If you’ve ever had a rival who competed so fiercely with that she won your admiration, and ultimately your friendship, you know how I felt about Pauli Crooke.
There was a time when I detested her and had no doubt that she detested me. But when she died last month, at 85, the news brought a sense of loss. State Sen. Cherie Buckner-Webb, a friend of hers, called to let me know about it.
“We were talking about a lot of things a week or so before she died, and she mentioned you,” Buckner-Webb said. “She referred to you as ‘that kid who gave her a run for her money.'”
Coming from Pauli, there could have been no higher compliment. We were reporters on the city beat at a pivotal time in Boise’s history. I was a rookie at The Statesman; she was a veteran at Channel 2 when Channel 2 was without a close second as the dominant local news station.
It was an exciting time to be a local-government reporter in Boise. The city was busy tearing itself down in the name of urban renewal. One downtown building after another was being demolished to make way for a shopping mall. The city had joined the county and its other cities in hiring a staff of professional planners in an effort to avoid mistakes other places had made as they’d grown. And the population was about to explode.
We traded jabs like pugilists. One day I’d beat Pauli on a story about the leveling of yet another department store – there used to be five downtown – and the next day she’d beat me on a decision to raze a historic hotel. I’d beat her on a plan for a new bus system and she’d beat me on a plan for improving traffic flow. We were friendly to each other’s faces, but fought like pit bulls to develop sources and get the news in print or on the air first.
Being first trumped almost everything – so much so that her boss, who later became mayor, once remarked during a city council meeting that Channel 2 wasn’t interested in a story – no matter how important – if it had already been in The Statesman.
Important as they were, I had almost zero enthusiasm for covering the city’s annual budget meetings. They were long, complicated, excruciatingly tedious. Never good with numbers and possessing limited patience for boring meetings, I skipped most of them to work on more interesting stories. But I did make it to the final meeting at which that year’s budget was adopted – and for which Pauli was inexplicably absent. She’d dutifully attended every other budget meeting, but missed the one that counted. I wrote my story and gloated when it wasn’t on Channel 2 the night before.
“It was the only time,” she later admitted, “that I cried about being beaten on a story.”
Tears didn’t stop her, however, from promptly beating me on a story I’d been working on for weeks. The day before it was published, my primary source called her out of the blue and dropped it in her lap. Unlike my rival, I did not cry. But I did get a stern talking-to from the boss for throwing my AP Style Book across the newsroom.
We saw each other less after she was promoted to the news director’s job at Channel 2 – CBS’s first female news director in the U.S. – and I moved from the local government beat to editorial writing and then column writing. (When CBS flew her to New York to give a speech, she learned at the last minute that she’d be following Walter Cronkite.) And we lost contact entirely when she moved to New York in 1978. To my surprise, I missed her.
An activist at heart, she helped found the Boise chapter of the NAACP, led the effort to establish the Idaho Human Rights Commission and won a truckload of professional and public-service awards.
Late in life, she moved back to Boise and the onetime nemeses had a rivalry-free and thoroughly enjoyable reunion. Only then did I realize what an honor it was to have gone head to head with this accomplished, fiercely competitive woman. She embodied what it meant to be a good reporter and public-spirited citizen. If there were more Pauli Crookes, democracy would be better for it.

***
March brought another passing, this one of a very different sort. Lew Johnson, a player in Boise’s early rock scene, died at 68 in Phoenix.
He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. Though we were never close friends – we played in rival groups – he never failed to make me laugh. He drove an old behemoth of a Nash that was absolutely silent. When you least expected it, he’d glide up behind your car, bump it and have everyone in both cars in hysterics.
Lew played in the mid ’60s in a very good band called the Quirks. His death is the latest of many local musical passings: Dick Cates, John Arant, Tim Bosworth, Eddie Heuman, Drake Levin, Vance Shirley, John Hynes, Leo Lawrence, Dennis Mulliken, Charlie Bieker, Cliff Green, Steve Johnson … trailblazers who started rock and roll in Boise and kept it going.
All gone. Maybe someone should start an Idaho Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – before the history is gone, too.

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

Editor’s note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the second of two columns from the trip.

Tourists have two options for getting around in Mexico – taxis and buses. Either can fall in the category of extreme adventure.

A third option, of course, is renting a car. One taxi ride convinced us that this might not be the smartest thing we could do. Imagine a NASCAR race on narrow, cobblestone streets and you’ll have a fair idea. We cringed in the back seat while our driver broke as many speed limits as possible, swerved sickeningly over crowded  sidewalks and played  chicken with other drivers. With people like him on the road, driving a rental would be like doing the running of the bulls backwards.

That leaves buses. Mexican city buses are cheap, frequent and get you where you need to go. That said, it should be noted that the only resemblance to American city buses is that both are large vehicles that carry people.

Mexican buses do not have functioning shock absorbers. They’re either built without them as an economy measure, or have long since worn them out on prodigiously potholed streets. Upholstery is considered a frill; the seats are hard plastic. The back of the bus becomes airborne when careening over the largest potholes, making for excruciating landings on the rock-hard seats. My back hasn’t been the same since.

The buses do have one feature, however, that American buses do not – entertainment. Musicians climb aboard and serenade the passengers by playing for tips. Some are pretty good, but one wasn’t even a bad musician. His “instrument” was a boom box, played at eardrum-shattering volume. Passengers grimaced and held their ears.

No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t get a lot of tips.

Many Mexican buses are equipped with shrines – crucifixes, holy cards, dangling rosaries … My guess is that the drivers see them as insurance for the hereafter, and considering the way they drive, they need it.

One driver had a dashboard button with a drawing of the Virgin Mary. He pushed on two occasions (possibly activating a prayer for a miracle). The first was when he accelerated just as an old man with a cane stepped into the street in front of us. The old man jumped back, narrowly avoiding becoming road kill. The second was when an 18-wheeler pulled onto the road in the oncoming lane. Our driver pushed the button and headed straight for him – playing chicken!

They missed each other by millimeters. It was enough to make us wish we’d taken a taxi.

 

***

Mexico is a wonderful place to take a vacation. It’s beautiful, friendly, inexpensive. But it has one seriously annoying drawback.

Vendors. They’re everywhere, and relentless. Yes, they have to make a living. But there has to be a better way of doing it than driving potential   customers to the point of justifiable homicide.

This is typical: We were tired and thirsty after a long, hot walk and had settled gratefully into chairs at a restaurant on the beach when the assault began. One vendor after another stormed the table, each with a “unique” product – sarongs, wood carvings, hats, T-shirts, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, dolls, puppets, blankets, fish mobiles, sunglasses, paintings, puppets, plastic skulls, parasailing Spidermen … It’s endless.

And every one of them came to our table. If one more vendor had pushed a carved wooden sword under my nose, I might have used it on him.

When the vendors finish picking your bones, the musicians take over – guitarists, mandolin players, bongo bands … My favorite was a vocal group singing – in Spanish – “Oh, when them cotton balls get rotten …”

When an accordion player headed our way, we paid the bill and fled. We’d had all the entertainment we could stand.

 

***

If your name and face are in a newspaper regularly, you get used to people you don’t know walking up and introducing themselves. It happens all the time.

In your home state.

But in another country?

I was dozing in a lounge chair by a sparkling pool, dreaming of   Margaritas, when a voice suddenly said, “Excuse me. Are you Tim Woodward?”

Dear God, did I forget to pay the tab yesterday?

I hadn’t. The stranger introduced himself as Tim Haskell. He and his wife, Bonnie, were staying at the same place we were.

The Haskells live in Boise and knew me from my column. Bonnie Haskell worked with my sister. She and Tim live a few blocks from my house.

What were the odds of that? We’re practically neighbors, meeting for the first time – 2,100 miles from home.

 

***

If there’s a black hole in the galaxy, it’s Gate 12 at the Puerto Vallarta airport.

To get to Gate 12, you pass through food courts, a security check, multiple duty-free areas, acres of shops and a corner of Guatemala. When we arrived at Gate 12 – out of breath and sweating like pigs – absolutely nothing was posted about Phoenix, our destination.

A forlorn looking sign provided one word of information:  Kansas.

Not Kansas City, not Wichita, not Topeka, just someplace in Kansas.

“Are you going to Denver?” a man in an official looking uniform asked me.

“No, Phoenix. Why does the sign say Kansas instead of Phoenix?”

“They probably changed your gate. Check the monitor.”

Good idea, only the monitor was broken. It conveniently provided information only for flights that had left hours earlier. The airport announcer, meanwhile, cheerily reported that Flight 571 – our flight – was ready for boarding at Gate 12. (Obviously it wasn’t, Gate 12 having been commandeered by Kansas.)

“Are you going to Phoenix?” I asked a weary looking American there.

“I hope so,” he said. “I sure don’t want to go to Kansas. Have you ever been to Leavenworth?”

The man in the uniform, meanwhile, continued to thread his way through the crowd shouting “Denver! Denver anyone?”  It was like a scene from the Tower of Babel.

When I returned from a restroom/sanity break,  my wife and other panicked-looking passengers were running, lemming-like, in the opposite direction.

“Hurry!” she said. “They moved us to Gate 15! It’s downstairs.”

“Is this Phoenix?” we asked at Gate 15.

“No, Houston.”

“Houston?! What happened to Phoenix?

“It’s at Gate 20.”

It actually was, too. As we climbed aboard, the clueless announcer continued to chirp that Flight 571 to Phoenix was boarding at Gate 12.

We were mercifully taxiing for takeoff when the plane stopped.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have some passengers who didn’t make it on board. We’re going to go pick them up.”

They were waiting for us at … Gate 12.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears in the Idaho Statesman every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Subscribe to http://www.woodwardblog.com for free if you don’t have access to Tim’s column in The Statesman. A column will be e-mailed to you every other Monday, at no charge. Contact Tim at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.