Some places you remember for life. When I was seven, an uncle took my mother, sister and me to a beach lot he’d recently purchased near Monterey, Calif. There for only a few minutes, I made what must have struck him as a ridiculous request. “I know I’m just a kid, Uncle Bill, but please don’t ever sell this place to anybody but me.” That’s how beautiful it was. A cliff with a wooden stairway overlooked the blue Pacific and Uncle Bill’s 200 feet of beach. He sold it a few years later for $10,000 and thought he’d made a killing. Today, it would be worth millions. We spent several hours in Monterey that day, walking around town and looking…
Tim Woodward is a longtime Idaho columnist. His columns appear one Sunday a month, often more frequently, in The Idaho Press and are posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays.
Posts by Tim Woodward
Suggested headline: Noted musician’s other passion? Clocks When John Hansen was a young man trying to decide what to do with his life, he got a student loan and spent the money on a guitar. “I was living in Pocatello then. I registered and started school at Idaho State University and bought a new Martin guitar. I played rock and roll covers in a band and eventually started working for a couple who would go back east and buy antiques. She died, and he was half blind so I started going with him on his trips to buy antiques.” Things have a way of working out. Hansen never did finish college, but he ended up with two livelihoods. Most people know…
Facebook Twitter Email Print Save It’s an understatement to say that I am not a tech-savvy guy. Part of this has to do with being born in the wrong generation. My kids and grandkids, who grew up with computers and the Internet, do intuitively what has me screaming at the device of the moment. I threw my smartphone across a street once. It landed in tall grass and wasn’t damaged, though part of me wished it had been. Another part of it has to do with having the wrong kind of brain. I’m right-brained. Right-brained people tend to be creative and artistic, as opposed to left-brained people, who are better at things like math, science and mechanics. My wife is left-brained. She had to…
My wishes for the New Year are pretty basic. Good health, the well being of family and friends, the usual stuff. And one unusual wish. Wouldn’t it be a great New Year’s gift for all of us if Congress passed the Robocall Bill this year? The Robocall Bill would allow telephone carriers to block calls with pre-recorded messages. As you know if you’ve gotten them (and who hasn’t?), the relentless barrage of unwanted calls is beyond annoying. My wife and I estimate that roughly three of every four times our phone rings, it’s a call from a scam artist who thinks he or she has a perfect right to interrupt our lives. They call every day, often at the worst possible…
Artificial Christmas trees have come a long way. My wife and I had one of the early ones one year. One year was enough. When the holidays were over, we left it in the trash. The reason our artificial tree ended up in the trash was that it was patently ugly. It looked like it had been made with green pipe cleaners and smelled like shoe polish. No amount of tinsel, lights or ornaments could compensate for its existential hideousness. After that thankfully short-lived experiment, the trouble it took to have a real tree seemed worth it. The pipe-cleaner tree made us disdainful of artificial trees. People who had artificial Christmas trees, the reasoning went, would also have artificial flowers or…
Some of my favorite news stories are about treasures lost and rediscovered – a priceless painting found under decades of dust in someone’s attic, an unreleased Beatles song turning up in a vault, the discovery of a lost manuscript by a famous author. A lost manuscript by Vardis Fisher recently was found after lying untouched in a folder for nearly 80 years. “Vardis Who?” you may ask. A fair question. All but forgotten today, Fisher was once Idaho’s best known writer. He was brilliant, iconoclastic, infuriating. He wrote 36 books, evoking comparisons with Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. He also drove a wife to suicide and alienated both critics and readers with his acerbic observations – which earned him the nickname…
Here in Idaho, 3,000 miles away, we don’t hear much about what’s been happening in our hemisphere’s poorest nation. Few countries have known more suffering than Haiti – earthquakes, hurricanes, grinding poverty and, most recently, violent protests that continue to claim lives. Idahoans, long noted for their generosity, are providing assistance through a project that has been helping the people of Haiti for 25 years. Coverage of the violence in Haiti has been scant, sporadic. Political news and disasters in the U.S. – floods, fires, Hurricane Dorian – have dominated the news cycle. That doesn’t mean that nothing newsworthy is happening in Haiti. Protests over rising inflation, lack of basic goods and government corruption have turned streets into battle…
Some towns, even very small towns, are known for having at least one really great restaurant. Albion (population 270) was renowned for the now defunct Annie-Laurie Cafe, which served steaks big enough that, if the legs had been attached, you could have thrown a saddle on one and ridden it home. Mexican food at Kuna’s El Gallo Giro and Enrique’s draws customers from far beyond Kuna. Nampa’s El Charro started out as a taco truck and became a destination restaurant for diners throughout the valley. I was reminded of iconic Idaho restaurants in a recent email from online reader Judy Pray of Medford, Ore. Pray was writing in response to one of my columns she’d found on Google about the late,…
Hoodsport, Wash. – You never know when or where you’ll run into colorful characters. Idaho has its share. I’ve been fortunate to have spent time with the likes of Free Press Frances, Buckskin Bill, Dugout Dick and other unforgettable individuals. In other states, it’s been my good fortune to have met a man who was traveling all the way from England to Idaho for the sole purpose of seeing Hells Canyon, a woman whose pet was an albino alligator, and a man who helped Ernest Hemingway save the manuscript to “A Farewell to Arms” from a fire. And the most recent, “Harley Bob” McFarland. McFarland lives in Hoodsport, Wash, on the Olympic Peninsula. His home overlooking a scenic channel…
Editor’s Note: This is the first of two columns from Tim’s summer travels. The second will run two weeks from today. HOODSPORT, Wash. – The road to Hoodsport, Wash. is so familiar my car could almost drive there without me. I’ve driven it over a hundred times. Hoodsport is the closest town to the Woodward family getaway, a cabin on a finger of Puget Sound. When my wife’s folks were alive, we’d go there to swim, fish and otherwise enjoy ourselves. With their passing, the cabin passed to my wife. Now we go there to weed, paint, replace the deck, replace the flooring … We liked it better when we could lie around like slugs, but there you are. This summer, we…