Rose Torphy has recently become the oldest junior ranger ever from Grand Canyon National Park. Rose is 103 and so, three years older than the park itself, that Tuesday a hundred candles might blow out. The American Rose has a strong link with our country: her parents emigrated more than a hundred years ago from Belgium to the US.
103 is Rose Torphy from Fox Lake in Illinois, and familiehoofd of five generations. She has three children, nine grandchildren, eighteen great-grandchildren, and ten achterachterkleinkinderen. Rose was in 1915 born in Superior, in the state of Wisconsin, but her parents were Belgians. As a child, she was already nature-lover. Every weekend she went with the family to another lake. Rose is also fond of bowling, traveling, and poker. She sounds every day with a glass of wine on her Ralph, with whom she was more than sixty years, was married, until his death in 1999. With Ralph, she travelled around the world. Also to our country, from where her parents came.
But the Grand Canyon is stretched out in between all of that traveling for her is clearly out. Rose was already in 1985, fell in love with the breathtaking Grand Canyon, when she and her husband, “there still could walk around”. “We have our children always told. I have always been told that they are in the park absolutely had to visit,” says Rose. However, she turned herself just in January of this year, in her wheelchair. She went together with her daughter Cheri Stoneburner on a visit to Cheri’s own daughter, who in the Grand Canyon National Park works. Just as in 1985, Rose a photo in the seat where president Theodore Roosevelt once sat. But the highlight came when she was in the gift shop heard about the junior ranger program, and she decided to take the oath. “A special occasion”, she said afterwards. “I enjoyed every minute.”
