a big, fat tadpole and immediately fell in love. Jeremiah was a Bullfrog and became the cornerstone of an international family of over 60 frog migrants to the United States from every continent, except Antarctica. All were quite legal migrants, and the poison dart frogs even gave up their poison to become Americans, something their forests required them to do when they left. The array was stunning, and she designed terrarium homes for them that showed off their best qualities to effect.

The "pinhead" crickets sold in pet stores are too large for really small frogs, so Pam raised her own crickets that start out as the actual size of the head of a pin. She became known as "The Frog Lady" to the pet store owners and her students. Frogs don't live but a few years, so they were all gone before Pam, but the swarm of plush frogs and other froggie presents from her students live on upstairs in her woman-cave we called The Eyrie.

In 1994, Pam divorced Bill.

Pam's dad died on March 23, 1998, and my dad barely had time to tell me the news before he died on June 2, 1998, at which time I came home to take care of my mom, Phyllis, and her variety of ailments. Pam, who had been friends with her longer than with me, was a big help, staying with Mom when I had to be gone.

One morning, a man called and wanted to look at my dad's office with an eye to buying it for his business. I called Pam and she came over. Mom was just getting dressed and sometimes dawdled, so she still wasn't dressed when Pam got to the house. I was giving Pam some last-minute instructions as we walked to the back door, but by the time she got back to where Mom had been, she had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. She wasn't answering to her name. Pam looked everywhere, but there was no sign or sound of Phyllis. Finally, Pam ended up in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, trying to collect her wits and think where she might not have looked, when there was a tap on her shoulder. The savage naked lady of the house had a big grin on her face. Her stalking skills had not abandoned her yet. As Mom said to me more than once, "I think that girl is going to learn some things around here."

After Mom died, 1999 was rolling to a close and Dick Clark was preparing for the big ball drop-in Times Square to usher in the new millennium. Pam and I decided that since we had both married other people on the summer solstice and the coming winter solstice was the 35th anniversary of our last official date in 1964, it would make a perfect day to wed.

That was also the night when three astronomical events coincided. #1 The sun was particularly close to the Earth. #2 The moon was particularly close to the Earth. #3 The moon was particularly high in the sky. Those three things coinciding made the moon look 14% bigger than usual and also brighter, making it, we thought, a particularly propitious time for big changes. (photo in the gallery)

A couple of years later, I was privileged to assist Pam teaching a class in Creative Writing encompassing the time of the 9-11 attacks. Until the afternoon of that day, hers were the only classes that were watching live coverage of the event and discussing and writing in real time how it would be a life-altering event for them and their country, as it still is.

Unfortunately, life was not all fun and frogs. On March 26, 2006, her younger son, Dylan, succumbed quite unexpectedly to walking pneumonia at age 29. Ten weeks later, on June 3, 2006, her ex-husband Bill died of a heart attack. Though divorced, Pam, Bill, and I had an amicable relationship, and Bill and Dylan dying so close together was a double shock.

Pam said she wanted to retire while she was still at the top of her game, unlike what she had seen some other teachers do. Despite the pain of the recent deaths, she soldiered through one more year of teaching and was chosen Teacher of the Year for the second time in her career. That seemed like a good place to stop, so she did.

Her elder son, Matthew, was a considerable consolation to her during this time, even though he was often at a distance, making his way in the world as a Cordon Bleu chef in restaurants from Arizona to Wyoming. However, while visiting Idaho Falls for Christmas 2009, he died December 28, also quite unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 35.

Pam never recovered from this loss. For the past 15 years, at least once a week, sometimes more and increasingly as time went by, she would wake up in the morning and say, "I wish I could go back to sleep for the rest of the day."

She became a hermit. We both did. The traveling we had planned never happened. The little traveling I did was alone to see family in California.

Pam couldn't bear to be with friends of many years, because "all they ever talk about is the wonders of their children and grandchildren, and I don't have anything to say about that."

Prior to the beginning of 2025, we took frequent rides around town and into the nearby countryside where she used to ride Penny, and Pam enjoyed the novelty of the new things we saw in this burgeoning town of ours. As the year turned over, she turned down my offers of a drive, and since the weather had turned inclement, she even stopped going out to the back porch to feed the squirrels. Her world shrank almost instantly to the size of the bedroom. She ate less and slept more.

Her last three days were pretty much sleeping, but I could occasionally get a hand squeeze from her. After what I didn't know would be the last hand squeeze, I went to sleep myself, a bit after midnight, the morning of June 27, her mom's 114th birthday. When I awoke with the sun, she was gone.

Always the teacher, even beyond death, Pam taught me a new word, and that's hard to do because I know a lot of words. Leave it to her to find one I had never seen or heard. On her death certificate, in the Cause of Death field, was the word inanition. Everybody out there who is reading this, raise your hand if you have ever seen or heard the word before. See, hardly a handful. . . The word comes from the Latin meaning the act of removing the contents of something; the state of being empty. The shorter and not-so-sweet part of it is that Pam died of starvation.

Let's not forget, Pam didn't want an obituary, so this isn't one. It is definitely a love story, so let's finish it off with a poem and some Love Songs for Pammy!

One summer's sunset

When I was still young

I camped in the desert

at Fish Springs Slough.

Glimmering through the golden glow,

A glorious Monarch and his mate

Fluttered brightly,

Coupled tightly

& bounced bravely

On the brim of the breeze.

Tattered and torn,

By spirit's breath borne,

Onward they flew to their fate.

I thought at the time

How wondrous fine

To tightly entwine

And go for a ride

On the wind.

But I knew nothing then.

It's only now

This star frost night

Many years from then,

As tiny temblors

Tell their tales

Of sweet and sweeter surrender

& wash with waves

Heart's secret caves,

I now realize

That invaluable prize,

The companion in flight

Through the windiest night,

I have found in you.

Pam loved Rock 'n' Roll from an early age. You'll remember that if you ever played Trivial Pursuit with her. Her brothers had a good collection of vinyl 45s that reverberated throughout the house when she was little.

I had listened to KOMA, Oklahoma City, since I was in grade school. Not only did KOMA rock the entire North American continent, but it was about 150 miles from both our hometowns in Kansas and Oklahoma.

But, when we first got together and I wanted to impress her, I said, "Classical music is really where it's at." She, wanting to impress me, said, "How did you know?" I had no idea at first that she was listening to KOMA on the side.

Meanwhile, we had some wonderful experiences with Beethoven's Pastoral, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, and, especially, Ravel's Bolero, but when Bob Dylan and The Beatles finally came along, there was no more keeping up pretenses, and we had to admit to each other that Rock'n'Roll really does soothe your soul.

A while ago, when she could no longer search for music on her computer, I made a playlist of Love Songs for Pammy that I put on CD for her. I know the pros like our friend Doug Hernan does his playlists on Spotify, but I've made Pammy's on YouTube. Hope that works for you.

At her request, no services were held. Cremation was under the direction of Coltrin Mortuary, 2100 First Street, Idaho Falls. Online condolences may be sent to the family at www.coltrinmortuary.com.

Love Songs for Pammy

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvtVmcp5G2iPYaHNJcrNH-o8yFN5D0Zdl