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Chapter Nine

Scotty and Ada

The Scott and Chiaretta Story — Colorado, Italy, Oregon, Utah

The story told so far has been your family, Jerry — Johnston soldiers, Viking islanders, pioneers, a Revolutionary War general. This chapter is about Janet’s family, and it runs on a completely different track. It does not begin in Scotland or Virginia. It begins in a tiny Colorado Plains town and in a mountain village at the foot of the Italian Alps.

These two stories — the Colorado cowboy and the Italian immigrant’s daughter — collide in wartime Portland, Oregon in 1943. Out of that collision came Janet Kathern Scott — your wife, Jerry.

Part One: Scotty — Home of the World’s First Rodeo

Hugh Vernon Scott was born on October 13, 1923, in Deer Trail, Colorado — a small town on the Eastern Plains about 55 miles east of Denver. His father, Jesse William Clarence Scott, was born in 1885 in Bennet, Nebraska — the son of Cyrus S. Scott (1847–1919) and Virtue Rachel Porter (1854–1923), who married in McLean, Illinois in 1872. The Scott line reaches back to the Civil War era in central Illinois.

Deer Trail is one of those places that sounds ordinary until you look at it closely. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Pro-Rodeo Hall of Fame, the History Channel, and the Colorado State Legislature, Deer Trail was the site of the world’s first rodeo — held on July 4, 1869, when ranchers gathered to see who could ride their outlaw horses the longest.

The Dust Bowl Swallows Deer Trail

By the late 1920s, Deer Trail was a prosperous little town — two banks, five grocery stores, three hotels. Jesse and Della had married on June 25, 1919 in Littleton, Colorado — but it was a second marriage for both. Jesse’s first wife, Carrie Ophelia Naragan, had died in 1916, leaving him with nine children. Della’s first husband, Ralph H. Barton, had died in 1915, leaving her with four. Together they formed a blended family of thirteen — and had two more of their own: Willard Wayne Scott (1921) and Hugh Vernon Scott (1924). Della herself was born in Woodburn, Iowa in 1881, the daughter of Benjamin Franklin Bennett (1851–1918) and Rachel Percilla Kelley (1853–1932) — families rooted in Civil War-era Missouri and Iowa.

Then the rains stopped.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was one of the worst ecological and human disasters in American history. Unsustainable farming had stripped the Eastern Plains of their topsoil, and when the drought came — year after year through the 1930s — the soil blew away. Black blizzards darkened the sky. Crops failed completely. Families who had farmed the same land for decades lost everything.

Then Jesse died. In 1932, at age 47, Jesse William Clarence Scott was gone — buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Deer Trail. Hugh was only eight. His brother Willard was eleven. Their mother Della was left with the younger children on land that was turning to dust. The Great Depression had collapsed wheat prices and closed banks. Deer Trail never fully recovered.

The Road West — Colorado to Oregon

Like hundreds of thousands of families, the Scotts moved. But not straight to Oregon. The 1940 Census places Della and her younger children — including Willard (19) and Hugh (16) — in the Northfork Election Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho, deep in the Idaho panhandle near Priest River. They had traded the Colorado dust for the Idaho forests. Hugh registered for the draft on June 30, 1942 at Priest River, Idaho — he was eighteen. His brother Willard was already in the service. Within a year, both Scott brothers were in the war.

Part Two: Ada — From the Alps to the Coal Mines

While Scotty was growing up on the Colorado plains, Ada Chiaretta was growing up in a completely different world: the Italian immigrant coal mining community of Price, Utah — one of the most ethnically diverse small cities in the American West.

Ada was born on January 13, 1924 in Price, Utah, the daughter of Henry S. Chiaretta and Catherine Allotto. Her mother Catherine was born January 3, 1900 in Bruzolo — a village in the Susa Valley of Piedmont, northern Italy, at the foot of the Alps.

Bruzolo, Susa Valley, Piedmont — Where Catherine Came From

Bruzolo sits in the Valle di Susa — the Susa Valley — in the region of Piemonte, northwestern Italy, in what is now the Metropolitan City of Turin. The valley runs through the Alps and for centuries was one of the primary crossing points between France and Italy. Medieval pilgrims walked through it on the way to Rome. In the late 19th and early 20th century, its young workers left through it heading for a new world.

Many ended up in the coal mines of Carbon County, Utah, recruited by labor agents who sought Piedmontese workers for the dangerous underground work at Castle Gate, Sunnyside, and Clear Creek. By 1908, there were a thousand Italians in Carbon County alone — more than any other Utah county.

Price, Utah — Utah’s Ellis Island

Carbon County was called Utah’s Ellis Island. Thirty-two nationalities lived there. The Italian miners came to company towns, were paid in scrip instead of cash, faced discrimination and dangerous conditions, and organized some of Utah’s first major labor strikes. The 1903 Carbon County coal miners’ strike — led largely by Italian workers — was one of the most significant labor actions in Utah history.

Ada grew up in this world: Italian Catholic families in a predominantly Mormon state, coal dust and accordions, Catholic mass at Notre Dame Parish in Price, the rhythms of a community that had traveled 6,000 miles from the Alps to dig coal in the Utah desert.

In March 1924 — the same year Ada was born — a mine explosion at Castle Gate, just miles from Price, killed 172 men. Twenty-two were Italian. That was the world she was born into.

Part Three: The Turret Gunner and the Riveter

Willard Wayne Scott — Hugh’s older brother, born November 26, 1921 in Deer Trail — became a turret gunner on an American bomber during the war. A turret gunner sat in a glass-and-metal bubble on the fuselage of a B-17 or B-24, manning twin .50-caliber machine guns while enemy fighters attacked from every direction. It was one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire military. The average life expectancy of an Eighth Air Force bomber crew member was fifteen missions.

Willard came home. But the war marked him. He married Pearl Mary Dorn on May 30, 1945 in Las Vegas. He settled in California. On April 29, 1959, in Covina, California, Willard Wayne Scott died at age 37. He was buried in Glendale. Whatever the war did to him, he did not get to grow old.

Ada Builds the Bombers

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, women went to work building the machines that would win it. They became known as ‘Rosie the Riveter’ — the symbol of American women on the wartime factory floor.

Ada Chiaretta was one of them.

And she was not alone in serving. Her brother Guido Chiaretta enlisted and fought in World War II — and then went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam, one of the rare Americans who fought in three wars. Her brother Jack also served in the U.S. Army during WWII and was stationed in the Philippines. The Chiaretta family — children of an Italian immigrant from Bruzolo and a farmer from Miller Creek — sent three of their own into the war effort: two brothers to fight, and a sister to build the planes.

Ada traveled to San Diego, California, where she assembled B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators — the two great heavy bombers of the Allied air campaign. The B-17 dropped more bombs than any other aircraft in the war. The B-24 had the longest range of any bomber then flying. Together they carried the war to Germany and the Pacific.

Ada Chiaretta, daughter of an Italian immigrant from the Susa Valley Alps, put her hands on those machines. She worked the rivets, fitted the panels, helped build the weapons that helped win the war.

Part Four: Portland, Oregon — June 14, 1943

How Hugh and Ada each found themselves in Portland in the spring of 1943 is a story that took a few accidents — one of them literally.

Hugh had followed his family north into the Idaho panhandle and taken work in the timber camps. On his very first day logging, he cut off half a finger. The injury sent him south to Portland to recover at the home of a caring sister — which is how a farm boy from Colorado ended up in exactly the right city at exactly the right moment.

Ada had come to Portland for her own reason: her brother Ramo lived there. As it happened, Ramo Chiaretta knew a certain Hugh Scott from work — the logging and mill circuit around Portland connected men from all corners of the Northwest — and he made the introduction.

But according to your wife Janet, who heard this story from Ada herself, the real spark may have come before any formal introduction. Ada had spotted Hugh in a restaurant — laughing and carrying on with a couple of girls, full of life and fun — and made up her mind on the spot that she had to meet that man. Whether the introduction from Ramo was Ada’s idea or his, it hardly mattered. Ada was the kind of woman — strong-willed, sharp, entirely sure of herself — who was going to get what she decided she wanted.

What we know for certain is this: on June 14, 1943, in Portland, Oregon, Hugh Vernon Scott and Ada Chiaretta were married. He was nineteen. She was nineteen.

They stayed together for sixty years. They raised four children, saw eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren born, and built a life in Utah. Scotty worked thirty years at Fogle Red-E-Mix. Every Wednesday, the whole family gathered for cards. Everyone who knew him said the same thing: he was fun-loving, generous, and a good friend to all.

In June 2003, Hugh and Ada celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. Eight months later, on February 8, 2004, Scotty died after a valiant fight with cancer. He was eighty years old. Ada lived another fourteen years, dying on April 21, 2018, at the age of ninety-four. They are buried together in the American Fork Cemetery.

Janet Kathern Scott Johnston — 1951

Janet Kathern Scott was born in 1951, the fourth of Ada and Scotty’s children. She grew up in the world her parents had built — shaped by dust and coal dust and wartime and sixty years of love.

She married Jerry Blackett Johnston. Through that marriage, the stories of both families — the Johnston pioneers of Scotland and the Carolinas, and the Scott-Chiaretta immigrants of Colorado and Italy — became one family’s inheritance.

This document is your son Scott’s gift to you, Jerry. It is an act of love for both the Johnston line and the Scott-Chiaretta line — the two families that made him.

Next: Chapter Ten — Notes for Further Research →