It was in the Fall of 1949, in Saint Anthony, Idaho. Mary, 28, is a waitress at the Star Café, a restaurant on Bridge Street owned and operated by a local Japanese family, the Hosodas. Harvey, 29, is spending the summer working at his uncle Bill’s sheep ranch in Island Park. Each has a son—his is two and hers is ten. He is divorced; she is widowed.
One evening, Harvey and his uncle Bill enter the restaurant. “I liked him the minute I seen him,” Mary says of Bill, who was a regular at the restaurant. Harvey winks and says, “I knew she pined for him.” Mary goes on, “I would get his oyster stew, and look in it and it didn’t have very many oysters in that oyster stew. And I’d tell Leo (the cook and owner’s son), ‘Look, this guy loves oyster stew. Where are the oysters? Give him some more oysters!’ I couldn’t talk him into it.”
From that day on whenever Harvey was in town, he would go into the cafe to have a cup of coffee and to strike up conversations with Mary. He told her about his little boy, John, and that he was divorced. Mary said, “I thought he was just a kid. We got to talking, not a lot cuz I was on the job. And we started going out.”
For one of their dates, they went horseback riding. Coming upon a stream, Harvey said the horses were thirsty so they rode to the edge of the water. Mary said, “My horse kept wadin’ out a little deeper. About the time she got in the middle, my feet were almost getting wet, and Harvey says, ‘She loves to walk out in the middle and roll with you.’ He’s laughing . . . and I married him!” Mary remembers another time when Harvey picked her up after work, and in his father’s 1936 Ford, he drove her and her son, Jerry, to West Yellowstone Park to spend the day.
The following year Harvey secured a summer job working for the Idaho Cattle Association. Ranchers would send their cattle into the foothills above town to feast on the pastures there, and Harvey was to stay with a herd of about 1200 and make sure they didn’t wander too far off. So in June 1950, he came into Saint Anthony for the day and asked Mary to marry him. He said, “Let’s get married today, and you can go back up with me.” When asked about the quickness of the nuptials, Harvey said, “I didn’t have much time off.’ The local bishop married them at Harvey’s folks’ place July 1, 1950.
The Star Café 
