Ride for the Band

Josephine (Dutton-Blakley) Koehn was born in White Cloud, KS in 1908. Josephine was orphaned as a young girl and raised by the John Shelton family. She married Edward B. Koehn in 1922 and moved back to his birthplace in Montezuma, Kansas. She was Grandma Koehn to 27 and “Aunt Josie” to many others. Grandma bore 12 children, 10 whom survived as toddlers and teenagers through the Great Depression and the World War II era on their Western Kansas Farm. In 1946, in the heart of the dust bowl, she lost her husband in a farm accident. She became the cornerstone of the family and the brand. She was devoted to the love of Jesus, all of her grandchildren can remember the hours of Bible stories.

They prayed on their knees with their elbows in their chairs every evening in her small house with no television, no radio, and very little contact with the outside world. Grandma has a special place in her heart for Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch and visited several times with her grandchildren. Rugged individualism, agriculture, a touch of the western lifestyle, and taking full responsibility for one’s self were all consistent themes in her life. These were all bred into the fiber of the Koehn family because of the influence form this strong, durable woman. The poem “Footprints in the Sand” and the song “My Jesus Has Broad Shoulders” define her life and way of coping with the hard reality of those times.