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Paul Eugene Tracy was born on May 18, 1889, in Vancouver, Washington, the son of Frank and Wilhelmina (Hunck) Tracy. When he was still quite young the family moved to Idaho; first to Boise and then in 1895 to Silver City, a gold mining town in Idaho's Owyhee Mountains. His father established a sheet metal and tinsmithing business in Silver City, and the family lived above the shop. The Tracy children (sons Paul and Walter and daughters Lela, Dorothea, and Marjorie) were encouraged to read and take music lessons. Tinsmith Frank Tracy taught Sunday school in Silver City, and church socials and hymn sings were favorite family diversions. Young Paul Tracy found adventure in the lively mining town and surrounding mountains. In Silver City he encountered miners, teamsters, blacksmiths, and other colorful characters, and established friendships with the town's Chinese children. In 1900 the Tracy family moved from Silver City and established a ranch near the confluence of Succor Creek and the Snake River, now the community of Homedale. Then it was a harsh and thinly-settled neighborhood, a land of sagebrush and coyotes. The Tracys are counted among the pioneers of that corner of Owyhee County, and Paul Tracy’s father was instrumental in organizing the local school district. In 1907 Paul Tracy moved to the city of Caldwell and entered the Academy of the College of Idaho. There he met Dr. William Judson Boone, a Presbyterian minister and founder of the college. Dr. Boone became an intellectual and moral mentor to the young Tracy and remained a friend and correspondent until his death in 1936. Paul Tracy wrote essays and poems for the student magazine (The College Coyote) and graduated from the academy in 1912. He held several jobs (including work as an electrician’s helper and linesman during the construction of Arrowrock Dam) before beginning collegiate studies back at the College of Idaho in 1915. In 1917 he transferred to the University of Oregon, closer to his parents who also moved to Oregon. Though he considered himself a pacifist before the war, he enlisted in the Army after America’s entry into World War I and spent almost a year in France and Germany with the 218th Aero Squadron as a magneto repairman. Putting his childhood musical training to work, he also played cornet and served as squadron bandleader. Tracy returned to the United States in 1919, and in 1920 he married Dorothy Luck, whom he had met at the College of Idaho before the war. They tried farming in the Long Valley, near McCall Idaho, for a few years, but relocated to Newport, on the Oregon coast, where Tracy’s father had established a heating and plumbing business. Paul Tracy joined his father in that work and embarked on a lifelong career as a plumber. He also took courses at the University of Oregon and earned a degree in journalism in 1927. Paul Tracy started writing during his schooldays, and in the 1920s he began submitting his work, both poetry and prose, for publication. Several poems were published in Oregon newspapers and then in 1927, the same year he obtained his bachelor’s degree, Marianne Moore accepted his story, “Old Red,” for The Dial. It was published in the December issue. Tracy hoped to work as a journalist after graduation, but unable to find a job in that field, he moved to Baker, Oregon (with his wife and young son William Boone Tracy), where he went to work as a plumber for the Montgomery Ward store. All the while he continued to write. Harold G. Merriam published his poetry and prose in The Frontier and Frontier and Midland in the early 1930s; poems also appeared in Poetry. In response to his essay, “How to Ride the Broncho” (Frontier, March 1930), a representative of publisher Alfred A. Knopf inquired if he had written any other Western stories that might be collected in a book. (The book never materialized.) Tracy’s success in publishing in national literary journals faded after the mid-1930s and until his retirement in the mid-1950s, little more of his work was published. In 1935 he and his family (now with a daughter, Lorna) moved back to Caldwell, Idaho, where he worked as a plumber. Caldwell remained his home for the rest of his life. With retirement in the mid-1950s, Paul Tracy again found publishing outlets for his verse, chiefly in two Oregon newspapers, the Portland Oregonian and Medford Mail- Tribune, and in Driftwood, an Oregon poetry magazine. Two poems were published in The Christian Century in the 1950s; another in The Christian Science Monitor in 1967; others in church magazines. During retirement Tracy also served on the Board of Trustees of the Caldwell Public Library and was a deacon for Caldwell’s Boone Memorial Presbyterian Church. He was an active fisherman and golfer. He collected a number of his poems, plus his story “Old Red,” and published them in a book entitled Owyhee Horizons in 1968. He issued a shorter, paperback collection, Sego and Sage, in 1975. Paul E. Tracy died on May 27, 1976, in Caldwell, Idaho, at the age of eighty-seven. He was survived by his wife, Dorothy, son William Boone Tracy, and daughter Lorna Tracy. Lorna Tracy married British poet Jon Silkin and edited, with him, the British literary journal Stand Magazine. --by Alan Virta, 1992 Sources: Biographical materials in the collection (Box 1) Reminiscences in the collection (Box 1) Return to Special Collections homepage For questions or comments about this page, contact the Special Collections Department This page last
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