If you’ve lived in Bend for a long time, you probably remember Owl Taxi. And if you remember Owl Taxi, you most likely know Shirley Kilpatrick.

The 92-year-old Kilpatrick is as Bend as Bend gets, which made her a logical choice to be the Deschutes Pioneer Queen of 2022, an honor bestowed by the Deschutes Pioneer Association in Central Oregon. The first queen was coronated in 1949, the year Kilpatrick graduated from Bend High School, a fact she finds amusing because she never expected the queen would one day be her.

”It hasn’t really sunk in yet,” Kilpatrick said of her coronation as she sat on her sunny patio at her NW First Street home in Bend.

Next to her on the patio table sat her tiara, wrapped in a shower cap to keep it clean and safe.

”I just can’t believe anybody would choose me over all of these other women,” she said.

Kilpatrick’s family members are truly pioneers of Central Oregon in the sense they first came to Oregon, settling in the Willamette Valley as homesteaders, from North Dakota around the turn of the 20th century. The family eventually moved to Central Oregon, settling in Fort Rock, before planting their roots in Bend.

Kilpatrick was born in Terrebonne in 1930, but grew up in Bend. An avid bowler, a popular neighborhood hairdresser, and an expert at driving a taxi cab in inclement weather, Kilpatrick witnessed first hand over the decades how Bend went from a small, rural agricultural community to what it is today.

As the family lore goes, her family moved to Central Oregon because Kilpatrick’s grandmother was told by her doctor she needed to move to a drier climate. At the time, Kilpatrick’s father was 8, and the family went east across the Cascades, where they eventually settled and grew wheat in Fort Rock.

“So, they came with their 20 mule team and their covered wagons,” Kilpatrick said. “And I had an aunt that was 18 years old at the time … and the ‘wind blew’, she said, and ‘the wind blew, and the wind blew,’ it never quit blowing,” Kilpatrick said.

Eventually, the family either sold or gave away the farmstead in Fort Rock and moved to Terrebonne, where Kilpatrick was born. Soon after, the family would move to Bend.

Most of her vivid childhood memories are from life on her family’s ranch on 350 acres of land on Deschutes Market Road in Bend. She recalled frequently missing the bus to school because she was too busy with her ranch chores and then having to walk miles to school, sometimes in knee-deep snow.

“There was usually someone going with a load of hay or something we could ride on,” she said. “Or a bus, there was a bus. But if we didn’t get down to the highway… if we didn’t get there when the bus got there, they didn’t wait.”

The first Deschutes Pioneer Queen, according to Kelly Cannon-Miller, the executive director at the Deschutes County Historical Society, was Eva Todd Bennett, the daughter of John Y. Todd, who as the story goes, purchased Farewell Bend Ranch and two saddle horses for $60 before Bend was Bend.

Flashing forward to 1962, Kilpatrick was married to her late husband, Melvin John Kilpatrick, and the couple owned Owl Taxi. The Kilpatrick’s owned and operated Owl Taxi until 1980. Kilpatrick started off as a dispatcher before driving the taxi, a job she held for nearly 20 years.

During her taxi driving years, she helped run a motel in addition to maintaining the family’s household and raising her three children, who were teenagers when she began driving. At one point, she was also the neighborhood hairdresser, and all the women up and down the street would come to Kilpatrick to get their hair done. Eventually she stopped doing hair because word was getting out and the professional beauticians in town were not pleased.

At her job driving the cab, Kilpatrick would drive people from Bend to Redmond, Klamath Falls, Silver Lake and anywhere else anybody needed to go.

”We were the only taxi in town,” Kilpatrick said.

Many of her passengers were intoxicated men catching a ride home from the bars on Bond Street.

”They’d scoot over and put their hand on my leg, and I’d say, ‘kind sir, I know you don’t mean to do that,’ because I said, ‘I am very happily married and I don’t fool around and I know that you are a perfect gentleman,” she said. “And boy, they’d scoot over on their own side and they’d never try anything like that again.”

One time, she was driving some skiers around town in the winter when the streets were icy. Kilpatrick was coming down S. Third Street, and around a sharp corner, and wound up giving the skiers a bit more entertainment than they had expected.

Kilpatrick said when she turned the cab down the road, it slid across the ice. After sliding across the street, thinking on her feet, and as to not alarm her passengers, she turned to the skiers and asked, “well, how did you like that?”

The skiers who seemed to be rather amused replied, “Oh boy! Do it again!”

As the Deschutes Pioneer Queen she will be participating in a number of parades in Central Oregon this year. Those parades include the Sisters parade, and the Christmas, Fourth of July and Veterans Day parades in Bend.