The building was dark, silent, empty. Paper cups and other debris littered the floor. It was as if the once busy transit hub had been forgotten, destined to spend the rest of its days as a relic of a gone era.

  The old Greyhound bus station at 1212 W. Bannock Street in downtown Boise was replaced some time ago by a new one closer to the Interstate. It didn’t seem all that long ago, though, that it was crowded and bustling. I happened by there one morning in February and, memory-smitten, stopped to peer through the windows.  

  So many memories. Two stood out, though. The first had to do with a memorable incident from my teens.

  I was a member of a rock group, and we were playing in a downtown ballroom one night when my then girlfriend asked if she could use my car.

  “My little sister has to be home by 11,” she said. “Can I borrow your car to give her a ride?”

  I gave her the keys and, without giving it another thought, went back to playing music. About half an hour later, a uniformed police officer approached the stage and beckoned to me. Not just any police officer, but Vern Bisterfeldt, a larger than life cop who patrolled our dances and went on to become a city councilman and county commissioner. 

  “Your girlfriend and her sister were in an accident in your car,” he said. “They’re at the bus station.”

  “The bus station? What are they doing there?”

  “That’s where the accident happened. Some guy broadsided them.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure. You’ll have to go over there to find out.”

  When we finished our last song, one of the band members gave me a ride to the station. My car, a Volkswagen Bug, was lying on the sidewalk in front of the station, upside down.

   The officer on the scene said the car that hit it was being driven by a man who was going way too fast. A witness claimed that upon impact my car had flown over the telephone wires before landing on the sidewalk.

  My girlfriend and her sister were thrown clear through the windshield, which had popped out. Miraculously, neither was seriously injured. The little sister needed a few stitches, but other than that they were both okay.

  I’m a firm believer in wearing seatbelts, but if they’d been wearing theirs that night the crash would have been a whole lot worse. The steering wheel had broken in half and gone through the driver’s seat. If the girls hadn’t been thrown clear, the driver almost certainly would have been killed. And her little sister probably would have needed a lot more than a few stitches. They were incredibly lucky.

  The car wasn’t. It was a total loss.

  The other bus-station memory that stands out was of taking the bus to North Idaho to join friends who wanted to start a band while attending the University of Idaho. I’d just gotten out of the Navy and hadn’t bought a car yet so the bus was the only way to get there.

  It left early in the morning so everything had to be ready to go the night before. My suitcase was packed and sitting beside my bed. My guitar was propped up against the suitcase.

  For a reason that remains a mystery, I got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning.

  Ever wonder where the expression “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” originated?

  Ancient Rome, actually. A superstitious lot, Romans believed that getting up on the wrong, or left, side of the bed would bring bad luck. That morning may have been the only time in my life that I got up on the left side of the bed. And sure enough, bad luck followed.

  It was still dark when I got up, walked smack into the guitar and fell down on top of it. In addition to some spirited cursing, the silence was broken by a sickening crack. The guitar was in a fabric gig bag rather than a hardshell case, and its neck snapped off.

  It was a gloomy lad whose folks drove him to the bus station that morning, sans guitar, for the long trip to Moscow (six hours by car, longer by bus).

  These and other memories crowded together as I peered through the windows of the old bus station, recalling what a vital place it used to be and thinking what a shame it was that it wasn’t being used.

  Fast forward a few weeks. Driving by on a recent evening, I noticed people inside, stopped and went to investigate. Workers were busy sweeping and otherwise cleaning up. Seeing me outside, a young man opened the door and let me in.

  He was Aidan Brezonick, founder of the Idaho Film Society. He said it had taken over the building and is using it as work spaces during the day and showing films in the evenings.

  “There’s one playing right now that you’re welcome to watch if you’re interested,” he said, gesturing toward a curtain with a sign identifying it as the entrance to the society’s theater. 

  The film was “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which I’d already seen so I thanked him just the same and left, feeling chipper. It was great knowing that the old building had become an active part of the community again.

  To learn more about the society and films showing at what is aptly named the Omnibus Theater, click on idahofilm.org.

                                                     ***

  My last column, about an online publication’s story on “the coolest buildings in every state,” asked readers for their thoughts on what the coolest buildings are in Idaho.

  The online publication, The Discoverer, gave the Statehouse as Idaho’s. I begged to differ and named some I thought deserving of the title – the Hoff Building, Teater’s Knoll, some depots and churches, etc. To those, readers added the following:

   Brian Bazenni suggested Boise’s Idanha Hotel and Nampa’s Smallwood House.

  Jack Hourcade is partial to the administration building at the old Idaho Pententiary, “made with sandstone mined just a few hundred yards away.”

  The most unusual building suggested:  Miner’s Hat Realty, in Kellogg. The roof of the building actually looks like a miner’s hat, complete with a headlamp. Thanks to Glenn McGeoch for that one.

  Ray Guindon likes the Sun Valley Lodge and the Coeur d’Alene Resort, Joanna Marshall the circular Boise Little Theater. 

  To all who sent suggestions, thanks.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 My late father was a building junkie. He was keenly interested in any new building of note that was going up in his adopted home of Boise, occasionally taking me with him to construction sites to watch the work being done.

  Some of his passion for building-watching rubbed off on me. I’ve been known to stop and ask questions of workers at construction sites and can’t drive the Connector into downtown Boise without multiple glances at the Arthur, the new high-rise being built at 12th and Idaho streets.

  So when an email from The Discoverer, an online travel publication, included a story about “the coolest buildings in every state,” I was eager to read every word, 

  Many of the states have buildings that in one way or another are decidedly cool:

  Colorado’s, for example. The Cadet Chapel at the Air Force Academy is so unusual and striking that it’s said to draw visitors from all over the world. It has 17 spires reminiscent of fighter jets and a frame made of 100 tetrahedrons. Tetrahedrons, for those who have no idea what they are (I didn’t), are triangular pyramids.

  Nevada is home to one of the most unusual buildings in the U.S. – the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. Patients seeing it for the first time could be forgiven for thinking their brains were misfiring. The building looks as if it’s imploding.

  Alaska’s coolest building is weirdly whimsical. Known as the Dr. Seuss House, it started out to be a two-story cabin, but the owners kept adding one story after another. Now it has 17 and looks like something out of, well, a Dr. Seuss book. Cool and then some.

  And Idaho’s coolest building, according to The Discoverer, is …

  The Statehouse?

  Granted, the Statehouse is imposing and historic. And it ranks fairly high architecturally among the state capitol buildings. That said, however, it’s but one of many that use the generic capitol style. 

  Impressive? Absolutely. 

  Cool? Not so much.

  So what buildings does Idaho have that could be considered cool? There have to be some, right?

  Well, yes. A few do come to mind.

  Teater’s Knoll, for example. One of only two Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in Idaho, it was built as a studio for late artist Archie Teater. Perched on a hillside near Hagerman, it’s made largely of Oakley Stone. The Idaho Architecture Project calls it “a premier example of organic architecture at its best, where the fundamental integration with nature blurs the meeting of building and nature.”

  One of the members of a group I have coffee with on Saturday mornings cast his vote for Teater’s Knoll. Another suggested the Cataldo Mission, in North Idaho.

  Built in the1850s by Catholic missionaries and members of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, the baroque style church is the state’s oldest building and the oldest surviving mission church in the Northwest. Interesting fact:  the wood of its interior got its color not from paint, but from huckleberries.

  Several Boise buildings are at least moderately cool:

  The Hoff Building, at Eighth and Bannock, was Idaho’s first “skyscraper,” though at just 12 stories plus a penthouse it may or may not have warranted the appellation. Originally the Hotel Boise, the art-deco style building now houses offices and, notably, a lovely   ballroom. 

  The Boise Depot, overlooking Capitol Boulevard, is both beautiful and historic. With its Spanish style architecture, red tile roof and illuminated, 96-foot bell tower, it’s one of the city’s most recognizable and distinctive structures. Harry Truman made a speech there from the back of his presidential train, the Ferdinand Magellan, during one of his 1948 “whistle-stop tours.”

  Nampa, Caldwell and several other Idaho cities also have interesting depots. 

  Wouldn’t it be nice if passenger trains actually stopped there?

  Not everyone will agree with this, but the JUMP building, on the Grove Plaza, arguably could be considered cool. Some people love it; some hate it. And who knows? Maybe the ability to inspire conflicting opinions is part of what makes a building cool.

  Churches come to mind. From Idaho’s larger cities such as Boise and Pocatello to towns as small as Paris and Silver City, the state has a plethora of distinctive places of worship.

  But I’m almost certainly overlooking some of our cool buildings.

  Can you think of any?

  If so, please email them to me at the address below. If there are enough suggestions, they’ll appear in a future column.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  If there’s one movie Idahoans can relate to through personal experience more than any other, it would have to be Clint Eastwood’s “Bronco Billy.”

  The movie was filmed in 1979 at more than 20 locations in Southwest Idaho – Lake Lowell, the Nampa and Boise train depots, the Meridian Speedway and Fort Boise Park to name a few. Hundreds of Idahoans watched it being filmed, were hired as extras for crowd scenes and in some cases had speaking parts.

  My wife and I and our then small daughters were among them. More on that later.

  For those who weren’t here then or never saw the movie, “Bronco Billy” told the story of a stuntman-star of a rundown traveling circus. Eastwood played the title role and directed the movie. He was quoted as saying that “if as a director I ever wanted to say something, you’ll find it in ‘Bronco Billy.’”

  Caldwell resident Sandy Kershner wrote a book about the making of “Bronco Billy.” “On the Trail of Bronco Billy” has gone through three editions, the third of which was published in 2016.

  It all started with a headstone. Kershner was doing some volunteer cleanup work in a cemetery when she came across a handmade headstone bearing the name “Art Yensen.” Yensen, who lived in Parma, was the Santa Claus at Nampa’s Karcher Mall for 22 Christmases.

  “I decided that he would be a good person for me to research,” she said. “I found out that he was an extra in “Paint Your Wagon” and “Bronco Billy” and that “Bronco Billy” had been filmed in a lot of places around here.

  “When I learned that, I got sidetracked and went crazy on it. So many people were so enthusiastic about the movie because they’d been in it and told me about Clint Eastwood and the filming. That’s what made me want to do the book.”

   Kershner is working on a new and expanded version of the book, titled “On the Trail of Bronco Billy II.”

  But she can’t finish it. She’s 77, is losing her vision and is looking for someone to take over the project.

  “My parents had the same problem, but not as bad as my sister and me,” she said. “We’re identical twins and are both losing our eyesight.

  “I’m looking for one or more people to finish the new book. It will be bigger with a lot more stories. It wouldn’t have to be a writer or an editor, just someone who loves the project and wanted to finish it. Someone like me. I’m not a real writer.”

   I was surprised to learn that the woman who has devoted so much time to doing books about “Bronco Billy” wasn’t there for the filming (her husband was in the Air Force and they were living in Japan at the time) when so many Idahoans watched it, were extras or had bit parts. 

  The Woodwards were in an indoor crowd scene, and at one point in the movie I can be seen running after one of my then small daughters in a carnival scene filmed at the Meridian Speedway.

  One of my newspaper assignments while the movie was being filmed was to spend a day shadowing Candy Loving, Playboy Magazine’s “25th Anniversary Playmate.” We were at a party that evening at what’s now the Riverside Hotel when Eastwood dropped in, surveyed the crowd and made a beeline for Loving, who, as you’d expect, was a knockout. He introduced himself, as if he needed an introduction, and the three of us had a brief conversation. Brief because it was interrupted by a photographer.

  “Hey, how about the three of you get in that bathtub and I’ll take your picture?” he said. 

  Three of us in a bathtub? He had to be kidding.

  He wasn’t.

  It was a large, heart-shaped bathtub in what, if memory serves, was the honeymoon suite. To my surprise, Eastwood and Loving obliged him by hopping into it (fully clothed). I joined them. If it was good enough for people as famous as they were, it was good enough for me.

  The photographer wasn’t one I recognized; nor have I seen him since. But I’d really like to have a copy of that picture. It isn’t every day, after all, that you get your picture taken in a bathtub with Clint Eastwood and a famous model. If the photographer reads this, I’d love it if he emailed me at the address that follows the end of this column,

  Loving, incidentally, could not have been nicer. She also was smart (she went on to earn a masters degree and work as an account executive in the health insurance industry), fun to talk to and didn’t suffer fools gladly. 

  “So you’re this year’s bunny?” a reporter at one of the television stations asked her.

  “We’re not bunnies,” she said. “We’re people.”

  She said that on television! I was in her corner from that moment on.

  Between Loving’s visit and Eastwood’s movie, it was an interesting time to be in the Treasure Valley. Kirshner’s new book, if she finds someone to help her with it, should provide a fresh perspective on the filming of a movie in which countless Idahoans participated.

  As mentioned above, you don’t have to be an editor or a writer to finish  what could be an interesting and entertaining book. If you’re interested, she’d like you to write to her. Her address is:  Sandy Kirshner, 18969 Upper Pleasant Ridge Road, Caldwell, ID 83607.  

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolulmn@gmail.com.

  Sometimes when we really need it, we get help from people we’ve never laid eyes on until we need them most.

  It happened to my wife and me many years ago in Davis, Calif. Our car had broken down on a Friday night at the beginning of a three-day holiday weekend so we had to wait until Tuesday to find someone who could fix it.

  We were young and had so little money in those days that our “hotel” during our vacation was a pup tent. We pitched it in a park, and to kill time waiting for Tuesday we played a lot of tennis. The temperature on the coolest of the three days was 107, and I got the worst sunburn of my life.

  We were sitting by the tent, commiserating, when they happened by – a couple, professors at the university in Davis. My sunburn stopped them in their tracks.

  “That’s a terrible burn you’ve got!” the woman said. “Do you have anything for it?”

   “No. Our car broke down and there aren’t any stores around here.”

  They mulled that over, wished us well and an hour later returned with an offer: 

  “We’ve been thinking about it. You can’t sleep here in the park, especially not with a sunburn like that. Why don’t you come to our house?”

  We were initially skeptical. We didn’t know these people in the least. They could have been a serial-killer tag team.

  They did seem awfully nice, though. They said their house had an entire wing that we could have to ourselves, and some sunburn ointment that bordered on being miraculous. That decided it. 

  They were as good as their word. Their sunburn ointment stopped the pain almost instantly, never to return. They fed us wonderful meals, trusted us in their house while they taught their classes. We spent two nights with them. A week later, home from our trip, we received a package with a note: 

  “You left these clothes at our house. We washed and ironed them for you.”

  Decades later, their kindness isn’t forgotten. It never will be 

  I’m revisiting that long-ago tale as an introduction to a similar kindness recently experienced by one of my granddaughters and her husband.

  Kelsie and her husband, Christian, were subjects of one of my columns last spring. If you read it, you may recall that they’re the couple who sold their Boise home, bought an old Air Force bus and spent months converting it to a “schoolie.” (Schoolies are buses converted to motor homes.) They did a smashing job on it. It’s so nice inside that I wanted to stow away and go with them when they left on their cross-country adventure. 

  They’ve been gone almost a year now and have been to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, worked as camp hosts in Wisconsin and Michigan, enjoyed live music and standup comedy in Austin, Texas. They’re currently in Quartzsite, AZ, where the year-round population of 3,400 swells to a quarter of a million or more as a mecca for snowbirds.

  It was there in the Arizona desert that the trusty schoolie that had taken them so many miles threw in the towel. 

  “We drove about two minutes to a spigot to fill our water tank, and when we finished the bus wouldn’t start,” Kelsie said. “It was turning over, but not starting.”

  Christian can fix or build just about anything, but the vagaries of old Air Force buses were outside his experience.

  “I went and got our neighbor Josh (Josh Barks, coincidentally a fellow Idahoan) because his setup is a semi-truck front with a custom flatbed and fifth wheel and a winch and crane,” Kelsie said. “… He towed us back to our spot.” 

  Quick, what’s the first thing you suspect when your car won’t start?

  The battery, of course. Or, if your vehicle is an old Air Force bus, three batteries. Christian replaced them with new ones, but the bus still wouldn’t start.

  By this time the ailing schoolie had attracted the sympathetic attention of neighbors. Mark Hillebrand, a mechanically inclined neighbor from Michigan, offered to help. He and Christian spent three days checking everything they could think of – every wire, every fuse, every sensor, everything but the kitchen sink and couldn’t pinpoint the problem.

   “I did some research and noticed that a prominent thing with these engines is a certain sensor that can be the problem,” Christian said. “If you can unplug it and the engine starts, that could be what’s wrong.”

  Finding the plug was about as easy as finding ice water in the Arizona desert. 

  Enter “Diesel Dave” Atherton. A mechanic Christian found on Instagram recommended Atherton, a retired mechanic familiar with the type of engines used in the schoolie. With his help, Christian, Kelsie and Mark were able to find  the plug. Christian installed a new sensor, and the engine sprang to life.

  Altogether, it had taken five people and more than a week.

  Kelsie and Christian are in another part of Arizona now, having bid farewell to their Quartzsite neighbors. But they’ll remember them and their acts of kindness for their rest of their lives. 

  We’re forever hearing about bad people doing bad things. They’re so often in the news that we tend to forget about good people – who greatly outnumber them – and who, asking for nothing in return, share their time and knowledge with complete strangers in times of need,  

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

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  Everyone loves a puppy, but they tend to come with some bad habits –  crying, excessive barking, jumping up on people …

  The new puppy at the Woodwards’ house doesn’t have any of those habits, but she does have one that’s truly annoying, to say nothing of expensive.

  She reminds me of something a friend of mine did in high school to try to get out of writing an essay for English class. When it was time to read his essay to the class, he stood and announced that his essay was about his dog. This was a bit unexpected, as he didn’t have a dog.

  “My dog chews everything,” he read. “He chews bones, sticks, slippers. He chews …”

  At this point he held up the “essay” he was reading to show that most of it had been chewed to oblivion. The students thought it was hilarious. Our elderly, no-nonsense teacher, Miss Woesner, did not see the humor. She gave him a withering look, and an F on his assignment.

  He could have been writing about Jojo, the aforementioned puppy. Jojo is a good dog. She’s smart, affectionate and gets along well with both people and other dogs. But she chews everything. She’s a chewing machine. We’ve had a lot of dogs over the years, and none has come close to her when it comes to chewing everything she can get her paws on.

  It’s not as if we haven’t given her things that are okay for her to chew. We’ve bought her chew toys made of rubber or nylon. She chews on them constantly.

  Until she finds something more interesting to chew.

  My reading glasses, for example. Left where she can get them – and few places seem to be beyond her reach – she has the arms of my glasses looking like pipe cleaners in seconds.

  At least she doesn’t discriminate, though. She chews on my wife’s reading glasses, too.

  One of my favorite things in our back yard is an ornamental grass plant. It’s several feet tall, with green stalks culminating in feathery plumes. It was, that is, until Jojo discovered it. Now it looks like 

Guy Fieri on a bad hair day.

  She almost chewed up the latest Idaho Public Television Channels guide. If I hadn’t gotten it away from her in the nick of time, it would have looked like confetti.

  We find confetti in virtually every room. She chews tissues, newspapers, paper napkins, book markers, the instructions that come with medical prescriptions, the box for an expensive Christmas ornament, a package of Lik-M-Aid left in a bedroom by our nine-year-old grandson. This had the added benefit of staining part of a white bedspread blue.

  While I was writing this, she snuck behind a lounge chair, found a  charger the grandson had left for his favorite game and in less time than it took to yell “Jojo, don’t even think about it,” she’d chewed its cord in half.

  We worry that she’ll chew her way into a lamp cord or appliance cord and get a nasty shock. Not that that would stop her from chewing. A 7.0 earthquake wouldn’t stop her from chewing. 

  She chewed the plastic lid on a jar to the point that it was all but unrecognizable as a lid. Actually, I rather like it. It looks like abstract art. Picasso would have loved it. 

  She chewed up a ballpoint pen. How she avoided getting ink on herself, or, worse, the carpet, is a mystery. 

  She pulverized a set of toy wooden blocks. How she finds some of the things she chews is another mystery. We hadn’t seen those blocks in years. How or where she got them is anyone’s guess, but she’s spooky smart. The only thing that comes to mind, improbable though it may be, is that she found a way to pull down the attic ladder, climb up and help herself to the contents of an old toy box.

  We have to be careful not to leave things within her reach that could splinter when chewed and injure her if she swallowed the splinters. Popsicle sticks, one of her favorite victims, could be deadly.

   Our older daughter, who owns Jojo but has us dog-sit her while she’s working 12- and 24-hour shifts on her job, bought her a supposedly safe deer-antler chew. She loves it.

  But not as much as she loves paper, cardboard, pens and pencils, the television remote …

  Why, you may be asking, have we failed to keep those things out of her reach. We’ve tried, and to an extent succeeded. But she finds things in the least likely places. She crawls behind lounge chairs, squeezes into the cramped spaces behind couches, and comes up with things we forgot we ever had.

  Things you’d think would be out of her reach aren’t. Her jumping ability is extraordinary for a small dog. She’s the Michael Jordan of canines. She once jumped from a standing start over the back of a couch and landed on the other side, where our astonished daughter was napping and almost came out of her skin. 

  A few days ago, the mail brought a pitch for a publication called Whole Dog Journal. Its purported benefits include, among other things, “five easy ways to prevent your dog from chewing.”

  Our check’s in the mail.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

When we think of artists, we tend to think of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, O’Keeffe, Picasso … Fine artists.

  There’s another kind of art, however, done by artists who aren’t famous, but their work is ubiquitous. We see it every day, on everything from billboards to cereal boxes.

  Commercial art is used primarily for advertising. It appears in newspapers and magazines, on packages, websites, television, you name it, to promote services and products.

  Idaho, and Boise in particular, has been home to many commercial artists. Last month I received a news release about one of them, Roscoe “Duke” Reading.

  Reading died in 1990. The release was from his daughter, Kathleen Haws, who is working to make sure her late father’s artwork isn’t forgotten.

  “When people ask me why I want to make my father’s artwork available after so many years, I reply that it’s too good not to share,” she said. “Mid-century commercial art was produced from the skilled hands of the artists without any technology. Just a keen eye, a steady hand and a great sense of what makes great art.”

  Mid 20th Century commercial art, she said, “was all done by hand, well before computers. It was design-oriented, very clean and used certain styles in the actual lettering. It was very stylized. You can almost tell when you look at it whether it’s mid-century or not.”

  Boise in the 1950s was home to a profusion of commercial artists. Haws’s “keen eye and steady hand” comment could have been about my late friend John Collias. John did commercial art and was a fine artist as well. He drew and painted everything from portraits to pool halls.

  He and Reading were roughly contemporaries, working in Boise doing somewhat similar kinds of work. Both were drafted during World War II and worked as artists for the army. But while Collias leaned more toward fine art, Reading concentrated on commercial art with a fine touch. A painting he did for the 1963 Idaho Centennial of a syringa, the state flower, is an example of how good he was.

  For both longtime Idanoans and newcomers, his work constitutes a mini-history lesson. His range was impressive, and, as his daughter put it, his work is “tied into Boise history, and to a smaller extent, Idaho history.”

  He did artwork for billboards, Christmas cards, murals, movie advertisements, portraits of athletes and politicians, and, notably, the original design used for a 33-foot tall “Last Chance Joe” statue now at a museum in Sparks, Nev. 

  The statue began as a drawing Reading did for the Last Chance Cafe in Garden City. If you’re a newcomer, you may not know that Garden City use to have legalized gambling. When it was outlawed in the 1950s, its owner moved to Nevada, where Last Chance Joe became an icon at Nugget casinos. The statue stood outside the Nugget in Sparks for half a century before being moved to a museum.

  “If you’re in Sparks, Last Chance Joe is kind of your guide,” Haws said. “You can see him from the freeway. The statue is the only thing in town that’s that tall.”

  Though the artist behind it wasn’t well known to the public, Reading’s work was. Three of his paintings graced the Royal Restaurant, once the place to dine in Boise. Those paintings are now in the Owhyee County Historical Society Museum in Murphy.

  His drawings of movie stars adorned the Egyptian and Pinney theaters. (The Pinney, arguably the nicest theater in town, was torn down in 1969. In its place is a parking lot that exists to this day at Eighth and Jefferson streets.)

   His work appeared on posters at the Western Idaho Fair and the outfield signs at Braves Field, the minor league baseball park that once stood on what is now the site of the Idaho Fish and Game Department’s headquarters in East Boise. You almost couldn’t get through a day without seeing his work somewhere.

  None of his work was ever signed. It would be all but forgotten if not for Haws’s efforts to keep that from happening. She’s created a website to make it available to view or purchase. The site is https://www.midcenturyartbyduke.com/.

  “It’s not about keeping his memory alive,” she said. “His memory is alive and well with his family. It’s about what he created. He represents the wonderful commercial artists of his time.”

                                                 ***

  A recent column told the story behind lost-dog fliers – hundreds of them – that have been posted in East Boise, the BSU area and along the Greenbelt.

  Daisy is a beautiful white Husky mix, belonging to Steven Moore and Kristi Bronkema. I’m sorry to report that Daisy, who has been missing since Thanksgiving, still hasn’t been found. Her owners are offering a $1,000 reward for her return. Her picture is on the fliers. If you’ve seen her or know where she is, please call them at 916 534-0774 or contact the Idaho Humane Society.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  Good morning, and Merry Christmas Eve Day to you.

  Christmas Eve is the main event of Christmas at our house, much more so than Christmas morning.

  My wife is busy preparing goodies days in advance – cookies, pie, homemade fudge … The entire clan gathers in the living room to open gifts. It’s a tradition that began with her family when she was growing up. Christmas Eve was the big deal for them, too. Christmas Day was an afterthought. 

  The Christmas Eve gift opening at our house reminds me of Christmas morning at the Parker household in the movie “A Christmas Story.” Ribbons and wrappers flying, squeals and peals of laughter … chaos.

  Christmas, of course, isn’t just about gifts. More on that later.

  Selecting and purchasing Christmas gifts, as anyone who has done it is well aware, can be challenging, expensive, stressful. One year I was still roaming store aisles searching for gifts on Christmas Eve itself. You only do that once before vowing never, ever to do it again.

  With all that goes into buying and receiving gifts, it’s surprising that we may not remember some or any of the gifts we received the preceding Christmas. Do you remember what you got for Christmas last year? I don’t remember a single gift. Neither does my wife.

  Only one gift through all the years stands out, a gift remembered for life.

  I was a teenager at the time, smitten by rock and roll and saving up for my first good guitar. It was a slow process for a kid making a dollar an hour working summers on the end of a shovel. 

  My father and an uncle were partners in a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. Dad figured that a job with the company would teach me the value of hard work. (It’s also possible that he couldn’t find anyone else willing to work that hard for a buck an hour.)

  I saved virtually every dollar made on that job, but when Christmas came around I was still $150 short of having enough for the guitar. My parents surprised me by making up the difference and giving it to me for Christmas. I sat and stared at it for a long time without taking it out of the case. It was almost too beautiful to touch. To this day, it remains the only Christmas gift I still remember.

  So maybe the gifts we stress over aren’t all that important. 

  More than any of the gifts I’ve received, a Christmas experience still stands out many years later. It was a Christmas Eve so vividly remembered that it’s as if it happened last year rather than decades ago. I’d have been eight or nine at the time.

  As Christmas Eves go, it was almost perfect. My great grandmother had come to stay with us for one of her extended visits, and the house was filled with the aroma of her baking. Dad was busy in the kitchen, making a batch of his signature Tom and Jerrys. Lights glittered on the tree, a fire crackled in the fireplace and George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy,” still my favorite Christmas album, played softly on the stereo.

 The only thing missing was snow.

  That December, much like this December, had been unusually dry. Hardly any snow at all. Dreams of a white Christmas appeared to be that and only that – dreams.

  Until Christmas Eve. No snow had fallen that day or most of the evening. We had a tradition in our family of opening one gift on Christmas Eve, the others on Christmas morning. We’d had dinner, opened our gifts, and still no snow. Then, a little before bedtime, I looked out the dining room window and couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Snow was coming down so hard it was if it were making up for lost time the rest of the month. I stood and watched, wonder-struck, as it fell in the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlight on our corner.

 The flakes looked to be as big as quarters. Instead of diminishing, as snowstorms often do in the valley, this one intensified. Snowflakes fell, and fell, and fell. Lawns disappeared, streets glistened; curbs and sidewalks, even cars were buried. It happened quickly, a no-nonsense storm, and it was a thing of transcendent  beauty.

  The snow was still falling at bedtime, promising snowballs and snow forts on Christmas day. 

   I’ll never forget the feeling of watching a perfectly timed and extraordinarily beautiful snowstorm on that Christmas Eve. It was special enough to be remembered for a lifetime. All these years later, when countless gifts have been forgotten, I’m still grateful for having experienced it.

  It isn’t the shopping or the gifts or the goodies that embody the spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is something deeper, something that gives us, for a brief but magical time, the feeling that cares and conflicts are on hold and all is well with the world.

  My wish to you is that you’ve known or will know the sort of wonder I felt on that long-ago Christmas Eve. That was a gift to be  remembered.

  Merry Christmas.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  I know; I promised not to do any more columns about dogs for a while.

  That was before I saw the fliers.

  Perhaps you’ve seen them – some 200 of them, all over East Boise, the BSU campus, the Greenbelt …

  “Lost dog. She is our best friend. Please help us.”

  I have a good idea of how the people who wrote that feel. Two of my recent columns were about our family’s dog, who died in September. We were crazy about her, and it’s obvious from reading the fliers that the owners of the lost dog feel the same way about her.

  The dog’s name is Daisy, and her owners are offering a $1,000 reward for her return. There may have been larger rewards for lost pets, but if so I’ve never seen one. Clearly these people love their dog. And, as a fellow dog lover, I wanted to meet them. 

  Their names are Steven Moore and Kristi Bronkema. Daisy went missing  from their East Boise home the day before Thanksgiving. They were careful to keep the back yard gate shut, but on the fateful day a service technician left it open. Steven and Kristi didn’t know that when they let Daisy out of the house the next morning.

  “We let her out to go potty,” Steven said. “Kristi was on a conference call so it was a while before she went out to the back yard to let her in. She called her name and she didn’t come.”

  “I freaked out,” Kristi said. “I started calling her name frantically. I was afraid she’d get hit by a car. I went next door and asked the people there if they’d seen her, then got in the car and drove the street.”

  Almost immediately, an alert neighbor posted a picture of Daisy on a neighborhood website and asked “whose beautiful dog is this? She’s really friendly.”

  “I went to her house right away,” Kristi said. “Unfortunately she didn’t bring Daisy in. She said later that she was so sorry she didn’t do that.”

  “But we’re not blaming anybody,” Steven added.

  Daisy wasn’t wearing her collar when she got out of the yard because they took it off at night so she’d be more comfortable sleeping.

  “People who saw her might have thought she was a stray because she didn’t have her collar on,” Kristi said.

   Daisy’s friendliness might also have contributed. A Husky mix, she’s one of those dogs who loves everybody. She’d have hopped right into the car of a friendly stranger.

  I asked her owners to tell me more about her.

   She’s two years old. Steven and Kristi have had her for a year and a half. They don’t have children, and “she’s pretty much our daughter,” Steven said. 

  Kristi described her as having “a lot of personality. And she’s really affectionate. She loves to cuddle and snuggle.”  

  Smart?

  “Really smart,” Steven  said. “She knows all the commands. She knows how to shake hands, sit, stay, lie down … Puppies can be rambunctious, but she wasn’t that way at all. When we taught her to sit, we only had to show her a couple of times and she got it.”

  When they first got Daisy, she didn’t know how to climb stairs. They taught her by putting doggie treats on the steps.

  “It’s like having a child, watching them learn and grow,” Steven said. 

  They’ve searched relentlessly. Steven works nights, starts looking for her as soon as he gets off work and says he’s logged over 100 miles walking in his neighborhood, on the Greenbelt, in the Foothills, even in Canyon County.  

  They’ve done social media posts and created a Daisy website accessible by scanning a bar code on their newest fliers, which have neon ink and glow in the dark. They even hired a company that uses tracking dogs to help with the search.

  Unfortunately, Steven said, Daisy “isn’t chipped and hasn’t been spayed yet, either. We’d planned on getting that done. We’d just got new jobs and were saving up the money for it, and then she went missing.

   “We’re pretty sure somebody picked her up because no one’s seen her since that first day. Maybe if whoever found her has bad intentions, like trying to breed her, they might just bring her back and take the cash instead. Cousins, aunts and uncles helped us come up with the $1,000. If we could, we’d do $10,000.”

 “Because she went missing the day before Thanksgiving, we think maybe someone who was traveling found her,” Kristi said. “That’s our fear, that they might have picked her up and taken her home to wherever they live.”

  That’s why Steven has been pounding the pavement as far away as Nampa.

  They’re gratified, maybe even a bit overwhelmed, by the response to their efforts.

  “The community has been so amazing,” Steven said. “Everyone has been so friendly and kind. We’ve had people go out looking and put up posters. I get five to seven calls a day from people asking if we’ve found her. We can’t thank them enough for taking time out of their busy lives to help us.”

  “We try to think that a good person has found her and not someone that wouldn’t treat her well,” Kristi said. “When we think about that happening we break down and start crying.”

  “I hope that right now she’s at a house with a family and that they do the right thing,” Steven added. “I understand that kids get attached to a dog, but we need her back. If they bring her back to us we’d be more than happy to have the kids visit.”

  Here’s hoping that whoever found Daisy reads this and does do the right thing. I told Steven and Kristi that if she is found and returned, it would surprise me if the person who did it actually claimed the reward.

  “That’s what everyone has been saying,” Steven said. “They say that most people wouldn’t take the reward, that it would be enough just to bring your dog back to you.”

  There were no tears during our interview. They say they put on a brave face in public, but “behind closed doors we shed our tears and hug each other.”

  If you see Daisy – or if you have her – please call them at 1 916 534-0774. 

  I asked them if they’d get another dog if Daisy isn’t returned.

  “No,” Steven said. “I don’t think we’d be able to handle another dog right away knowing that our Daisy is still out there. We just want some closure. The hardest part is not knowing. Is she lost, out in the cold and dead, or does someone have her? It’s driving me crazy.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him a woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Readers of this column could be forgiven for thinking it’s gone to the dogs.

  A column in September detailed the loss of Roux, a dog loved by every member of the Woodward family. She just went out in the back yard, chose a shady spot to lie down, and died. She was only six and seemingly healthy. A heart attack or heart defect were seen as the likely cause. 

  My wife and I dog-sat Roux several days a week so it felt almost as if she were our dog, but her actual owner was our daughter Andie. A letter from 98-year-old reader Hilda Packard convinced Andie to get a new dog sooner rather than later to ease the pain of losing Roux. My last column was about the new dog, purchased from a rescue group in New Mexico, and asked readers to suggest names for her. 

  Before writing another word, I want to thank readers not only for their suggestions but for sharing their stories. Roux’s struck a chord with dog lovers who also had lost beloved canines and expressed  heartfelt condolences. We’re grateful to every one of them.

  I also want to say up front that the search for a name didn’t turn out quite as expected. More about that later.

  But first, the suggestions. There isn’t space to include them all, but here’s a sampling:

  Several readers – Shaun Byrne, Jim Strait and Eileen Thuesen – suggested the name Ruby. It sounds like Roux but is just different enough to be specific to its new owner.

  Terrie Galloway lives in New Mexico and has two dogs from the same shelter that rescued Roux. Her name suggestions: Toffee, Pretzel and Sasha.

  Kris Lamke wrote to say that she liked the name “Baton. (You are passing the baton.)”

   You never know when you might learn something. Larry Richardson wrote to say that “seeing as how the dog is from New Mexico, a good name might be Zia.”

  Not being from New Mexico and having spent very little time there, I had to look that up. 

  Zia, according to the International Property Watch, is a sun symbol that originally belonged to New Mexico’s Zia indigenous nation and was stolen from it. (Is there anything that wasn’t stolen from indigenous people?) It’s depicted in red on a yellow background on New Mexico’s state flag.

  The symbol, also according to IPW, represents “the four cardinal directions, the four seasons of the year, the four periods of the day (morning, noon, evening and night, and the four seasons of life (childhood, youth, middle age and old age).  The center of the sun symbol stands for life itself.”

  The aforementioned column asking for suggestions was accompanied by a photo of the new dog. Elizabeth Moore thinks she looks like “a Pearl. Needs care, could be a little rough around the edges, but you love them every day.”

  To Mary Gray, the new puppy “looks like a Daisy.”

  Arguably the most unusual name came from Jay Thyfault:  Skoogs.

  Janet Mollerup, “a lifelong, adventurous cook” emailed to say that  because roux is a sauce often used in Cajun cooking (Roux came from a rescue group in Louisiana), it would make sense to name the new dog Gumbo.

  I love that one! It would be my choice from the names suggested, but it’s not my call. It’s Andie’s dog, her call.

  James Glenn also suggested the name Gumbo, adding that “every good gumbo starts with a good roux.” And Nancy Harvey wrote that because roux is a sauce, a good name would be Saucy. 

  Marilyn Shake’s idea was to name the dog Chance, “as in a second chance to fill the hole in your heart” left by Roux’s passing.

  Teri Hoover’s email made me laugh. 

  “Her new name should be “Blessing since you are both blessings to each other. I know it’s corny, but what do expect from an old broad?”

  Lee Byrd’s email also gave me a chuckle:

  “When my wife was very young, she had a dog they called DL. Her father was not that excited about having a dog around so the name DL was short for damn lucky because he got to stay, to the delight of  my wife. Maybe your dog should be called Lucky because she is damn lucky to have ended up in such a good home.”

 Ann Donovan figured that because the new dog’s color is similar to that of a penny, the name of a Beatles song would be fitting:  Penny Lane.

  This brings us to the search not turning out as expected. I’m sorry to report that none of the names readers suggested – as good as many of them were – was the one chosen.

  The one who inadvertently came up with the new name was none other than … Paul McCartney. The ah-ha moment came while Andie was watching a documentary about the Beatles. Something clicked when she heard the opening line to one of their songs: 

  “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it couldn’t last.”

  And so, thanks to Sir Paul, the new dog’s name is Jojo.

  My choice would have been Gumbo, but as mentioned earlier, not my dog.

  Again, to those who took the time to suggest names, thank you. I didn’t expect such an overwhelming response and was touched by it.

  That said, I promise not to write about dogs for a while.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Are there any roads or intersections in Boise that aren’t a) closed, b) torn up or c) gone?

  Of course there are. It just doesn’t seem that way when you’re trying to reach a destination more distant than, say, your front porch. 

  I’ve lived in Boise virtually all my life and can’t recall another time when so much roadwork was being done. It seems that no matter where you go, you run into signs warning of roadwork, actual roadwork and/or roads doing passably good imitations of bomb craters. 

  If you live in East Boise, plan on taking extra time to go anywhere west of, well, East Boise. That’s because two of the main streets in the East End – Warm Springs and State Street – are closed. They’ve been closed for weeks. I have more than a passing familiarity with this because I live in the East Boise and for weeks have been late for virtually everything west of there.

  And occasionally east of there. A couple of weeks ago, some friends who live east of my neighborhood planned to meet me for coffee. A logical spot to meet would have been The Trolley House, a cozy little restaurant on Warm Springs Avenue.

  I say “would have been” because The Trolley House was closed. Instead, we decided to meet at the Warm Springs Golf Course clubhouse. The decision made, I confidently drove up Walnut to Warm Springs, something I’ve done almost every day for years.

  What greeted me, however, wasn’t the traffic that makes you wait forever to get onto Warm Springs ever since Harris Ranch was built. People coming from Harris Ranch or other locations east of Walnut have to wait for oncoming traffic to make left turns onto Walnut, meaning that those of us wanting to get onto Warm Springs have to wait forever.

  That wasn’t the case on this particular morning, though. Instead of the usual, annoying traffic, the problem was even worse. Barricades had been erected and, just in case you were tempted to try to slip around them, heavy equipment had blocked the road completely. Short of abandoning your car and walking, there was no way to get onto Warm Springs. 

  My friends, meanwhile were enjoying their coffee at the golf course clubhouse and wondering where I was. When I called to explain, one of them suggested abandoning my car and using a bicycle.

  Barring that, he suggested a circuitous alternative route that, if I understood him correctly, would have put me somewhere in the vicinity of Tablerock. It sounded like a recipe for getting lost, something I’m extraordinarily good at doing. We never did meet for coffee, agreeing instead to postpone until Warm Springs is open again – whenever that is – or choose a different meeting place.

  There’s no guarantee, of course, that a different place would be accessible. So many roads are closed that you never know what’s accessible and what isn’t. I passed no fewer than nine roadwork, road-closed and detour signs on Front Street alone last week.

  Have you tried to drive down Mallard Drive, off of Park Center, lately? Mallard happens to be the street that leads to a clinic where I get allergy shots. It’s gone. Not the clinic, the street. Completely gone – sidewalks and all. It looks like a bomb went off there. You can’t even walk around the crater.

  “How do I get to the clinic on the other side of the blast zone?” I asked a workman.

  He thought about it for a few seconds and suggested backtracking a couple of blocks, parking my car at a business on the opposite side of what was left of the street and walking. This involved walking past the back side of the business, through a park and a marsh and across a rather large parking lot. Bottom line:  15 minutes late for the allergy shot.

  That isn’t the only crater in town. Another one has closed the street where a member of a band I play in lives. His home is where we rehearse. The street where his house is located looks like a scene from “Casualties of War.” He was told that it would be closed for two years.

  Parts of Warm Springs Avenue and State Street have been closed for weeks. This, of course, has meant multiple detours. You have to wonder how long it will be before the people doing the work run out of detour signs.

  To find out the reasons for all the roadwork and when at least some of it might be finished, I contacted the Ada County Highway District and was surprised to learn that ACHD isn’t doing most of the projects. Most, according to ACHD public information officer Rachel Bjornestad, are “utility improvements and/or work related to new development.”

  In the downtown area, she added, “a lot of the utilities are old and need repairs or replacement even without the new development. The Capital City Development Corporation also has several projects in the downtown Boise area, including Eleventh Street and the Linen Blocks projects.”

  When will it end?

  ‘We have seen this level of activity, especially in the downtown core, for the last two to three years and expect to see it continue.  As one project finishes, there is another waiting in the wings.”

  No end in sight, in other words. 

  It looks like my friend may have been right when he suggested an alternative to driving.

  It might be time to drag out the bicycle.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com. 

Matthew Hartz is a champion fiddle player with scores of fiddling trophies from competitions around the country. So you might expect him to have scores of books, records, posters and other fiddling oddments.

  You’d be wrong.

  It’s not exaggerating to say that Hartz is a world-class musician. He’s won the Grand Masters Fiddle Contest at the Grand Ole Opry three times. He’s won the World Fiddling Championship in Texas and recently became a member of the multiple Grammy-winning roots group Asleep at the Wheel, playing venues throughout the U.S. and as far away as Switzerland.

  But his other passion – the one you wouldn’t expect – has nothing to do with fiddling. 

  He’s a diehard, lifelong Beach Boys fan. 

  With the Beach Boys memorabilia to prove it – enough Beach Boys memorabilia to fill three rooms.

  “I’ve been collecting it my whole life,” he said. “Some of it dates back to my childhood.”

  Hartz, 54, became a Beach Boys fan when he was three years old.

  “I was raised on Dixieland jazz and Simon Garfunkel. Those were my Dad’s records. But Mom was a Beach Boys fan.

  “I didn’t understand their music because I was just a little kid, but there was something so resonant about it that just stuck with me. It was so enveloping. I’m a Beatles and Rolling Stones fan, too, but it doesn’t go to that depth. I appreciate it all, but nothing as much as the Beach Boys.”

  He was such an avid Beach Boys fans that his older cousins brought him programs and photographs whenever they attended a Beach Boys concert. 

  A Boisean since he was 16, Hartz grew up in Blackfoot and Pocatello and has been playing music virtually all his life. His father started him on banjo and guitar, which he still plays, and, when he was eight, gave him a violin.

  “He said I could probably use it to play in the school orchestra. I joined the school orchestra at Syringa Elementary School in Pocatello, then got some private lessons and did classical competitions. Then one night Mom and Dad took me to an old time fiddle contest.”

  The contest changed his life. He was in third grade then and has been playing old time fiddle music ever since. He started small, playing at rest homes, never dreaming that one day he’d be knocking them dead at the Grand Ole Opry.

  As much as he loved fiddling, his love of the Beach Boys music never dimmed. He refers to the three rooms that house his Beach Boys collection as a “sanctuary.” Each room is dedicated to a specific era of the group’s long career – an early 1960s room, a late 1960s room and a 1970s-and-beyond room. Expecting to see records, photos and a modest assortment of other Beach Boys memorabilia, I was amazed at the scope of what he’s assembled.

  In addition to scores of records and photos, he has a Carl Wilson signature Rickenbacker 12-string guitar. (For those unfamiliar with them, three of the Beach Boys’ original members were brothers – Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.)

  He has replicas of the Pendleton shirts the group wore for photos on two of their early albums. 

  He has a surfboard signed by Brian Wilson, who wrote virtually all of the Beach Boys songs and according to Rolling Stone is the 12th greatest songwriter of all time. (Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and John Lennon are the top three.)

  He has dozens of books about the Beach Boys.

  He has the set list from one of their concerts.

  He has a picture he drew of the Beach Boys – when he was seven.

  And a whole lot more.

  Hartz has seen the Beach Boys in person about half a dozen times. At an age when most Boys his age are excited to go to a movie or a ball game, he’d attended two Beach Boys concerts. His first was in in Salt Lake City. He was ten and living in Pocatello then.

  He knows things about Beach Boys concerts that happened before he was born, including one I attended at Boise High School in 1963.

  Or so I thought. 

  “It wasn’t ’63,” he said. “It was in ’64. That was during the time when the Beach Boys were touring and everyone thinks of as the classic Beach Boys tour with everybody, including Brian. What most people don’t know was that it only lasted eight months.”

  A troubled genius, Brian Wilson stopped touring in 1964 after having a nervous breakdown. He resumed touring much later in his life, though, with a large band and multiple backup singers. I was fortunate enough to attend one of their concerts. Wilson was in his 70s then and showing his age. He couldn’t hit the high falsetto notes he once sang so effortlessly –  but the backup singers could. And he sang and played everything else perfectly. It was a great show.

  Occasionally the Beach Boys’ influence shows up in Hartz’s fiddle music.

  “It’s there, no matter what kind of music, even when I’m with Asleep at the Wheel. There are guys that are hip enough to ask about a note choice I play that other people wouldn’t play, like ‘Wow, how come you used that?’ like in the context of the blues. It makes it a softer sound to use to shape a passage.”

  To hear him discuss the Beach Boys’ music, check out the In My Beach Boys Room podcast, hosted by his Harts and his friend and manger Adam Schreiner. 

  Given the myriad items in his “sanctuary,” it’s surprising to learn that he only started it a short time ago.

    “I’ve been collecting my whole life, but it’s just been two years since I started putting it on display in these rooms,” he said. “And this isn’t all of it.”

  He had to be kidding.

  He wasn’t.

  “It’s not all out yet. Some of it is still put away. It’s sort of a work in progress.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  It’s been a tough few months for aging pop stars.

  Since November, we’ve lost Jeff Beck, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, David Crosby, David Lindley, Tina Turner, Robbie Robertson, and Jimmy Buffett. 

  For those of us who grew up with them, their deaths were personal. We bought their recordings, watched them on television, went to their concerts. We read about them, felt as if in a small way we knew them. With the exception of Tina Turner, I’ve played music by every one of them in my group, the Mystics.

  Speaking of the group, the loss of so many of our musical heroes put me in mind of departed musicians I worked with and knew well, all of them good friends. Musicians tend to be memorable characters, in a colorfully offbeat sort of way, and now seems as good a time as any to reminisce about them.

  Bassist John Hynes was a success story with a shaky beginning. Given a choice between a date with the prettiest girl in our high school and a case of beer, he’d have taken the beer every time. There were a couple of nights when he drank so much of it that he fell down on stage, his bass guitar sounding like an exploding meteorite when it hit the floor.

  John drove a souped-up, bright orange Chevy hot rod with what some suspected to be a rocket engine. If you were a passenger when he floored it, you felt the skin on your face stretch like Silly Putty. The  car was known to every cop in town. And when it came to cops, John was spectacularly unlucky. He once threw a beer can out his car window at a stoplight and it landed on the hood of a police car!

  So much for the shaky beginnings. He was, after all, only a teenager then. He married his high school sweetheart, went to work on the green chain at a sawmill and earned one promotion after another. He and his wife raised two sons and returned to Boise when he retired from his last job – supervising some 400 employees at multiple sawmills. He also was active in his church, which surprised me. Maybe beer was served there.

  Our keyboard player in those days was a boy named Vance Shirley, the youngest member of the group and the one usually conned into doing what none of the rest of us wanted to do. When a rival band broke into the ballroom where we played and took some of our equipment, it was Vance who was nominated to return the favor at their dance hall. The rest of us waited nervously in the alley while he tried to squeeze into one of its windows.

  And got stuck – half in the window, half out. This was his predicament when a police car entered the alley. Its headlights illuminated all of us except the would-be burglar, who was just out of their beams. The driver of the car was the late Vern Bisterfeldt, who went on to become an Ada County commissioner and Boise city councilman. Vern occasionally patrolled our dances.

  “What are you guys doing in the alley?” he asked us.

  “We’re waiting to get into the Rocking Castle for a rehearsal.”

 “You guys don’t play at the Rocking Castle. You play next door, at the Fiesta Ballroom.”

  “Uh … Well, yeah, we do. But we’re doing a special gig at the Rocking Castle.”

  “I see. Well, have a good rehearsal boys.”

  “We will, Vern. See you later.”

  His patrol car moved a few feet, then stopped.

  “By the way,” he said. “What are Vance’s legs doing sticking out of  the window?”

  He not only had seen Vance in the darkened part of the alley, he had recognized him by his stubby legs. Whatever we made up to wriggle out of that tight spot is long forgotten, but it must have worked because none of us went to jail for breaking and entering. Sadly, the only thing extracted from the dance hall that night was Vance. We never did get our equipment back.

 Tom Burke wasn’t an actual member of the band; he was our sound man. We knew he’d be a good fit when we learned that he owned  every Steely Dan album ever recorded – on vinyl. We were all hard-core Steely Dan junkies. Tom was a good sound man, but the thing I remember best about him was his garden.

  His vegetable garden was a thing of beauty. It was huge, row upon row of meticulously tended plants. His tomatoes, “tomaters” as he called them, were his pride and joy. If there are better tomatoes, I’ve never tasted them. Not long after he died, his property was sold and his garden plowed under to build a new house, which in my fond imaginings is infested with tomato worms.

  Russ Martin was one of a kind. Beard, long hair, natty dresser,  magnetic personality. Women flocked to him the way adolescent girls flock to Taylor Swift concerts. He was smart, funny, impossible not to like.

  And one of the most scatter-brained people I’ve ever known.

  Some examples:

  The two of us had been looking forward for weeks to attending a concert in Seattle. We were on the plane waiting to take off when he said something astounding, even for him.

  “You know that Robben Ford concert we’re going to tomorrow night, May 16th?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “I got the date wrong. It was actually on April 16th.” 

  His sense of direction was all but non-existent. When we were leaving to play in New Meadows, he asked if it was before or after Mountain Home. 

  After playing one winter night at the Trail Creek Lodge north of Sun Valley, he turned the wrong way to go back to Boise, drove white-knuckled on the icy highway over Galena Summit and was rescued by a state police officer who found him a place to spend the night in Stanley, possibly saving him from freezing to death. 

  We used to box him in so he wouldn’t get lost – one of us driving ahead of him, another behind him.

  He’d still get lost. 

  En route to North Idaho, he missed a turn at New Meadows and drove all the way to Weiser – 60 miles in the wrong direction. He was so late we had to start playing without him.

  Like many musicians, he was an unforgettable character. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone.

  Or that any of them are gone. Some were younger than I was. The moral, if there is one, is that we should make the most of the time we have. Life is short and time is precious. In a way, it’s all we have.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  How do I tell you about Roux?

  I could tell you that she was the smartest dog I’ve ever known.

  I could tell you that she she practically spoke English.

  I could tell you how crazy we all were about her and that we  thought she was the best dog ever, of the many dogs our family has owned. But you still wouldn’t know her or how we felt about her. 

  Or how we’re feeling now.

  Our daughter Andie got her from a border terrier rescue group in  Louisiana. They’d named here there, after the sauce-thickener  often used in Cajun cooking.

  She was a puppy then, and at first glance not a lovely sight. Andie had had her flown up from Louisiana. She still had a lot of black puppy fur mixed in with the blonde, had been in a crate all day and looked more than a little bedraggled. We wondered whether Andie had made a good choice.

  It didn’t take long to realize that she couldn’t have made a better one.

  How smart was Roux?

  I wasn’t kidding in saying that she practically spoke English. A partial list of the words in her vocabulary included “walk, leash, drink, treat, sit, busy bee (the name for her stuffed-animal toys) catch, high five, shake, roll over, squirrel, gently (take the treat gently instead of snapping at it), stick, bye bye and some I’ve undoubtedly forgotten.

  If you told her to go from the front of the car to the back seat, she understood and complied. If you told her not to bark, she didn’t. If you told her to fetch one of her toys (she had a large box of them) and corrected her by saying she’d gotten the wrong one, she’d run back and return with the right one. 

  She learned tricks almost effortlessly. She did all the usual ones – sit, shake, lie down, roll over and others – but the most impressive involved a two-part command. Upon hearing the words “stick ‘em up,” she’d stand on her back paws with her front paws raised above her head, as a person would if confronted by an armed assailant. Then, hearing the word “bang,” she’d fall down and play dead.

  Technically, she was Andie’s dog. But because her job requires her to work lots of 12- and 24-hour shifts, my wife and I dog-sat Roux multiple days a week. It felt like she was our dog. 

  It fell to me most evenings to take her for her walk. Borrowing one of the late Patrick McManus’s lines, I enjoyed telling her as we walked that a dog like her should live a thousand years. She’d look up at me as if she understood, and agreed wholeheartedly.

  I took her for a walk the night before she died, never dreaming it would be our last walk. Her death was so sudden, so wholly unexpected. It would have been one thing if she’d been old or sick, but she was only six and seemingly in good health. 

  She seemed entirely normal that day. She sat at the table as usual, begging for a handout during breakfast. She was a polite beggar, never aggressive or pushy; she’d just look up at you with those soulful brown eyes and the scrap of bacon or bit of toast were a forgone conclusion. 

  Late that morning, she whined to be let outside. Again, entirely normal.

  We let her out; she ran around the yard barking, as usual. Running while barking was one of her greatest pleasures.

  A few minutes later, she wanted to be let out again. More running, more barking.

  Then, a third time. That wasn’t usual.

  “You were just out. You want to go out again?”

  She did. 

  This time, she walked to the side of the yard and lay down in a shady spot.

  “That’s funny,” I told Sheila, my wife. “She’s lying in the shade. Usually she likes to lie in the sun.”

  “Maybe she’s just hot.”

  “Yeah … maybe so.”

  Not long afterwards – Sheila, had left for an appointment – I went to let Roux back in the house. She was still lying in exactly the same spot, in exactly the same position.

  “Roux! Time to come in.”

  Nothing.

  I think it was then that I knew. Nothing can describe the sinking feeling. I went to her, petted her and knew beyond doubt. The dog we had loved more than any other was gone. 

  In telling her countless times that a dog like her should live a thousand years, it was because I half hoped she would outlive me. We’ve lost so many dogs during our lives. You can only go through that so many times.

  She should have had another seven or eight years. A vet said that when young, seemingly healthy dogs die suddenly, it’s often because of a heart attack or other major organ failure. It certainly wasn’t because of lack of care, or lack of love.

  I called Sheila to tell her what happened, then carried Roux into the house and held her in my lap until Sheila got home. She took it hard – crying, screaming, hyperventilating. Andie’s reaction was similar. Her cries and shrieks were so loud and heart-rending that one of the neighbors thought a child had been hit by a car.

  I did my best to remain stoic, then excused myself and went to look for some Kleenex. 

  So many Roux memories. But the one that never fails to choke me up was of her riding beside me in the car and putting her head on my shoulder. As a lover would. Roux loved everyone. And everyone who knew her well, and even some who didn’t,  loved her. Andie’s been getting calls from friends as far away as Connecticut, friends telling her how sorry they are and what a great dog Roux was. 

  I don’t think we felt this bad when we lost parents or siblings. Maybe that’s because pets are such a fundamental part of our daily lives. They sleep with us, get up with us, follow us around all day, provide unconditional love no matter what. Not many people do that. Maybe that’s why it’s so painful when we lose them.

  You could say that Roux was just a dog, that it wasn’t like losing a human member of the family. And you’d be absolutely right. It would be worse losing a spouse or a child.

  But she was a member of the family, and she was almost human. She was our companion, our unfailing friend, our most beloved pet ever.

  We’ll get through this. It will just take time, probably quite a bit of time. There may or may not be other dogs – at this point I’d say probably not – but there will never be another dog like Roux. And there will always be a hole in our hearts.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Boise has changed so much there are times when I hardly recognize it.

 There have even been times when, because it’s changed so much, I’ve gotten lost in my hometown. New buildings, new streets and roads, new everything.

  The Boise of today is a vibrant, up-and-coming city. It has more businesses, more opportunities, more things to do than we once would have thought possible. What many who moved here or grew up here in, say, the last 20 or 30 years don’t realize, however, is that in a different way it was a pretty vibrant place before then.

  A recent email from groupupdates@facebook.com reminded me of this. Titled “Remembering Boise When,” it contained scores of photos of Boise institutions long gone but fondly remembered:

  The first was Manley’s Cafe. Manley’s, on Federal Way, is affectionately remembered for gigantic portions of food. Steaks or a serving of prime rib covered a plate – and then some. Pie a’la mode was a quarter of a pie with a pint of ice cream.

  A photo of the long-departed downtown railroad yard on Front Street evoked memories of evenings spent there with my parents and sister, watching the trains come and go. Boise was a much smaller city then. We entertained ourselves with the limited options available.

  I’d all but forgotten what the airport used to look like then, a small terminal building with the tower attached and no ugly parking garages blocking the view of it as you approached. It had a wonderful restaurant on the second floor where you could watch the planes take off and land. 

  A photo of the C.C. Anderson’s store brought equally pleasant memories. Later the Bon Marche, it was a three story building at Tenth and Idaho. Mr. Anderson, dressed to the nines, roamed the store handing out candy to children. The store’s Empire Room, a mezzanine-level restaurant, served some of the best burgers in town.

  “Remembering Boise When” was replete with photos of gone eateries. In addition to the aforementioned Manley’s Cafe, they included The Torch, Murray’s Drive-in, the Crow Inn and the Howdy Pardner. 

   The Torch, in the same building that now houses a strip joint of the same name, was best known for the finger steaks invented by its owner, Milo Bybee. It stayed open late and was frequented by musicians who played till midnight or 1 a.m. I know that because I was one of them. 

  Murray’s was a classic drive-in, with carhops on roller skates. The Crow Inn was locally famous for serving buckets of clams. The Howdy Pardner’s claim to fame was a disk jockey in a booth on the roof. Customers watched the deejay play their favorite records while enjoying their burgers and shakes.

  One of the Remembering-Boise posts asked whether anyone remembered the name of the Spanish Mission-style restaurant “that sat off of Hill Road?”

  That would be Hill House. Its cinnamon rolls were legendary; its fried chicken was arguably the best in town.

  A picture of the Hip Sing Association building, the last structure in Boise’s Chinatown, recalled my first and worst day on the local government beat. The building was being demolished, it’s last tenant gone to live with relatives in California. I insensitively described his former quarters as messy (the living room housed a towering stack of empty tuna fish cans) and got hate mail about it for weeks.

  The photos continued:  the 1969 Oxford Hotel Fire, a parade honoring the Boise Braves minor league baseball team, the Fun Spot amusement park, the old Grand Central Store …

  Boise’s population at the time most of the photos were taken was about 15 percent of what it is now. It didn’t have a university, a regional medical center, a performing arts center or many other things we now take for granted.

   That said, it was still a pretty great place to grow up.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  As a journalist I’ve interviewed hundreds of people – and none more impressive than a man who has devoted his life to helping the poorest of the poor.

  Fr. Rick Frechette spent his early years as a Catholic priest in Baltimore, Mexico and Honduras. His life changed when he was sent to Haiti, where he and another priest opened an orphanage. He’s been there ever since, remaining even when crime and economic political chaos were so rampant that his superiors suggested he leave.

  As he put it, “What kind of shepherd would leave when the wolf comes?”

  He’s been in Haiti for 36 years now, working to help the poor and suffering. Ssuffering which has seldom if ever been as bad as it is now. 

  Father Rick, as nearly everyone calls him, has visited Idaho a number of times through his association with Saint (cq) Alphonsus Foundation’s Project Haiti. I was fortunate enough to interview him and learn his story during two of those visits.

  Early in his time in Haiti, he decided he couldn’t do enough for the people there as a priest. Enrolling at a college in New York City and studying by candlelight during intermittent visits to Haiti, he became a medical doctor. He’s been caring for Haitians’ medical and spiritual needs ever since. 

  Haiti can’t see to get a break. Cyclones, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and now a descent into pervasive terrorism. A CNN story early this month reported the following:

  “Warring gangs in Port-au-Prince have visited terror in the city’s vital port city with rape, torture and killing as they vie for territorial control. Thousands of Haitians have fled their homes, gathering in makeshift encampments across the sprawling capital.”

  Father Rick has “never lived through a crisis in our 36 years in Haiti that compares to the chaos, violence, economic collapse and social devastation we are living now.”

  He’s been on the front lines of the chaos, which surprises no one who knows him. He has been on the front lines of unrest in Haiti for decades, providing medical treatment for the wounded, removing bodies from the streets, risking his life time and again.

  After initially being reported by major news outlets, the crisis in Haiti faded from the news cycle and has been largely forgotten here in the U.S. Father Rick’s letters, forwarded to me by Project Haiti’s Jill Aldape, provide a grim picture of the island nation’s continuing  nightmare.

  “We cannot get surgeons to come to our area,” he wrote. “It is a red zone. … We cannot even keep the competent people we already have, since many are fleeing Haiti to raise their families in a safer country. 

  “ … We are facing the worst crisis we have ever faced, and the consequences are not only the disintegration of a nation and all the institutions that constitute civilization, but the people are floundering in a tsunami of despair.”

  The following is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to some U.N. advisors:

  “The mantra from the worldwide community is ‘Haitian solutions to Haitian problems.’ This pacifies the world’s collective consciousness. Even I like the sound of it, the logic to it. The mantra puts everyone to sleep as far as any hope from abroad is concerned. But the gangs are ruthless and unopposed, raping and butchering women, cutting the heads off of children.

  “… Haiti is abandoned. That is the reality.”

  His letters aren’t easy to read. We want to turn away, which is precisely what we shouldn’t do. If he and others can face the atrocities in person and try to help the victims, we should at least be able to read about them. And do what we can to help from afar. More on that at the end of this column.

  Continuing with his letter, “The gangs attack each other by terrorizing each others’ populations. They gain territory by terrorizing, burning, raping, killing families in neighborhoods already dirt poor.”

  The Haitian police, he wrote, “have not even timidly shown themselves to be the solution to ‘the Haitian problem.’”

  When calls for help in a particularly hard hit area went unheeded, he and his assistants “tried to get there for the sake of the vulnerable and the wounded, but there was no way to get there past the blocked roads. And the gangs were shooting at anyone trying to get there or get away from there by boat.”

  He says he is is not yet a victim, but believes “that it is inevitable sooner or later.”

  That would be a tragedy. If anyone I’ve ever met is qualified for sainthood, it’s this remarkable man who has devoted his life to helping the destitute and downtrodden. But the violence has such a profound effect that even he is struggling to remain faithful to his vows, to his core beliefs.

  “I am a priest of 43 years and prefer pacifist solutions, turning the other cheek and forgiving 70 times 70, but I would kill with my bare hands anyone I saw approach a child to beat or rape or cut off the head. 

  “As a 70-year old man, I would still be more than game for that fight, a last stand. This is a confession of something I know is dreadfully wrong and is far from turning the other cheek. … If there is a cheek to turn, I  stand some chance I will turn mine if and when my turn comes. But I will not allow a child’s other cheek to plunge to the ground after a swipe of a machete.”

  It was all I could do to watch a two-minute video of a man whose face was virtually cut in half by a machete. For Haitians, it’s not a video. It’s what they’re living with every day.

  A lasting truce would put an end to it, but unless and until that happens nothing is likely to stop the violence. We can help its victims, though. Project Haiti has a proven track record of helping Father Rick and others ease the suffering in Haiti. We can’t go to Haiti to help – the State Department has ordered U.S. citizens to leave the country and issued its highest level advisory against going there – but donating to Project Haiti can make a difference.

  Donations, Aldape says, will help Father Rick “distribute food,   relocate people to safer areas … I can assure everyone that donations will help him help others breathe easier, whether it means in medicine, in shelter, in nourishment, in safety and in prayer.”

  Online donations may be made by clicking on https://donate.saintalphonsus.org/ProjectHaiti-Donate. Checks may be mailed to Saint Alphonsus Project Haiti, Attn: Jill Aldape, 1055 N. Curtis Road, Boise, ID 83706.

  We’re so lucky in this country. Americans living now have never experienced a war in our homeland. We’re one of the 20 most prosperous nations in the world. Most of us, at least here in Idaho, live in safe neighborhoods. We have access to wholesome food, reliable transportation, good medical care.

  And we have never experienced anything remotely like what is happening in Haiti. Donations, large or small, are the least we can do.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  In the aftermath of guitarist Jeff Beck’s death earlier this year, a friend brought over a DVD in which Beck talked about his favorite guitars. One – the rarest in his collection – recalled an incident that remains painful decades after it happened.

  For those unfamiliar with him, Beck was one of the world’s great blues and rock and roll guitarists. No less a guitarist than Eric Clapton said he watched him perform and had no idea how he played some of the things he did.

  The rare guitar in his collection was a 1954 Fender Stratocaster. Stratocasters, along with Gibson Les Pauls, have been the most popular electric guitars in the world for years. Millions have been sold since 1954, the year Fender began producing them.

  On the DVD, Beck said that he was lucky to get one. If Jeff Beck, one of the best and most famous guitarists in the world, was lucky to get one, what would the odds be of an average Joe being that lucky?

  Enter average Joe, a.k.a. yours truly. I actually owned one of these rare instruments. How I got it, and how it got away from me, are tales you don’t have to be a guitarist to appreciate.

  The first tale began with a desire to have a backup guitar. I only had one guitar at the time, and figured it would make sense to have a second  onstage if the first broke a string, got knocked over and damaged or otherwise was out of action.

  But what sort of guitar? After ruminating on it for a while, I decided not only on the sort of guitar but a specific guitar. It had been years since I’d heard it, but the memory of how great it sounded was indelible.

  In the early days of rock and roll, one of the most popular bands in Boise was a group called Dick Cates and the Chessmen. They played to sold-out audiences on Friday nights at the long defunct Miramar Ballroom on Fairview Avenue.

  Cates was the lead singer and a big reason for the group’s popularity. When he was born, the gods reached down and touched his vocal cords. People used to compare his voice with that of the late Roy Orbison, who had an impressive string of hit records and was known for the range and quality of his distinctive voice. I was far from being alone in thinking that  Cates’s voice was every bit as good. He should have been famous.

  The Chessmen’s guitar player was a man named Darrell Francke. Two things invariably wowed me at a Chessmen’s gig:  Cates’s voice and the sound of Francke’s guitar – a 1954 Stratocaster. There was just something about the tone of those early guitars that newer ones seem to lack.

  Not having heard anything about Francke in years, I had little hope of tracking him down but made some calls and got lucky. He was living in Jordan Valley, Ore., and had a listed number. I gave him a call.

  “Darrell?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Tim Woodward. You probably don’t remember me, but I used to come to a lot of your dances.”

  My expectation did not go unfulfilled. He didn’t remember me in the slightest.

  “I’m calling about that old Strat you used to play. You wouldn’t still happen to have that, would you?”

  “I do,” he replied. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about selling it.”

  I was at his house in Jordan Valley two hours later. The guitar definitely looked its age, but it sounded just fine. We agreed on a price of $300.

  On the way home with it, I noticed the serial number: 0935. The 935th Stratocaster made – out of millions.

  It’s hard to believe now, but neither I nor any of the musicians or guitar makers who saw it had any idea how much it was worth.

  Fast forward a few years. When a friend of a friend saw the guitar, he said I should send it to his friend Howard in Los Angeles. 

  “He can get you top dollar for it.”

  Itching to buy a new guitar by then, I sent it to Howard. A week or so later, my phone rang.

 “You (expletive deleted)!”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Howard in L.A. You didn’t tell me the neck on this guitar was  refinished or that it had new frets installed.”

  “That was because some of the old frets were practically falling out. The guy who did it thought it made sense to refinish the neck at the same time.”

  “Big mistake! Collectors want everything original. Anything new or altered from the original lowers the value.”

  “Fine. Send it back to me.”

  Instead, he sent me a check for $900.

  I called him back.

  “I don’t want your $900. Send me back my guitar.”

  “It’s too late. It’s already in Japan.”

  Sold, no doubt, to a collector.

  God knows what Howard got for it, but three guitars like the one that cost me $300 currently are advertised online. The least expensive asking price is $40,000. The most expensive, for one in mint condition, is $250,000. 

  Such stories abound – the rare stamp used to mail a letter, the classic car unwittingly sold as a junker, the priceless antique sold for a few bucks at a yard sale.

  That does absolutely nothing, however, to ease the pain of selling a guitar worth five figures for $900.

  Or to change my feelings about Howard.

  He’ll probably never read this, and for all I know he may not even be alive now. But if he is alive and he sees this, I hope he feels at least a twinge of remorse.

  And if not, may he ship an expensive instrument on trust someday to someone just like himself.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him a woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

We all have things we put off doing. We put them off for a few hours, a few days, a few  weeks …

  My wife and I put off cleaning our attic for 35 years.

  There were good reasons for this. Its contents were conveniently out of the way, happily out of mind. The attic is frostbite cold in the winter, hotter than the hubs of hell in the summer.

  It’s also hard to get to. A new attic ladder, installed to make it easier, actually made it harder. The new ladder is narrow, poorly designed, precarious. There was no way we could climb it without risking a fall.

  Still, it was time. It had been so long since we put most of the things in the attic after building the house that we’d forgotten most of what was up there. We could have left the job for the kids to do after we’re gone, but we’d rather have them remember us without grimacing. The stuff had to be taken down and dealt with before any more years passed.

  Even If I could climb the ladder without coming to a hard landing on the concrete floor and potentially a trip to the E.R, I’m getting too old to be tottering around in the dark on the tops of ceiling joists. Someone young and strong would be needed to bring the stuff down. We were only too happy to hire a friend’s grandsons. It took them half a day to finish.

    We had no idea what treasures were lurking in those dimly lit recesses, entombed in decades of dust. 

  Some of what the boys brought down was junk. Some was destined for the Good Will. And some were reminders of times long ago, experiences all but forgotten.

  One of the oldest was a flier for a St. Patrick’s Day dance with “Live Music by the Playboys.” The Playboys were my first band. Its leader was Ron Shannon, son of the late Velma Morrison. I’d have been about 15 then. The dance was in the Cascade High School gym. I have absolutely no memory of it.

  Another relic from the hoary past was a Civil Defense Preparedness card. Its instructions included, among other things, warnings to equip your family shelter with a two-week supply of “food, water, first aid kit and battery radio.” 

  This was what we lived with in those days. Paranoia about the Russians bombing us was rampant. People dug shelters in their back yards. A community shelter in the Highlands exists to this day. Happily, it was often used as a dance hall, never as a refuge from a nuclear attack.

  Four Bogus Basin ski lift tickets recalled teenage winters when skiing was an obsession. I skied every weekend, every day of the Christmas break. 

  Multiple receipts from the Orange Grove Drum and Guitar Shop were early evidence of a lifelong obsession. Two, both from 1969 and both for $150, were for guitars – a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. Either, in pristine condition, would be worth four to five figures now. 

 Four Boise Aviation, Inc., receipts were for flying lessons. I was 20 years old and besotted with the idea of becoming a dashing airline pilot. Jet jockeys returning from Vietnam dashed that hope by getting virtually all the jobs. All I got was a private pilot’s license.

  Some documents change our lives.  Documents like the torn and faded one ordering me to report to the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego and from there to the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston, S.C. for further assignment to the Naval Communications Training Center in Pensacola, Fla.

  The orders on that tattered piece of paper would take me from my lifelong Idaho home to a new life as a low-level spy in faraway  places. The last would be Germany, to intercept radio transmissions of the Polish, East German and Russian navies.

  The attic’s keepsakes were many and varied. There were pictures of old friends, old girlfriends, a newspaper clipping with a photo of a friend who made a cello in his high school woodworking class. He went on to play bass with Paul Revere and the Raiders.

  The oddest item? The Official 1984 Price Guide to Beer Cans.

  No, as a matter of fact, I have no idea why it was up there.  

  Most of these things were in lacquered wooden boxes. The smaller of the two had “Jazzmaster $” carved on the lid and had once contained savings for my first good guitar. My parents made up the difference between the savings and the price of the guitar and surprised me with it on Christmas morning. It’s still one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received.

  The larger box had strips of paper with names of minerals in a youthful scrawl taped to the bottom – gold, iron ore, turquoise, crystal … My father and I collected them from abandoned mines in the town of his birth, Cripple Creek, Colo. I’d have been seven or eight at the time.

  A banker’s box contained scores of my old columns; another box was filled with letters. Letters from my parents when I was in the Navy. Letters from my wife when we were newlyweds and she was spending a semester student teaching in Washington state.

  The oddments from the attic spoke of many chapters – a young boy exploring with his father, a teenager in a rock group, a student pilot, a sailor, a journalist … 

  Sometimes, in down moments, we feel as if we haven’t done much with the time we’re given. It can take a revelatory experience, perhaps something as mundane as cleaning out an attic, to make us realize how full our lives have been.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  A recent story in The Idaho Statesman revisited stuntman Evel Knievel’s 1974 attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon. The story noted that Knievel’s “legend lives on,” but stopped short of calling him a hero. 

 I was part of a team assigned to cover the jump for The Statesman. I was a Statesman reporter at the time. 

  The jump was the biggest thing to happen in Idaho in years. Thousands of people from every part of the country were there for it, and that didn’t include the legion of print and broadcast journalists from newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television networks.

Celebrities reportedly included Steve McQueen, Linda Evans, Dustin Hoffman and Ali McGraw.

  The jump site is several miles east of Twin Falls. Every motel room in Twin Falls and nearby cities had been booked weeks in advance. The Statesman sent half a dozen reporters and photographers to cover the jump. My job was to cover the story from the south rim of the canyon, the site of a huge, earthen ramp from which Knievel’s steam-powered “Sky Cycle” (actually a rocket) would blast off for the opposite rim of the canyon.

  Jim Poore, the paper’s sports editor, would view the launch from the bottom of the canyon, which surprisingly turned out to be the best possible location. A reporter whose name I’ve forgotten would be waiting on the canyon’s north rim for Knievel to touch down. Photographers were assigned to all three locations. 

  Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle on the south rim. According to one report, 30,000 people were there, occupying the fields around the jump site. Most had been there for days. It was an ongoing party –  alcohol, drugs, nudity, you name it. Barring egregious violations of the law, police officers pretty much turned the other way. There was little they could do among so many. 

  As the time for the jump neared, hundreds of Knievel’s fans converged around the earthen ramp, hoping for an up close and personal encounter with him. When at last he appeared, he obliged them by slugging a cameraman.

   The jump itself, as has been widely reported, was infamously known as “the big fizzle.” The Skycycle/rocket went pretty much straight up and straight down, landing in the bottom of the canyon a few feet from the river. Poore, who wasn’t happy about having been stationed there, ended up with the best seat in the house, and the best story.

  It was another story altogether from my vantage point on the rim of the canyon. A strip of land closest to the rim was cordoned off for Knievel’s crew, guests, celebrities and media people. Law enforcement officers were stationed every few feet between them and the rest of the crowd. I was roughly ten feet from the edge of the canyon.

  Those on the other side of the barrier formed by police officers weren’t happy about being denied the best view. Many had been partying for days and, drunk, stoned or both, decided it would be a good idea to push their way to the rim for a better view. It may or may not have occurred to them in their addled condition that this would involve pushing those of us closest to the rim over the edge.

  It’s an understatement to say that it was scary. The law officers did their best, but they were no match for the crush of bodies moving us ever closer to the canyon rim, and a 500-foot fall.

  Suddenly the momentum shifted. Badly needed assistance for the overmatched law officers came from an unexpected source: the Hells Angels.

  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this is not an unequivocal endorsement of the Hells Angels. They are involved, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, in murder, drug trafficking and other criminal activities. Angels they decidedly are not.

   But on a September day in 1974, their actions earned the undying gratitude of scores of people, this one included. I was a scant few feet from the canyon’s edge when they began knocking heads and pushing back the crowd. If not for them, I might not have been here to write this now. 

  Knievel made a lot of money that day, a little under $3 million according to the New York Times.

  The Hells Angels didn’t make a lot of money, but they may have saved a lot of lives.

  As a stuntman, Knievel deserves to be called legendary. It took a lot of courage to do some of the things he did. Most of us wouldn’t dream of doing them. You wouldn’t have gotten me on that Skycycle for a date with Raquel Welch and all the money in the world. 

  But a hero? There wasn’t much that was heroic about the Big Fizzle. It was a disappointment to just about everyone who witnessed it. 

  There were heroes there that day, though. They may well have saved my life. And for that I am forever grateful to the unlikely heroes of the Snake River Canyon jump – an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted the following Mondays on woodwardblog.com. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 How long had it been since I’d visited my country relatives?

  Twenty years?

  Thirty years?

  Longer?

  Not that they minded, of course. They’ve all been dead longer than that.

  My country relatives were my Great Grandmother Susie, my Great Aunt and Uncle Amy and Adolph and my Uncle Weldon.

  Every year on Memorial Day, I put flowers on the graves of my parents at Boise’s Morris Hill Cemetery. This year, having done that, I decided to do something different a few days after Memorial Day and pay overdue respects to the country relatives buried in the Star Cemetery.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t think to bring flowers, and it had been so long since my last visit that I’d forgotten how to get there (Thank you, Google Maps). The cemetery even looked different, larger and with fewer trees than I remembered.

  No cemetery workers were around to help with directions; it took a lot of tromping around in a hot sun to find all the graves. The first was Grandma Susie’s. 

  Susan Marguerite McCoy Cuddy Chandler was born 18 days before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, officially ending the Civil War. According to family lore, she came west from her native Iowa in a covered wagon.

  One of my earliest memories of her is of Thanksgiving dinner at her home in Notus, a town of about 500, northwest of Caldwell. It allegedly was named by a railroad official’s daughter who thought Notus was a Native American word for “it’s all right.” It was all right with Grandma Susie, who with her last husband, Harry Chandler, lived there for many years.

  She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children but remained positive and jovial right to the end, dying in 1956 at age 91. My most vivid memory of her is of her long hair catching fire in the toaster during one of her visits to our home in Boise. She thought it was so funny that she laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. Her sense of humor undoubtedly helped her deal with the tragedies of her life. 

  One of the things that made the Thanksgiving dinner in Notus memorable was the main course – roast goose instead of turkey. Harry, who also is buried in the Star Cemetery, probably shot the goose. 

  The following year, they came to our house for Thanksgiving. That dinner was memorable in a different way. Harry slumped over at the table and was carried upstairs, where he died of a heart attack. He was a nice man who wore three-piece suits and a gold pocket watch on a chain when they came to visit. He invariably brought me a pocketful of pennies.

  The only one of my great grandmother’s children to outlive her was my Aunt Amy Schneckloth, who with her husband, Adolph, and one of her sons, Weldon, lived on a farm between Star and Middleton. All three are buried in the Star Cemetery. My overdue visit there was a chance to catch up, at least with Aunt Amy. Uncle Adolph and Uncle Weldon were old-school farmers, strong, silent types about as talkative as the Sphinx.

  It was easy to imagine Aunt Amy greeting me in her kindly but bustling, business-like fashion. Her appearance was such that she could have come straight out of the “Wizard of Oz.” Baggy, mid-calf dresses with high collars and rolled-up sleeves, nylons with seams down the back, black, low-heeled work shoes and an ever-present apron. She’d have made a first-rate Aunty Em.

  The Memorial Day feast at the Schneckloth farm was one never to be forgotten, even these many, long years later. Wooden picnic tables in the back yard all but overflowed with salads, bowls of quivering, fruit-filled Jell-O, potato salad, homemade Parker House Rolls fresh from the oven in the wood-fired Monarch Stove, homemade pies and homemade ice cream and, the piece de resistance, Aunt Amy’s famous fried chicken.

  Preparation of the chicken was, shall we say, indelicate by today’s standards. No chicken from Albertsons or M&W for Aunt Amy. The main course began with me catching chickens in the barnyard. From the depths of her apron, she produced a beat-up hatchet and lopped off their heads. Plucked and cleaned, they were off to the kitchen, where she worked her magic. The result – oiled, sprinkled with flour and spices and fried to perfection – was, in memory at least, the best fried chicken ever.

  Uncle Adolph is buried next to her, Uncle Weldon not far away. The only times I ever saw them in anything but work shirts and bib overalls was when they drove their ancient Austin sedan to our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. They invariably wore suits that were old-fashioned even then, set off by colorful, hand-painted ties. They always left early, ostensibly to get home in time to milk the cows, but it’s a good bet that they also were itching to get out of the suits and back into their overalls.

  My visit to the Star Cemetery brought a profusion of memories, mixed with a dash of guilt. It had been far too long since I’d paid my respects to those good people.

  Next year I won’t wait until after Memorial Day to do that. I’ll go at a  proper time, before Memorial Day.

  And bring flowers.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

 Quick, do you know what a skoolie is?

  I didn’t, either.

  Skoolies, for readers unfamiliar with them, are school buses that have been converted into motor homes.

  They are, according to a website about such things, “an example of upcycling at its best. Upcycling is the art of taking something that can no longer be used for its original purpose and transforming it for a different use.

  “Once renovated, skoolies essentially become a cross between an RV and a tiny house on wheels. Like RVs, they don’t require a separate towing vehicle. The conversion process … makes them look and feel more like a tiny home on wheels.”

  So why is this a subject of this column?

  Because my granddaughter and her husband have spent the last year turning an old school bus into a skoolie. I saw them off recently on what I’ve come to call The Great Adventure, something I considered doing at their age but didn’t and still regret it. More about that later. 

  They left from our house for their adventure and, if all goes well, will be gone for about a year. Saying goodbye to them was bittersweet. I’m happy for them and, truth be told, am also a tad envious. While they’re free-wheeling it around the country on The Great Adventure, I’ll be home mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, cleaning the garage …

  The adventurers sold their house, which they’d remodeled, and bought their new home, the skoolie, in Missouri. They found one there that they liked and was in their price range and drove it back to Idaho. It was just an old school bus then, with bench seats that once accommodated elementary school students now in college or the work force.

  My grandaughter’s name is Kelsie. Her husband, Christian, is one of those people who can build or fix just about anything, and she’s become a skilled handywoman herself. They spent a year gutting the bus and building a new interior. It has a living room and a tiny kitchen, a bedroom and a tiny bathroom. It has a TV projector and roll-down screen. All the comforts of home.

  Much of it is solar powered. It’s as much a home on wheels as many RVs are, and on the inside an attractive home at that. On the outside, it still looks like, well, a school bus.

  The Great Adventure was a far cry from what we expected they’d be doing now. Kelsie graduated from BSU with a teaching degree, and Christian can do anything from rebuilding a car engine to building a house. We figured he’d have a jack-of-all-trades business and she’d be an elementary school teacher by now. Instead, they’re criss-crossing America in a blue bus.

  They’re in New Mexico now and plan to be in New England in time to catch the fall colors. From there they’ll head south, chasing the warm weather. Kelsie will do some online teaching en route; Christian hopes to land some handyman jobs.

  Their adventure put me in mind of one I envisioned, albeit on a much smaller scale, when I was their age. I’d finished two years of junior college and had spent several summers working for my father’s and and uncle’s business, installing lawn-sprinkling systems. It was hot, hard work, most of it on the end of a shovel, and I wanted to spend a summer traveling before leaving for active duty in the Navy.

  My vehicle of choice was, or would have been, a motorcycle. That I didn’t own a motorcycle and had never driven one were irrelevant. I had money from the sprinkler company job and playing in a band. I could buy a motorcycle and learn to drive it. How hard could it be?

   The idea was to drive the motorcycle, preferably a souped-up, glamorous looking one Like Steve McQueen or Marlon Brando would have owned, from Idaho to the east coast and back. I envisioned myself tooling across the plains and along the coastlines at breathtaking speed, free-wheeling without a care in the world. 

  The reality, of course, most likely would have been far different – driving rains and howling winds, breakdowns in godforsaken places and, worst case scenario, an accident that would have changed my life.

  Or ended it.

  Many years later, I came close to buying a scooter that a friend was selling. I had my checkbook out to pay him for it when he said the words that changed my mind:

  “Just remember that you’re invisible and everybody’s trying to kill you.”

  I didn’t buy the scooter and never did go on the motorcycle trip across the county. Instead I spent most of that summer digging ditches for the sprinkler company and, in August, left for the Navy.

  You hear it said that when they reach the end of their lives, most people don’t regret things they did. They regret the things they didn’t do. Decades later, I still wish I’d have taken that motorcycle ride. 

  Kelsie and Christian have been on the road for about a month now. I’ll be calling them for occasional updates (while trying not to be too much of a pest), imagining things they might encounter along the way, and envying them the experience.

  Their Great Adventure is my motorcycle ride. I’ll be living it by proxy, through them. And for them, the ones who are actually living it, here’s hoping it’s everything they dreamed it would be.

Tim Woodward’s column runs every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.