Tim’s new columns are alternating with previously published “Woodward Classics” during the pandemic. This one originally appeared in The Idaho Statesman in 2010, following the death of actress Lynn Redgrave.

  Occasionally, not often because there aren’t a lot of them in Idaho, readers ask me what it’s like to interview famous people. 

  The answer depends on the famous person. A few are arrogant snobs, but most are just regular people who happen to be famous.

  I like regular people. I’m comfortable with them. That’s why, on the night I had dinner with Lynn Redgrave, the famous actress, I was looking for a regular person to hang out with instead.

  The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Morrison Center. Velma Morrison was hosting a $250-a-plate dinner at her home. The newspaper paid $250 for me to go and write about it.

  For someone whose idea of dressing up is wearing my best pair of jeans, it was unnerving. Some of the men were wearing tuxedos, and most of those who weren’t were sporting suits that cost more than my car. The women were wearing formal gowns and expensive jewelry. No jeans anywhere.

  The guest list included corporate presidents, university presidents, congressmen, society mavens, a governor or two … You could have thrown a boomerang and not hit anyone who frequented a tavern or a tattoo parlor.

  I was looking for someone I’d feel comfortable having dinner with and not finding anyone when my attention was drawn to a regular looking guy wearing a corduroy jacket and a string tie, sitting alone at a table for 12. Figuring that he felt as uncomfortable and out of place as I did, I pulled up a chair next to him.

  And that’s how I met the world famous raptor expert Morley Nelson. 

  “Anyone sitting here?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Considering that no one but him was sitting in any of the other 11 chairs, I thought he was joking.

  Until a big shot asked if he and his wife could join us.

  “No,” Nelson replied. “That’s where Lynn and her family are sitting.”

  “Lynn” was Redgrave, who was appearing at the Morrison Center that evening in a one-woman play she’d written. Searching for regular folks, I’d stumbled into the last seat at the VIP table.

  You can imagine my surprise when Redgrave herself sat down beside me, so close our elbows were touching, and introduced herself.

  As if she needed an introduction. This was a member of one of Britain’s preeminent acting families – Sir Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson to name a few. She’d become a household word in the title role of the movie “Georgy Girl, won two Golden Globe Awards, was nominated for two Academy Awards and was critically acclaimed on both stage and screen,

  As if that weren’t enough, she was then omnipresent on television in a series of Weight Watchers commercials. I might as well have been sitting next to Oprah.

  Normally the situation would have left me tongue-tied. It probably did, in fact, until I realized something surprising. I was sitting between two of the most regular folks in the room. Nelson was one of most down-to-earth people you could meet, and Redgrave couldn’t have been nicer.

  In the unlikely event that you didn’t know who she was, you’d never have guessed that she was a star. It wasn’t just that she was utterly lacking in attitude; she had a way of effortlessly putting you at ease. It was like talking to an old friend over a beer. She was funny and genuinely interested in what you had to say. In two minutes, you felt as if you’d known her for years.

  We spent the evening talking about acting, Morley’s birds, population control and other subjects that interested them. I’ve seldom enjoyed an evening more.

  It’s hard to believe they’re both gone now – two people who made it to the top of their professions, received worldwide acclaim and had the good sense not to let it go to their heads.

  I’ve been missing Morley, who later became a friend, since his death a couple of years ago. Now I miss both of my onetime dinner companions. Landing at their table was one of the luckiest accidents I’ve had.

  The $250-a-plate lasagna wasn’t bad, either.

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

  The last time I saw Dr. Geoff Williams, in 2006, his foundation to help children with facial deformities was in its infancy. It was’t quite a one-man operation, but it wasn’t far from it.  

  Fast forward 15 years. Today, Williams’s International Children’s Surgical Foundation has medical workers from South America to Southeast Asia. He personally has performed more than 3,000 surgeries on some 2,300 children in 13 countries –  all at no expense to the kids or their parents.

  Along with Fr. Rick Frechette, who has devoted his life to helping the poor in Haiti (studying by candlelight to become a medical doctor so he could tend to their physical as well as their spiritual needs), Williams would get my vote for sainthood.

  The pandemic has restricted his travel, giving him more time to spend at home and an opportunity for us to catch up.  We met at the same place where I interviewed him 15 years ago, then his parents’ home in Boise. They’ve since passed away; the house is his now. Little seemed to have changed, with one notable exception – a playpen filled with toys in a corner of the living room.

  Williams, 65, is a bachelor who spends most of his time working in other countries. The playpen and toys seemed incongruous until he explained the reason for them.

  “They’re for Conchita’s little girl,” he said. “She’s three years old.”

    Conchita Hernandez was five years old when the house where she and her mother lived in Oaxaca, Mexico caught fire. She got out but ran back to save her mother and was badly burned. Williams did surgeries to treat her burns, helped her with her homework, sent her to nursing school. Some 20 years later, he brings her to the U.S. several times a year for more surgeries. She and her daughter stay at his house while she recuperates.

  How many doctors do you know who will cover your travel expenses, operate on you for free and let you stay at their home while you recover?

  Williams grew up in Boise. He went to medical school at the University of Utah, studied surgery there and at Vanderbilt University and studied plastic surgery at the University of Texas in Galveston. He received additional training in Taiwan and at Stanford University. He could have had a comfortable private practice. Instead, he chose a less lucrative but arguably more rewarding path. He was doing a fellowship in Taiwan when he was invited to join three Chinese doctors on a medical mission in Vietnam. It was a turning point in his life. 

   “We went into a poorly lit gym where about 200 mothers were waiting for us, all mothers of kids with cleft palates. Because I was the tallest and the only westerner, they pressed me against the wall and held their kids up to my face. It was like a melee. Sadly, we were only there for two days and only did 20 operations. I remember looking at the lights in the countryside from the plane as we were leaving and thinking of all those mothers who had been turned away. That’s when I got the idea to volunteer full time in poor countries.

  “I planned to do full-time volunteer work for two years, get it out of my system and come back to the U.S. to start a practice, but in that time I accumulated lots of complicated cases that required a long-term commitment for more surgeries. Kids would ask me when I’d come back. Partway through, I realized I could never come back and do a full-time practice. That’s when I started thinking about starting the foundation.”

  Local hospitals and doctors helped. 

  “St. Al’s started donating supplies. It could have been a nightmare without that. St. Luke’s also stepped in later, and a there’s group of doctors in the area who go with me sometimes.”

  You’ve probably received donation requests in the mail from charities who do work similar to what Williams does. We’ve all read the literature, seen pictures of the children. What we don’t often know is the kids’ stories.

   One of Williams’s patients was a teenager named Maria, in the Philippines. Her face was so deformed that even with his years of experience he was “aghast” when he first saw her. She didn’t just have a cleft palate. Hers was a “global deformity,” clefts running all the way up to her eyes. Temporarily speechless, Williams was trying to decide how to respond to her when a co-worker told him she’d just graduated from high school.

  “I could not believe what I had just heard, that a girl with such a deformity would be so brave as to go all the way through school to the point of graduation. … I immediately saw Maria in a different and new light. I felt as though I was sitting in a hallowed place in front of this 18-year-old who had, I am sure, gone through so much teasing, marginalization and outright ridicule, day in and day out, to attend and finally graduate from high school.”

  The members of his team gave up their day off for Maria’s surgery. It took eight and a half hours. The girl with the face that left him aghast now has a face with a smile. 

   Another Filipino girl, a seven-year-old named Rosemarie, had one of the saddest faces he had ever seen.

   “She had a look of a child who had been teased mercilessly and had begun to feel as though every day at school was a day of unpleasantries. She had a forlorn look, more so than the other kids we see. I wondered if anything we did for her could ever improve such a sad face.”

  After her second surgery, he asked her to return the following year for the foundation’s speech therapy session. She said she would, but didn’t. Refusing to accept a no-show, Williams and his team procured a van and set out to find her.

  All they had to go on was the name of her village, and her home wasn’t even in the village. It was deep in a jungle. They were about to give up when they saw her, walking down a road. She apologized for not attending the therapy session and promised to come the next year. And, after years of being teased at a school, the girl with the sad face told them she had decided to become a teacher.

    It was an example, he said, “of the change that can come on the inside when the outside is fixed. And how the four hours of operating for the cleft lip was worth the time and backache.”

  Williams has brought smiles to faces in India, Kenya, Pakistan, Taiwan, Thailand, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Tanzania, the Philippines, China and Vietnam. He was mugged in Mexico. In Peru, he treated a young man who had had a grenade blow up in his hand.  In Mexico, he operated on a man whose chest had been branded by a cartel.

   The foundation he started in Boise now has medical workers in Bolivia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In Vietnam, he trained a young surgeon to do cleft palate surgeries. She in turn is training other doctors, so his work is having an international ripple effect.

   Though the surgeries are free for the patients and their parents, travel costs and other expenses are ongoing. The foundation relies on donations. To help, click on icsfoundation.org or send a check to ICSF, P.O. Box 4594, Boise, ID 83711-4594. 

  I asked Williams whether he had any regrets about choosing a life of endless travel and work in poor countries over a cushy private practice. 

  “I think the main regret is not having a normal social life or circle of friends. That, and I’ve always gotten by on just the basics. I still have the same car I’ve had most of my life, a 1992 Honda. I still drive it.”

  His priorities have nothing to do with living in a mansion or driving a Mercedes. The payoff for his travels (he has a million and a half frequent fliers miles with United Airlines) and long hours at operating tables is “the change in the lives of these kids, to know that we’re giving them a new life. And not just them but their mothers, their families. When a child is born with a deformity, the whole family grieves.”

  Soon he’ll leave for Bolivia on yet another medical mission. At 65, he isn’t slowing down at all. 

  “I get asked all the time if I’m going to retire” he said. “The answer is no. As long as my hands can hold the instruments, as long as my eyes can see to do the operations and my neck can hold my head up, I want to keep doing this. I realize age will eventually catch up, but for me to say I’m going to retire? I can’t see myself ever doing that. That would be the saddest day of my life.”

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.

Dear Blog Readers: Sorry this is a few days late. I’ve been out of town and returned to a computer glitch. (Thanks to Zack Sheppard for getting me back online!)

My mother has been gone nearly nine years and a day seldom passes that I don’t think of her in one context or another.

  Her colorful expressions: 

  “She made me feel like two cents waiting for change.”

  “I read it in The Daily Blab (her moniker for newspapers.)”

  “You need to have sticktoitiveness, Tim.”

  Her sense of humor. Little things that tickled her, made her laugh and even now make me laugh remembering them.

  Her meticulous housekeeping and her penchant for getting rid of anything that wasn’t being used – including my baseball card collection. (I’m over it now.)

  Some things, however, she saved for life. One was a box of old photos, a gift from one of my nephews after my sister died. They gathered dust on a closet shelf for a long time before I got around to looking at them, and was treated to unexpected glimpses of my mother’s life.

  The photos spanned more than a century. Many were of the sort you’d expect – snapshots taken on family outings, vacation pictures, group photos … Others were intriguing, funny, mysterious:

  A photo of my mother, her brother and his wife, for example. It could have been taken on another planet. They were surrounded by eerie, steaming rock formations. Yellowstone Park came to mind, but I’ve been to Yellowstone in virtually every season and not seen anything remotely like the scene in the photo. 

  A photo of the same uncle at Yosemite Falls, on a road now gridlocked throughout the tourist season. His was one of two cars.

   A winsomely smiling woman and a boy in a scout uniform. A dour-looking woman and two girls on a porch. An elegantly dressed woman seated on the deck of an ocean liner. All of their identities lost in time. People in the pre-digital era should have written names and dates on the backs of photos, for those of us who would come after them and wonder. 

  A postcard to my mother, postmarked a month before Pearl Harbor, featured an idyllic winter scene at “Sun Valley Village.” In those days, and for a long time afterwards, a village was exactly what it was. No condos, no mansions, no traffic. It was isolated, self-contained, magical.

  On the back of the card, my father had written “Wesson you could be here with me.”

  No, he wasn’t a terrible speller. But he was, for a time, a traveling salesman for the Wesson Oil Co.

  My parents married for life after brief first marriages. One of the funnier pictures, to me at least, was of Mom’s first husband holding hands with a mystery woman. Mysterious because someone (my mother?) had cut all but her arm and hand out of the picture. I could picture my Irish-American mother – her maiden name was O’Leary – doing something like that. 

  Some of my favorite photos were of long-gone relatives. My Aunt Helen and Uncle Wayne, who seemed exotic to me because they had lived in Peru and he’d been the foreman of a mine there. I could listen forever to his tales of working deep in the Andes.

  My Great Aunt Amy, who chased chickens around her barnyard as the first step in making what is still the best fried chicken I’ve ever had

  My Great Grandmother Susie, cherished by all who knew her. She came across the plains in a covered wagon, outlived three husbands and three of her children, survived three house fires and somehow remained the jolliest  of all the relatives. Mom counted the days till her grandmother’s visits. She’d come and stay with us for a week or two at Christmastime, filling the house with the aroma of baking and the joy of the season.

  There were, of course, pictures our mother had saved of my sister and me when we were growing up. Mom used to complain that I ruined every picture she took by making goofy faces. Now I know what she meant.

  In addition to the loose photos in the box was a scrapbook, meticulously assembled by my mother when she was in her early 20s. Her beautifully penned captions raised more questions than they answered.

  Several of the photos are of couples posing on the road to Idaho City – on Easter Sunday, 1929. They looked so young, so happy – blissfully unaware of the economic catastrophe that waited just a few months down the road.

   I’ll say this for my mother and her crowd: they got around. The scrapbook documented trips to Coeur d’Alene, San Francisco, Catalina Island, Dillon, Mont., Hollywood … She spoke wistfully of the California trip for the rest of her life, often saying that she didn’t want to come home.

  This was the first time I’d seen pictures of her and her friends from that odyssey, and they were stunning – the men robust and handsome, the women svelte and beautiful. Some of the names and faces were familiar, but many were complete mysteries: Archie, Ed, Jack, Bud, Charles, Jida, Gertie, Skeet, Roberta. Their images appear again and again – never with last names.

  Who were those people? My mother never mentioned any of them, and by now everyone who knew them is long dead. If you’re truly gone when the last person dies who knew who you were, my sister in this case, then those once striking people are truly gone.

  I should have asked Mom about them.

  I should have done a lot of things. I should have spent more time with her in her last years. I should have thanked her for all the times she made me laugh, for the long talks that helped get me through troubled times, for being the one person who was always there for me – from the first moment of my life till the last of her own – no matter what.  

 Most of all, I should have told her how much she meant to me. How much she still means. I couldn’t have asked for a better Mom.

  Even if she did throw away my baseball cards.

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.