The onetime president of the National Fruitcake Makers Association – yes, there actually was such a thing – is making Happy Cakes in a better place now.
Actually, he’s been making them there for some time. Dick Rodby – past president of the defunct fruitcake makers association, director emeritus of the Arizona Memorial Foundation and creator of the Hawaiian Happy Cake – passed away at his home in Hawaii in 2012.
I discovered his obituary online while trying to come up with an idea for a Christmas column. It had been years since I’d heard from him and I wondered what had happened to my old friend the Happy Cake maker.
I know – nobody is supposed to like fruitcake, let alone admit to it. Fruitcake has become the universal butt of Christmas jokes. People use it as doorstops, shoot it out of cannons. Fruitcake fusillades became so popular at one point that local practitioners made the news, chortling with glee as they fired flaming fruitcakes into the night sky at Quarry View Park.
But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when fruitcake was actually respectable.
Which brings me back to the Happy Cake maker. We became friends following a column I wrote in defense of fruitcake. Former Statesman columnist Judy Steele and I had had a friendly feud over fruitcake in our columns. Hers was anti-fruitcake; mine was pro-fruitcake. Rodby, fruitcake’s number-one cheerleader, ended up with a copy of mine and reprinted it in his newsletter. He had relatives in Boise, who had sent him the column, and whenever he came to town to visit them we’d meet for lunch or coffee. We became friends through a mutual love of fruitcake.
Fruitcake wasn’t merely his passion; it was his business, or at least a good part of it. He managed a rural Hawaiian restaurant, described in his obituary as “a refuge where time stood still and the gracious Aloha of old Hawaii resided.” The Kemoo Farm Restaurant was known for, among other things, Hawaiian Happy Cake.
He sent one of them to me every Christmas for several years. Happy Cakes are a uniquely Hawaiian twist on fruitcake. They’re made with pineapple and macadamia nuts. Think pineapple upside down cake with nuts and sprinkled with grated coconut. (My wife liked them, and she hates fruitcake.) They’re made with fresh ingredients that, if memory serves, were grown on Rodby’s Kemoo Farm. He invited me to visit there any number of times. Now I’m kicking myself for not taking him up on it.
His love of fruitcake began on Kemoo farm, where he grew up surrounded by tropical fruits. Mine began with my great grandmother Susie.
Grandma Susie was the kind of grandmother everyone wishes they had. She looked like a Norman Rockwell grandmother – aprons, old-fashioned dresses, a jolly face that belied a hard life. She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children, survived three fires that claimed everything she owned and somehow remained a cheerful, positive person, admired by all who knew her.
Her culinary skills were good enough to get her a job running the kitchen at what was then known as the Old Soldiers Home, in what is now Veterans Park. None of the old soldiers were ever known to complain about the cooking.
Her extended Christmas visits were a highlight of the year at our house. They were the happiest time of the year – old-fashioned lights gleaming on an old-fashioned tree, George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy” album playing on the stereo, the aroma of my mother’s and Grandma Susie’s baking filling every room.
My mother’s specialties were Christmas cookies and fudge. Grandma Susie’s piece de resistance was, of course, fruitcake.
Forget the fruitcake sold in supermarkets, the kind with the jellied candy that everyone loves to hate. This was real, homemade fruitcake, similar in texture to good zucchini bread but with Grandma Susie’s special blend of spices and dried fruit. She may or may not have doused it with rum or brandy. I was too young to care about such things in those days, but it’s a good bet that she did. Good fruitcake needs a dose of Authority, and she was too good a baker not to have known that.
Whatever the ingredients were, the result was almost sinfully delicious, a Christmas confection destined to become a cherished memory. In a perfect world, Grandma Susie would have included the recipe in her will. By now it would be a family treasure, at least at my house.
I thought of her and my late friend Rodby recently while passing a display of fruitcake at Costco. It was a bit of a surprise to see it there. It hasn’t been all that long since fruitcake’s reputation was at such a low ebb that it was almost impossible to find. The memory of asking for it in a store during that dark time and having a smart-mouthed employee shout that “this guy is looking for fruitcake,” as if I’d asked for illegal drugs or pornography, is still painfully fresh.
If it isn’t sold out (not likely), I’m going back to Costco this week to buy some. Christmas isn’t Christmas without fruitcake. And it’s the least I can do for Grandma Susie, and my departed friend the Happy Cake Maker.

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

Many of you may know this, but for those who don’t, I’ve been working with Wide Eye Productions again this year in making the sequel to 2012’s Emmy-winning “Idaho the Movie.” “Idaho the Movie 2” was released last week and is available now in stores and online.

The sequel features places we missed the first time around. ((Idaho is so big and has so many beautiful and interesting places that it’s impossible to fit them all into a single documentary.) As beautiful as the first film was, the new one is in many ways even better. Technological advances in photography allowed the team to do things that were impossible four years ago. The new movie was shot in ultra HD for greater resolution and clarity, and many of the scenes were shot from a helicopter equipped with gyroscopically mounted cameras. The result is breathtaking aerial shots of Idaho as it’s seldom seen. Imagine skimming the peaks of the Sawtooths or White Clouds and you’ll have an idea of what they look like.

As with “Idaho 1,” I wrote and narrated the film, researching and writing about lesser known Idaho settings – the Magruder Corridor, the Hiawatha Trail, Hell’s Half Acre, Selway falls and others – in addition to some of the state’s more iconic attractions. The movie premiered at the Egyptian Theater in Boise and a theater in Idaho Falls and aired on  Boise’s KTVB Channel 7, but the public viewings are finished for the holidays so if you want to see it, check it out at any of the locations listed below. It makes a great stocking stuffer or gift to send to friends and relatives outside Idaho to show them just how beautiful our state is.

It’s available now at all Idaho Costco, Winco and Albertsons stores, Idaho Mountain Touring in Boise and Meridian and online at idahothemovie.com. I’ll be doing signings at the Boise Costco from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday Dec. 17 and the Nampa Costco on Sunday Dec. 18 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Hope to see you there, and Merry Christmas!

Tim

 

A recent Statesman restaurant review of the Owyhee Tavern noted that it lacked “campy remnants” of the Gamekeeper, the restaurant that previously occupied its space.
Campy as it may have been by today’s standards, the Gamekeeper occupied a space in the hearts of countless Boiseans. For more than half a century, it epitomized fine dining in Boise. It was also the setting for one of my earliest jobs and most memorable blunders.
Like the Owyhee Tavern, the Gamekeeper was upscale for its time. But how the times have changed! The Owyhee Tavern bears virtually no resemblance to its storied predecessor. It’s muted grays and browns, open and airy. The Gamekeeper was dark wood and red accents, dimly lit. Its heyday, as the reviewer noted, was “during a time when flaming cherries jubilee and lobster Thermidor were in vogue.”
My second job was working as a busboy there. My first job was on the end of a shovel, working for my father’s and uncle’s lawn-sprinkler company. I thought busing tables at a fancy restaurant would be a cinch compared to digging ditches in the hot sun. But I was 15 and knew diddly about the restaurant business.
First, a bit more about the Gamekeeper itself. It was the sort of place you went with your date to the senior prom or your parents toasted you for your college graduation or you celebrated paying off the mortgage. It was one of the most if not the most expensive restaurant in town, the sort of place most people went for a rare splurge.
And the sort of place where the wealthy and powerful dined as a matter of course. The lunch crowd typically included a millionaire or two, city council members, state legislators, corporate executives, an occasional governor or U.S. senator … these were the folks whose tables I’d be busing.
The first clue that the job might not be as easy as expected had nothing to do with the clientele. My shift started early in the morning. By 10 a.m. or so, my feet were starting to hurt. By the time the lunch crowd was filtering in, they were killing me. This had never happened on the ditch-digging gig.
“Hold your foot up so I can look at your shoes,” one of the waitresses said.
I obliged, giving her a closer look at the stylish-but-cheap shoes purchased to create a proper impression in my opulent new surroundings.
“No wonder!” she said. “There’s no support in those things. You need better shoes.”
She was right. My ditch-digging boots would have been more comfortable, if less appropriate.
Our boss was an imposing gentleman named Andy Horton. I was never sure of his title, either head waiter or maitre d’. Whatever his title, he was not a man to be trifled with, at least not if you were a lowly busboy. He wore an air of authority that had little to do with his neatly pressed black slacks, immaculate white dress shirts or elegant waist coats, of the sort favored by generals for formal dinners. As far as I was concerned, he may as well have been a general. I don’t recall ever speaking to him. Concerns that merited his attention were relayed through the chain of command, meaning the waitresses.
The waitresses were themselves a fairly formidable lot. You didn’t get a job waiting tables at the Gamekeeper fresh out of high school. Its wait staff consisted of veterans who had proven themselves at lesser restaurants and were hired for their efficiency and table-side manner. They were pleasant enough, but they had little patience with busboys who broke the rules, meaning me.
My first shift ended with a mixture of agony and elation. Never in my life had my feet hurt so much. But compared with digging ditches, the money was great.
The waitresses, on the other hand, were something less than elated.
“I’ve never seen such a cheap crowd,” one of them said.
“Me, neither,” another replied. “I didn’t get a single tip. Not even from my regulars.”
“You’re kidding!” I told them. “I did great!”
To prove it, I pulled a fat roll of bills from my pocket.
Imagine a pack of hungry wolves closing in on a strutting peacock and you’ll have an idea of the scene that followed. The only thing that saved me from annihilation or, worse, having to answer to Horton, was my total ignorance of the rules. The waitresses wasted no time informing me that the bills I’d happily pocketed were their tips, not mine, and that my cut was 10 percent. The only things that saved me were my youth and innocence. If they’d thought for a second that I knew better and was stealing from them, the result would have made me long for the relative bliss of digging ditches.
Later in life, I came to know the Gamekeeper as an occasional customer on special occasions. Horton and the waitresses I’d known were long gone, but there was a plaque in the lobby honoring his many years of service and his status as a Boise institution.
To its credit, the Owyhee Tavern is giving a nod to local history by featuring photos of old Boise street scenes as part of its decor. If one exists, it would be a nice addition to include a photo of the Gamekeeper in its prime. It had a place in our hearts, it was part of our history and it deserves to be remembered …
Almost as much as some of its former waitresses would like to forget a certain busboy.

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