Boise’s First High School Museum to Open Saturday

    At one time or another, a little-used room at Boise High School has served as a textbook room, a storage room, a temporary gym and a shooting range – with the bullet holes to prove it.

   This week it will open with a new role – as a museum.

   The Boise High School History Museum, according to Sandie Waters, will be the city’s first. A Boise High alumnus, Waters began working on the project in 2020. Fellow alums Molly Ackley Brown and Doug Lee joined her a couple of years later. Together, they’ve logged 1,700 volunteer hours, turning the dusty old room into a museum that would be the envy of any high school.

  Full disclosure:  I’m a Boise High School graduate. But I’d be writing this, and in exactly the same way, if I’d graduated from Borah, Capital, BK or any other high school. The opening of the state’s first high school museum is news.

  The museum is in part a response to the name of the school’s mascot being changed from the Braves to the Brave. Braves was thought by some to derogatory to Native Americans (though not all of Idaho’s high schools with Native American-themed names changed theirs).

  “It’s a bridge from the past to the present, to preserve the history after the mascot change,” Ackley Brown said. “That way all the Braves memorabilia wasn’t just put aside.”

  And what a stash of memorabilia it is! One of the state’s oldest schools, Boise High was established more than a century ago. With so many years to accumulate, the volume of odds and ends the volunteers had to sort was overwhelming. Nothing had been filed or organized. Things were dumped hither and thither with little or no thought to anything but getting them out of the way.

  “It took a year just to sort the archives,” Ackley Brown said. “There were hundreds of trophies, and the file cabinets full of photos and memorabilia weren’t organized. Everything ended up being sorted by decade since there were so many items.”

  Waters, Ackley Brown and Lee weren’t working alone. Other volunteers included Kathleen Reading Haws, Roma Hawes, Vicki Hawkins Kuebler, Tamie Shaffer O’Hara, Jeannie Rice Peterson, Larry Thomason And Dean Worbois.

  Two grants from the Idaho Education Association, one for $1,000 and another for $10,000, helped fund the work. The $1,000 grant was used to transform a section of the school’s old gym floor into a Braves conference table. The other was spent on carpentry work, framing, cabinets, materials … 

  The museum’s collection includes a complete set of yearbooks, from 1901 to the present. Never having seen a high school picture of my mother, I looked for her and found a mystery instead. There wasn’t a single photo of her, either as a senior in the year she’d have graduated or as an underclassman the previous two years.

  Did she even attend Boise High? The only other possibility would have been St. Teresa’s Academy, the predecessor to Bishop Kelly High School, but the odds of finding a St. Teresa’s yearbook for her graduation year are all but non-existent. Not even the state archives had one. 

  The odds of finding arcane Boise High memorabilia at its new museum, though, are excellent.

  An auditorium chair with a hat rack, for example. It dates to the 1890s, when the school was a red brick building that preceded the current one. (And presumably when students and visitors wore hats other than beanies to the school.)

  One of the displays features famous alumni – World War II flying ace Duane Beeson (for whom the terminal building at Boise’s airport is named), U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the late U.S. Sen. Frank Church among others. A photo shows an impossibly young Church with a fake mustache and a swastika on his sleeve, being hanged in effigy as Adolph Hitler.

  The collection includes photos, awards, books, articles, uniforms, and other oddments too numerous to mention. If you attended Boise High, it’s well worth a visit for a trip down memory lane. The museum will have its official opening Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free; donations are accepted.

  When she first started working on the project, Waters “didn’t think we’d have enough things to fill the space.” 

  Now it’s not only filled, but as attractively arranged and displayed as if it had been done by professionals. 

  Maybe one day other high schools in the area will catch up with museums of their own.

  That could take a while. Boise’s second high School, Borah High, didn’t open until 1958. Boise High, founded in 1881, had a heck of a head start. 

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.