Is Idaho less quirky than it once was?

As the state has grown, has it lost its ability to produce uniquely colorful characters?

The question occurred to me recently while working in my home office, which among other pictures has a framed photo of Dugout Dick.

If you’re a newcomer to the state, you’re wondering who that was.

Dugout Dick, real name Richard Zimmerman, came by his moniker legitimately. Also known as the Salmon River Caveman, he was best known for digging caves on a hillside south of the town of Salmon.

There were over a dozen of them. He dug all of them himself with a nothing but a pick, a shovel and a pry bar. Thirty-two when he started, he lived in one or the other of them for more than 60 years.

The caves became a mini-tourist attraction and a source of income for him, rented out to down-on-their luck itinerants who needed a place to stay and didn’t mind living in a cave, and to hunters for $2 a night. Rustic as they were, they included many of the comforts of home, provided you didn’t mind bathing in the river. Dick’s was equipped with a bed, lanterns, a table and chairs and a wood stove for cooking and providing winter warmth.

His diet consisted of vegetables from his garden, dried fruits, yogurt flavored with carrots and onions and mush made with, among other things, goat’s milk, stinging nettles and fermented vegetables.

His possessions included a beat-up guitar and a harmonica, which he used to entertain himself and visitors who cared to listen (though it didn’t hurt to be tone deaf). Some of the songs he played were hobo songs, learned in his youth while hopping freight cars.

Because of his unusual lifestyle, he was featured in National Geographic and invited to appear on The Tonight Show. He declined.

When he had to leave his cave for more than a few days, he told me in a long-ago interview, he missed it.

“It’s warm in winter, cool in summer,” he said. “I’m as comfortable or more comfortable as I’d be in a house. I’ve stayed in houses. I don’t like them.”

You’t think that living in a cave would be such a difficult existence  that no one could live that way for long. You’d be mistaken. Dugout Dick did it for most of his adult life. He died in 2010, at age 94.

The Salmon River canyon was once a magnet for eccentrics. No one who knew her will forget “Free Press Frances” Zaunmiller Wisner.

Formerly a telephone operator in Texas, she headed west to find a quieter lifestyle. She found it at Campbell’s Ferry, on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River deep in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness – isolated and accessible only by foot, horseback, whitewater raft or a back-country airstrip.

When I expressed an interest in interviewing her, someone who claimed to know her suggested offering to bring her a carton of Doublemint chewing gum. She responded to my letter by saying that she didn’t chew Doublemint, she smoked Lucky Strikes. But I could come anyway.

It’s an understatement to say that the flight to the airstrip with a pilot who claimed to have crashed six times was exhilarating. Expecting to meet a hardbitten woman in a flannel shirt, grimy jeans and work boots, I was surprised to meet a white-haired lady nattily outfitted  in a floor-length skirt, ruffled blouse and frilly bonnet. Though she lived alone except for occasional visitors and her dog, Gretchen, she took pains to look nice.

She had so many books that her old log house seemed almost to be held up by them. She said she’d read them all, with the exception of religious books that people had sent her.

She claimed to have shot eight bears in her front yard.

Like Dugout Dick, she nixed an invitation to appear on The Tonight Show.

Her nickname, Free Press Frances, was an offshoot of the weekly columns she wrote for the Idaho County Free Press – for more than 40 years – in Grangeville. The columns were flown there from Campbell’s Ferry on a back-country mail plane.

She was 72 years old when she died in 1986, leaving a hole in the wilderness and in the hearts of all who knew her.

Five Mile Bar, ten miles downstream from Wisner’s log house at Campbell’s Ferry, was the home of her neighbor, Sylvan Hart – better known as Buckskin Bill for his homemade buckskin and bearskin clothes, topped by fur hats or leather helmets.

Though he lived alone for most of his time on the river, he was anything but a hermit. College educated, he was an avid reader, a World War II army sergeant, an expert gunsmith, and, following an article about him in a national magazine, a willing and enthusiastic celebrity.

To his lasting pleasure, his home became a popular stop for river runners, whom he happily entertained by answering questions and spinning yarns. The so-called “last of the mountain men” died in 1980 of an apparent heart attack, his death touching the hearts of his many friends and admirers.

A nine-hour drive from Five Mile Bar took a seeker of colorful characters to the southern Idaho hamlet of Hill City on the Camas Prairie, and the covered-wagon  home of Louis Roman. Better known as Sunrise, he said he chose the name because the sunrise is what wakes people up.

He dressed in buckskin, wore a six-shooter on his hip and peppered the hills along Highway 20 with posters espousing his acerbic political opinions. A native of Hungary, he came to the U.S. seeking freedom after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Belying his grizzled, intimidating appearance, he was friendly, loquacious, quick-witted.

“We’re all victims of isms,” he told me. “… Communism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Mormonism. You? You’re a victim of journalism.”

Like virtually all of his fellow solitaires, Sunrise is gone now. Over the years, the state has been home to a dozen or more of them. They were part of what made Idaho Idaho. Now, to the best of my knowledge, there are none.

I’d like nothing better than to be proven wrong on that. If you know someone who qualifies, please email me at the address below.

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

  Summer – thankfully – is officially over. 

  Never thought I’d feel that way. Summer has long been my favorite season, a time of clear blue skies and sunshine, picnics,  barbecues, swimming …

  This year, not so much. The summer of 2026 was one to be endured as much as enjoyed.

  It was, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “officially the hottest summer on record for the contiguous United States in 132 years of record keeping.”

  The nation’s average temperature was three degrees above the Twentieth Century Average. It “beat the previous record – set during the Dust Bowl in 1936 and tied in 2031 – by a massive 0.4 degrees.”

  July, according to NOAA’s records, was the hottest month ever in the U.S. August was nipping at its heels, the hottest August since 1895.

  Surprisingly, it was only the eighth hottest summer here.

  It just didn’t feel that way. To borrow one of my father-in-law’s favorite phrases, it felt “hotter than the hubs of hell.”

  Why?

  Maybe the smoke had something to do with it. Remember the smoke that drifted in from the fires in eastern Oregon, blanketing the valley for what seemed like forever?

  Maybe not. Maybe you’ve been lucky and forgotten. 

  Boise, according to NOAA, had “some of the worst air quality conditions in 15 to 20 years. … 

  “Hourly Air Quality Index peaks reached between 255 and 260, making it the worst 48-hour air quality period in up to two decades and briefly ranking Idaho’s air quality as the worst in the nation.”

  Try finding that in the stories about what a great place this is to live.

  Except for time away at college and in the Navy I’ve lived in Boise all my life. And for most of that time it actually has been a great place to live.

  Big enough to have diverse entertainment and recreation options: concerts, theater arts, hiking in the Foothills, skiing at Bogus Basin, multiple types of sports events … All while retaining a small-town feel and a pleasant, four-season climate.

  Now it’s a pleasant three-season climate. Fall is beautiful, winters are typically mild and spring is lovely and welcome. Summer is, well, not as welcome as it once was.

  This may have been only the eighth hottest summer on record, but with temperatures as high as 104 degrees and continual  regional air quality advisories it seemed like the hottest and arguably one of the worst summers ever.

  I like to take the dog for daily walks, sometimes twice a day. Sadly, there were more than a few days this summer when that wasn’t a great idea. The smoke was as unhealthy to breathe – for both of us – as it was depressing.

  Unhealthy air canceled a Boise Hawks baseball game. The city canceled or altered outdoor activities, including swimming lessons and some pool operations.

  In other Treasure Valley cities, the smoke led to outdoor events being canceled and softball games and school practices being moved indoors.

  What’s causing all this? Though many including our president still deny it, the evidence points to, among other things, climate change. Google cites the following factors:

  “Climate Change: Rising global temperatures and lower moisture levels pull water from soil and plants, creating severe fire weather. Hotter nights also prevent fires from dying down overnight, helping them grow larger.

  Human Activity: People cause roughly 84% of wildland fires through unattended campfires, discarded cigarettes, equipment sparks, fireworks, and arson.

  Fuel Buildup: Decades of total fire suppression policies stopped natural, small burns. This allowed dead wood, brush, and thick vegetation to accumulate, feeding much larger and more intense fires.”

  Put another way, we’ve brought a lot this on ourselves.

  Is there anything we could to do change this?

  Yes. Switching to clean energy sources like solar, geothermal wind and nuclear energy would help.

   Individually, we could walk more, bike more, drive EVs.

   Some of these things are happening. But not enough, at least so far, to turn the tide. Our president is opposed to many of them. 

  Much as I’d like to end this on a positive note, none comes to mind.

  Ideas? Suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

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

  Have you ever thought something disappeared recently only to learn that it had been gone for a long time?

  If so, you’ll understand  how I felt learning just last month that a building once an important part of my life collapsed four years ago.

  The building was the Trocadero Ballroom, later the Country Club Reel Theater, on Boise’s Overland Road. In my defense, I don’t get to that part of town often and am focused on traffic rather than the surroundings when I do. I knew the theater had closed but didn’t know that it had subsequently collapsed.

  It was sobering to realize that the building once a scene of popular dances every weekend had been reduced to a memory.

  For several years during my teens, it was the place to go on Friday and Saturday nights. Depending on what band was playing and what the competition from other venues was, its crowds numbered anywhere from fewer than a hundred to over a thousand.

  Name acts who performed at the Trocadero included the Cascades, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Wayne Newton, Paul and Paula, Dick and DeeDee, the Wailers and the Marketts.

  Some of the local bands who played there were Dick Cates and the Chessmen, the Chancellors, the Monarchs, the Coachmen, the Hitchhikers and the Mystics.

  I was the Mystics’ guitar player. I had to chuckle when reading the AI description of the group:

  “Popular local regulars who arrived in style, driving a cherry red 1956 Chrysler Crown Imperial limousine to their Friday night sets.”

  The old limousine still has a place in our hearts. It was dark blue when we bought it, but we had it painted candy apple red with the name of the band in gold on the front doors. It was beautiful.

Picture/cutline:  This isn’t the actual Mystics limousine, but it’s the same make, year, model and color. I found a picture of a black one, and my computer savvy granddaughter, Hailey West, changed it to red and added the band’s name on the door.

  As mentioned above, we were the Friday night band; the Hitchhikers played Saturday nights. We were envious of that; Saturday was the main event, the night with the biggest crowds.

   The Hitchhikers deserved it, though. They were older and better than we were. Two of them had been in Paul Revere and the Raiders.

   The Trocadero’s manager was a disc jockey named Del Chapman. Del was also our manager. He initially got us gigs out of town because we weren’t experienced enough or good enough for “the Troc,” as everyone called it. Eventually we got better, though, and he made us the Friday night regulars.

   That ended abruptly. After playing New Year’s Eve in Burns, Ore., we got up early on Friday morning to make it back to Boise in time to drive home  and play at the Trocadero. A good plan – until the blizzard hit.

  We were approaching Drinkwater Pass, a hilly area in eastern Oregon, when snow started falling thick and fast. In hardly any time, the highway was snow-covered and slick.

  Then one of our tires blew out. It was slow going changing it  because the jack kept slipping on the slick pavement. As if that hadn’t been enough, one of the power-window motors blew out.  Smoke poured from all the windows. 

  As you can imagine, it took a while to get underway again. Worse, the road was slick most of the way to Boise. By the time we got to the Trocadero, set up our equipment and started to play we were 45 minutes late.

  We thought we deserved a medal for getting there at all. Del didn’t. He quit as our manager and fired us from the Trocadero. We never played there again.

  It could have meant the end of the band. Without our main gig, the future looked bleak.

  Enter Bert Woodward, my dad.

  It  happened that one of the most popular dance halls in town, the Fiesta Ballroom, had been closed for months. I was sure that if we could reopen it, we’d have good crowds there. None of us were 21, but Dad signed the lease on the condition that we’d be responsible for running the place – including the bills.

  It worked. We played there Saturday nights, competing with the Trocadero, and had good crowds just about every week. The Trocadero didn’t, and had to close.

  Decades later, I ran into Del and told him it was never our intention to run him out of business. We just wanted to play.

  He couldn’t have been nicer about it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Lots of water under the bridge since then.”

  Looking back, it seems like just a few years since we were carefree teenagers, playing hits of the day and freewheeling it along the highways of Idaho and Oregon in a beautiful red limousine. I wouldn’t trade the memories for anything.

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 

GREENLEAF – Why do people collect things?

   Google and AI tell us it’s to “satisfy deep psychological needs for order, identity and emotional support.”

  Collecting “gives the brain a soothing sense of control and structure,” and the search for things to collect “triggers dopamine in the brain.”

  Or maybe it’s that for some people collecting is just fun.

  I’ve never been much of a collector. As a kid I had a collection of unusual rocks – iron ore, turquoise, fool’s gold – that my father and I scavenged in the Colorado mining town where he was raised. I’ve owned a lot of guitars, but they’re to play rather than satisfy a “deep psychological need,” so they don’t really qualify as collections.

  I’ve written a number of columns over the years about collectors, however. Several of them come to mind at the moment:

   Ed Ketner collected junk. Literally. He had a mountain of it. Most was scrap lumber, which he used to build his house outside Boise. It looked like an overgrown bird house. Asked why he had so much junk, he said it just made him feel good to know it was there.

  Garfield Shults collected trees. He planted so many around his Owyhee County home that they filled nearly 40 acres. He had four kinds of pine trees, five kinds of fruit trees, six kinds of nut trees and a variety of others, from quince trees to hickories. The only kind he wanted but didn’t have was a pistachio tree. Idaho winters are too hard for them.

  Robert Grubbs collected rocks, from pebbles to a 750-pound chunk of crystallized quartz. He also collected oddments from horseshoes to telegraph wire, some of which he sold at his shop in Bliss.

  I’ve missed writing about people and their collections, so in a recent column I asked for collectors to let me know if they’d be interested in being interviewed. Two responded. One collects dead insects. The other was Ken Yellen.

  Yellen, who lives in Greenleaf, collects cast iron. Mostly cast-iron skillets, which he restores if they’re in bad shape. He also collects cast-iron griddles and makes cast-iron knick knacks – a cast-iron bee,  cast-iron dog, cast-iron dinosaur …

  Yellen, 71, has “used cast iron forever,” but has been collecting it seriously for about five years.

  The appeal of collecting can be limited to collecting just one type of thing – be it coins, stamps or cast iron – or a variety of things. Through the years Yellen has collected wood figures, stained glass and Mason jars. Jars were his main interest before he got hooked on cast iron.

  “I’d buy and sell them and make some money,” he said. “It was cheap and it was fun,” he said, “It’s a hunt. Now everybody’s into it so you can’t buy them cheap any more.”

  “Everybody” may not be much of an exaggeration. There’s actually a book for canning-jar collectors – “The Collector’s Guide to Old Fruit Jars.” It’s popular enough that it’s been published in multiple editions.

  You’d think there wouldn’t be a lot of variety in fruit jars. Not so. They come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, even colors. Yellen has a rose colored one that’s beautiful, or at least as beautiful as a fruit jar can be.

   “I collected jars for three or four years, then moved on to cast iron,” he said. “I’d pick things up at auctions, garage sales. … It’s just fun. I’m retired so I gotta’ do something.”

  He’s done a lot of things, He retired from contracting and property management, ran an avocado ranch, learned to fly and once built a two-seater airplane.

  His cast iron collection numbers about 30 pieces. 

  One of his and his wife Linda’s favorites is a Wagner 14-inch skillet that he got at a yard sale for five dollars and is worth about $100.

  “We use it all the time,” he said. It’s great for pancakes.”

  Wagner and Griswold brand skillets are the Cadillacs of cast-iron cookware.   Griswold Manufacturing Co., closed its doors in 1957. Wagner Ware  shut down in 1999, but Wagner Cast Iron now makes reissues. The rarest Griswold and Wagner skillets are worth thousands of dollars. (Yellens’ aren’t in that category.)   

  Another of his favorite pieces is a waffle maker.

  “It makes the best crispy waffles!” he said “We’ve used it a few times, but I’m afraid that if we made a mistake with it we’d be cleaning it for two days so we don’t use it that often.”

  How does Linda feel about having all that cast iron around the house?

  “I’m fine with it,” she said. “I use it every day.”

  Is there a Holy Grail of cast iron, something Ken’s itching to add to his collection?

  “No, I’m probably done with cast iron. The problem is everybody’s doing it. The prices to buy it unrestored are almost what they’re worth restored.”

  Linda’s view of the collection is pragmatic. 

  “It’s probably a good thing that he’s done,” she said. “We don’t have room to put it any more.”

                                                       ***

A recent column quoted a researcher who claimed that “America is more divided now than at any time since the Civil War” and asked readers how they felt about the state of the country.

  It didn’t result in a lot of responses –  four, exactly.

  If there were some optimistic ones, I’d have been happy to include them. There weren’t:

  Walt Varnes wrote that he remembered “reading somewhere that the average age of world empires going back as history records is 200 years. This year is number 250 for the United States. Will we see 300? I doubt it.”

  William Brudenell thinks “that the nation is worse off today than any time I can remember as we are under the leadership of people who are either scoundrels or who are members of a cult.”

  Don Newton likes what President Trump has done: “It is easy to overlook his childish name calling, tweeting and over use of gold decorations in the White House as he does seem to put America first.  Just the fact his DOGE team instituted the new hunting for fraud is refreshing as neither party was interested in the past.” 

  Janice Davis is “very sad for America. We’ve gone from the top spot, number one country leading the world, to a pathetic laughingstock. I believe America is in the worst trouble ever, in danger of losing her identity and everything she has stood for for 250 years.”

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.

  “So how was your trip to Africa?” people ask.

  There’s no short answer to that. Only a long one will do.

  We were a group of nine, sponsors of students at Caring Hearts High School in Kenya. We’d be there for ten days, staying in Nairobi and commuting to the school, where we’d be teaching classes to the students. The school was founded by Vincent Kituku, a native Kenyan who lives in Boise.

  Kenya is more than 9,000 miles from Boise, nearly halfway around the world. To get there, we flew from Boise to Seattle to Paris to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. Twenty hours of flying time, not counting layovers.

  By the time we arrived, we were beyond tired and wanting nothing more than to retrieve our bags, go straight to the hotel and sleep for about a week.

  No such luck. One of my wife’s suitcases failed to make an appearance at the Nairobi airport. We looked for over an hour, repeatedly checking the bags on every carousel and in the lost baggage area,

  No suitcase. It was after 1 a.m. when we found out why.

  The good news was that the lost bag had been found.The bad news was that it had been found in Paris. It hadn’t been transferred to our new plane during our layover there. 

  While unpacking at our hotel, we realized that the contents of the bag left in Paris included the adaptors for all of our chargers – cell phones, smart watches, etc. There wasn’t a clock in our room, so there was no way of knowing what ungodly hour it was when we finally got to sleep. Morning came all too soon.

  Bleary eyed, we boarded the van to take us to the school, an hour away from our hotel.

  The road to the school was lined with goats, cows being led, cows pulling carts – and colorful signboards:  “Blessed Welding Shop, Mustard Seed Education Center, God’s Vision Electronics, Mother Courage Plaza …” The signs were so entertaining we forgot how tired we were.

  The school had grown exponentially since our visit a decade earlier. Additions included a third floor for the girls’ dormitory, a life skills center, an administrative block with science laboratories, classrooms and administrative offices, a marching band equipment room and a dining hall with classrooms, a chapel, library, kitchen and bakery. Enrollment had grown from 120 girls to 320, and a boys’ school with an enrollment of 214 had been built just down the road.

  One thing that hadn’t changed was the unusual names (to American ears) of some of the students:  Paradis, Kayalo, Liberty, Irafashu, Dedan, Geradin, Ivexsie …

  My job was to teach classes on essay writing. My first presentation seemed to go pretty well, until I asked the class if there were any questions.

  Not a single hand was raised – and 20 minutes of class time remained. Increasingly desperate pleas for questions resulted only in uncomfortable silence – until one of the regular teachers and my wife, a former teacher, suggested that the students write their questions on notes.

 The problem had been that everyone was too shy to ask the first question out loud. The notes idea opened the floodgates. Most of the questions were on essay writing, but others varied wildly:

  “Do American kids go to school with their mobile phones?”

  “What is the hardest lesson you learned about life?”

  “Do students in America learn the Kiswahili language?”

  “Are there boarding schools in America?”

  “Is it hard to get a job in America?”

  “What is the best book you’ve ever read?”

  “How old are your daughters, and why didn’t you bring them with you to Kenya?”

  “You said you played in a band. Can I sing a song with you?”

  Two things didn’t vary. One was the friendliness and helpfulness of the people. Wherever we went, from the airport to a museum to the school, people offered to carry our bags. At first I was leery, fearing that if I handed my suitcase to someone, he or she would run off with it at the first opportunity. 

  How wrong that was! Not only did people not flee with our bags, they happily handed them back at our destination and even thanked us for letting them help us. And no, not a single one of them asked us for money.

  The other thing that didn’t vary?

  Smiles. Smiles everywhere, especially at the school. The students smiled at us, they smiled at their teachers, they smiled at one another. Many are kids who had been orphaned, kids who had been abused, kids who had been homeless. They had every reason to look sad or angry, but they didn’t.

  Takeaways from the trip? First, gratitude for the opportunity to visit a distant and distinctly different part of the world. Second, to be more grateful for what so many Americans take for granted – comfortable homes, jobs, enough to eat. At a Masai village, we spent time with people who live in mud huts, but seemed happy and content.

  Third, to try to make better use of the time left. The ten years since we’d last been to Kenya passed in a blink. Who of us knows whether we’ll still be around in another ten years? It would be foolish to fritter those years away.

  So thank you, Kenya. Thank you for a memorable experience, and for lessons learned.

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

A friend and I recently spent some time reminiscing about the hardest jobs we’d ever had. It brought back a lot of memories, most of them painful.

  The friend, Bob Hagar, lives in Missouri now but grew up in Council.  His hardest job was working on a railroad section gang.

  “Second,” he said, “would be in high school helping make a fire break when there was a forest fire near Council.”

  Third, “pushing wheelbarrows full of wet cement over a narrow plank when a foundation was being built for a dry kiln. … After the second time I missed the plank and wound up in a ditch covered with cement. I was told to draw my pay, get on my motor bike and head home.”

  Just about everyone has stories about working at jobs they detest before settling on one they like well enough to make a career of it. My wife still talks about picking berries in the hot sun and working at a chain restaurant where she made beautiful pies only to have her numbskull boss come along and poke his fingers in them.

  My hardest jobs?

  The first was as a kid working at Braves Field, Boise’s minor league baseball park. It was at the end of Walnut Street adjacent to Municipal Park, on the site now occupied by the Idaho Fish and Game headquarters. The Braves were a farm team of the Milwaukee Braves, and a few of its players went on to the Major Leagues. I used to have a catcher’s mitt signed by Bob Uecker, but my my meticulous mother couldn’t stand having anything around the house that wasn’t being used, and it “mysteriously” vanished while I was in the Navy. 

  At first working at the ball park seemed like fun. A devoted Braves fan, I got to see all the home games for free. My job was to sell refreshments, walking through the stands shouting things like “Popcorn, fresh, hot popcorn right here!”  and “Get your red-hot, salted -in-the shell peanuts!” 

  It was a great job. You got to watch the games, you were selling things fans were eager to buy, and the physical labor was minimal.]

  Until the boss switched me from popcorn and peanuts, which weighed almost nothing, to soda pop. It was kept in a metal cart with a strap around your neck to help hold the loathsome thing up. Filled with ice and sweating bottles of soda pop, the cart would have been only slightly heavier if it had been filled with bowling balls.

  My first and last experience with the soft-drink cart came on an unusually hot summer evening. By the third inning my neck hurt and my arms ached. By the fifth or sixth inning I was in serious pain and on the verge of heat stroke. At some point in the late innings I trudged downstairs to the office, turned in the cart and told the boss I was quitting. That done, I exited the stadium, dragged myself to an isolated patch of weeds behind the outfield fence and threw up.

  My father, who grew up in Cripple Creek, Colo., and as a boy worked in the mines there, believed in teaching the value of hard work at a young age.

  “What do you mean you quit your job?” he asked me.

  “It just got too hard, Dad. Last night it was so hard I got sick.”

  “Do you have another job in mind?”

  “Not really,” I replied, daring to hope that after working at the ball park I could spend the rest of the summer doing something I was actually good at, namely loafing.

  “You don’t? Hmmmm, I can think of something.”

  The “something” turned out to be working for him and my uncle, co-owners of a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. It would be a good experience, Dad said. I would earn some money and learn how the installations were done.

  Translation: The rest of the summer would be spent on the end of a shovel.

  It wasn’t all bad, actually. I learned a lot from my co-workers, grizzled older men who had done that kind of work most of their lives. They taught me to cool off on hot days by running cold water from a hose over my wrists instead of guzzling it and getting sick. They taught me enough about installing sprinkler systems that, many years later, I was able to install one at my current home.

  But it was still hot, hard work, the majority of it digging trenches for the underground sprinkler pipes. I stuck it out for the rest of the summer and part of the next before bolting for what sounded like an easier job, working at a cannery in Emmett.

  The cannery job was a piece of cake.

  At first. The boss put me on the plum line. Plums rolled along a conveyor belt made of rollers. My job was to guide any wayward plums to their proper location, using a sort of squeegee on the end of a pole. It was monotonous but ridiculously easy. Hardly any physical labor at all.

  The corn line, my next assignment, was another story. It consisted of using a special tool to lift several heavy cans of corn at atime and transfer them from one belt to another. By lunchtime my arms ached so much it was painful to lift a sandwich.

  I worked at the cannery for several weeks before gratefully returning to my old job installing sprinklers. Compared with lifting what felt like tons of corn every day, it was a cinch.

  My pay, however, remained at a paltry buck an hour. Lured by a newspaper ad for a job paying almost three times as much, I quit the sprinkler job and went to work on a section gang of the storied Union Pacific Railroad.

  As with my friend Bob’s experience, it was to be the hardest job of all. You spent most of the long, hot days on the end of a special sledgehammer, pounding spikes into the railroad ties. It was hard, unrelenting work. Between the heat, the staccato blows of the sledgehammer and the draining physical labor, it was almost enough to make you physically ill.

  Our lunch break was half an hour. Hoping for a bit of rest, I bolted my lunch in no time and stretched out on the ground for a nap.

  In the old Paul Newman movie “Cool Hand Luke,” the section-gang boss is a silent, menacing figure wearing mirrored glasses. Our boss could have been the inspiration for him. When he ended my nap all too soon one day by poking me in the ribs with a sledgehammer handle, I walked to my car, drove home and returned the following week to the comparative luxury of installing sprinkler systems.

  That, thankfully, completes my hardest-jobs list.

  Do you have a miserable job story? If so, email me at  woodwardcolumn@gmail.com. I’d love to hear about it. 

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

 The director of the Greater Boise Auditorium District recently was quoted as saying that its purchase of the Mardi Gras Ballroom was “a fun opportunity” to stimulate transformational growth.

  Nothing was said about the fun the old ballroom brought to generations of Idahoans. 

  The longtime Boise icon, located at 615 S. Ninth Street, was built in 1927 as an open air pavilion. Orson and Lydia Merrill bought it in 1958 and ran it briefly as a skating rink before converting it to a ballroom and changing  the name from Riverside Pavilion to the name we know it as today. They thought Mardi Gras Ballroom sounded more festive than Riverside Pavilion.’

  And festive it was. Big name acts that performed there through the years included, among others, the Glen Miller Orchestra, Bobby Vee, Buddy Rich, the Ventures, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Leon Russell, Carole King, Muddy Waters, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Ice T, REM, Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker.

  The Mardi Gras also was a popular venue for dances with music by local bands: Gib Hochstrasser and the Kings of Swing, Dick Cates and the Chessmen, the Fabulous Chancellors and many more.

  Few of those who performed on the Mardi Gras stage could equal Cates as a vocalist. He was easily one of the best singers I’ve ever heard, big names included. Roy Orbison had nothing on Dick Cates.

  I went to the Mardi Gras to see Johnny and Edgar Winter, Leon Russell and Buddy Guy. It was so jam-packed for Buddy Guy that it took almost half an hour to squeeze through the crowd from the back of the ballroom to the stage. I never knew what the official capacity of the Mardi Gras was, but rumor had it that there were 1,200 people there that night. The fire marshal couldn’t have been pleased.

  The ballroom was a favored haunt of musicians because it had great acoustics. Live, but no reverberation or echo. Rich, widely considered to be one of the greatest drummers ever, mentioned the Mardi Gras’ acoustics as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He said it had the best acoustics of anyplace he’d ever played. 

  Vying with the acoustics for the ballroom’s greatest asset was its 3,000 square-foot dance floor. It was made of hard rock maple over celotex (high-performance insulation boards).

  The Merrills installed the dance floor themselves and were rightly proud of it. Lydia said it was the best dance floor in town, and Orson was forever cleaning and polishing it.

  My group, the Mystics, played at the Mardi Gras a number of times. I honestly don’t know what the nightly rent was. When we hosted our own dances rather than being hired to play there, the Merrills never charged us. They may have done the same for other local bands. They were good-hearted that way.

  The venerable ballroom was the setting for hundreds if not thousands of dances. A big part of the reason for that, according to Lana McCullough, the Merrills’ daughter, was that Lydia firmly believed in providing wholesome entertainment for young people.

  “My mom always thought that if they were dancing, they wouldn’t get into trouble,” McCullough once told me. 

  Lydia was a big part of why the ballroom ran so smoothly and was a part of Boise’s social scene for more than half a century. No matter what time of day or night you happened to go there, she always seemed to be there. 

  “She was the one who took the tickets and counted the money,” her daughter, Lana McCullough, said. “And she loved to dance. That’s what she always wanted to do.”

  Lydia, incidentally, had a goal of living to be 110. She didn’t miss it by much, dying in 2022 at age106. She was a sweet lady. Her passing was mourned by virtually all of the many musicians who played at the ballroom she and Orson so obviously loved.

  Orson was a bit of a character. He loved to chat up band members when they were setting up or practicing. One of his stock phrases: “Even I know that, and I’m not bright.”

  Few if any of those who heard him say that believed it. He was bright and then some.

  An auditorium district feasibility study for an area that includes the Mardi Gras site proposes a 100,000 square-foot exhibition hall, a multi-use event center and an indoor sports facility as possible uses for the land.

  The ballroom, obviously, would have to be torn down to make way for whatever the new development proves to be.

   Sad for those who loved it, but inevitable.

  It would be great if some part of the new development included a mention of the site’s former use. A Mardi Gras Room, perhaps. Or at the very least, a plaque with images of Orson and Lydia and a brief summary of their Mardi Gras history.

  They and the ballroom they loved deserve to be remembered.

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

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   As we celebrate 250 years of America’s independence, it’s natural for Idahoans to wonder how their state, and they themselves, fit into all that history.

  What is it about Idaho and Idahoans that’s special? What makes Idaho Idaho, and how does that affect those of us who live here?

  Part of what makes Idaho Idaho is its natural beauty, much of it found in mountains. Idaho is the 14h largest state, but if its mountains could be pounded flat it would be the third largest, behind only Alaska and Texas. We have over 80 named mountain ranges, the Sawtooths, White Clouds, Bitterroots, Pioneer, Lost River, Lemhi and Owhyee ranges figuring prominently among them.

  Idaho is more than mountains, of course. It’s wetlands, woodlands, lakes and rivers, prairies, canyons and deserts, each beautiful in its own way.

  “Beauty in a desert?” you may ask.

  Absolutely. Arches, dunes, buttes, cliffs, craters, calderas … Idaho’s deserts have them all, populated with wildlife from rattlesnakes to antelopes to birds of prey. The Bruneau Sand Dunes are North America’s  tallest, free-standing sand dunes. The Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area is home to the continent’s greatest concentration of nesting birds of prey.

  How have the state’s natural wonders affected us? Does being surrounded by so much beauty so readily accessible contribute to character traits?

  Idahoans are known for a number of those:

  We’re fiercely proud of our state’s natural beauty. Those who have lived here long enough to get to know and appreciate it have a deep connection to the diverse landscapes that make up our state. We tread lightly on them and want them to be protected, to remain as they are for those who come after us.

  With all it has going for it, Idaho still is one of the least known states. Our neighboring states – Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Montana – are well known to the average American for attractions ranging from national parks to the Las Vegas strip.

  Idaho lacks such identities. Despite its abundance of scenic wonders, it’s among the lesser known states. That’s changed somewhat as we’ve grown. Idaho is the second fastest growing state – Utah is first – but to many Americans it’s barely on the radar.

  When I was in the Navy and told fellow sailors I was from Idaho, the responses included “Idaho! That’s the state we always forget when we’re playing name the states and their capitals on a boring mid watch and we have 49.”

 Knowing that people in other states seem only marginally aware of Idaho’s  existence has led to a certain resentment – how dare they think we don’t exist? – and with it an independent streak. We’re one of a minority of states with Don’t Tread on Me license plates and have long attracted independent characters:

  Free Press Frances Wisner, who lived alone on a remote stretch of the Salmon River in a cabin all but held up by books. They and her dog, Gretchen, were her only companions (not counting the bears who frequented her property).

  “Dugout Dick” Zimmerman, “the Salmon River Caveman.” An Indiana native, he walked across a bridge over the Salmon River in 1947, built a makeshift home on a hillside and spent the rest of his life there, mostly in caves he dug into the hillside. Independence personified.

  Sylvan Hart, better known as Buckskin Bill. Another of the solitaries who settled along the Salmon River, he was one of the last true mountain men to settle in the Idaho wilderness.

  Idahoans feel a deep connection to the land and get their hackles up when it is threatened. When the North Fork of the Payette River was threatened with development, public opposition led to adoption of a state water plan that protects it.

   The same thing happened with a proposal to develop Upper Mesa Falls, in eastern Idaho. Though not as well known as Shoshone Falls, the so-called Niagara of the West, Upper Mesa Falls is easily as spectacular. News of a plan to develop it met with anger bordering on outrage. Journalists, myself included, were so incensed that they penned editorials and columns arguing that the falls were perfect as they were and should never be developed. The proposal was dropped. 

  Idahoans are known for friendliness, We’re concerned about the effects of rapid growth on our state, but on a personal level are welcoming to newcomers. We’re so friendly that people from other places comment on it. We smile and say hello to strangers. Accustomed to avoiding eye contact, visitors from other places find that surprising. They can’t get over how different it is from where they left.

  Neighborliness and generosity are Idaho character traits. When news comes of a tragedy that leaves people badly injured, homeless or otherwise in dire straits, in pour the donations. GoFundMe goals are routinely met, often exceeded.

  All things considered, we’re fortunate to live here. Here’s to America’s 250th, and to the beautiful state we call home.

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 didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has lived in Boise very long that it was recently named the number-one city people are moving to from other parts of the country.

  Boise, according to a recent analysis titled “America’s Most Magnetic Metros Ranked by 2026 Migration Demand,” is the nation’s number-one magnetic metro. The reason citied is that it has the highest rate of people moving to Boise as opposed to  leaving.

  As if we didn’t already know that Boise is attracting newcomers. Last year, according to the U.S. Census, the Boise area’s growth was a major factor in Idaho’s ranking as the second fastest growing state in the country by percentage. Boise has been among the nation’s fastest growing cities for some time now.

  My father, who died in 1985 and lived in Boise much of his life, would’t recognize it today. The metro area’s  population then was roughly 145,000. Now it’s 488,000.

  When I was a teenager, it was approximately 93,000. The population of the city proper, as opposed to the metro area, was a little over 34,000.

  It was an idyllic place to grow up. From our neighborhood in the North End, it was a five-minute walk to school, church, two grocery stores (one with a really great bakery), a municipal swimming pool and a bicycle repair shop.

  We rode bikes everywhere. We rode them to the school grounds  to play baseball, which actually was the national pastime then. We rode them to the swimming pool. We rode them to Camels Back Hill to catch tadpoles in the ponds there. We caught them in Mason jars, pedaled home with them and put them in fish bowls. When they grew into frogs, we held frog races.

  Races in name only. Frogs have no concept of starting or finish lines and are annoying independent. They hop pretty much wherever they please and, often as not, don’t hop anywhere at all. Given their refusal to cooperate, frog races tended to be fleeing diversions.

  Not so with fishing at the Strawberry Glen Bridge. It was just west of what’s now the Glenwood Bridge, and a long bike ride from our neighborhood. There was a small airport there, long since replaced by houses. 

  With decades of development resulting in hugely increased traffic on State Street, few parents today would let their kids make that ride. It’s too dangerous. (Lending Tree recently rated Idaho as having the seventh worst drivers in the nation.) Our parents didn’t give it a second thought.

  And the fishing was great.

  Now the Strawberry Glen Bridge is a memory. So are the Strawberry Glen airport, both of the old neighborhood’s grocery stores and the bicycle repair shop. It’s probably been decades since a kid caught a tadpole at Camels Back Hill, now Camels Back Park.

  But while we’ve lost a lot, we’ve also gained a lot. Yes, we have long lines and gridlock that once were unknown, but Boise also is a more interesting place with far more things to do.

  We didn’t have the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts in my younger days. A small sampling of the notable acts and individuals that have appeared there includes Broadway and touring productions such as Cats, Hamilton, Wicked, the Lion King, Les Miserable and more; B.B. King; Tony Bennett, Itzhak Perlman, Hal Holbrook, Robert Redford …

  I vividly recall going to Bronco football games with my sister, who was ten years older and a student at what was then Boise Junior College. The games were played on a grass field with wooden bleachers that might have held 100 people and were mostly empty. Most of the fans who bothered to attend stood on the sidelines. The players’ uniforms were streaked with mud and grass stains.

  Now the Broncos play in a stadium with a capacity of 36,000 on a blue field that is nationally famous. They’ve defeated powerhouses like Georgia, Florida State, TCU, Virginia Tech, Oregon and, in one of the most famous games in college football history, the mighty Oklahoma Sooners.

  Shopping in Boise, aside from grocery stores, used to be limited mainly to a few stores downtown.The city struggled mightily and unsuccessfully for years to build a shopping mall downtown, fearing that a suburban mall would be downtowns’ death knell. The suburban mall opened in 1988, and today downtown is alive, well, vibrant.

  A partial sampling of attractions that didn’t exist in the good old days includes the Velma V. Morrison Center, the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, the Basque Block and Basque Museum and Cultural Center, the Idaho Black History Museum, the Irma Hayman and James Castle houses, Freak Alley, the Old Idaho Penitentiary and Outlaw Field, Art in the Park …

  And still we continue to grow. The number one place to move.

  To newcomers, welcome. To those who are thinking of becoming newcomers, please think about some other places as well. Boise is still a pretty good place to live, but it’s not the idyllic little town you may think it is. We’ve grown so much, so fast. That place doesn’t exist any more.

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.

  One of the most memorable incidents of my junior high school years was of being saved.

  Not in a religious way; I was saved from what most likely would have been humiliation at best, a beating at worst. It happened one afternoon while I was walking home from school. I was partway down an alley used as a shortcut when three bullies came after me for no obvious reason. They were complete strangers. 

  They backed me up against a fence, said some things that can’t be printed in a general circulation newspaper and were threatening to rearrange my face when a boy walking home from my school intervened.

  He was an imposing presence, a head taller than any of us. He didn’t swear at the bullies or raise his voice. He just calmly told them to leave me alone and go on their way, and they did. There was a presence about him that commanded respect.

   His name was Terry Reilly, a name now well known as the founder of Terry Reilly Health Services – currently celebrating its 55th anniversary.

  Like many young men at the time, he was opposed to the Vietnam War, enough so that he was given conscientious objector status and did two years of community service helping poor people. Because many of them didn’t have doctors, they used emergency rooms for primary care, racking up huge bills. This was his primary inspiration for starting TRHS, to give them the care they needed for what they could afford to pay. 

  Reilly was an early VISTA volunteer. Volunteers in Service to America, is a program designed to combat poverty. He also studied to become a Catholic priest.

  That wasn’t surprising; priests devote their lives to helping people. Reilly didn’t become a priest, but he clearly wanted to help people. 

  While working for VISTA, he met a fellow volunteer named Rosie and experienced something few people do.

  “It was love at first sight,” Rosie Delgadillo Reilly recalled.

  They were married two years later.

  TRHS started in their home in 1971.

  “It was a house with four apartments,” she said. “It really should have been condemned. We lived in one of the apartments. That’s where it (TRHS) started.”

  It started on a shoestring. The first actual clinic was in a space in a Nampa grocery store building. Terry and Rosie Reilly and several staff members purchased in1973 for $600. It had one doctor. Its “pharmacy” was a meat locker. A grant allowed it to be razed and a new building to replace it.

 “It was the first community health clinic in Idaho,” Reilly said.

  Tragically, Terry Reilly was killed in a plane crash in 1986. TRHS, however, not only survived him but has grown exponentially. As it observes its 55th anniversary, it is providing services far beyond what those that were offered, or perhaps even imagined, in its early days.

  From that first clinic with a single volunteer doctor in a former grocery store, it has expanded to 122 doctors and and other health care providers working at 22 clinics in Boise, Nampa, Caldwell, Marsing, Homedale and Middleton. Another clinic is being built in Parma.

  TRHS offers medical, dental, behavioral health, pharmacy, obstetrics and pediatric care. Beyond its clinics, it offers services at the Ada County Victim Services Center, Nampa Family Justice Center, Allumbaugh House, New Path Housing, a clinic at Interfaith Sanctuary, and supportive housing locations in Boise, Nampa and Caldwell, as well as school-based therapy and mobile medical and dental clinics at schools, rural areas and skilled nursing facilities.

  It serves more than 42,000 patients a year, a majority of whom live below the federal poverty level despite working. Nearly two thirds have no insurance. Without TRHS, many would find it difficult or impossible to receive the care they need.

  TRHS “patient navigators” help them apply for Medicaid, Medicare and Children Health Insurance, connect patients with housing services, locate food pantries, make referrals for legal assistance, employment and Internet access, arrange transportation to health appointments and provide case management services and help in applying for assistance programs that they’re eligible to receive. 

  The family of a four-year-old boy named Titus came to TRHS because he didn’t seem to be developing properly. This led to a diagnosis of autism. TRHS workers helped the family get health insurance and start receiving the care he needed. A year later, he’d gone from being non-verbal to walking to a bulletin board and naming every color and letter on it.

  A domestic violence victim named Brenda suffered from a brain injury and memory loss. A TRHS team connected her with multiple resources that helped her heal and remain employed and stable. Four years later, her provider said no one would ever guess that she’d had a traumatic brain injury.

  Bottom line:  The organization Terry Reilly started on a shoestring all those years ago has helped and continues to help thousands of people. I can only imagine how good that would make him feel.

  If you’d like to help, donations may be made online at trhs.org or by sending a check to:  Terry Reilly Health Services, 211 Sixteenth Avenue North, P.S. Box 9, Nampa, ID 83653.

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

  We never know when moments from our past will return as if they’d happened yesterday. They can stop us in our tracks when we least expect it, sometimes simply by turning a corner.

  It happened to me on a walk through what I thought was an unfamiliar neighborhood. The winding route took me past some homes at the foot of a hill, around a bend and up the street that led to the top of the hill. I walked a block up the street – and there it was.

  It was older, but clearly the same house – red brick, two stories, white pillars on the front porch. The neighborhood had grown up and grown old – there were still vacant lots the last time I was there – and the yard’s trees and bushes, then newly planted, had also grown old, giving the place an overgrown look.

  But there was no doubt that it was the same house, the one where as a teenager I’d  spent some of the longest, hottest workdays of my life, doing the hardest job I ever had. 

  No, that’s not quite right, actually. The hardest job was working on a Union Pacific Railroad section gang, but that’s another story.

  Working as a ditch digger was a close second. I was 13, maybe 14. Old enough, in my father’s way of looking at it, to go to work for the sprinkler-system company that he and one of my uncles had started a few years earlier.

  I learned enough about installing sprinkler systems during the four summers I worked for them to install my owner sprinkler system at the house where I lived now, Learning was secondary to doing hard, manual labor, however, most of it on the end of a shovel.

  There on that street, staring at the brick house with the white pillars, it was as if hardly any time had passed. I was a kid again, working with the company’s hard-bitten old timers who had done that kind of work all their lives, all of them long since passed.

  There was Uncle Wayne, my father’s partner and foreman of the installation crews. He had once been a foreman of a mine in Peru, a job I thought impossibly exotic. He knew a lot about hard work in hot weather and was generous with his advice.

  “You’re working too hard,” he told me one afternoon. “Don’t use your muscles to dig. Use your weight. Otherwise you’ll be worn out by noon.”

  Another time:  “Don’t drink so much water from the garden hose  when you need to cool off. Run the cold water over your wrists instead.”

  Uncle Wayne was but one of the ghosts to surface while I stood transfixed in the Court of Memory. There was burly, grumpy Paul, the  crew boss who rarely had anything good to say to anyone, particularly me. And Lew Steinborn, a red-haired bear of a man who took me under his wing and brought camaraderie and laughter to the the long, hot days of those Idaho summers.

  It was Lew who taught me the mechanics of the job. He showed me how to tie in to the main water line, how to install valves for the sprinkler lines, how to  install the sprinklers themselves. And despite a difference of some 30 years in our ages, we became friends.

  By about my third summer, he decided I was old enough to accompany him to his favorite watering hole, a tavern on Fairview Avenue. The bartender had to have suspected that I was underage, but Lew vouched for me, which apparently was enough. He was a regular whose business would have been missed had the bartender offended him by asking for my ID. And it wasn’t as if we drank to excess, just a cold beer or two after a hard day’s work. 

  We went to Lew’s house a time or two to sample his homemade dandelion wine. It was awful, but I pretended otherwise. It wouldn’t do to offend the crew boss who mentored me and became my friend.

  Our most colorful co-worker was a man named Bill, last name long forgotten. Bill was probably in his 60s then. He was a man who had done hard manual labor all his life and looked it. His hands were gnarled and scarred, his face wrinkled and leathery from years of working outdoors in the summer sun and winter cold. He was given to colorful speech.

  “How hot will it be today, Bill?” we’d ask him.

  “Hottern’ the hubs of hell.”

  “How cold do you think it’s going to be today, Bill?”

  “Colder’n a well digger’s ass in the Klondike.”

  Those colorful characters from so long ago came back to me as I stood in the street in front of the pillared house. I remembered their faces, their voices. I remembered the black, workman’s lunchbox my mother packed each morning with a sandwich, a hard-boiled egg and Thermos filled with soup. I could almost taste it.

  If someone had told that boy on the end of the shovel that he would come back there one day in his twilight years and it would seem like hardly any time had passed at all, he wouldn’t have believed it. He’d have had trouble believing he’d ever be old.

  Time passes so quickly. It doesn’t seem like it when it’s happening. It only seems that way after it’s gone. We’re young, and then, in what doesn’t seem like much time at all, we aren’t. 

  Time is something we shouldn’t take for granted. It’s so precious. In a way, it’s all we have.

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

  To borrow a line from the movie Six Days, Seven Nights, I  may have had all the vacations I can stand.

  Most people’s vacations are relaxing. The Woodwards’  tend to be, well, something other than that. 

  A recent vacation in Mexico was typical. Our home away from home in Mexico was on the sixth floor of what was billed as a high-rise “beachside resort.” It was a suite consisting of a living room, two bedrooms and bathrooms, a small kitchen and a “sitting room,” basically a room with a couch. 

  It was attractive – marble floors (marble must be cheap in Mexico; you see it everywhere), nice furniture, a jacuzzi bathtub and a balcony with an ocean view. We were initially impressed.

  The favorable impression lost some of its luster the first time we needed to use the sink in one of the bathrooms. It was so clogged that we had to call a plumber.

  Unfortunately, the plumber was long gone by the time we needed to use the dishwasher, which had an unusual feature. When you opened it, it wasn’t just the door that opened. The entire dishwasher pulled out of its enclosure and all but fell on the floor. After putting in the soap and loading the dishes, you had to push it back into the space where it belonged.

  The obvious question was whether it would leak. It didn’t, but the washing machine more than made up for this. It leaked prodigiously. Every time we did a load of laundry, we had to mop the floor.

  Not to be outdone, the lock on the sliding door that opened onto the deck was utterly useless. A habitual door locker, I found this a bit unnerving. That said, it wasn’t likely that anyone would scale six floors and use the malfunctioning sliding door to steal our beach towels. 

  This brings us to the light bulbs. There weren’t any.

  That’s an exaggeration, actually. Some of the lights had bulbs that actually worked, but most didn’t. When we reported this, a smiling woman named Letty brought us enough light bulbs to get the lamps working. Letty herself was a bright spot. Every time we saw her, she was smiling. There should be more Letty’s in the world.

  Perhaps you read about cartel violence at a Mexican airport last month. It was pretty big news. The airport and most other places in the city where it happened were closed for several days. We were several hundred miles north of there, but the airport and businesses closed where we were as well. We were told to shelter in place. 

  Despite all this, the first 12 days of the vacation went pretty well. We swam in the pool, walked on the beach, read books. For the most part, we had a good time.

  So what happened on Day 13?

  About an hour after dinner that night, my stomach began to hurt.

  A lot.

  It hurt all night and all of the next day.

  “Maybe you should go to the hospital,” my wife said.

  Fortunately, the hospital was a short bus ride away. Unfortunately, most of the people in the E.R. spoke limited or no English. Pointing to my stomach and groaning managed to get the point across, however, and a doctor was summoned.

  The doctor, who did speak English, diagnosed the problem as an inflamed colon, prescribed pain medication and admitted me to the hospital overnight on an IV drip. By the next morning, I was feeling well enough to be discharged.

  Being hospitalized came with an unexpected benefit. I missed all of the excitement at our Mexican home away from home. The washing machine had leaked, flooding pretty much every room.

  None of this, however, means that we’re down on the idea of beach vacations. We’ll probably take another one next spring.

  I’m thinking Florida.

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.

Singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, who died last month at age 86, was a hit machine. He wrote songs for, among others, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, Tom Jones and the Carpenters, in addition to hits he wrote for himself.

  As seminal a figure as he was in pop music, however, I remember him mainly for an incident that happened the day of his one and only performance in Boise, in 1975.

  First, some background about the man himself:

  Not familiar with him? If you’re a young reader, that makes sense. His heydays – there were two of them – were in the 1950s and 1970s. But no matter your age, you’ve almost certainly heard some of his songs:

  “Where the Boys Are,” “Love Will Keep Us Together,” “Calendar Girl,” “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and on and on …He wrote or co-wrote over 500 songs.

  When he came to Boise, I was assigned to interview him. I called his agent to request the interview and was told that it could  happen but that there were no guarantees. Depending on how tight Sedaka’s schedule was, he may or may not have time.

  The concert was on a Sunday night, which was unusual in those days; concerts almost always were on Friday or Saturday nights. This may have explained my forgetting about the concert entirely that Sunday afternoon.

  My wife and I had spent the weekend texturing and painting a ceiling in Maintenance Manor, the 90-year old fixer upper we’d purchased a few years earlier. I was standing on a ladder, paint roller in hand, when she suddenly remembered what I’d forgotten:

  “Isn’t tonight that Neil Sedaka concert?”

  Yikes! It was indeed that night, and it would be starting in a little over an hour. There wouldn’t even be time to change out of our work clothes, which were lavishly splattered with paint and joint compound. 

  The concert was in the Boise State University gym. Hoping not to see anyone who’d recognize us in our bespattered condition, we climbed to the upper rows of bleachers at the back of the gym, where it was unlikely that anyone would notice us.

  Roughly half an hour before the concert was scheduled to begin, a young man began to climb the bleachers, heading in our direction. We assumed that for reasons of his own, he also was seeking anonymity.

  He wasn’t. He climbed directly to where we were sitting.

  “Are you Tim Woodward?” he asked.

  “Uh … yes.”

  “Mr. Sedaka would like to see you in his dressing room.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think I heard you right. Neil Sedaka wants to see me?”

  “Yes. You requested an interview with him, didn’t you?”

  “I did, but never heard for sure that it was actually going to happen.”

  “Well, it is. It’s happening now.”

  With that he led me down the bleachers toward the main floor and certain humiliation. Along the way, we passed a photographer who was covering the concert and, seeing my plight, graciously offered me a pen and notebook.

  Try as I might to think of some interview questions on the fly, I could only think of one:  What the hell am I going to ask him?

  The young man who had led me to slaughter, somehow resisting the urge to laugh or at least snicker, stopped at the dressing room door and knocked.

  When the door opened, I was roughly eight or ten feet from Sedaka and his band members. He was dressed in a silver sequin suit. The guys in the band, though sans sequins, all were dressed to the nines.

  A long, awkward silence followed. Everyone stared, at yours truly.

  It was Sedaka himself who broke the silence.

  “I’ve been interviewed a lot of times,” he said, “but never by anyone covered in paint.”

  This elicited some polite chuckles from the band, and a general lessening of tension. I relaxed a bit and explained that we’d been painting a ceiling and temporarily forgotten about the concert. Seemingly amused, he couldn’t have been more accommodating. I managed to think of a few questions, which he thoughtfully answered before he went onstage and I slunk back to my seat.

  His fans will remember Neil Sedaka as a prolific songwriter and a great singer and performer. I’ll remember him as all of that – and as a genuinely nice man.

(Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday and is potted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.)

  Most of us early in life have little idea of what we want to do with our lives. In my teens, I hoped at one time or another to become a rock star, a famous author, an architect or an airline pilot.

  The airline pilot idea began with family dinners in the old Boise airport. It had a restaurant called the Strato Room, where you could watch the planes come and go while you dined. My folks used to take my sister and me there for occasional splurges. I was all but mesmerized by the arrivals of United and West Coast Airlines planes. (Boise only had two airlines then.)

  This eventually led to taking flying lessons at Boise Air Service, located near the airport terminal building. I got a private pilot’s license, but was never comfortable flying solo. A fear of putting the plane into a spin and crashing never left. I simply wasn’t cut out to be a pilot.

  Unknown to me at the time, one of the top pilots at Boise Air Service in those days was a man named Harold Dougal. My granddaughter Hailey, who works at the Boise Veterans Administration Medical Center, met him when he was a patient there and loved listening to his stories. She thought he’d make a good subject for my column so I went to see him and hear some of the stories for myself.

  It’s an understatement to say that the flying bug bit Dougal early. A Nampa native, he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t interested in airplanes.

  “There has never been a time in my life when I did not have an obsession to fly. Not just a desire or feeling that it would be fun to fly in the blue sky above, but a driving force always after me. Flying was the only thing I cared anything about.”

  That’s the first verse of the first chapter of his book, “The Adventures of an Idaho Mountain Pilot.” Immediately beneath it is a picture of him as a toddler, holding a toy airplane.

  He’s worked at a lot of things in his life. He’s been a welder, a blacksmith, an auto mechanic, a Boise police officer, a Boise fireman and a fire department dispatch officer. He also married and had five children. Throughout all that, he flew whenever he could. 

  When the U.S. entered World War II, he joined the Navy.

  “I was in the amphibian forces,” he said. “I wanted to be a pilot, but this was almost at the end of the war and they had so many pilots they didn’t need me. When I came home after nine months of dodging mines in the Pacific, they said I could go to school and learn whatever I wanted so I signed up for Navy flight school.”

  His father wasn’t happy about it.

  “He was pretty upset. He thought I was going to get in an accident and kill myself.”

  Hardly. He went on to become a pilot, a Navy captain and has been flying ever since. He’s a qualified multi-engine pilot, a certified flight instructor, worked as a mail-plane pilot and has flown thousands of hours on instruments.

  “I’m the only pilot in the country and maybe the world who has flown through a snowstorm on instruments in a biplane with one spark plug.”

  Biplane? Perhaps you’re wondering how old he is? In April, he’ll be 99.

  I asked him whether he’d had a lot of close calls in all those years. 

  “I’ve had about 80 forced landings in over 23,000 hours of flying. If you fly that much, you’re going to have some trouble. Some of the planes I flew were old, junkers not equipped to fly through weather.”

  He’ll never forget the time he was hired to drop a member of a parachute club when things went horribly wrong.

  “I looked back to see if he’d gotten out okay and my oxygen tube came loose at 23,000 feet.”

  At that altitude, the air is too thin to sustain consciousness. Without supplemental oxygen, you only have a few minutes before you black out.

  “I couldn’t see,” he said. “I flew the plane by sound and feel. When I got down to 18,000 feet my sight came back and I was able to land the plane. I sat in the plane on the ground and breathed for half an hour before I could get out.”

  Dougal worked as a pilot for Boise Aviation, later Boise Air Service, where I took took flying lessons in hopes of becoming a dashing airline pilot. It’s possible that we bumped into each other there (on the ground, of course.)

  Seeing as how he’d done about every other kind of flying, I asked him if he’d ever been or wanted to be an airline pilot.

  “No,” he replied. “That’s a joke. The airplane does all the flying. All you do is sit there and watch. There’s nothing to it.”

  Compared with the kind of flying he’s done, he may have a point.

  I still think the uniforms are pretty dashing, though.

  You’d think that at 98, his flying days would be over.

  You’d be wrong. I was about to ask him if he missed flying when he told me he was planning to fly to the back country to take pictures of a bridge built with materials he supplied by flying there 37 times in one week.   

  “Another pilot will be with me. He’ll fly while I take the pictures. I’ll fly the rest of the time.”

  Moral:  Don’t let anybody tell you you’re too old to keep doing what you love.

 What does he like best about flying?

  “The freedom that it’s given me and the experiences I’ve had. It’s something that’s hard to explain, but the feeling I get is the same as when I took off by myself for the very first time. Even at this age, it’s the feeling of freedom I get every time I take off in an airplane.”

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

  Sometimes the smallest things trigger memories when they’re least expected.

  A magazine advertisement for a fountain pen evokes memories of inkwells in elementary school desks.

  A song on the radio brings back memories of an old flame.

  A beat-up wrench in the bottom of a tool box summons memories of a long-ago mentor.

  That happened to me last week while looking for a wrench to remove a car battery. There must be a couple of dozen wrenches in my toolbox and hanging from a pegboard in my garage. Most are relatively new, meaning purchased in recent years. This one, however, had been around for decades.

  it was a gift from a childhood friend and mentor who lived across the street from my parents’ home. Howard Snyder was an Idaho Power Co., troubleshooter, the neighborhood fix-it man and a second father to most of the kids in the neighborhood. He and his wife, Fern, never had children, which was a shame. Their kids would have grown up knowing how to build or fix just about anything.

  Howard gave me the wrench and several smaller ones like it, figuring  they would come in handy when I was older. Neither of us knew at the time that I’d inherited my father’s mechanical aptitude gene, meaning limited mechanical aptitude at best. The wrenches have come in handy from time to time, though, and as wrenches go they’re somewhat unusual.

  When you think of wrenches, brands that come to mind are Craftsman, Milwaukee, DeWalt … The ones Howard gave me are New Britain brand. The New Britain company hasn’t existed for more than 30 years. According to Google, it was known for making “vintage, collectible, high quality hand tools.” Howard didn’t skimp when it came to gifts. He even went to the extent of engraving my name on one side of them, my address on the other.

  If anyone in the neighborhood would have a set of collectible tools, it was Howard. HIs garage and basement workshop were filled with tools, literally hundreds of them – hand tools, power saws, a lathe, grinders, welding machines, painting tools, plumbing tools … You name it, he had it. 

  It wasn’t just tools. He had parts for practically anything. A carburetor for your car? Call Howard. A replacement gas cap for your lawnmower? Howard was your man. A ringer for a discontinued  washing machine? Chances are he had it.

  He looked like what he was – a no nonsense, blue collar working man. Except on Sundays, when he dressed up in a suit and tie for church, he invariably wore sturdy work boots and a matching shirt and work pants made of heavy material in hunter green. He wore his hair in a pompadour and except when wearing welding goggles he was never without a pair of glasses on his prominent nose.

  He built soapbox derby racers for every kid in the neighborhood. He fixed our trikes, bicycles, roller skates. When I was a young teenager hoping to start a rock group, he made my first guitar amplifier out of oddments from his garage.

  He loved to hunt and fish and happily shared his knowledge and his time with any kid who was interested. He taught me how to use a shotgun, tie flies for fishing and took me with him on some bird hunting trips that produced indelible memories.

  Despite his clear instructions and patient coaching, I was and remained a lousy shot. Luckily for the birds, I fired time and again without hitting anything.

  Except for one memorable incident on a grouse hunting trip in the mountains overlooking Boise.

   “You walk down here along the road,” he said. “I’ll go up on the hill and flush the birds down to you.”

  Put another way, he was unselfishly giving me an opportunity to shoot and actually hit something.

  Anyone who has hunted birds knows the explosive sound they make when flushed. As a novice, I was utterly unprepared for this. When it happened, I was so startled that I closed my eyes and inadvertently fired straight up.

  You can imagine my surprise when a grouse fell with a thud practically at my feet.

  “Nice shot, Tim!”

 I never told him my eyes were closed.

 We went duck hunting on the Snake River early one winter morning when the trip unexpectedly was cut short. We’d just pushed the boat into the river when Howard noticed my stricken expression.

  “Are your hip waders leaking?” he asked.

  Affirmative. The water was so cold it immediately turned to ice when it splashed against the side of the boat. Inside my waders, it felt like fire.

  Giving up his day of hunting, Howard pulled the boat from the water, told me to remove the waders and my socks, dried my feet and built a fire to warm them. We went home without any ducks – or frostbite.

  I never was much of a hunter, but fishing with Howard was another story. Time and again we brought home creels filled with trout, perch or crappie.

  It was fun just hanging out with him, watching him do mechanical, welding or woodworking projects and learning a little in the process. Or just watching TV over a bowl of popcorn with him and Fern.

  His life was as long as it was productive and selfless. He died in 2002 at 96.

  This is a bit late, Howard, but for everything you did for me – and countless other kids – thanks.

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

  The pain was like nothing I’d experienced.

  It happened during a family birthday celebration

  “What’s wrong, Dad?” one of my daughters asked.

  “I have this weird pain in my back and stomach. It will probably go away in a few minutes.”

  It didn’t. Four hours later, the birthday party was over but the pain wasn’t, prompting a call to the same daughter, a paramedic.

  “It still hurts?” she said. “Is it getting any better at all?”

  “No.” 

  “That’s a long time for something like that to hurt, Dad. You should probably go the the ER.”

  By then it was nearly midnight.

  Long waits are common at the ER, but they got me right in to see a nurse, then a doctor. Unable to diagnose the problem based on my symptoms alone, the doctor ordered some tests. The pain, meanwhile, didn’t let up.

  Sometime around 2 a.m., while we waited for the results of the tests, the doctor ordered Dilaudid for the pain.

  Dilaudid? That perked me right up.

  My only previous experience remotely related to Dilaudid was in the form of a song lyric by Steely Dan, one of my favorite bands.

  “What will it be – some soothing herb tea? … Let’s say we spike it with Dilaudid.”

  If Dilaudid was good enough for Steely Dan, it was good enough for  me. I’ve never been into drugs, but a medical drug under a doctor’s supervision was another thing altogether. It would help with the pain, perhaps with the fringe benefit of a pleasant buzz. 

  “When will you give it to me?” I asked.

  “You’re already getting it. It’s in your IV.”

  A few minutes later, as if by magic, the pain subsided.

  The buzz, however, never happened. Under medical supervision, the drug did exactly what it was supposed to do – minus the “fringe benefit.”

  After leaving the room briefly, the doctor returned with the results of the tests.

  “I don’t see anything in them that could explain the pain you were having,” he said. “For now it’s a mystery, but come back if it returns tomorrow.

  That said, he added that one of the tests found something disturbing.

  “You have an enlarged pulmonary artery. That can be serious. You should make an appointment to see your primary care doctor in the next few days.”

  My doctor was booked solid but arranged an appointment with a physician assistant at the same clinic. Waiting for the appointment gave me time to worry and consult “Dr. Google.” Not necessarily a good  idea.

  An enlarged pulmonary artery, according to Google, “can be dangerous because it often signals underlying pulmonary hypertension or other severe lung/heart conditions, increasing the risk of serious complications like right-sided heart failure, arrhythmias, and even sudden death, especially if the enlargement is significant.”

  Sudden death? Don’t sugar-coat it, Google. Give it to me straight.

  Reading something like that puts your worry mode into overdrive. Should I make sure my will is up to date? Buy a cemetery plot?

  The physician’s assistant assured me that I wasn’t going to keel over in the next five minutes. But the condition was serious enough that it warranted monitoring. Some additional tests were ordered. After reviewing the results of those, my doctor ordered yet another test and told me to try not to worry too much. He also told me to avoid strenuous exercise.

  Fast forward to the present. With the results in from all of the tests but one, which can’t be done until spring because of backlog in the system, the news from the doctor was good. The artery isn’t enlarged enough to be a serious threat.

  “He said to tell you not to worry about it,” the physician’s assistant told me. “Actually it also showed up on a test done a number of years ago. It hasn’t changed since then, which is a good thing. You may have had it your whole life.”

  She also said the doctor had cleared me for strenuous exercise. 

A good sign. Not that I’m running any marathons these days, but a encouraging nevertheless.

  Maybe the mystery pain that took me to the E.R. was a gift. Because of the findings it led to, there’ll be regular monitoring of the artery. If it becomes a threat, the chances are good that it will be caught in time.

  The normal reaction to learning that you’ve dodged a potentially fatal bullet, obviously, is relief. Relief and, hopefully, something more.

   Relief is fleeting. Ideally, an experience that temporarily makes you think you might not have much time left comes with a lasting effect as well. A desire to improve.

  Thanks to the harmless (so far) time bomb in my chest, I’m going to work on my faults – to try to be more generous, to do a better job of controlling my temper, to be more accepting of those with whom I disagree, to be more thoughtful and kinder to people. In short, to try to be a better person.

  Easier said than done. But for what it’s worth, that’s my New Year’s Resolution.

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

 By now you’ve probably watched “A Christmas Story” on television, and not for the first time. Or the second, or third … It’s a Christmas classic most of us have watched more times than we remember.

  The movie, for whose who have been living in a cave or for some other reason haven’t seen it, tells the story of nine-year-old Ralphie Parker and his dream of getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.

  Filmed partially in Canada, the movie won two Canadian Genie Awards and airs annually for 24 hours, from Christmas Eve to Christmas night. The Library of Congress honored as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

  The feel-good ending alone is a classic. After hearing repeated objections from grownups convinced that BB guns are dangerous, Ralphie wakes up on Christmas morning to find the gift of his dreams, a present from his father. The movie ends with him as a grownup, remembering “the best gift I ever received, or ever would receive.”

  Have you received such a gift? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

  Mine came on the Christmas when I was 17. I had dreams of playing in a rock group and already had a guitar, if you want to call it that.

  It was a black Silvertone, purchased at a pawn shop for $50. I paid half; my sister paid the other half. Even at $50, it was probably overpriced. It wasn’t exactly ugly, but it was far from being beautiful. It didn’t play particularly well or sound particularly good. It was what it was. A cheap, used guitar.

 Like my friends who also wanted to be in a rock band, I was a huge  fan of the Ventures, an instrumental group from Tacoma credited with being the band that influenced more rock guitarists than any other. I spent hours mooning over a picture of them on one of their early album covers.

 Bob Bogle, then their lead guitar player, was playing a Fender Jazzmaster guitar in the photo. With its beautiful sunburst finish, two big, white pickups and mottled, tortoise-shell pickguard, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was to my Silvertone what a Rolls Royce is to Yugo. I had to have one.

  The price, however, was a bit of a problem. A new Jazzmaster in those days sold for $402. Today, used ones sell for many thousands, but $400 then was a fortune for a kid who was making a buck an hour on the end of a shovel for a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. It would take forever to save that much money. I might as well have been saving for a Rolls Royce.

  I saved for well over a year, keeping the cash in a special box. It was a small, wooden box with a hinged, wooden lid on which I’d laboriously carved “Jazzmaster $.” That box is still in my dresser drawer these many years later. The lid is broken in half so it’s not much good for storing anything, but it has too much sentimental value to throw it away.

  With the Christmas season of my junior year in high school approaching, even after saving those hard-earned dollars for all that time, I was still roughly $150 short of the $402 need to secure the dream.

  Hints to my sister that it would be greatly appreciated if she helped out fell on deaf ears. She’d already helped with the Silvertone, and it was an understatement to say that rock and roll wasn’t her thing. She was ten years older than me and a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan. (Think “Edelweiss,” “My Favorite Things,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” etc.)

  There weren’t many gifts for me under the tree that Christmas morning, and those that were were pretty ho-hum, mostly clothes. I was feeling a little down about it until my mother suddenly seemed to notice a red string lying on the floor amidst the shredded wrapping paper.

  “Wonder what that string is,” she said to me. “Why don’t you follow it and see where it goes.”

  With that a faint hope was kindled. Could it be?

  No. No way my folks would have bought the Jazzmaster for me, even though I’d talked of little else for months. They were far from being wealthy, and money was tight enough that year that my mother had started a business, converting our dining room to a home office.

  The string led from the living room, through the kitchen and office and down a hallway to my bedroom, ultimately disappearing under my bed.

  It was than I knew that, against the odds, the seemingly impossible had happened. I reached under the bed, felt the distinctive Tolex covering of the case and slowly pulled it out into the light.

  Knowing it was an experience that would be remembered for life, I waited a bit before opening it, savoring the moment. Then, when the latches were opened and the lid lifted, there it was – arguably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It looked just like Bogle’s guitar on the cover of the Ventures album. It had a sweet, woody smell. Lying on the  plush, red velvet lining of the case, reflecting the light from its gleaming finish, it was almost too perfect to touch.

  Unknown to me, my folks had ordered it from the old Leon Burt Music Studios on Latah Street in Boise, making up the difference between the purchase price and the $250 I’d saved. They’d been hiding it at my sister’s house (she was married by then) for weeks.

  That afternoon, I took it to the home of the bass player in the band we hoped to start, for the sole purpose of showing it off. Neither of us knew how to play well enough to show off. It was an important enough occasion that even the drummer came by to “ooh” and “aah.”

  A couple of years later, actually playing in a band by then, I sold it to buy a Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar like the one played by George Harrison of the Beatles.

  Many guitars and many Christmas gifts have come and gone since then, some of them costly and wonderful, but none are remembered as fondly or sentimentally as the Jazzmaster. With due respect for all of them, that guitar, like Ralphie’s BB gun, was the best gift I’d received, or ever would receive.

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

  Father Rick Frechette has devoted his life to helping the poor in Haiti. He’s been there for 37 years, witnessed suffering most of us can barely comprehend and says things have never been as bad during his time in the island nation as they are now.

  Haiti doesn’t get a lot of attention in the news. No matter how bad things are there, other stories – the Epstein files, Venezuelan boat bombings, the end of penny, etc. – make headlines while Haiti is pretty much ignored.

   I’m writing this because what’s happening in Haiti now is atrocious, because Father Rick is in the forefront of efforts to relieve the suffering, and because Boise’s St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center’s Project Haiti is one of his major supporters. (More on that presently.) 

  Father Rick is a priest of the  Passionist religious order, a core mission of which is to aid the suffering, especially the poor and neglected. I’ve written about him several times through the years because few people have impressed me as much.

 This is a man who grew up in Connecticut and could have had a comfortable life as a parish priest there, but  volunteered to go to Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere. Deciding he couldn’t do enough for the poor as a priest only, he went back to school and became a medical doctor, caring for Haitians’ physical as well as their spiritual needs.

  Last week he was in Boise for some needed rest and recreation, courtesy of local Project Haiti volunteers. An earlier trip to Idaho was postponed in part because he was working to free two girls kidnapped by one of the criminal gangs that have overrun the island. He vowed not to leave until he’d secured their release, an effort in which he succeeded.

  The criminal gangs have all but absolute control.

  “Three-thousand bandits,” he says, “are holding 13 million people terrorized.”

   He estimates that he and those working with him have rescued some 100 kidnapping victims in the last five years. Armed criminal gangs routinely kidnap victims and demand money for their return.

  Crimes against women have become commonplace. The United Nations and human rights organizations report that “violence, which includes rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and murder, overwhelmingly targets woman and girls.”

  Father Rick himself has had his life threatened, been held at gunpoint.

  Bad as things are, he is adamant that Haiti isn’t a lost cause.

  “I think most people feel helpless to do anything about it, but we can try,” he said. “The focus shouldn’t be on Haiti as a lost cause. The focus should be on the innocent millions who are in excruciating suffering and who deserve to be led to some kind of balance which is civilized, discordant but civilized. It’s a time to focus on saving civilization and trying to restore civility and normalcy, to stand with the people and give them direct, concrete relief.”

  Project Haiti has been helping Father Rick do that for more than 30 years, sending medical supplies and teams to Haiti, treating victims of gang violence, helping build clinics, distributing food, medicine and water, helping provide shelter and relocating people to safer parts of the island.

  Is it possible to restore civility and normalcy?

  “Yes, but it takes will, and it takes being able to talk to the opposition in a clear way which adds to the correctness of choices instead of just leading to defamations like, ‘you’re crazy, you should be killed or deported.’”

  With so much of his time spent negotiating with gang leaders and treating victims of violence, primarily gunshot wounds, I asked him how much time he has to perform the normal duties of a priest. Is he, for example, the pastor of a church? 

  “No. I celebrate the sacraments and anoint the sick and dying, but not in a parish. … Seventy parishes have closed because of the bandits.”

  Is he able to say Mass, one of a priest’s primary duties?

  “There was a home for the destitute and dying that was destroyed. There were four sisters (nuns) there plus their staff who took care of them. When their place was destroyed, we took all of them to our hospital so the sisters live there and function there with the original purpose of their mission. I say Mass for the sisters at a small house where they live.”

  I asked him if he does that in other people’s houses.

  “No. Almost nobody in Haiti has a home now. Four-thousand people have been killed by bandits since March.”

  He is among those who don’t have a home. He lives in a warehouse.

  “I lived for a long time at St. Damien Hospital. But when Covid came, I started taking care of Covid victims and didn’t want to be tracking it anywhere so I moved into the warehouse.”

  He was 35 when he came to Haiti. Now he’s 72.

  Is retirement part of his plan?

  “If I saw what I do as a job, I’d put a retirement age, but I see it as a calling. It’s dangerous where I am, and people say ‘don’t you think you’ve done enough. Why don’t you just come back (to the U.S.)?’ But we’re a team of people in Haiti and a community. We’re all in this together. We’re a ‘we.’ It would be strange to take myself out of that.

  “… No matter how dire things get, we lose ground but we slowly regain the improvements. We can still get things done and even recover lost ground. That counts for something.

  “I think that standing for human life and human dignity where it is most degraded is a huge service to the human family. In no way, shape or form should concern for the Haitian people or donations to help them be considered futile. Investing in humanity can never be futile.”

Note:   Every dollar donated to Project Haiti goes to supporting Father Rick’s efforts in behalf of the poor. Online donations:  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.

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

  Halloween isn’t what it used to be.

  This year’s Halloween was, once again, a quiet one where I live. 

  Traditional trick or treating, with kids going door to door, has largely been replaced in our neighborhood by a Halloween parade. Kids in costumes, many accompanied by their parents, line up at around 5 p..m. – well before dark – and parade in unison down streets lined with candy-dispensing grownups seated in lawn chairs. It’s become a neighborhood tradition that everyone, kids and grownups alike, seems to enjoy.

  The number of trick or treaters who independently came to our door after sundown that evening:  zero.

  I enjoy the parade as much as the next person and look forward to it as the social event it as become. But, at risk of being branded a codger, I can’t helping thinking that what once was a venerable part of traditional Halloweens has all but been lost.

  The words “trick or treat,” though still spoken on countless doorsteps, have virtually lost their relevance.

 Treats are handed out in abundance.

 Tricks? Largely an anachronism.

  Tricks used to be half of the fun on Halloween. In the old North Boise neighborhood where I grew up, it was hard to say which we looked forward to most: the treats or the tricks. Tricks added spice to the sugary evening. They were expected and, with rare exceptions, they were harmless.

  A perennial favorite was lowering the street lights. Streetlights in those days hung from cables attached to telephone poles catty corner from each other at intersections. Devices on the poles allowed power company workers to lower them for changing bulbs or performing other repairs.

  It wasn’t just power company workers who knew about these  devices, of course. Every kid in the neighborhood knew about them. It was a rare morning after Halloween night that they weren’t hanging far below their usual height.

  Tipping over trash cans was another Halloween prank. It made a mess in the alleys and was annoying to the property owners, but nobody got hurt and the messes were quickly cleaned up.

  The most common form of mischief, by a wide margin, was soaping windows.

  Soaping windows, for those unfamiliar with the practice, was the simple act of writing on a window, using a bar of soap as the writing instrument. It was a popular Halloween trick, fun but harmless. The soap was easily removed the next day. 

  This brings us to Howard.

  Howard was the neighborhood fix-it man and a mentor to most of the kids within a block radius. He worked as a troubleshooter for a utility company and seemed capable of making or fixing just about anything.

  Howard was the go-to guy for making a soapbox derby racer. They were primitive as vehicles go,  four wheels on a wooden platform with a seat, a plywood body and ropes attached to the front wheels for steering. A soapbox derby race was held every summer on the Capitol Boulevard hill, with hundreds of participants. Thanks to  Howard, no kid in our neighborhood ever lacked a racer.

  If you had a flat tire on your bicycle, Howard could fix it in no time. 

  A broken chain on your bike? Howard was your man.

  When we were older, he took us fishing and hunting, teaching us how to do both successfully and safely. He knew all the best places to go. We seldom returned empty handed.

  He was the kids’ best friend every day of the year but one. For reasons that were never known, Howard hated Halloween.

  It was a perennial mystery where he and his wife, Fern, disappeared to every year on Halloween night. With the exception of church on Sundays and occasional get-togethers with friends, they seldom went anywhere. On Halloween night, however, their home was dark and silent as a grave. Not a single light burning, no box of candy or popcorn balls on the front porch.

  As you can imagine, this was both inexplicable and a bit galling to those of us who had come to think of Howard as a friend. How could he be so friendly and helpful to kids all year and become such a grinch on Halloween?

  One year I decided to get even. I would soap his windows.

  To make absolutely sure he wasn’t home, I watched the house carefully for signs of life.

  Nothing. No moving shadows, no flicker of a flashlight. Once again, Howard and Fern had vanished. The coast was clear. Time to make my move.

  Quiet as a church mouse, I crept to the picture window on the front of the house. Looking both ways to make sure no one was watching, I retrieved the soap from my pocket and reached for the window, intending to write something incredibly clever and cutting on it.

  Then, a disembodied voice:

  “Don’t touch that window!”

  I about came out of my skin. A few yards behind me – silhouetted against the Halloween moon – was the unmistakable figure of Howard perched on the limb of a tree, holding a shotgun.

  It was known to those who knew him well that Howard loaded some of his shotgun shells with rock salt, the dubious theory being that they’d cause pain but not a serious injury. Not that that made a difference on this particular occasion. There was but one prudent course of action.

  I ran like Dracula with his hair on fire.

  I never did know whether Howard recognized me in my costume that night, or what it was that he had against Halloween. The incident was never mentioned, and we remained friends into my teenage years and beyond. He built me my first guitar amplifier.

  Frightening as the window-soaping experience was, it remains one my favorite Halloween memories. The shotgun was over the top, but long after the treats have been forgotten I still recall the spine-tingling thrill of sneaking up to that window, soap at the ready.

  Treats are fine.

  But there was something to be said for tricks as well.

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 my early years as a journalist, a recurring subject of my columns was an old North Boise house that came to be known  as Maintenance Manor.

  In buying the house, my wife and I placed our faith in the time-honored real estate maxim, “location, location, location.” Buy the worst house in a nice neighborhood, bring it up to the standards of the houses around it and your investment will more than pay for itself.

  It was a fixer-upper, with apologies to proper fixer-uppers everywhere. What it really was was a nightmare.

  The exterior made it plain that it was the worst house on the street – white, clapboard siding that was original and looked it, a hideous, rose-colored roof, a back porch enclosed with plastic sheeting instead of windows, a chimney that was falling apart …

  The interior was worse – a single bathroom that could only be reached from the back porch, woodwork that had been painted glossy black, pea-green carpet with multiple cigarette burns, single-pane windows that let in so much cold air they might as well not have been there, an ancient furnace that burned $300 worth of oil a month …

  A few weeks after buying it, we invited my in-laws to visit and have a look at the place.

  “I had no idea!” my shell-shocked mother-in-law said. “If you’d told me you’d bought a shell, I might have had some idea. And even that wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it is.”

  My father-in-law, a skilled handyman, walked all around the house and yard before delivering his verdict:

  “It is a nice neighborhood. If I were you, I’d tear down the house and build a new one on the lot.”

  It was the best advice we ever got. We totally ignored it, of course, and spent the next 13 years fixing the place up and adding on to it. We bought it for $20,000 and sold it for $70,000. After deducting the costs of materials and professional help with the addition, plumbing and electrical, we made next to nothing for the countless hours I spent with hammers, saws, chisels, paint brushes, etc., turning a house of horror into a home.

  Early this month, its current owners emailed to ask whether we’d “like to see what’s going on at your old place.”

  We would. A date was arranged.

  We expected the house to look different, and probably better. It had been a lot of years and a lot of subsequent owners since we’d live there. Most had probably made improvements resulting in an attractive, inviting interior.

  The reality couldn’t have been more different. The interior had been gutted. The addition we’d built on a slightly lower level than the rest of the house was gone, and a new floor had been built on the same level as everything else. The finish work is weeks away. It was a stick house –  nothing inside but framing, with holes in the floor where sinks, toilets and other fixtures would be installed.

  It’s fair to say we were thunderstruck.

  Everything I’d spent so many hours working on was gone:

  The living-room archway with bookcases on either side, gone.

  The China hutch, gone.

  The bathroom with wallpaper I’d hung and tile I’d installed, gone.

  The “new” bathroom with the beautiful vanity and sunken tub, gone.

  The family room, gone.

  My office, gone.

  The original fireplace with the ornate copper trim, gone.

  The new owners have big plans for the house: A bathroom with a sauna. A bedroom closet almost as big as the old bedrooms were. A kitchen several times the size of the old one. A deck on the back of the house. It’s going to be a beautiful home.

  Their plans are a tribute to the staying power of traditional old neighborhoods like North Boise. Successive generations pour  thousands of dollars into their venerable homes to preserve and improve them.

  The work being done on the onetime Maintenance Manor also is a testimonial to a basic human need. No matter a home’s condition when it’s purchased, people need to alter it, to make it their own.

  It doesn’t bother me in the least that my old home’s new owners have gutted it. On the contrary, it’s great that it was purchased by people who care enough to give it a major overhaul. Here’s wishing them the best.

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.