HUNTER, Rodello

Born 23 March 1920, Provo, Utah

Daughter of Thomas R. and Venus Harris Hicken; married Ross Hunter, 1938; Frank J. Calkins, 1965; children: three daughters

Rodello Hunter was born two months after her father was killed in a mine accident. When eight years old, she was adopted by her paternal grandparents because of a neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather. She grew up in a "strict Mormon home, a very loving home," in the semirural mountain valley town of Heber, Utah.

"Papa," Hunter's grandfather, beloved of family and towns-people alike, believed education for women after high school unnecessary. Under his persuasion, Hunter declined offers of scholarships to three Utah universities, instead attending high school an extra year so she could take every English, literature, and journalism class available. She subsequently entered nurse's training for the college credits, and much later, after marriage and the birth of three daughters, at the age of thirty-six, entered the University of Utah.

From 1958 until 1967, Hunter edited and wrote for the Utah Fish and Game magazine. For months at a time she edited the magazine alone but was never allowed the title of editor because she was a woman. Each monthly issue contained one of her "Read-Aloud Stories" or a segment of the "Babes in the Woods" series for young readers, for which she won local and national awards. The back covers carried her poetry linked to a photograph.

While claiming to "know nothing about poetry," Hunter somehow, sometimes, manages to match words exquisitely in various poetic forms. At least 200 poems have been published. Her themes are of the Western land and people, the old West and the new West. In "The Jubilant Desert," for example, the reader is invited to participate in an intimate historical review as the Salt Lake Basin awaits and then receives her destiny. "And the wind swirled her sands like mists. / She knew only the claws of the scurriers / And the bellies of the crawling ones." Until, "The sound of feet…the sounds of steel, / The sounds of suffering, and the silence of dying… / And the desert knew that she was not barren."

Hunter's first book, A House of Many Rooms (1965, reissued 1981), is a family memoir told in first-person narrative style. It is the most successful of her early major works. It charms the reader into taking another look at a less complicated era, when family and church were all-important. This particular family was not uncommon in the way they lived, loved, disagreed, hurt, helped, cried, and laughed with one another. They were amazing because there were so many of them. Nine "born" and five "borrowed" brothers and sisters lived in the house which "did with wood and plaster what the loaves and fishes did for the multitude." In spite of what seems like a life of poverty and hardship, Papa convinced his children they were blessed with a "heritage of going without." This is a work that in compelling and simple prose leaves us an accurate imprint of a people and a set of values well worn but perhaps never discardable.

Wyoming Wife (1969) is an entertaining account of Hunter's middle-aged marriage and move to Freedom, Wyoming. Though witty and well written, it lacks the impact and substance of her prior and subsequent books.

Dubbed "critic" by her family, Hunter is continually probing, prying, questioning, wondering, and making simple yet profound observations. While loving her Mormon people and her pioneer heritage, she is not blinded to their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings. An iconoclast of sorts, she campaigns for the removal of blindfolds from all those who would seek to know the truths of things for themselves. A Daughter of Zion (1972, reissued in 1999) is the superb unraveling of Hunter's own blindfold, a courageous standing at the mirror of the past, eyes open, ready for reckoning.

Hunter is significant beyond the intermountain region as a refreshing voice in the present, chronicling a not-so-distant past already out of reach. She writes rapidly and rarely revises. In her prose, this creates a charming spontaneity; in her poetry, an uneven quality. She is not a trendsetter, nor does she consciously strive for effect. Her prose is characterized by homely diction and plain, sharp images. Hunter is an unself-conscious, if slightly sentimental, writer. Not a leader, not a follower of literary style, she reflects the archetype of the questioner facing the dogma, the skeptic weighing the moral values.

Other Works:

The Soul of Jackson Hole (1974).

Bibliography:

Calkins, J., Jim and Rodello Hunter Calkins Interview (audio recording, 1973).

Other references:

Book Week (4 July 1965). LJ (July 1965). PW (28 Apr. 1969).

—CHERYL K. HUDSPETH