Suggested headline:  ‘The kindest man I’ve ever known’

  The first time I saw Terry Shibata, he was smiling happily while flagrantly violating a no-parking zone at the ferry dock in Seattle.

  He was impossible to miss, wildly waving his hands at us while my wife, one of our daughters and I disembarked. It was worth it to him to risk a pricey parking ticket to make sure we spotted him.

  There are people you don’t have to know long or well for them to affect you deeply. Terry was one of them. When word came that he died last month at 86, we felt as if we’d lost an inspiration, a model for how life should be lived.

  He and I and a friend in St. Louis were the contemporary equivalent of pen pals. Terry and Bob Hagar, my St. Louis friend, met on a group tour and began exchanging emails. That led to the three of us exchanging emails, and a long-distance friendship was formed.

  The reason he was waiting at the dock in Seattle that day was that he knew we’d be in the area and had offered to take us to a Seattle Mariners game. We tried to pay him back for the tickets he’d purchased, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  At the game, featuring the woeful Mariners against the even more woeful Baltimore Orioles, he surprised us by pulling Costco hot dogs out  of his jacket pockets and offering one to each of us. Then he announced his intention to go the concession stand to buy us insanely expensive cups of beer.

  “Let me get them,” I said. “I’ll come with you.” 

  “No, no, no. You stay here and enjoy your hot dogs. I’ll be right back with the beer.”

  After the game, he took us to one of his favorite restaurants. Despite repeated offers, he wouldn’t let us pay for dinner. Only when it became clear that allowing us to pick up the tab would have ruined his evening did we acquiesce. He reluctantly let us pay the tip.

  A resident of Everett, Wash., and an avid fan of the Mariners, the Seattle Seahawks and the University of Washington Huskies, he loved buying their team gear for people, whether or not they were fans. 

  “He was most generous,” Hagar said. “He sent us Washington Huskies caps, Seahawk blankets, University  of Washington sweatshirts …” 

  A Huskies cap is lurking in my closet as well. He sent it to me as a good-natured joke a few days before Washington played Boise State in the 2019 Las Vegas Bowl. 

  And never said an unkind word about the Huskies embarrassing the Broncos.

  Two years ago, we all met at the Hagars’ home near St. Louis. Terry insisted on sleeping on a couch so my wife and I could have the guest room. We went to places that required a lot of walking, which was  difficult for him because of a back injury. He painfully shuffled to museums, the top of the St. Louis Arch and a Cardinals game, never once complaining. 

   “He’d been taking steroid shots for his back for more than 20 years,” Toni Mullins, one of his daughters, told me. “The doctor told him he needed an operation, but he kept getting the shots instead. He didn’t want to let an operation interfere with his travels.”

  Asked how many countries he’d visited, he said it would be easier to count the ones he hadn’t visited. He traveled with his wife until her death in 2009, then on his own. He went to Antarctica – alone – in his early 80s.

  In his 86 years, he worked on a fishing boat, in a cannery, pounded rivets into Boeing airplanes and worked his way up at a succession of supermarkets, eventually opening his own – Terry’s Thriftway, in Everett.  

  He took his dog to church with him on Sundays. The dog happily attended the service along with the rest of the congregation. Later he got a cat named Oreo and took her to church. Oreo had to wait in the car.

  She “shredded his upholstery,” Mullins said. “He never got mad at her, though. … Oreo was definitely spoiled. He fed her raw tuna. He had a freezer full of it for her.”

  Her father was among the few remaining survivors of the Minidoka Internment Camp, northeast of Twin Falls. It was one of ten camps created after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entering World War II. Fearing that people of Japanese ancestry would side with Japan in the war, the government ordered those living on the West Coast to leave their homes and report to the camps. More than 9,000 were sent to Minidoka.

  It was a shameful chapter in our history. Virtually all of those sent to the camps, including the Shibata family, were loyal U.S. citizens. While they were interned at Minidoka, their business, a Seattle bakery, was  taken from them. A child at the time, Terry Shibata was too young to understand fully all that happened. He told me once that what he remembered most about Minidoka was playing baseball with the other children.

  “He was nine years old,” Mulllins said. “He could tell that something about it wasn’t right, but he made it fun for himself.”

  She remembers her father as “always happy and joking.”

  His nickname:  Hap. Shortened from Happy.

  I knew him for only a few years. The total time we spent together can be measured in days rather than months or weeks. I didn’t even know his nickname until Mullins told me about it.

  He didn’t need a lot of time, though, to make an indelible impression. His passing affected me as much as if he’d been part of my life much  longer. He may have been the kindest man I’ve ever known.

  My daughter who went to the Mariners game with us and spent no  more than six or seven hours with him in her life had the same reaction. 

  “Of all the people I’ve ever known,” she said, “Terry is the one I’d most like to be like.”

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

Tim Woodward’s new columns will alternate with previously published “Woodward Classics” for the duration of the pandemic. This one, slightly revised here, originally was published in The Idaho Statesman in 2017.

  How many times had I passed the building, once so dear, without stopping?

  The old brick building has graced the corner of Sixth and Idaho streets in downtown Boise for over a century. I’d walked or driven past it countless times, invariably with memories drifting back, but always in too much of a hurry to stop and venture inside to see how it had changed. 

  Until now. It was a slow day, no need to hurry anywhere, and the building seemed to beckon. Why not?

  It was built in 1912 as the Fraternal Order of Eagles building. It had a beautiful hardwood dance floor on the second floor, which eventually led to its becoming an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. For much of the 1960s, it was known as the Fiesta Ballroom.

  For its patrons, the Fiesta was a teenage dance hall. For me and my friends who played in a band there on Saturday nights, it was a clubhouse, a second home.

  It had been closed for a couple of years when we got the idea to reopen it. We were desperate to find a regular place to play, but the man who previously ran it had had his fill of the dance business. No amount of reasoning or pleading would convince him to get back into it.

  My father, who was more susceptible to pleading, agreed to sign the lease with the understanding that we, the band members, would run the place. It would be our responsibility to pay the rent and other bills, hire security and maintenance people and not lose our shirts. He made it clear that we were on our own. If we failed, there’d be no bailing us out.

  We didn’t fail. We advertised on the radio. We hired police officers to patrol our dances, one of the toughest kids in town to work as a bouncer and friends to run the soft-drink bar and do the janitorial work. For two of the best years of our lives, the old ballroom was packed with teenagers every weekend. 

  We made more money than we’d dreamed possible and had an idyllic hangout. It was perfect for everything from rehearsals to parties to telling ghost stories late at night with the vacant third floor creaking and groaning above us. There were times when we swore we heard footsteps up there. One night when I went to the ballroom to get a guitar, a heavy amplifier began to tilt back and forth – all by itself – and tip over on the stage. No one else was in the building, and no one in the history of feet has run faster.  

  Fast forward to today. The building has been renovated and is now mostly offices. The stairs we used to lug our gear to the second-floor ballroom have been replaced by an elevator leading to the three upper floors. I rode it to where the ballroom used to be and stepped into a hallway finished in muted greens and earth tones. Locked offices lined either side. Where hit songs once played and hundreds of people danced, it was eerily silent. 

  A window provided a view of the building across the alley. Now an office building, it used to be Boise’s jail and police station. On hot summer nights when the fire-escape door was open, prisoners shouted song requests at us from the jail windows. Through some mystery of atmospherics, our amplifiers picked up police radio transmissions – a source of amusement to most and of occasional strategic value to those planning illicit activities.

  A window in a deserted conference room offered a view of a concrete ledge and the roof of an adjoining building, which also used to be a dance hall. It was where our primary competitors played. 

  When some of our gear mysteriously vanished, we blamed them and decided to get even by breaking into their clubhouse and swiping some of their gear. The obvious choice to squeeze through an alley window and let us in was a band member named Vance. Vance was small enough to fit and had experience in such matters. It might have worked, too, except that he got stuck halfway through the window. It was at this inopportune moment that a police car entered the alley.

  The officer driving it was Vern Bisterfeldt, later a city councilman and county commissioner but then a cop who, among other things, patrolled our dances. Asked what we were doing in the alley, we told him we were waiting for someone to let us in so we could rehearse.

  “Oh,” he said, seemingly satisfied, as he started to drive away.

  Then, stopping after a few feet:  “Why is Vance stuck in the window?”

  He’d recognized him by his stubby legs, which were flailing madly. We made up a cover story, which he pretended to accept and drove away. We avoided jail (conveniently just a few yards away), and our one and only fling with attempted burglary was mercifully terminated.

  The aforementioned ledge was our “emergency entrance” to the Fiesta when we’d forgotten the key. From the top of the fire-escape stairway, it was possible to leap to the ledge and pry up a window to get inside. The leap was patently dangerous. A fall to the alley below would have been fatal. Between that and some of the other stupid things we did, I sometimes wonder how we survived our teenage years.

  Another elevator ride led to the fourth floor and more offices. It was late on a Friday afternoon; all of the office workers seemed to have left for the day. The fourth floor, like the others, was almost spectrally quiet.

  Then, an unexpected sound.

  Piano music. Played haltingly, like someone practicing. 

  In the old days, this floor was the spooky part of the building, the part that creaked and groaned and inspired ghost stories. The music was coming from an office down the hall, but the view through its door window revealed … absolutely no one.

  The song being practiced: Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.” 

  Vance had been our piano player.

  The only member of the original group to have passed away, he also was something of a practical joker. 

  Breaking the creepy silence that preceded it, the piano music with no visible source gave me goosebumps. 

  It’s possible, of course, that there was an unseen piano somewhere on the fourth floor. Or maybe a practice tape was playing behind one of the locked doors.

   Or maybe …

   I’m glad the developers saved our old clubhouse. Instead of being torn down, it was tastefully restored and is home to new tenants.

   And maybe a ghost or two. 

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.