Cheryl "Gaye" Scheffel

Gaye has gone by many names. I knew her as Gaye Shafer. Her mother had initially named her Cheryl, pronounced with a hard ch, like in the word church, after a little Indian girl. Since people reading her name would never get the pronunciation correct, always calling her Sheryl, she started going by her middle name, Gaye, to eliminate the confusion.

If you are interested in tracing Gaye Shafer’s ancestral line, you will not find her anywhere in the Shafer family tree. I didn’t find this out until we were applying for our marriage license. It was then I discovered I was the victim of probably the greatest “bait and switch” deal of all time. I wasn’t marrying a Shafer, I was marrying a Johnson! That revelation didn’t deter me, however, as I was marrying a particular young woman, not a name.

Gaye was the creation of two very young people: John Homer Johnson and Lois Rosada Foy. It is said that Homer did not even spend the wedding night with his bride, as he had caught the first bus out of town on their wedding day to join the Army. Homer and Lois’ marriage was short lived, and Lois married John Henry Shafer several years later.

About those early days: The Johnsons, Homer’s parents, offered to send Lois to some sort of business school in return for baby Gaye. But, “the mother did not want to give up her child,” and so Gaye was able to grow up with her loving mom, Lois.

After Lois’ marriage to John Henry Shafer, Cheryl Johnson became Gaye Shafer and identified herself with the Shafers of Moab fame: The Shafer Trail in the Canyonlands National Park and Shafer Lane, a street in Moab.

At the time of Gaye’s birth (1944), Moab was a small farming community. In the early 1950’s, the movie industry was actively filming movies in the area. And in 1952, after the nearby discovery of high-grade uranium by Charlie Steen, Moab became a bustling mining town. In the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the mining boom days dwindled and Moab turned to tourism to sustain the community.

During the small farming community days, Gaye’s step-father, John Henry, was a farmer. Gaye lived in a little two-room adobe house which is still in use, but has been added onto. (We never went to Moab without visiting this adobe house.)

In 1950, John Ford filmed the John Wayne movie “Rio Grande” near Moab, featuring none other than six-year-old Gaye Shafer, her Aunt Francis, and her Uncle Harold who was dressed up to look like Maureen O’Hara for a dangerous covered wagon scene.

During the mining boom days, John Henry operated a haul truck, hauling uranium ore from the mines to the mill in Moab. In those days, the Shafers drove around Moab in a “pink Cadillac.” They could cram as many as 14 kids at a time in that caddy.

In 1962, Gaye was a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune. While attending the Girl Scout Senior Roundup in Vermont, she wrote daily articles for the paper to keep the citizens of Utah informed of their activities.

I like to look back on my life from time to time to see how the “Hand of God” has been at work. Outside of knowing Jesus, Gaye has been my greatest blessing. How we ever met had to be divine providence: We met at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City my sophomore year. Gaye was a freshman, valedictorian of her high school class. She came from Moab, to the south. I came from Soda Springs, to the north. Essentially, we “met in the middle,” which I think is a very good description of our married life.

While dating Gaye, I quickly found out that she possessed a high moral character, and she had a good sense of humor; I liked hearing her laugh. Primarily because of her moral character, I told my roommate at the time, “This is the person I want to take care of for the rest of my life.” (Sometime in my upbringing, I had learned that if you are going to get something, get something good and take care of it. With proper attention, it could last a very long time.) We were married 57 years.

The following year, I proposed marriage while eating at a favorite and famous little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant in Salt Lake City called the Cinegrill. We were engaged for about 4 years. (Gaye started her college education a year after I enrolled and graduated about a year ahead of me with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology.) The long engagement was the result of my wanting to graduate and be gainfully employed before getting married. Gaye was patient and waited for me.

As a young married couple, we were not without problems. Our marriage got off to a rocky start when she started cooking our meals. (Her ability to cook was a skill I had not considered before proposing marriage. However, looking back on that deficiency, I am thankful I did not consider it, as it might have been a possible deal breaker; like the time she flipped a flaming marshmallow off her stick and onto the inside of my bare thigh at a campfire party. Another six inches higher and that, surely, would have been a deal breaker!)

I made the comment one time about her cooking: “That is not how my mother does it.” Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say, as that particular comment started the ball rolling. Initially, I was banished from the kitchen; then we began getting on each other’s nerves. It got so bad that I suggested, or maybe she told me, that she was leaving to spend some time with her mother in Moab until I got my act together … or was she supposed to get her act together?

It wasn’t too many months after Gaye returned from Moab that she informed me we were going to become parents. And so we began our family.

Thirty or so years later, Gaye did finally let me back into the kitchen. Almost all of my favorite recipes are those that Gaye found and prepared for our family over the years. She even improved some of my cooking skills.

Gaye was a Proverbs 31 type of woman, a Woman Who Fears The Lord. She was an almost perfect reflection of Jesus in her everyday life. She grew up in the Baptist church in Moab, UT, and taught Sunday school and VBS in Presbyterian churches at various other locations after our marriage. She read and studied the Bible at home and liked going to various Bible studies. I think one of her favorite studies was Susie Watkin’s series on the “Women of the Old Testament.”

Gaye was always quoting Bible verses to me. She was a prayer warrior and had a long prayer list. I was somewhere near the top of that list. Her prayers for me were probably something like this: “Please Lord, watch over my husband, Tom. Make him into a kinder, gentler, person. Amen.”

I don’t wear a wedding ring; never wanted one. It was a safety concern of mine. I heard too many stories about people getting their rings smashed on their fingers. My father once pointed out a man wearing a glove with the ring finger of his glove flopping about, empty. “That man jumped out of a stake bed truck and caught his ring finger on a bolt, pulled his finger right off.” That was all I needed to know about rings. Besides, I didn’t need a ring to remind me that I was married; I had a wife who was very good at that!

My profession as a mining engineer took us to small towns throughout the west, including towns in New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Washington. The largest town, Battle Mountain, had a population around 3000; the smallest, Round Mountain, was basically a ghost town; we lived in a triple wide trailer on the mine site. Gaye was happy and made many friends at all locations. As a reward for faithfully putting up with this kind of lifestyle, I asked her to pick where she wanted to live when I retired. She chose Boise for a couple of reasons: she wanted to be close to medical care, and our oldest son, Scot, lived there.

Other than our both being “firstborns,” we were about as opposite as could be: Gaye was an extrovert, I am an introvert; I am athletic, Gaye is not, however, she could dance and claimed that she was a very good swimmer. Gaye could sing; she often kindly inferred that I couldn’t. And she had some degree of musical talent as she had played the cymbals in high school; I have none.

In spite of our differences, Gaye often said we made a good team. We supported each other in child rearing, and I especially liked working alongside her during the canning season. She taught me all I know about canning. Most importantly she told me, “It’s a sin to reuse canning lids.” If that’s the case, I sinned many times.

Gaye was a stay-at-home mom, rearing our children in a godly fashion. Outside of money set aside from each paycheck for investing in our future, she set the budget and managed all the household finances to make sure we lived within our means.

Gaye was a socially active person and really liked living at Avista. She participated in practically all of the activities and liked to tap on a tambourine whenever musicians were performing. She liked all the caregivers, but she had a few favorites. Gaye loved all the residents and didn’t mind telling them so. She was always touching or pointing at various people as I wheeled her out of the dining area, mentioning something about them that she liked and telling them that she loved them.

How Gaye ended up staying at Avista Senior Living is another of God’s many blessings. Initially, she was turned away from Avista, but a reevaluation by Lori, the director at that time, reversed the initial decision. Avista is only a mile from our house, which made visitations very convenient for me. I was able to spend a great deal of time with her each and every day. She lived her final year of life at Avista, and we both enjoyed meeting a beautiful community of people there. We are grateful to God for the way He has provided for us, from the beginning of our life together until now.