In the aftermath of guitarist Jeff Beck’s death earlier this year, a friend brought over a DVD in which Beck talked about his favorite guitars. One – the rarest in his collection – recalled an incident that remains painful decades after it happened.

  For those unfamiliar with him, Beck was one of the world’s great blues and rock and roll guitarists. No less a guitarist than Eric Clapton said he watched him perform and had no idea how he played some of the things he did.

  The rare guitar in his collection was a 1954 Fender Stratocaster. Stratocasters, along with Gibson Les Pauls, have been the most popular electric guitars in the world for years. Millions have been sold since 1954, the year Fender began producing them.

  On the DVD, Beck said that he was lucky to get one. If Jeff Beck, one of the best and most famous guitarists in the world, was lucky to get one, what would the odds be of an average Joe being that lucky?

  Enter average Joe, a.k.a. yours truly. I actually owned one of these rare instruments. How I got it, and how it got away from me, are tales you don’t have to be a guitarist to appreciate.

  The first tale began with a desire to have a backup guitar. I only had one guitar at the time, and figured it would make sense to have a second  onstage if the first broke a string, got knocked over and damaged or otherwise was out of action.

  But what sort of guitar? After ruminating on it for a while, I decided not only on the sort of guitar but a specific guitar. It had been years since I’d heard it, but the memory of how great it sounded was indelible.

  In the early days of rock and roll, one of the most popular bands in Boise was a group called Dick Cates and the Chessmen. They played to sold-out audiences on Friday nights at the long defunct Miramar Ballroom on Fairview Avenue.

  Cates was the lead singer and a big reason for the group’s popularity. When he was born, the gods reached down and touched his vocal cords. People used to compare his voice with that of the late Roy Orbison, who had an impressive string of hit records and was known for the range and quality of his distinctive voice. I was far from being alone in thinking that  Cates’s voice was every bit as good. He should have been famous.

  The Chessmen’s guitar player was a man named Darrell Francke. Two things invariably wowed me at a Chessmen’s gig:  Cates’s voice and the sound of Francke’s guitar – a 1954 Stratocaster. There was just something about the tone of those early guitars that newer ones seem to lack.

  Not having heard anything about Francke in years, I had little hope of tracking him down but made some calls and got lucky. He was living in Jordan Valley, Ore., and had a listed number. I gave him a call.

  “Darrell?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Tim Woodward. You probably don’t remember me, but I used to come to a lot of your dances.”

  My expectation did not go unfulfilled. He didn’t remember me in the slightest.

  “I’m calling about that old Strat you used to play. You wouldn’t still happen to have that, would you?”

  “I do,” he replied. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about selling it.”

  I was at his house in Jordan Valley two hours later. The guitar definitely looked its age, but it sounded just fine. We agreed on a price of $300.

  On the way home with it, I noticed the serial number: 0935. The 935th Stratocaster made – out of millions.

  It’s hard to believe now, but neither I nor any of the musicians or guitar makers who saw it had any idea how much it was worth.

  Fast forward a few years. When a friend of a friend saw the guitar, he said I should send it to his friend Howard in Los Angeles. 

  “He can get you top dollar for it.”

  Itching to buy a new guitar by then, I sent it to Howard. A week or so later, my phone rang.

 “You (expletive deleted)!”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Howard in L.A. You didn’t tell me the neck on this guitar was  refinished or that it had new frets installed.”

  “That was because some of the old frets were practically falling out. The guy who did it thought it made sense to refinish the neck at the same time.”

  “Big mistake! Collectors want everything original. Anything new or altered from the original lowers the value.”

  “Fine. Send it back to me.”

  Instead, he sent me a check for $900.

  I called him back.

  “I don’t want your $900. Send me back my guitar.”

  “It’s too late. It’s already in Japan.”

  Sold, no doubt, to a collector.

  God knows what Howard got for it, but three guitars like the one that cost me $300 currently are advertised online. The least expensive asking price is $40,000. The most expensive, for one in mint condition, is $250,000. 

  Such stories abound – the rare stamp used to mail a letter, the classic car unwittingly sold as a junker, the priceless antique sold for a few bucks at a yard sale.

  That does absolutely nothing, however, to ease the pain of selling a guitar worth five figures for $900.

  Or to change my feelings about Howard.

  He’ll probably never read this, and for all I know he may not even be alive now. But if he is alive and he sees this, I hope he feels at least a twinge of remorse.

  And if not, may he ship an expensive instrument on trust someday to someone just like himself.

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

We all have things we put off doing. We put them off for a few hours, a few days, a few  weeks …

  My wife and I put off cleaning our attic for 35 years.

  There were good reasons for this. Its contents were conveniently out of the way, happily out of mind. The attic is frostbite cold in the winter, hotter than the hubs of hell in the summer.

  It’s also hard to get to. A new attic ladder, installed to make it easier, actually made it harder. The new ladder is narrow, poorly designed, precarious. There was no way we could climb it without risking a fall.

  Still, it was time. It had been so long since we put most of the things in the attic after building the house that we’d forgotten most of what was up there. We could have left the job for the kids to do after we’re gone, but we’d rather have them remember us without grimacing. The stuff had to be taken down and dealt with before any more years passed.

  Even If I could climb the ladder without coming to a hard landing on the concrete floor and potentially a trip to the E.R, I’m getting too old to be tottering around in the dark on the tops of ceiling joists. Someone young and strong would be needed to bring the stuff down. We were only too happy to hire a friend’s grandsons. It took them half a day to finish.

    We had no idea what treasures were lurking in those dimly lit recesses, entombed in decades of dust. 

  Some of what the boys brought down was junk. Some was destined for the Good Will. And some were reminders of times long ago, experiences all but forgotten.

  One of the oldest was a flier for a St. Patrick’s Day dance with “Live Music by the Playboys.” The Playboys were my first band. Its leader was Ron Shannon, son of the late Velma Morrison. I’d have been about 15 then. The dance was in the Cascade High School gym. I have absolutely no memory of it.

  Another relic from the hoary past was a Civil Defense Preparedness card. Its instructions included, among other things, warnings to equip your family shelter with a two-week supply of “food, water, first aid kit and battery radio.” 

  This was what we lived with in those days. Paranoia about the Russians bombing us was rampant. People dug shelters in their back yards. A community shelter in the Highlands exists to this day. Happily, it was often used as a dance hall, never as a refuge from a nuclear attack.

  Four Bogus Basin ski lift tickets recalled teenage winters when skiing was an obsession. I skied every weekend, every day of the Christmas break. 

  Multiple receipts from the Orange Grove Drum and Guitar Shop were early evidence of a lifelong obsession. Two, both from 1969 and both for $150, were for guitars – a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. Either, in pristine condition, would be worth four to five figures now. 

 Four Boise Aviation, Inc., receipts were for flying lessons. I was 20 years old and besotted with the idea of becoming a dashing airline pilot. Jet jockeys returning from Vietnam dashed that hope by getting virtually all the jobs. All I got was a private pilot’s license.

  Some documents change our lives.  Documents like the torn and faded one ordering me to report to the U.S. Naval Training Center in San Diego and from there to the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston, S.C. for further assignment to the Naval Communications Training Center in Pensacola, Fla.

  The orders on that tattered piece of paper would take me from my lifelong Idaho home to a new life as a low-level spy in faraway  places. The last would be Germany, to intercept radio transmissions of the Polish, East German and Russian navies.

  The attic’s keepsakes were many and varied. There were pictures of old friends, old girlfriends, a newspaper clipping with a photo of a friend who made a cello in his high school woodworking class. He went on to play bass with Paul Revere and the Raiders.

  The oddest item? The Official 1984 Price Guide to Beer Cans.

  No, as a matter of fact, I have no idea why it was up there.  

  Most of these things were in lacquered wooden boxes. The smaller of the two had “Jazzmaster $” carved on the lid and had once contained savings for my first good guitar. My parents made up the difference between the savings and the price of the guitar and surprised me with it on Christmas morning. It’s still one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received.

  The larger box had strips of paper with names of minerals in a youthful scrawl taped to the bottom – gold, iron ore, turquoise, crystal … My father and I collected them from abandoned mines in the town of his birth, Cripple Creek, Colo. I’d have been seven or eight at the time.

  A banker’s box contained scores of my old columns; another box was filled with letters. Letters from my parents when I was in the Navy. Letters from my wife when we were newlyweds and she was spending a semester student teaching in Washington state.

  The oddments from the attic spoke of many chapters – a young boy exploring with his father, a teenager in a rock group, a student pilot, a sailor, a journalist … 

  Sometimes, in down moments, we feel as if we haven’t done much with the time we’re given. It can take a revelatory experience, perhaps something as mundane as cleaning out an attic, to make us realize how full our lives have been.

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.