Leithauser is Rodeo Grand Marshal

She was at the first Sisters Rodeo parade in 1941 and next June she will be honored as grand marshal for the 65th Sisters Rodeo parade.

Edith Leithauser, 86, will ride at the head of the rodeo parade on June 11 probably still in a state of shock that the Sisters Rodeo Association has named her grand marshal.

“When Bonnie Malone called me with the news, I couldn’t believe it,” Edith said. “I never ever thought I would be asked. I didn’t know what to say except ‘Can I call my children and tell them?’”

Edith is the only surviving spouse of the original seven-member board of directors that funded the first rodeo in 1941 and organized the association several years later. Her late husband, Pete Leithauser, was one of seven that held that first rodeo in a little meadow just east of the present-day Sisters Airport a short distance from where Edith lives today.

“Two years later, the rodeo moved over to where Hoyt’s Hardware is now,” Edith said. “Three of us, Virginia Campbell and Virginia Wakefield and I painted numbers on the wooden bleachers and counted the money for tickets sold only at the gate.”

Edith’s husband, Pete, was parade grand marshal in 1985.

“When we drove out into the rodeo arena that year in a Model A, it was raining hard,” Edith said. “We almost got stuck in the muddy arena.”

“We did have a parade that first year,” Edith said. “Our first son was 15 months old and too young to pedal his pedal car. We put him in some striped bib overalls and Pete pulled him in the parade with a rope.”

The Leithauser family has been in Sisters for almost a century. Her husband’s grandfather moved here from British Columbia in 1911 and constructed a building where the Sisters Drug Company now stands. He operated a barbershop and lived at the back of the store.

Later his son, Frank, moved here to operate a store and post office at Camp Sherman before taking over his father’s grocery store at the Sisters location.

Edith was born in Boring, Oregon, east of Portland. She married Frank’s son, Pete, in 1938 and lived in Sisters and Portland before returning to Sisters to stay in 1941. At that time, they purchased the grocery store from his father and operated it for 36 years.

“We worked like two dirty dogs and made a go of it,” she said.

They raised their five children in Sisters; four are still living. They lived at the back of the store, but when the store was enlarged, they moved part of the building to where the post office now stands. The house was moved again when the Leithausers built the building that she still leases to the postal service. Pete retired in 1977 and the Leithausers moved to their new home on Camp Polk Road where Edith lives today. Her husband died in 1990.