BOISE, Idaho — Tillie Arnold was working at an Idaho mountain resort back in 1939 when she came across an adventurous writer named Ernest Hemingway, who was at the lodge's restaurant eating marinated herring and drinking a beer for breakfast.
"I burst out laughing and said, 'Mr. Hemingway, is that breakfast?' " Arnold wrote in her 1999 book, "The Idaho Hemingway." "He said, 'Yes, daughter. Have some. It's good for the kidneys.' "
The encounter at the Sun Valley Lodge was the springboard for a relationship that made Arnold part of Hemingway's tight-knit circle of friends -- a group that is remaining close even after death.
Arnold, who died in January at the age of 99, will be buried in a plot next to Hemingway's grave on Thursday -- July 21, the author's 106th birthday.
The body of Arnold's husband, another old Hemingway pal who died in 1970, has been dug up from an Iowa graveyard to be placed in the plot in Ketchum this week.
Historians and Hemingway buffs say the burial of Tillie and Lloyd Arnold helps complete the circle of friends Hemingway made during his two-decade relationship with Idaho, where the Nobel Prize-winning writer shot himself to death in 1961 after a career that produced such famous books as "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and the Sea."
Two former hunting guides are just a plot or two away, as is Chuck Atkinson, the Ketchum motel owner who was with Hemingway the day before he committed suicide. Six members of Hemingway's family, including two sons and his fourth wife, Mary, are also buried there.
Even a Hemingway scholar from the University of North Carolina, John Bittner, asked to be buried in the cemetery as close to "Papa's" grave as possible when he died in 2002.
"Hemingway inspired in his friends a fierce loyalty," said James Plath, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University who co-wrote the 1999 book "Remembering Ernest Hemingway." "He could be quite unpleasant to be around, but you'll never get any of that from his friends."
Hemingway first arrived in Sun Valley in 1939, just as he was splitting up with his second wife and finishing "For Whom The Bell Tolls," his novel of the Spanish Civil War.
He was a frequent visitor to Idaho for the next 20 years, making periodic trips to Sun Valley when he wasn't off fighting in World War II, bullfighting in Spain, going on African safaris or fishing in Key West, Fla.
