When he was 12 years old. Fred Norman raised the bar for baseball scholars in his hometown of Johnstown, Penn. He was the only person in the city of 65,000 to predict with 100 percent accuracy the starting lineups of both leagues for the All-Star Game that was played in St. Louis that year. His prize was two free tickets to the game.

“It set the expectation for the rest of his life,” his brother, George Norman, said. “The entire community expected him to be a genius. People would ask him what a player’s average was, how many home runs he’d hit, how many times he’d struck out – and he would always know. He was a genius.”

Few who knew Fred Norman, who died July 2 at 78, would argue that point. And though his knowledge of sports history was encyclopedic, his genius was far from being confined to sports. He was one of those people who seem to know just about everything.

Who played left tackle for the Oakland Raiders in the 1968 Super Bowl? Ask Fred.

Who played Judith Fellowes in John Huston’s “Night of the Iguana?” Ask Fred.

Where did Mikhail Baryshnikov first study ballet? Fred would know.

In Boise, his home for many years, he was best known as the first director of the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts. He and Velma Morrison planned the center together and led the effort to get it built. With Morrison, he was the Morrison Center, handling the myriad details of operating it, personally directing some of its most memorable plays and charming one world-class entertainer after another into performing there. He kept their numbers in a book his brother described as being “a foot long and half a foot thick.” It contained contact information for celebrities from NBA stars to presidents.

When actor Hal Holbrook gave his Mark Twain performance at the Morrison Center and I wrote a review of it, Norman called to tell me he knew Holbrook well and was sending him a copy.

I was skeptical, but a few weeks later a letter arrived in a Morrison Center envelope. Inside was a scrawled note from Norman, and a long, personal letter from Holbrook, commenting on the review.

A few years later, actor Robert Redford visited Boise for the premiere of “Jeremiah Johnson.” Norman was involved behind the scenes, something that happened a lot, and the week after the premiere he called to say he was sending a copy of a biography I’d written of author Vardis Fisher (who wrote a book on which the movie was based) to his friend Bob.

“Bob?” I asked him. “Bob who?

“Robert Redford.”

Right.

I’d all but forgotten about it when the mail brought an envelope with a return address in Sundance, Utah. Inside was a note from Redford’s assistant, who said that his boss’s friend Fred Norman had sent him a copy of the book and “Bob” wanted to thank me for it.

“Fred and Robert Redford played baseball trivia together,” George Norman said. “He said Redford was very good at it. But Fred was better.”

When he wasn’t schmoozing with stars or coaching actors, chances are you’d find the Morrison Center’s director on the blue turf, coaching BSU quarterbacks. He’d played quarterback in high school in Pennsylvania and was recruited by the University of Oregon, turning down a scholarship there to attend Boise Junior College with a friend who failed the entrance exam at Oregon. Norman played quarterback for BJC, married a local girl and in 1959 landed a job teaching theater and coaching football at Arizona State University.

A decade later, he was back in Boise with two sons and a troubled marriage.

“He and our mom were divorced a long time ago, but they remained friends for life,” his son Lance said. “They always said they got along better after they were divorced.”

“They were two different people,” George Norman added. “She wanted him to be a farmer like her father had been, and he wanted to do performing arts.”

Performing arts received most of his time and talent for the rest of his life. He and Morrison became friends shortly after his return to Boise, and he quickly became a Boise institution.

“Boise is a richer place for him and all of his gifts,” Director Michael Hoffman said. “This is a place full of gifted people, and he gave us the gift of believing in ourselves.

“… He was my mentor. When I didn’t believe in myself, he would always believe in me. And he was tireless. He never slept. he just drank coffee and inspired people.”

 

 

 

Norman’s longtime friend and former BSU Alumni Director Dyke Nally added that he “wasn’t just the Morrison Center director. He was director of anything that the university, the students, faculty, public and friends needed him for. He was BSU’s community-relations specialist and the greatest friend raiser and fund raiser the university ever had.”

His work for the university and the community won enough awards and honors to fill a trunk. What went unreported was what he quietly did for individuals.

“The biggest quality about Fred was that he was always giving to others,” his brother said. “When a gentleman from Canada somehow connected with him after failing to get an article published, Fred sent it to Ronald Reagan. It’s in the Reagan Archives now. … Two ladies he’d helped with problems they were having cried for 15 minutes when I told them he had passed.”

In the early ’90s, Norman offered to help me through a mid-life career crisis by trying to get me a job at BSU. The reason nothing came of it was that he didn’t try very hard – for an excellent reason. He knew what I was yet to learn, that I’d never find another job that would be as rewarding as the one I already had.

In at least one way, he was a man of mystery – vanishing for extended periods and, when they’d all but given him up for dead, surprising friends with a call or a letter.

“I wouldn’t hear from him for months and then I’d suddenly get a letter,” Hoffman said. “He’d track me down in England or somewhere. How he did it I never knew. He was like God.”

Sometime in the 1990s or possibly a few years later – sources’ memories vary “- he disappeared for good.

“He was tired of working so hard in Boise,” George Norman said. “He wanted to go to a place where he could relax, someplace where nobody knew him and he could clear his mind.”

Rumors circulated that he was in Toronto, Canada; Apache Junction, Ariz., St. George, Utah … Only a few close friends knew that he’d ended up in Mesquite, Nev., a retirement community of 15,000 on the Arizona border.

Last winter, after a long time without a word, he called me from there. A column I’d written had piqued his interest, and he wanted to talk about it. Later, he sent a letter quoting, among others, poet Maya Angelou:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

No one who knew him will forget how Fred made us feel:  in a word –  better. He was so alive, so intense, so infectiously enthusiastic that it was impossible to spend time with him without feeling better about life.

A memorial service is tentatively planned for Sept. 23 at the Morrison Center.

But there needs be something permanent. A sculpture on the center steps perhaps, near the one of Gib Hochstrasser. One gave us a lifetime of music, the other the gift of arts and entertainment. It’s the least we can do for all he did for us.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Statesman every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at http://www.woodwardcolumn.com.

 

 

 

 

I took advantage of a rare opportunity last weekend by dragging my grandkids to the Treasure Valley Train Show. Kids today grow up with only a vague idea of what trains are, let alone experiencing the romance of railroading, and I wanted to give them a shot at it.

It was a rare opportunity because the show, at the Boise Hotel and Conference Center, was the first here in seven years. The good news, according to railroad buff Phil Ulmen, is that it and other shows are proving popular enough that there’s talk of making it an annual event.

For the uninitiated, which includes most people under the age of, say, 50, a train show is an out-sized display of model railroads – miniature trains chugging through miniature recreations of everyday life – towns, farms, hills and valleys, roads, bridges, airports …

There was a time when an event like that would have been swarming with kids, mainly boys of elementary-school age. Now its mainly old guys – and a few old gals – playing with toy trains.

That’s not meant to disparage them. They work hard at what they do, putting on impressive shows throughout the West and charging very modest entry fees for them. Their group, the Rocky Mountain Hi-Railers, is based in Boise. They do the shows to share their enjoyment of model railroading and to teach others, especially children, about trains. (Interested in learning more? Go to http://www.rockymountainhirailers.com and click on “contact.”)

The Hi-Railers are helping to preserve memories of a bygone era – when America ran on rails and trains did much of what cars and airplanes do today.

How much have the times changed since then? When John Eichmann, the group’s coordinator, showed a young boy a speeding train spitting out a mail bag and snatching another from a hook beside a track, the response was “what’s mail?”

That’s exactly the sort of thing that made me want my grandkids to see the show. I didn’t want them to be wholly ignorant of the transportation system that helped build America – let alone the concept of mail – and I wanted them to experience a tiny fraction of the fascination kids used to have with trains.

Ulmen spent years working on a model railroad with his father. He attributes that to father-son camaraderie (the Hi-Railers also welcome mother-daughter teams) and to “humans’ natural fascination with big machines.”

When Eichmann was a boy, he could set his watch by the whistle of the train that passed through Boise every night at 10 o’clock. He remembers trains wending their way through downtown, a locomotive roundhouse (turnaround) at 16th and River streets, a furniture store with a wall built in the shape of a curve to conform to the curve of the tracks.

When I was that age, none of the neighborhood boys dreamed of getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. We all wanted parts for our train sets. We’d spend hours perusing catalogs for cars, switches, lights, scenic accessories, transformers and, best of all, locomotives.

There were two camps – steam and diesel locomotives. My choice was steam. There was something about those big, black engines thundering over the tracks, lights flashing, smoke pouring from their stacks, that was just short of mesmerizing.

One boy in our neighborhood was lucky enough to have both steam and diesel trains. His dad was rumored to make $1,000 a month – big money in Boise in those days – so they could afford it. The trains were set up on a huge table in their basement. The best time to watch them was at night with the lights off. You could see the headlights casting eerie beams in the dark, the glow of the illuminated dial on the transformer, the signal lights switching from red to green and back again in the rich kid’s basement. The rest of us hated him.

The most elaborate setup in town was that of a professional model railroader we knew only as the Lionel Man. That was because he sold, among others, Lionel brand trains. (Guitarist Neil Young is a Lionel consultant.) The Lionel Man had staggering displays of them in his home, which seemed to be mostly devoted to trains. We spent hours “oohing” and “aahing” as we compiled our wish lists there.

My own train set was far more modest. It easily fit on a ping pong table in my folks’ basement. They didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a big deal when they offered to buy me a set of switches and it wasn’t even my birthday.

Actually, it was a bribe. The catch was that I’d have to find a new home for Champ, a puppy I’d adopted and to which I was severely allergic. It was a case of giving up the puppy and having train switches or keeping the puppy  and having asthma. Seduced by the switches, I succumbed.

I missed Champ a lot. But the train switches were almost as much fun, and I didn’t have to get shots to play with them.

 

The Hi-Railers’ $10,000 display has 45 switches. Its name is “Lookout Junction.”

“Four trains can come to it simultaneously,” Eichmann explained. “We were always yelling ‘look out!’ so that’s what we decided to name it. We had eight crashes there yesterday.”

Crashes are fine for thrills, but the display has far more than the potential for mayhem – from an airport with a radio-controlled helicopter to old-fashioned towns with stores, banks, churches … My personal favorite: a recreation of the house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” with a “Bates Motel” sign advertising “showers available.”

“There’s a saying among model railroaders,” Eichmann said. “Growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”

Kids, he added, “are one of the main reasons we do this. There’s nothing like seeing a little kid who’s just tall enough that his eyes reach the table, and he’s smiling and his eyes are popping out. That’s the payoff.”

I was curious about how my high-tech grandkids would react to the Hi-Railers’ lovingly assembled, $10,000 setup. It didn’t take long to find out.

The oldest took a quick look and retired to a corner to text her friends. A typical teenager.

The middle kid, the only boy, stuck around longer and politely asked questions. Hopeful signs.

The youngest, who is six, seemed interested for almost an hour. A chip off the old block, perhaps?

No such luck. When I asked her afterwards what she thought of the show, she said she liked pushing the button that made the whistle blow.

“That’s all?”

“Well, I liked the train with the smoke. The rest of it was kind of boring.”

I should have known. Kids today will probably never be bewitched by trains. But perhaps in decades to come, they’ll find similar pleasure in resurrecting and entertaining themselves with the long-antiquated digital devices that are so much a part of life today.

Watching the Hi-Railers at play, it was hard not to hope so. The youngest member of their group is 59, the oldest in his 70s. The most striking thing about them was how happy they all looked. They smiled almost non-stop. For a few hours during the show they work so hard to put on, the aches and pains and worries of age fell away. They didn’t even look like old men. They looked like happy boys, who just happened to have gray hair.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears in the Idaho Statesman’s Life section every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.