On a recent Saturday, for no apparent reason, Lydia Merrill came to mind, making me wonder whether she was still living. A few days later, a call came saying that she wasn’t.

  She died the day I’d been thinking about her. 

  Maybe it was her way of saying goodbye.

  I’d have liked to have said goodbye to Lydia, the owner of Boise’s Mardi Gras Ballroom. In her quiet way, she was the heart and soul of the old ballroom at Ninth and River streets. I’ve attended or played music at events at the Mardi Gras since I was a teenager and there was never a time when she wasn’t there.   

  “If you went to the Mardi Gras, you probably saw her,” her son, Tim Merrill, said. “She took tickets, counted the money, answered the phone, did a lot of the cleaning.”

  “She was pulling tables around in her 90s,” daughter Lana McCullough added. “If a dance ended at one or two in the morning, she’d curl up on a recliner and sleep there.” 

  Interviewed on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, she said she’d try to make it to 110. She came within a few years, dying of Covid 19 complications at 106.

  The ballroom is almost as old as she was. Her husband, Orson Merrill, bought it in 1958. It was already a local institution by then,  opening in 1928 as the Riverside Pavilion, an open-air venue. By the time the Merrills took over, it had a roof and a history of hosting big bands and jazz artists – Buddy Rich, Glenn Miller and his orchestra and Gib Hochstrasser and the Kings of Swing to name a few.

  The Merrills initially operated it as a roller skating rink. When roller skating didn’t prove to be as popular as they hoped, it went back to being a ballroom and an integral part of the local music scene for decades. The Ventures, Johnny Winter, Leon Russel and Edgar Winter, Albert Collins, the Animals, David Lindley and his El Rayo-X band and R.E.M. were among the famous acts that played there.

   It could take forever just to get close enough to the stage to see the band at some of those events. I was there the night blues guitarist Buddy Guy had fans packed elbow to elbow – 1,200 of them filling the dance floor, the lobby, tables and chairs, nooks and crannies, anywhere with sitting or standing room. The  music was so loud you felt it in your solar plexus.

  In my high school years, the Mardi Gras was a magnet for teenagers drawn by the music of Paul Revere and the Raiders, Dick Cates and the Chessmen, the Chancellors and other local groups. Along with the Miramar and Fiesta ballrooms, now both memories, it was one of the happening places to go. 

  If the Mardi Gras had a front man, it was Orson Merrill. Outgoing and colorful, he enjoyed chatting up the bands onstage while they were setting up. I still laugh about the time he carved “Orson” with a nail on one my group’s microphones, thinking it was his. He once poked a teenager with a hat pin for sitting on a table and was known to stop the music during dances to clean the hard-rock maple dance floor, which he installed himself. 

  And always, behind the scenes, there was Lydia – an icon in her own, quieter way. She helped keep the ballroom running for over half a century, kept the books in her younger years, and in her 90s was still vacuuming, cleaning tables, answering the phone, overseeing pretty much everything.

  “She’s probably the hardest working individual I’ve ever known,” McCullough said. “The two things that gave meaning to her life were being able to work and being able to learn. Until last few months of her life, she talked about wanting to go back to school to learn to speak Spanish.”

  On her hundredth birthday, she received an honorary certificate from Boise State University – where she earned over 100 credits as a senior citizen.

  “She had bookshelves in almost every room of her house,” McCullough said. “She read everything – self-help books, cookbooks, religious books, political books, everything except fiction. To her, novels were just stories. She wanted to learn, and she read everything she could to do that.”

  The ballroom during her last years wasn’t the force it had once been on the popular music scene.

   “It was mostly used for ethnic celebrations,” Tim Merrill said. “Mexican, Laotian, African, Afghan, a Bosnian party. … Mom went to a few of those. She had a T-shirt with ‘Security’ written on it.”

  With her passing, the iconic ballroom’s days most likely are numbered.

  “I think it’s going to go the way of Lydia and Orson,” McCullough said. “I think they were the only two people who could do the job the way they did it.”

  Developers, she added, “have been interested in it for years. It would be great if someone bought it who wasn’t just in for the money, who wanted to keep it a ballroom. I’d be all for that. Money isn’t everything. I’m hoping for something that would be a legacy for Lydia and Orson.”

  And for the city. How many venues do we have that have been around for nearly a century and entertained Idahoans with artists from Artie Shaw to Pinetop Perkins?

  Here’s hoping that McCullough gets her wish and someone who appreciates its history will buy the Mardi Gras, pump some money into it and bring the artists and the crowds back. We have plenty of banks, office buildings and condominium complexes. There’s only one Mardi Gras. 

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.

I inadvertently posted on my blog information about my new book that was supposed to have been in a message to those on the email list for my band, the Mystics. Sorry for the confusion. The information about the book, at least, is accurate.

— Tim

Okay, so this technically isn’t about the Mystics. But I wanted to let those of you who follow our blog know about my new book.

It’s a memoir. The title is “Finding My Niche.” It’s pretty much my life story, but its three main elements focus on growing up in a very different Boise (35,000 people, no high rises, no traffic), playing in the Mystics, and my career as an Idaho Statesman reporter and columnist. Readers will learn what it was like growing up in a town where kids caught tadpoles and swam in the Boise River. They’ll go inside The Statesman newsroom for a behind-the-scenes look at the workings of Idaho’s largest newspaper, and will read the stories of how the Mystics came to be and continue to be one of Idaho’s longest running rock bands.

“Finding My Niche” is available at Rediscovered Books, 180. N. Eighth Street in downtown Boise, on amazon.com, and will soon be at Barnes & Noble, 1315 N. Milwaukee, near the Boise Towne Square Mall.

And, as long as I’m at it, a bit of Mystics news: We’ll be playing at the Sapphire Room in the Riverside Hotel on January 8.

Thanks,

Tim Woodward

Tim Woodward’s new columns are alternating with Woodward Classics during the pandemic. This one originally was published in The Idaho Statesman in the late 1990s. We’ll leave it to readers to decide how relevant it is today.

  Most people move to Boise because they’re looking for a better place to live. Don Taylor is thinking of leaving for the same reason.

  “I’m tired of our officials telling us what a wonderful place they’re making of Boise,” he said. “It already was wonderful.”

  A Boise native and fourth-generation Idahoan, Taylor misses the Boise of before the boom. He knows his views on growth aren’t popular. In fact, he considered canceling the interview he requested with me to speaking for the overrun-native faction. He didn’t want people thinking he was an anti-growth zealot.

  “I try to be positive, and there are some new things about Boise I like,” he said “I’ve gone to some hockey games and enjoyed them. I like having more concerts. But I’m not sure that what we’ve gotten is worth what we’ve lost.

  “ … It’s hard for newcomers to understand. We had Boise at its best. They may think it’s great compared with where they came from, but what about those of us who have lived our whole lives here? Is our opinion any less valid?”

  Taylor, 47, grew up in a Boise that is now a memory. Its population was 35,000. Downtown had two “towers,” the Statehouse and the Hoff Building. The North End was riddled with dirt-cheap building lots. Anything west of Orchard Street, once aptly named, was considered rural.

  “I grew up on a 40-acre farm off of Maple Grove,” he said. “My father bought it to get us out in the country. The farm is part of the Interstate now. The house was moved and converted to a day care-center.”

  The Boise of his youth was geographically isolated, slow to change. Growth was almost imperceptible until the 1980s, the beginning of a 50,000-person population explosion.

  “Until then, we had normal growth cycles. What’s happened since isn’t normal. It’s crazy.

  “I miss the sense of community. It wasn’t really a small town, but you always ran into people you knew. People weren’t in such a hurry, and it was so easy to get around. We didn’t know what traffic was.

  “Now, whether you’re going to church or out to dinner or whatever, you have to wait in long lines. My wife and I used to ride bikes with our kids on Maple Grove. And that was just a few years ago. Now we wouldn’t even think of doing it.”

  Taylor isn’t anti-newcomer. His complaint is with “our officials who welcome any big development with open arms. … The people who settled this area called it the Treasure Valley because it was a treasure. But we’re paving over it as fast as we can.”

  Like his parents, Taylor thought he’d spend his entire life here. Now, he and his wife are looking for “a place with a sense of community, a phone book less than half an inch thick, no traffic-watch planes and no mall.”

  In a few years, when their children are grown, he says they’ll leave Boise.

  “My biggest feeling about Boise now is sadness,” he said. A lot of the newcomers are very gracious. They say wonderful things about what a great place this is.

  “They should have seen it 15 years ago.”

  ***

  It’s been roughly 30 years since this column first appeared. If he’s still living – he’d be in his 70s now – I’d love to find Don Taylor and interview him again.

  Did he in fact move to a smaller town? If so, how have things worked out for him there? Does he ever return to Boise, and if so what’s his take on it today? I tried searching for him online, but as you can imagine there are lots of Don Taylors out there. If anyone who reads this knows his current whereabouts, please email me at the address below:

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.

  Most Idahoans remember J.R. Simplot as the Idaho Potato King. The man who emerged from the front door of the mansion on Simplot hill every Halloween, however, more closely resembled Santa Claus.

  Boisean Shelley Smith Eichmann remembers a jovial Simplot wearing a red sweater and handing out envelopes to trick or treaters. 

  “If you got to his house early enough, you got an envelope with a silver dollar and a poem,” she said. “A well written poem and a shiny silver dollar. He’d tell the trick or treaters to invest it well and to let him know if they had any good investment ideas. It was so special for the kids.”

  Simplot is gone, but Halloween remains a special time for kids today. It’s an almost universally positive experience for them. 

  And a relatively tame one. Treats are abundant, tricks all but forgotten.

  We didn’t have a J.R. Simplot in the neighborhood where I grew up. We had a Halloween Grinch. And a trick he played on me one year is one my most vivid Halloween memories. 

  Howard the Halloween Grinch lived across the street from my parents’ house in North Boise. He was the nicest of men 364 days a year, a friend and mentor to those of us lucky enough to have him take us under his wing.

   The man could fix anything. His garage and basement workshop contained as many tools, nuts and bolts and miscellaneous parts as a Home Depot store. It was Howard who built our soapbox derby racers, fixed the flat tires on our bicycles and was ready and waiting with the proper tools and knowhow to repair anything from a BB gun to a ham radio.

  He enjoyed few things more than teaching kids the basics of hunting and fishing. It was from Howard that I learned to cast a fly, lead a bird on the wing. A hunting or fishing trip with him seldom failed to result in a duck or pheasant dinner or a cooler filled with trout.

  An exception to that was a duck hunting trip on a below-zero morning. We had just pushed the boat into the river when the expression on my face told him the trip was over.

  “Are your boots leaking?” he asked me.

  It was so cold that river water splashed on the sides of the boat instantly froze, so cold that the water in my boots felt like fire. If he hadn’t immediately helped me back to shore, built a fire and massaged my feet, it would have meant at the very least a trip to the emergency room. 

  The incident exemplified the compassionate, caring man who was like a second father to every kid in the neighborhood.

  Except on Halloween. 

  No treats from Howard the Halloween Grinch. Instead of handing out candy like all the other grownups, he turned off all the lights in his house and pretended he wasn’t home.

  This did not sit well with trick or treaters. Why he disliked Halloween so much was a mystery, but it was irritating enough that one year I decided to get even. I would soap his windows.

  For those not familiar with the practice in the age of treats without tricks, a word of explanation. Soaping windows consisted of using an ordinary bar of soap to write on window glass. It was a harmless trick, as the soap easily washed off the day after Halloween.

  What I would have written on the Halloween Grinch’s windows has long since been forgotten, but there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my boyish mind that it would have been devastatingly clever and cutting. 

  If only there had been a chance to write it.

  To make sure the grinch wasn’t lurking his darkened living room watching for trouble, I crept to his front porch and rang the doorbell. This was when his Halloween trick was revealed. He had wired the doorbell to shock any trick or treaters brave or foolish enough to ring it.

  It wasn’t a serious shock, but definitely enough to get your attention.

  And to make me even more determined to get even.

  Soap in hand, I crept around the corner of the darkened house to a picture window and was reaching to write on it with my soap when a voice scared me more than any ghoul or goblin could have.

  “Don’t touch that window!”

  I turned to look, and there in the crook of a tree, silhouetted against the Halloween moon, was the Halloween Grinch – brandishing a shotgun!

  It didn’t help to know that Howard loaded some of his shotgun shells with rock salt to make their effect merely painful rather than lethal. I took off like a rocket.

  It was a fright remembered for life.

  To this day, I don’t know whether Howard recognized me in my Halloween getup that night. If so, he never mentioned it. We remained friends until his death many years later, in his late 90s.

  Maybe it’s a good thing that Halloween tricks are less prevalent now. Some of them went too far. 

  That said, there was something to be said for a deliciously scary prank. Getting scared was half the fun. Simplot’s silver dollars and the Halloween Grinch’s electrified doorbell both had their place on what was once was the creepiest, most enjoyable night of the year.

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