SAVANNAH, Geo. – I’ve wanted to see Savannah for most of my life, and it took almost that long to get there
It was worth it, too,
My interest in Savannah began with an offhand comment by a Southern belle named Beth Herndon. Beth was married to a fellow sailor where I was briefly stationed in Charleston, S.C. When I mentioned that Charleston impressed me as a beautiful city, she quickly changed the subject:
“If you think Charleston is beautiful, you should go to Savannah. It’s the most beautiful city in the South!”
I’ve wanted to see it ever since, but didn’t get a chance to do it properly until last month on a trip to Atlanta. Atlanta has a lot going for it, but you expect that in a big city. By contrast, Savannah is a small but exquisite jewel. It’s about half the size of Boise and attracts more than 12 million visitors a year – 12 million.
There are reasons for that. One is that Beth was right – it’s ridiculously beautiful. A shopkeeper we met likened it to a little New Orleans – live oaks dripping Spanish moss, lush gardens, 22 parklike public squares, impressive architecture, imposing monuments and fountains … you can’t take pictures fast enough.
One reason Savannah has so many beautiful and historic buildings (a few dating to colonial times) is that it wasn’t burned during the Civil War. Why Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman spared it during his fiery March to the Sea depends on which version of the story you choose to believe. The official one is that the city sent a delegation to tell Sherman the city would surrender and offer no resistance if he didn’t burn it down. Others are that he couldn’t bring himself to burn such an attractive city and that his best friend lived there.
“What Yankee told you that?” a tour guide huffed when I mentioned it. “It wasn’t his best friend. He had a girlfriend who lived here. All the generals had girlfriends here.”
Savannah’s sidewalks, incidentally, were built extra wide to accommodate its Southern ladies’ billowing gowns.
History is almost palpable there:
* Savannah has the largest restored historic district in the U.S., the first motorized fire department in the U.S. and the nation’s first public art museum.
* It was the country’s first planned city, laid out around its famous squares.
* The Girl Scouts of America were founded there.
* Parts of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” were set in the Pirates’ House, built in the mid-1700s and still a popular Savannah restaurant today.
* Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in Savannah.
Civil War history is, of course, ubiquitous. Dates on some of the headstones in a downtown cemetery were altered to make it appear as if the deceased had lived for centuries. The culprits: members of Sherman’s army, who camped there.
Robert E. Lee was a frequent guest at a mansion now open to tours. Its original owner was Andrew Low, a cotton baron. His daughter-in-law, Juliette Gordon Low, founded the Girl Scouts in its parlor and died in an upstairs bedroom. (Nothing if not dedicated, she was buried in her uniform.) Lee slept in a bedroom across the hall. His prayer book is still on the nightstand.
Not for the first time – the first was on seeing Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained pillow in Washington D.C. – I was struck by how accessible our history is. I was standing inches from Robert E. Lee’s prayer book, the book he agonized over while deciding the grim fates of countless human beings. I wanted to touch it, but our guide – an imposing representative of the “Colonial Dames,” undoubtedly would have rapped my knuckles.
Impressive as it is, Savannah’s history is but part of its story – and its charm. More than 800 movies have been made there. It’s most closely associated with “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” But the iconic “feather scene” in “Forrest Gump?” And the scenes where Forrest sat on a park bench and told his story? They were shot in Savannah. The bench is in a museum now.
The fifth best ice cream shop in the world, according to the Toronto Sun, is in Savannah. (The Sun’s top four, respectively, are in Los Angeles, Madrid, New York and Torino, Italy.) Rankings like these, obviously, are subjective. But it occurred to me while contemplating the meaning of life over a double scoop that there would be a lot worse ways to go than death by Leopold’s rum raisin.
Not to be overlooked among Savannah’s attractions are its people, and their deserved reputation for Southern hospitality. From tour guides to taxi drivers, we didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t over-the-top friendly and helpful. They’re proud of their city and love to tell you about it. They talk a lot, laugh a lot. They seem to have found lasting joy simply by living in what a friend once called the most beautiful city in the South.
Without her, I probably never would have gone there. Thanks, Beth.

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

 

The newlyweds watched the first half of the game through a chain-link fence. They couldn’t afford the price of admission.
The year was 1971, the game the first ever between the University of Idaho and then Boise State College. Fans were admitted free for the second half, and the newlyweds watched from the bleachers as BSC defeated the Vandals 42-14. He’d been to games at Bronco Stadium before and knew what to expect. She hadn’t. A newcomer from Washington state, she was hooked for life that day by the Broncos’ high-voltage offense.
The newlyweds, as you’ve probably guessed, were the Woodwards. We’ve been to a lot of games since then, but never to a big-time game in a distant city and have always wondered what it would be like.
This year’s season kickoff against Ole Miss in Atlanta on Aug. 28 represented the perfect opportunity to find out. We had some airline rewards freebies, some friends were going, and Atlanta isn’t far from Savannah – a city I’d wanted to see virtually all my life.
Like others who watch BSU’s away games on television, we had a vague idea of what to expect. We’d seen the cheering, the celebrations. But what would it be like to be there and be part of that?
The first surprise came on the plane, when a flight attendant led a Boise State cheer. Twice.
The next surprise was the number of Bronco fans in Atlanta. Not as many as for a game in, say, Seattle or Las Vegas – Atlanta is almost four times as far away. But spontaneous cheers broke out on the streets, and BSU colors seemed to pop up everywhere – the airport, our hotel, in restaurants, at the Civil War Museum, the Margaret Mitchell House …
Bear with me for a brief digression of travel trivia totally unrelated to football: Mitchell only wrote “Gone With the Wind” because someone told her she wasn’t smart enough to write a book. She wrote it in a tiny apartment she called “the dump,” hid the manuscript pages and denied she was writing it. And she wanted Basil Rathbone (best known as Sherlock Holmes) to play Rhett Butler instead of Clark Gable!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Back to football.
The train ride to the stadium was, well, different. Fans in Rebel red outnumbered those in blue and orange by something like ten to one. It was weird to be engulfed by the opponents’ colors at a BSU game. Weird, and a little intimidating.
That changed, however, at the Chick-fil-A pre-game show. There were a lot of Bronco fans there. One was Linda Clark, superintendent of the West Ada School District. Clark figures she’s attended roughly 80 away games – two a year for 40 years.
“It’s a nice way to start the season,” she said, “and it’s always fun to go to a big game like this one. That and I wanted to be here for the start of a new era, with a preponderance of the new coaches having BSU ties. In case you can’t tell, I bleed blue.”
Unseen, at least by us, were the blue-haired Elvises, shirtless guys painted blue and orange and some of the other local-color staples of home games. That was okay, though. I was looking for staples of away games, and couldn’t have found a better one than Chuck Hallett.
Hallett was wearing orange pants, an orange BSU cap, a white and orange BSU shirt, orange and blue necklaces and was carrying an orange bag filled with pre-game memorabilia. A Capital High and BSU graduate, he’s lived in Olympia, Wash. for years but attends all of BSU’s home games and many of its away games.
“I live in a neighborhood where there are 300 Husky fans and two BSU fans, and BSU is better represented,” he said.
Hallett and his wife, Mary (blue shirt, orange blanket, blue and orange jewelry), have a BSU tent, balloons, banners, golf cart and other Bronco gear at their home in Olympia. They have autographed footballs, helmets, pool floats, a Kellen Moore display. A Husky fan had to pose for a picture wearing BSU colors after losing a bet to them. They take pictures of Husky fans’ pets lying on their BSU dog bed.
“We love the town of Boise, the team, the colors, everything,” Chuck said.
“And we really love going to the games,” Mary added. “We both have things we do on our own, but this is something we can do together that we both love.”
A bonus for BSU fans who made the trip to Atlanta was its newly opened College Football Hall of Fame. The Broncos were the first team to visit.
Some trivia totally related to football: The worst drubbing ever at a college game was Georgia Tech over Cumberland College, 222-0. (Mercy rules apparently were for sissies then.) Five rather than 10 yards used to be required for a first down, and a touchdown used to be four points.
BSU is well represented at the hall of fame – interactive displays, photos of a Bronco tailgate party and former coach Chris Petersen, film of the Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma … Nearly a thousand BSU fans passed through the doors the first week.
We’ve come a long way from the days when they could watch games through a chain-link fence.
Note: This is the first of two columns from Tim’s trip to Georgia. Next: Savannah.

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

If you’re going to lose something, there are a lot worse places than Seattle to do it.
I don’t know what it is about Seattle, but something about it brings out the worst in the Woodwards when it comes to losing things.
Not that we don’t lose things elsewhere. We lose things in our house, our cars, our yard – all sorts of places – on an almost daily basis. I can lose a cell phone or a pair of reading glasses in my sleep.
But there’s just something about Seattle. And, happily, people who live there seem to be as good at finding and returning things as we are at losing them. Seattle hereby gets my vote for Best City in America to Lose Stuff.
The most recent incident involved what can legitimately be called a heroic effort by Alaska Airlines employees to retrieve a computer my wife left on one of their planes. More on that later. First, some background:
The first incident happened several years ago at a hotel a few blocks from Seattle’s airport. I’d checked out and was walking to the airport to catch my flight home when I discovered that the wallet that should have been in my pocket wasn’t.
Panic! All my money and the ID I needed to board the plane were in that wallet. Without it, I’d be stuck. Visions of sleeping on sidewalks danced in my head.
The only hope was to search for the wallet and hope it turned up in time to catch the plane. I retraced every step. I went back to the hotel, turned my room upside down. Then I started looking in trash cans and dumpsters, hoping someone had taken the money and thrown the wallet away. That’s when a nice young man approached and asked if I’d lost something.
“The dumpster diving tipped you off?”
“Is this it?” he asked, holding out my wallet.
He’d found it on the sidewalk outside the hotel. I offered him the money inside as a reward, but he wouldn’t accept it. He wouldn’t even let me kiss his feet.
The second incident didn’t happen in Seattle proper, but close enough. My wife and I were driving from Boise to her folks’ house near Hoodsport, Wash., and stopped in Olympia to buy groceries. When we got to Hoodsport, an hour’s drive away, she realized her purse was missing.
Panic on steroids! Not only did the purse contain her ID, credit cards, makeup, photographs, cell phone, glasses, camera, pens, pencils, checkbook and a side of beef, it contained over $500 cash. Our money for the trip, and way more than she normally carries.
We drove back to the shopping center in Olympia, knowing it was hopeless. Who would turn in a purse with that much money?
We never knew, because the woman who found it in a shopping cart in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s didn’t leave her name. She just quietly turned it in – with every dollar still inside – and left. In the off chance you happen to read this, mystery woman, thank you for rescuing our vacation.
That brings us to the heroic Alaska Airlines employees. It was nearly midnight when our plane landed at Sea-Tac. We made it to the first restroom on the concourse when my wife realized she’d left her laptop in the overhead.
“You wait here with our luggage,” she said. “I’ll go back to and get it.”
She was gone a long time. Her expression when she returned left little doubt that the news wasn’t good.
“The plane is gone,” she said.
“What do you mean the plane is gone? You were back at the gate in ten minutes. They couldn’t have turned a flight around that fast.”
“They didn’t. They towed the plane to a hangar for maintenance.”
The airport was all but deserted at that hour, but we got lucky and found a solitary Alaska boarding agent finishing up at his post.
“Let me make some calls,” he said.
He did. Quite a few calls, actually.
“They’re going to search the plane. I’m giving them your cell number so they can call you when they know something. It shouldn’t take long.”
We sat and waited. And waited. And waited … The helpful agent got off duty and left. We waited some more. At last, a call.
“We have your laptop,” a voice said. “Where are you?”
We’d been expecting a call rather than an actual person, so we didn’t think it mattered that we’d left our gate. To our surprise, an Alaska supervisor had been waiting there for nearly an hour, repeatedly trying to call us.
It seems that a maintenance worker had transposed two of the digits when he gave my wife’s cell phone number to the supervisor. The supervisor, nothing if not resourceful, found our reservation on the lost laptop. The reservation included the correct cell phone number.
“It’s a good thing your computer isn’t password-protected,” he said. “We never would have found you.”
By this time half a dozen smiling Alaska employees who helped in the search had gathered to watch the handoff. You can’t ask for more from an airline than that.
And if you’re traveling and lose something really important, try to do it in Seattle.

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