Dear Subscribers,

This is the day I normally would be posting my blog, but there isn’t one to post. My editor has told me that The Statesman’s executive editor is reducing the frequency of my columns from every other Sunday to once a month because of cutbacks in the paper’s freelance budget. I’ve also been told that the one I submitted last week for yesterday’s newspaper, a followup to my November cancer diagnosis column and my October column on the dangerous railroad trestle bridge over Capitol Boulevard, either is being held or will not be published. I’m sorry not to be posting a column for you today, and sorry that this has happened.

Tim Woodward

 

Call me sentimental, but I like the old library.
A recent Statesman story about plans for a new, state-of-the-art library quoted a newcomer to Boise as saying that her first visit to the Downtown library “was so depressing I almost turned around and left.”
A reference to what was described as cramped, outdated quarters. The new library the city is planning will be larger, more attractive and have more to offer. It’s overdue, and if it’s even half as good as described it will be a great addition to Downtown.
But as we look forward to a glittering new library, it seems fitting to reflect on what the old one has done for us and meant to us.
The newcomer is entitled to her opinion, and it’s probably justified. The old library on Capitol Boulevard is just that – old. It may well be that in the greater library world, it’s a dinosaur.
But depressing? Compared with the library that preceded it, it’s positively exhilarating. The Carnegie Library, at Eighth and Washington streets, was Boise’s library from 1905 until 1973. It was small, dimly lit, and, well, depressing. It’s since been renovated as offices, but at the end of its run as a library it was dated and then some.
Late Statesman columnist Bob Lorimer described a last visit there as being “sorta’ like moving out of the old family home. … Maybelle Wallan and Marilyn McConaughey turned the lights on for Tim Woodward and me so we could get a final peek before the final rites were intoned.”
An event erased entirely from my memory banks.
The news that it would be replaced with what we now know as the Downtown or main library met with almost universal approval. The city bought what was then the Salt Lake City Hardware Building on Capitol Boulevard and converted it to a library at a fraction of what it would have cost to build a new library. It was one of the best bargains the city ever got.
Its opening was big news. Compared with the Carnegie Library, it was cheerful, spacious, inviting. It seemed positively huge. The Statesman called it “a showcase,” offering “more space and services, comfortable seating, listening spaces and meeting rooms”.
Lorimer described it as “pretty fancy,” but confessed to having a soft spot in his heart for the old one.
As I do for the Downtown library, now destined to become a memory.
One of its attributes was that as demands on it increased, it could be expanded at relatively little expense. Initially only the first floor was used. As Boise’s population grew, the second and third floors were converted from warehouse space to library space.
The main library has enriched its patrons’ lives with, obviously, books, movies, music, magazines, reference resources, computers, Internet access and meeting rooms. It has a recording studio and a children’s section that once boasted a story well with a secret door. The fourth floor houses Learning Lab offices. Activities its has hosted have covered the spectrum from classes and public hearings to book signings and model railroad shows.
On a recent visit, it struck me how much of my own experience is tied up in the library. The Marge Ewing Idaho Room, previously the Northwest Room, is where I spent countless hours doing research for a biography of an Idaho author, which sold dozens of copies. It and other of my books are on the library’s shelves.
Ewing is a longtime library supporter and was a member of the city council when I was The Statesman’s local government reporter. She was a straight shooter who didn’t play politics and was always willing to give a rookie reporter a break. I remember her fondly.
Hanging on a wall nearby is a painting of Boise’s old city hall, done by late Boise artist John Collias. John was one of my oldest and dearest friends. I can’t walk by that painting without thinking of him, and missing him.
I can’t begin to estimate the number of books from the main library that have provided me with inestimable pleasure – novels from Abbey to Zola, biographies, mysteries, books by regional writers, obscure writers, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners.
I’m drinking coffee from a library cup while writing this. It was a gift for giving a talk there. The cup is decorated with the now famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view), “Library!” logo. I think the logo is pure genius. With a single punctuation mark, it conveys enthusiasm for books, reading, knowledge.
None of this is to say that I’m opposed to replacing the library. Downtown needs a new library, and the plans for it are enough to make any library patron’s heart beat quicker. It would be in the same, Capitol Boulevard location, which is perfect for a library, and would include more space, a coffee shop, a rooftop garden, a small theater, more parking and a view of the Boise River, something conspicuously lacking in the current library.
The sooner they build it, the better. I’ll even donate a few bucks to the cause. But as we look forward to what will be the valley’s newest and largest public library, we should be mindful of all the old one has done for us. We’re lucky to have had it.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got an idea for a column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

Watching President Trump honor Pearl Harbor veterans in the White House this holiday season, it was easy to forget for a few moments the divisions that separate us as Americans.
There was dignity and levity. An aging veteran in a Hawaiian shirt spontaneously broke into song, singing a chorus of “Remember Pearl Harbor” without missing a beat or a lyric. The president and vice president were respectful. It was, for a fleeting moment, more like the way our country used to be, before we became so divided that bridging the divide seems almost impossible.
The veterans reminded me of World War II veterans it has been my privilege to know. To a person, they set an example by the way they lived. They were honest, decent people. They lived by and exemplified the principles on which our country was founded. They suffered greatly and thousands of them died during their war, but despite what they had to endure there is at least one way in which I’ve always envied their generation.
And never more than now.
The WWII generation was the last to experience what it was like for the entire country to pull together for an extended time. Everyone from soldiers on the battlefield to families growing victory gardens was on the same page. Never in our history has our name, the United States of America, been more apt.
The leader of our troops and later of our country was a five-star general whose honesty and integrity were unquestioned. The term “sexual harassment” was yet to be invented. Incidents of it undoubtedly happened, but compared with today, society in general was almost puritanical. The actors on a popular television program weren’t allowed to use the word “pregnant,” even though the star of the show was. Network executives deemed it too vulgar for public consumption.
Fast forward to the present. This fall I checked out a show that reviewers have called one of the best of the season and was stunned to see what once would have been considered hard core pornography.
If it’s on TV in prime time, on programs judged to be among the best, it must be acceptable, right? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that sexual harassment is making headlines.
Two of our last four presidents have lied in public and been accused of sexual improprieties. In Congress, sexual harassment scandals are more common than legislative achievements. And doing the right thing now appears to be secondary to doing whatever helps the political party.
Dishonesty is something we’ve come to expect from our leaders. Members of Congress have lied repeatedly in covering up improper behavior and used our tax money to pay for the coverups. The president, according to the Washington Post, was responsible for more than 1,300 misleading statements or verifiable lies by early October.
Some would dismiss this as “fake news,” an alternative reality in which legitimate news is rejected. Most Americans would agree, however, that the media – led by the Post – did a pretty good job of serving the public interest during Watergate. And if not the media, who else will fill the watchdog role that has served our country so well since its inception? The founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they made freedom of the press the first amendment. To attack it is to threaten our democracy.
In the year that is about to end, members of Congress and the Supreme Court, former presidents, entertainers, even private citizens have publicly been insulted as hacks, losers, fools, dummies, dopes, fat pigs … Since when is this considered acceptable public behavior from our leaders?
The crowds at last year’s campaign rallies were marked by insults, fistfights, vulgar placards and T-shirts and attacks on journalists covering the campaign. At least one network considered it alarming enough that it hired body guards to protect one of its reporters.
If our leaders are a reflection of our society, maybe we deserve the kind of leadership we have. And maybe, just maybe, society is beginning a new phase.
It shouldn’t take a tragedy for it to happen, but the outpouring of compassion and support for victims of terrorism, fires, floods and other tragedies shows that we’re still capable of pulling together, that unity is still possible in our divided nation.
The special election in Alabama was another encouraging sign. It wasn’t just a political victory for one party. It was a sign that regardless of party affiliations, voters have had enough disgraceful behavior from their leaders and won’t take it any more because we’re better than that.
And, as the special election in Alabama has shown, there still are plenty of Americans who value integrity and honorable conduct. Society will never return to what it was during WWII, and in some ways that’s a good thing, but maybe we can return to having more respect for doing the right thing and voting for leaders who feel the same way.
My Christmas wish for the coming year is that we’ll begin to bridge the divide that separates us, and that civility again will have a place in our affairs of state. Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, we’re all still Americans.
Peace on Earth and good will toward men may be too much to hope for in today’s world. But we can hope, and pray, that the new year will bring a renewed commitment to common decency, and the enduring values that unite us as Americans.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Have an idea for a column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

All my life I’ve been dodging bullets.
The mental illnesses that have affected three generations of my family bypassed me.
When I was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, it turned out to be something harmless instead.
When it was sending virtually everyone to Vietnam during the war there, the Navy sent me to fight the Cold War in Germany.
So it was a shock when I was diagnosed with cancer.
It should have been a routine procedure. I was having some minor problems following surgery and asked my doctor whether they’d be worth checking. My hope was that a procedure called a cystoscopy would reveal some small problem that could easily be corrected. The possibility of a serious problem never entered my mind.
There are things you don’t want to hear a doctor say during a medical procedure. One is “hmmm, this is interesting.” What’s interesting to a doctor often means a problem for the patient.
Another thing you don’t want to hear is what my doctor said:
“Hmm … this is annoying.”
Annoying?
“See this thing that looks like a sea anemone?” she said, pointing to a circular blob on the computer screen. “I don’t want you to worry too much, but that has to be biopsied.”
My doctor has a sense of humor. She knows I’m a worrier so she gave me a “prescription” not to worry:
“Take once a day, twice if needed.”
It worked. I didn’t worry.
The “sea anemone” was a tumor. It was removed at the hospital rather than the clinic because it required anesthesia, but I got to go home the same day. The appointment to discuss the results was the following week. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that this would be another bullet dodged.
It wasn’t.
The diagnosis: a form of bladder cancer. The good news, my doctor said, was that it couldn’t have been caught any earlier and wasn’t invasive.
The bad news, she added, is that those kinds of tumors like to come back.
So I have to be checked regularly – a cystoscopy every three months for two years, every six months for three more years and once a year after that for the rest of my life.
That’s if the cancer doesn’t return. If it does, it will have to be removed and the clock resets.
On one hand, it didn’t seem fair. That type of cancer usually happens to people who smoke or have been exposed to certain types of chemicals. I tried to start smoking half a dozen times as a teenager, got sick every time and finally gave up, not realizing at the time how lucky that was. And to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been exposed to hazardous chemicals.
So why me? Probably everyone who has been diagnosed with cancer asks that. The answer is that there isn’t an answer so there’s no point in dwelling on it. And relatively speaking, I’m lucky. I have an excellent doctor and live in a time when medical science makes this sort of thing manageable. Compared with people who had the same diagnosis a generation or two ago, I’m getting off easy.
Still, there’s something about being told you have cancer that rattles you deep down. We spend most of our lives living as if we’ll live forever. We know we’re mortal, obviously, and that the end could come at any time. But it seems far away, almost theoretical.
Until you’re told that you have the disease everyone dreads.
Even when it’s manageable, it makes you realize that you’re not invincible. You won’t live forever, and you might not have as much time as you thought you did.
Medical bullets not dodged are wake-up calls, reminders to make the most of whatever time we do have. They tend to rearrange our priorities. Getting the big raise or the new car become less important than making amends to those we’ve wronged or helping those less fortunate than we are.
I’ve been fortunate to have had a pretty good life. I’ve enjoyed good health, been married to a good woman for 46 years and have great kids and grandkids.
I was lucky enough to have been born in the United States, where we enjoy freedom and, compared with much of the world, prosperity. I grew up in Boise when it was an idyllic place to grow up and spent most of my working years at a job that was almost never boring and gave me a front-row seat to things most people only read about or see on television. I’ve been to more than 30 countries and all but three of the 50 states. Throw in Boise State winning three Fiesta Bowls and the Cubs winning the World Series and it adds up to a pretty good deal.
If a higher power had offered me a deal like that when I was 21, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat.
The first of the procedures required every three months found nothing worrisome.
One down and an uncertain number of procedures to go.
Bullets to be dodged, for an amount of time yet to be determined.
Here’s hoping it’s a long time. And if not, no complaints.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who would make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.
 

 

 

This is a Veterans Day story for young readers.
Young readers who haven’t had to serve in the military or go to war.
Teenagers and twenty-somethings who may never have known a combat veteran.
Previous generations grew up with them. Combat veterans seemed to be everywhere. My father served in the Marine Corps during World War II. Most of the dads in our neighborhood fought in that war. Some of my friends fought in Vietnam. I’d have been a Vietnam veteran if the Navy hadn’t sent me to fight the Cold War in Europe instead.
The point is that until recent times young people had more opportunities to spend time with combat veterans. They grew up with them, knew them personally, knew what they did for our country. That changed to a significant degree with the advent of the volunteer military. It’s not as common for young people today to know veterans or to understand and appreciate what they went through to give us the country we have today.
So, all you young folks who don’t know a combat veteran … meet Charles “Chick” Blakley.
Blakley wasn’t a general or an admiral. He isn’t a Medal of Honor recipient; he wasn’t famous for what he did in World War II. He was just an ordinary soldier who grew up on a farm near Parma. One of millions of ordinary soldiers who won an extraordinary victory that saved the world from a terrible fate. If you don’t appreciate what they went though or know how much we owe them, maybe his story will help you understand.
Blakley joined the army in August, 1942. For those of you who are sketchy about the history of that era, this was eight months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, an American Naval base in Hawaii, in a sneak attack that killed thousands of our sailors. It was what brought the U.S. into WWII. Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany, meanwhile, had defeated and occupied much of Europe and was murdering thousands of Jewish civilians in concentration camps. It was one of history’s darkest periods.
Blakley was one of 16 million Americans who went to war to stop Germany, Japan and their allies from ruling the world. He was 20 years old. He’d taken flying lessons and gotten a private pilot’s license as a student at the College of Idaho in Caldwell so he was assigned to the Army Air Corps. The army taught him how to work on B-24 Liberator bombers.
“I thought I was going to be a B-24 mechanic,” he said, “but then they sent me to a gunnery school in Texas.”
Instead of working on bombers, he became an aerial gunner – one of the scariest jobs imaginable. You stand behind a window with enemy fighter planes shooting at you. You shoot back, but the odds favor the guys in the fast, maneuverable fighter planes over the sitting ducks in the bomber windows. Blakley’s post as a waist gunner was the most vulnerable position on a B-24.
He went on eight missions, bombing a German-controlled heavy water (nuclear) plant in Norway, V-1 rocket plants in Nazi-occupied France and other targets.
“Actually, I went on seven and a half missions,” he said with a wry smile.
On Jan 21, 1944, his plane was shot down over France. The crew members attempted to parachute to safety, but not all of them made it. All four of the officers were killed – including the pilot, whose parachute either didn’t open or caught fire. Blakley landed safely in some trees, but was far from being out of the woods. German soldiers invariably searched for crash survivors. Two members of his crew were caught and became prisoners of war.
“I saw a trail through the trees and started running,” he said. “After a while I saw some people coming the other way so I hid behind a bush. I could see them as they went by. There was a woman and one of the guys from our crew with them so I jumped out and joined them.”
The people were members of the Resistance, French civilians who, among other things, helped soldiers trapped in Nazi-occupied territory. They hid Blakley and three other members of his crew while arrangements were made for them to catch a train to Paris. From there they would head south toward Spain and freedom. The Resistance supplied them with civilian clothes (his flight boots were replaced with patent leather dress shoes) and forged French ID papers.
The men stayed in Resistance safe houses in Paris before boarding trains heading south. At one of the stops, they jumped off of the train when it slowed down, hid until the train station’s lights went out and walked all night to a farm, where they slept in a barn.
“To stay warm, we’d take our shoes off, lie down with our feet in the armpits of the guy across from us and cover ourselves up with hay. We hadn’t had anything to eat since we left Paris. Our first meal in five days was the boiled insides of a sheep.”
They stayed there for a week, then started walking toward Spain.
“We spent 13 nights walking across the Pyrenees mountains in waist-deep snow. The last couple of hundred feet was a glacier. It took about two hours to climb it.”
In patent leather dress shoes.
To keep his legs from freezing, he used a trick he’d learned growing up on the farm outside of Parma. There, he’d made leggings out of gunny sacks to keep his legs warm in the winter. In the Pyrenees, he used pieces of an overcoat to make leggings that kept his legs from freezing in the snow.
In January of 1944, the men reached a small town near the Spanish border. From there, two members of the Resistance drove them to Barcelona, Spain and the British consulate there. Blakley was sent from there to London and then back to the U.S.
He spent six months in an army hospital in Spokane for, as he put it, “nerves.” Today we call it post traumatic stress syndrome. He served out the duration of the war as a training instructor, returned to Idaho and a career with Idaho Power, raised a family.
I asked him how he thought the world would be different if we’d lost WWII.
“It wouldn’t be the way it is; that’s for sure. I don’t know if it would be as bad as N. Korea is today, but it definitely wouldn’t be the world we know.”
No, it wouldn’t. If not for 16 million Charles Blakleys, we might be living under a dictatorship with few if any of the freedoms or luxuries we take for granted. Like people in N. Korea, we could be living with torture and starvation.
Blakley will be 96 years old this month, on the day after Thanksgiving. When you think about the things you’re grateful for that day, you might want to include the veterans who helped make them possible.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who’d make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

It was a beautiful afternoon for exploring the grounds of Boise’s depot. People were strolling through Platt Gardens, chatting on the hillside next to the railroad tracks.
A young mother, seeing that her son was getting bored, decided to take him for a walk. She’d stopped to talk to some people when the boy pulled away and ran to the railroad trestle bridge over Capitol Boulevard..
“Oh, my God!” she said, running after him as he climbed the stairs to one of its narrow walkways.
The boy was fast, but the mother was faster. She caught him and scooped him up just as he was venturing out onto the walkway.
“You can’t go out there!” she said, close to panic. “You could fall onto those cars down there!”
She was right. He could have fallen very easily.
This is the trestle bridge we’ve all driven under hundred of times, the one at the top of the hill by the depot, where Capitol Boulevard meets Vista Avenue. You drive under it in a blink, not giving a moment’s thought to the possibility that it could be dangerous. It’s roughly 20 to 30 feet above multiple lanes of traffic. A fall from it would kill or seriously injure you, even if you were lucky enough not to get hit by a car.
The bridge has walkways on either side of its railroad track, elevated several feet above the level of the track. Railings line the walkways, but their vertical bars are at least four feet apart, with horizontal bars some two feet above the walking surface. While this may be adequate protection for grownups, how many little kids do you know who can’t get through a two- by four-foot space? There were no gates blocking access to the stairs or the walkways. No warning signs or no-trespassing signs.
That was last spring. As a concerned citizen, I sent an email to Boise Mayor Dave Bieter’s office asking whether someone from the city or the railroad could do something to make the walkways safer. My email was forwarded to Boise Valley Railroad, which operates that stretch of tracks. (In its defense, the trestle pre-dated BVRR’s existence by many years.) Its response was that no-trespassing signs should have been posted there and that the railroad would look into the adequacy of the railings.
Fast forward six months. I hadn’t noticed any changes while driving by, so last week I stopped to have a look.
To its credit, the railroad had prominently posted signs by the steps:
“Keep off of Bridge. No Trespassing. No recreational vehicles. All trespassers will be prosecuted.”
A good start. But with due respect, it seems as if the signs are as much about protecting the railroad’s interests as they are about protecting the public. Small children – those who most easily could fall from the walkways – can’t read the signs. There are no “danger” signs, no gates to prevent access.
Am I overreacting to think this is an accident waiting to happen?
Not necessarily. While I was checking out the signs, a man rode over the bridge on a bicycle. He smiled and said hello as he passed, continued for a short distance, then turned around and came back.
“Are you Tim Woodward?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
His name was Randy Strong, and he wanted to talk to me about part of an old sign he’d found, with a faded hamburger and the words “red devil” printed on it. Because I grew up in Boise, he thought I might know the name of the restaurant it identified. (I don’t, but if you do please email me at the address below so I can put his mind at ease.) Then the conversation turned to the walkways.
“It’s good that they put those signs up,” he said. “But it would still be easy for someone to walk out there. It’s a really dangerous situation.”
So I’m not the only one.
Readers may be wondering why I became so interested in this. A fair question.
The little boy on the trestle? He’s my three-year-old great grandson. We were there to see Union Pacific’s steam locomotive 844, “the Living Legend.” There was a big crowd at the depot that day. Lots of people, lots of kids.
Six months later, there still are no physical barriers to keep a child from running onto one of the walkways.
So I called BVRR’s Nampa office to ask what, if anything, was being done about that. My call was referred to Tracie Van Becelaere, communications director for Kansas-based Watco Transportation Services, which owns the railroad.
“It’s a very odd setup there,” she said, referring to the trestle’s being over Capitol Boulevard. “It’s right over a highway.”
Technically, it isn’t. But it might as well be.
I asked her whether BVRR was, as promised, looking into railing adequacy.
“They’re doing that right now,” she said. “They’re going to put up gates to keep people off of the walkways.”
Will that take another six months?
“I’m not sure how long it will take. But it’s a very high priority for them.”
As it should be. Nobody wants to see a kid on one of those walkways.
Or, worse, lying in the middle of the street below it.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who’d make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

(Note to readers:  In the rapidly changing newspaper business, online page views are critical. They can mean the difference between stories and columns being published or discontinued. In hopes of avoiding the latter, I’m asking those of you who are tech savvy to go to idahostatesman.com every other Sunday, click on my columns and share the links to them on your Facebook pages. It might help me avoid going the way of the dinosaurs. Thanks. — Tim)

 

Sixteen years ago, someone left a baton on the floor of a multi-purpose room at an elementary school in Anaheim, Calif. A little girl saw it, picked it up and asked her mother if she could play with it.
Her life was never the same again.
The little girl had watched older girls twirl batons at her school that day and been awed by them. The baton one of them left behind was to her what ballet shoes are to a girl born to dance or a fielder’s glove is to a boy bewitched by baseball. She took it home, started practicing and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward 16 years. That “little girl” is 21 now and something of a Boise icon. You may not know her name, but if you attend Boise State University football games, you’ve watched her perform and felt something of the awe she did as a kid watching baton twirlers at her school all those years ago. At BSU’s halftime shows, Marlo Birkmann and the BSU Marching Band light up the field.
Birkmann is the twirler who gets almost everyone’s attention. She throws batons high in the air and does spins and walkovers before catching them. She almost never misses. She’s a twirler, but she could easily be a juggler, keeping multiple batons aloft simultaneously. She spins batons with her neck and shoulders. The crowd watches every move, reacting with cheers, applause and, when she pulls off an especially stunning trick, a collective “wow!”
“She’s a twirler times four!” BSU fan Randy Baxter said from his seat on the 30-yard line at the BSU-Virginia game.
A reference to a routine in which Birkmann juggles four spinning batons in the air at once.
“She’s a fantastic twirler!” fan Lynn Jensen added. “She’s mesmerizing to watch. So fluid and graceful.”
What does it take to go from being a kid playing with a baton to mesmerizing people at a major college game?
“It became my life,” Birkmann said of her initial exposure to the baton. “Once I picked it up, I just dove into it. I never experienced soccer or softball or other sports kids do at that age. I just loved the baton so much.”
She started practicing with a team when she was five and, “by the time I was six or seven I was getting better and needed better teachers. Mom and I found a coach, and that coach pushed me hard to practice every day.”
That’s when it became obvious how much she loved the baton. She practiced two hours every weekday – eight hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays. NFL teams don’t practice that much.
Football players aren’t the only ones who get hurt on the field. A spinning baton may not be lethal, but it packs a punch if it hits you.
“If you want to get better, you have be more daring and take more risks,” Birkmann said. “I’ve sprained my thumb three times. I’ve been hit in face and head, broken almost all my toes, my pinkie, my nose …”
She’s attended hundreds of competitions, including the national championships at Notre Dame University 11 times. She won a national pageant competition when she was only nine.
“I went to competitions almost every weekend when I was growing up. In college, it’s more laid back. It’s easier to impress the fans than it is to impress judges at a competition. At competitions, it’s all about points.”
If you stop during your performance, you lose a point. If you don’t smile enough, have poor form, catch the baton with two hands or, God forbid, drop the baton, you lose points.
Birkmann has performed at as many as four consecutive BSU games without dropping a baton.
“When I do drop it, it’s usually when it’s cold. Your fingers get numb and you can’t catch it as well. … When I do drop it, I hear the crowd go ‘ahhhh.’ I can hear that. I hear the disappointment.”
Dropping a baton may be the worst thing than can go wrong, but it isn’t the only thing. Birkmann has multiple sets of dance shoes. At one game, she accidentally wore the wrong ones.
“I got two different sizes and was wearing one that was too small and one that was too big. One was cutting off my circulation; the other one I slipped out of. But you can’t let things like that stop you. You just have to keep smiling.”
Fans impressed by her performances would be surprised to learn that she doesn’t do her most difficult tricks on the field.
“I do some of my hard tricks, but not all of them. Twirling four at once; that’s a hard trick. I do one called an illusion, where my leg goes over my head; that’s a hard trick. But I don’t do the tricks that require me to practice every day of the week.”
Such as …
“At competitions, I throw the baton in the air and do seven spins before I catch it. On the field, I do three or four. I do tricks that are hard, but not hard enough that I’ll drop the baton. The main goal at the games is to please the crowd.”
The practice it would take to perform her most difficult tricks at games would take time away from studying. Birkmann is attending BSU on scholarships for baton twirling and academics. She has a 3.8 GPA in nursing school.
She came to BSU because, “I wanted to go somewhere where I could be alone on the field and not be part of a team. Baton twirling is very popular in the East and the South; almost every school there has a line of twirlers plus a feature twirler. Twirling isn’t as popular in the West. I wanted to be away from home, but not too far. The schools that offered what I wanted were Oregon State, Arizona State and BSU.”
She chose BSU over the other two “partly because of the blue field and because of better academics and the beauty of Idaho.”
She’s a senior this year, but isn’t quite finished with her studies. Next year she’ll be a “super senior.”
And back on the field again.
“After that I’m done with twirling,” she said. “I know my body can’t take any more. But the opportunity to twirl at a big university has been a huge honor for me because I’ve done this for so long and it’s been my life. Just the fact that I’m out there is so cool. I’m enjoying every moment.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Know someone who would make a good column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

The Statesman held my column that should have run yesterday because the subject has a strong visual component and we didn’t have video in time. It will be in the Statesman next Sunday and I’ll post it here the following day.

Hint:  This of you who attend home Boise State football games should love it.

— Tim

 

Could N. Korea’s dictator be the most deranged world leader since Adolph Hitler?
Not necessarily. Josef Stalin comes to mind. Idi Amin, Pol Pot …
But with his unstable personality and expanding nuclear capacity, Kim Jong Un has the potential to inflict more destruction than any of them. Outside of his hermit kingdom, the world is pretty much in agreement that this is a seriously crazy bad guy.
He reminds me of a kid playing with fireworks. While the rest of the world earnestly ponders terrorist attacks, climate change and other problems that threaten our stability and way of life, he’s jumping up and down saying, “Hey, look at me! I just shot off another one!”
And the rest of the world worries about what he might do next.
How did we get to this point?
A Boise man has a unique perspective on that.
Richard Hart, a retired Boise State University dean of education, is one of a few people still living who were at the peace talks that led to the Korean armistice agreement. The armistice ended hostilities in the Korean War. It didn’t officially end the war, however, leading to the most heavily militarized border in the world between the two Koreas and setting the stage for what’s happening in N. Korea now.
That was in 1953. Hart was a 23-year-old U.S. Army corporal.
How did a corporal with two stripes on his sleeve happen to be a witness to history at a table lined with generals and other senior officials?
It started with a high school class he took in his home town of Cozad, Neb.
“I was the only boy in the shorthand class,” he said. “Cozad was a small town, about 3,000 people. It still is. There weren’t a lot of electives. The principal convinced me that taking shorthand would be useful to take notes in college, and there wasn’t much else so I took shorthand.”
A decision that changed his life.
“When I was inducted into the army, they said that anyone who had taken shorthand should take a step forward. I’d been warned not to volunteer for anything, but I stepped forward anyway. They wrote down my name, told me I was a stenographer and I was off to steno school.”
A job description rarely heard in the digital age, stenographers were people who specialized in taking dictation by shorthand. Shorthand, for readers unfamiliar with it, was a way to write rapidly, using strokes, symbols or abbreviations for letters, words or phrases. After completing the army’s stenographer school, Hart was sent to Japan and then to Panmunjom, the N. Korean village where the peace talks were held.
“I was thunderstruck when they told me I’d be taking notes for the talks and that I’d be working with generals. I’d only seen a general from far away.”
Panmunjom, he said, was two crude buildings and a smattering of tents. From the beginning, it was clear that negotiations with the N. Koreans would be difficult, at times to the point of being comical. Then as now, they were determined to talk tough and look superior in the eyes of the rest of the world.
“They were intransigent and they haggled over everything,” Hart said “… When Admiral Turner Joy (the senior United Nations delegate to the negotiations) put a small U.N. flag on the table, the N. Koreans immediately adjourned. When they came back, they had a N. Korean flag that was slightly taller than the U.N. flag and they put that on the table.
“The next day, one of our guys took in a flag slightly taller than theirs. This went on till the flags were huge. Finally Adm. Turner Joy brought back the little U.N. flag. Then they brought their little flag back, but they made sure it was still taller than ours. It was all about saving face for them.”
N. Korea remained in character during the 1980s, when it waged a “flagpole war” with S. Korea. Its resulting 525-foot flagpole (flying a 595 pound flag) was then the tallest in the world.
One of the pictures Hart took during the peace talks was of a N. Korean man in a dark blue military uniform.
“This was a funny little guy,” he said. “When the N. Koreans realized that we had an admiral at the negotiations, they had to have one, too.”
N. Korea barely had a navy then. Whether the man in the “admiral’s” uniform was a real admiral or pretending to be one is, at this point, anyone’s guess.
“If he was an admiral, he didn’t have much to command,” Hart said, laughing.
The negotiations dragged on for years, with N. Korea not willing to budge on the repatriation of prisoners of war being held in S. Korea.
“It was finally agreed that if they didn’t want to go back to N. Korea as prisoners they wouldn’t have to,” he said. “The N. Koreans thought there would only be a handful who didn’t want to go back. There were over 100,000.”
Who could blame them? The difference between the two Koreas today couldn’t be more obvious.
“S. Korea is booming and successful, and N. Korea is still a Third World nation,” he said. “Its economy is all aimed at its military.”
The military – and nuclear threat – continue to grow while starving N. Koreans eat grass.
And their leader gets chubbier and, arguably, crazier.
“If we could only figure out a way to establish peace with it looking like he won in the eyes of the world, it would all be over. But he’s intransigent, just like his grandfather was at the talks I attended. He has to win in his own mind. I just hope and pray that somebody will come up with a solution that will satisfy his ego. Only then will we be able to relax.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got an idea for a column subject? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Idahoans owe a lot to the Little Free Libraries that have sprung up in neighborhoods throughout the state. The one in my neighborhood has introduced me to books I never would have discovered without it – and reunited me with a pivotal figure from my past.
The libraries hold roughly 30 books. You can go to public libraries with acres of books and come home empty-handed, but with just a few you’re less selective. You choose books you wouldn’t at a big library and more often than not are pleasantly surprised. Some of my favorite books of recent years have come from my neighborhood’s mini library.
A recent pick was “The Osage Rose,” by a University of Arizona professor named Tom Holm. The most surprising thing thing about it was the inscription:
“For Roy Schiele: Writing about this was pretty easy because it takes place where I grew up. Best wishes, Tom Holm, 2008.”
Roy Schiele? Not exactly a common name. Could it be the same one?
A Google search found a Roy Schiele with a nearby address. Not quite in the neighborhood, but not far away. If it was the same guy, he changed my life. That Roy Schiele played guitar in a band called the Squires. They played at my high school’s Welcome Freshmen Dance.
I went to the dance with a friend, Justin Bonner. We were 13. It was the first time either of us had seen a live band, and it’s an understatement to say that we were smitten.
Justin decided that night that he wanted to be a drummer. I spent most of the evening watching Schiele, the beginning of a lifelong love affair with electric guitars. We started taking lessons, started a group. A few years later, we were running our own ballroom. It was the most fun we’d ever had.
A lifetime later, I’m still playing guitar in an evolution of that group. And it all started with Schiele and the Squires.
Prepared to be disappointed, I called the number from the Google search.
No answer. I left a voicemail identifying myself and asking whether it was the number for the Roy Schiele who used to play in a band called the Squires. A few days later, he called back.
It was the same Roy Schiele.
“You’re kidding!” he said upon learning the impact he and his guitar had had on me. “That’s amazing.”
He said his wife bought the book that turned up in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library for him at a book fair in Arizona. Its author was there signing books so she asked him to inscribe it to her husband.
“We took some books to the Little Free Library in our neighborhood a couple of months ago,” he said. “Someone must have taken them from there to yours.”
We met for coffee, and he updated me on his life since high school. The Squires were fairly short-lived, he said, but two of the band’s members went on to play with an excellent group called Dick Cates and the Chessmen, still fondly remembered by a generation of southwest Idahoans. Schiele went on to Gonzaga University, became an electrical engineer and later started his own telecommunications consulting company.
He had quite a run, consulting for major corporations and living all over the world – Los Angeles, New York, the Mideast, London …
“I did a lot of work in Russia,” he said. “I’ve traveled to Russia something like 40 times.
“… But Boise has been my headquarters forever. We always maintained a home in Boise. When I retired, we moved back here.”
Why go to the trouble and expense of maintaining a home in Boise when you spend most of your career working and living in other parts of the world?
“Because I had such good memories of growing up here,” he replied. “Boise was maybe 40,000 people then. You could ride all over town on your bike. You could go swimming in the river. It was a great place to grow up. Boise’s changed a lot. It’s bigger and more vibrant now. But it’s still a good place to raise a family.
“I wanted my kids to experience that. All of them spent at least part of their growing-up years here.”
Retired for four years now, Schiele is giving back to the community that gave him his start. He volunteers for the Anne Frank Memorial and serves on the board of Idaho Public Television.
He still plays the guitar for his own enjoyment, still has the guitar he was playing the night he made such an impact on a high school freshman – without ever knowing it. He was gracious enough to bring it to the coffee shop, where I got to play the guitar that changed my life.
All because of a Little Free Library.
For those unfamiliar with them, Little Free Libraries are the wooden boxes on posts that seem to have popped up everywhere. You take a book; you leave a book. The first Little Free Library went up in a Wisconsin neighborhood in 2009, and the idea caught fire. There are now more than 50,000 worldwide. Boise has about 50.
The one in my neighborhood is decorated with solar-powered Christmas lights that come on at dusk. A nice touch. A neighbor, Jill Jasper, put it up about three years ago.
Those little boxes of books have a way of connecting people. Jasper says she’s gotten acquainted with people she never would have met if they hadn’t stopped for books at the library beside her house. Strangers have become friends there, united by a mutual love of reading.
Stories like that abound on the Internet. A shooting victim in Ohio wanted to do something for the children in his neighborhood while he recuperated, so he built a Little Free Library that looks like a rocket ship. An elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease filled a wagon with books for the people in his neighborhood. A California man dedicated the one in his neighborhood to his grandmother and hid a memorial to her behind the books.
Book lovers have come up with all sorts of unique twists on the libraries’ designs – bird houses, a telephone booth, a boat, a phone booth, a movie theater …The designs are creative, entertaining and give artists and craft workers opportunities to express themselves.
They’re secondary, however, to the libraries’ real purpose: to make books easily available, fostering a love of books and reading.
And you never know what characters from the past – fictional or otherwise – you might meet in the process.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got an idea for an interesting column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Summer, as always, has passed in a flash. We’re now at that time of year when family vacations have ended and frazzled parents are catching their breath.
I know just how they feel.
It had been a long time since my family had taken a vacation with a dog and a small child in the car. This summer rekindled memories of those days. Nothing like 600 miles with a toddler and a puppy in the back seat to bring back memories of relaxing, restorative family road trips.
The logistics of this year’s jaunt to the family cabin in Washington state were a bit out of the ordinary. One difference was that instead of making the drive with us as usual, my wife joined us a week later. The reason was a potentially fatal conflict between – this is not a misprint – a dog and a lizard.
My wife has a pet lizard named Max. Our older daughter has a puppy named Roux. (A Cajun name; she got it from a border-terrier rescue group in Louisiana.) Like all puppies, Roux likes to chew things. There was no way my wife was taking a chance on Roux using her beloved Max for a squeaky toy so she spent a week making incredibly complicated arrangements for his care, then flew over to join us.
This should have saved space in the car. My wife typically takes Max, Max’s oversized terrarium and heat lamps, coolers, boxes, bags and suitcases containing everything from puzzles to pie crusts. Her idea of packing light is leaving the lawn chairs at home.
“What’s this?” our daughter asked her as she handed her a package to put in the car as the rest of us were about to pull out of the driveway.
“A mop.”
“A mop? You want us to bring a mop?”
“It’s a micro fiber mop. I thought it would be nice to have one of those at the cabin.”
Moments later, she returned with a quilt-sized piece of folded plastic.
“Here, see if you can fit this in.”
“What is it?”
“A portable mattress. I thought it would be nice to have over there.”
“A mattress? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
She wasn’t.
My wife’s and Max’s usual places in the car was taken by our three-year-old great grandson, Grayson, and his mother. We hadn’t even left yet when the bickering started.
“Where’s Grayson’s video player?” my daughter asked.
“I forgot it,” Grayson’s mother replied.”I’ll have to go buy another one.”
“You forgot? That’s his entertainment for the next 11 hours!”
Unsaid was that it was also a factor in the grownups’ peace of mind for the next 11 hours. Grayson is a good kid, but like all three-year-olds he gets antsy when stuck in a car all day.
“ I can’t believe you forgot it!”
A spirited exchanged followed, the two of them standing in the driveway exchanging verbal haymakers while I waited in the car.
“This could be a long day,” I grumped to myself.
“Why?” came a small voice from the back seat.
It was Grayson, who I’d forgotten was ensconced in his kid seat behind me. Leave it to an innocent three-year-old to lighten a moment.
While his mother went to buy a video player, my daughter fumed about leaving later than planned. She gets it from me. I used to be fussy about leaving on time, too. Years of family vacations changed that. Now I’m happy if we leave at all.
We were still in the driveway when the first mishap occurred, accompanied by shrieking audible in the next county.
“What happened?”
“Grayson dropped his breakfast on the floor and Roux is eating it.”
By 9 a.m., a mere hour behind schedule, we were underway. At approximately Ontario, the youngest member of the expedition made the first of an uncertain but large number of identical vacation wishes:
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
This was a reference to a previous vacation, during which he had fed bread to animals at a game park. The animals poke their heads into your car windows to beg for food as you drive through. The prospect of bison slobbering on my grandson did not warm my heart.
Somewhere between LaGrande and Pendleton, Grayson spilled a just-opened bag of potato chips on his mother, the dog and most of the the car.
“Grayson, you need to be more careful!”
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
At The Dalles, we stopped for gas at a station that had a single, unisex restroom with a waiting line stretching roughly to Portland. It also had a grassy area with shrubs, where Grayson and I took Roux to do her thing. Almost instantly, a belligerent-looking employee emerged from a back door to stand guard, as if I’d planned to beat the line by doing a poo in the shrubs. She loomed over us, practically snarling, until Roux finished and we returned to the car. Only then did she go back inside, looking disappointed at missing a chance to bark orders. Or possibly tase us.
“That lady wasn’t very nice was she, Grayson?”
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
The last stop before reaching our destination was a supermarket.
“We have food at the cabin, so let’s make it quick,” I pleaded. “Just a few things to get us through the week.”
A few things turned out to be bread, milk, orange juice, lunch meat, butter, mayonnaise, bananas, frozen berries, fresh berries, lettuce, kale, carrots, celery, three kinds of cereal, four quarts of kefir, 36 cans of soda, cookies, NutriGrain bars, chicken, turkey burger, peppers, fajita seasoning, asparagus, yams, salsa, spaghetti sauce … $200 worth of “a few things.”
“What are these?” the checkout woman asked, eyeing the yams as if they might leap from the counter and attack her.
“Yams.”
“Hmmmm. Guess I’m the wrong person to check out vegetables. I only eat vegetables if they come out of a can.”
By the time we made it to the cabin, we were the ones who felt like we’d been in a can all day. Eleven hours on the road will do that to you. I ached in more places than I thought possible. Roux, Grayson and Grayson’s mother were doing a reasonably good imitation of coma victims.
We still love going to the cabin, though, and a good time was had by all once we settled in and our dispositions returned to normal. We’re already looking forward to going back again next summer.
The airfare will be well worth it.

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

One act of kindness.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Just ask the drive-through miracle woman.
That would be Valerie LaChapelle, a subject of this column in March.
LaChapelle works the morning shift at the McDonald’s drive-through window at 1185 S. Vista Avenue. Her “drive-through miracle,” as she calls it, was an anonymous donation from a customer to pay for dental work she needed. She estimates the cost at $10,000.
The March column The March column attracted a lot of attention and activity on social media. It wasn’t long before customers at the drive-thru began sharing their own miracle stories with her.
“One woman told me she had four kids and was walking everywhere she needed to go with the kids because she didn’t have a car. Somebody saw her walking with the kids every day and felt bad for her so they gave her a car.”
Another customer told her that “his son wanted to play T-ball but they couldn’t afford it. He was explaining to his son that they didn’t have the money, and somebody overheard and gave him the money so his little boy could play.”
At the drive-through, acts of kindness are happening regularly.
“I bought breakfast today for a guy who’d forgotten his wallet,” LaChapelle said. “The next time he came back, he brought me a card and gave me a $50 gift certificate. I don’t expect that. I don’t expect anyone to even pay me back. That’s not why I do it. When people do pay me back, and they usually do, I just save it for the next person who forgets their wallet.
“…Today I had eight cars in a row pay for each other’s meals. It starts with one person. I say that the person in front of you paid for your breakfast, and they say they’ll pay for the person’s behind them. People say they never would have expected that at McDonald’s, but it happens all the time here.”
People who read her story have offered her jobs, including at least one that pays more than she’s making now.
“I’ve been offered jobs at other restaurants and at a hotel for $11 or $12 an hour, but I don’t see any sense in changing. I love my job. I just think I belong at McDonald’s.”
Her friendly service has made her an institution at McDonald’s. She’s one of those people who almost never seems to be having a bad day, even if she is. Her welcoming smile and positive attitude are infectious.
It’s an understatement to say that she’s turned her life around. Addiction to meth amphetamines cost her five years in prison. After being released, she lived in a shelter and a halfway house and worked three jobs to pay her fines and restitution.
Meth did a number on her teeth – only eight were left. When she smiled, something she does a lot at the drive-through, she covered her mouth. That led to the anonymous customer paying for her dental work, which should be finished this fall. Until then, she has temporary dentures that have changed her life.
“I smile more now,” she said. “I’m more confident in myself and I feel like I don’t scare the little kids anymore. I think before they were kind of scared of my mouth. Now I don’t have to cover it up when I smile. I don’t have a problem smiling at anybody any more.”
Publicity made her something of an attraction:
“People came through just to see me. We couldn’t believe all the people. We had a customer all the way from Washington, D.C. who commented on my drive-through miracle.
“… A lot of people gave me kudos for changing my life around, for getting out of prison and working three jobs. (She worked at a pizza restaurant and cleaning her church in addition to her job at McDonald’s.) People complimented me for doing the right thing rather than trying to milk the system.”
Because she included her recovery from addiction in telling me her story in March, readers have approached her about their own addiction problems.
“I’ve gone to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with them. I’ve talked to parents who thought they’d done something wrong with their kids and and helped them realize it wasn’t their fault, that doing drugs or alcohol is a choice people make on their own. I took them to Al Anon meetings where they learned that it wasn’t their fault that their kids were addicted and learned to help the kids make better choices.”
I asked her if the generosity of the person who paid for her dental work and the attention resulting from it had changed her.
“I think it’s made me more generous toward people,” she said. “If somebody had handed me that much money, even if they’d said it was for my dental work, I’d have declined. But I think all this has made me realize that everybody has a story. If somebody comes through the drive-through looking down, I think that maybe their wife or husband is in the hospital or they’re going through something else that’s really hard for them. I think it’s made me nicer to people.”
She laughed.
“And I was nice to begin with.
“… My main focus now is just to be kind to people. You never know what one little thing can do.”

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

 

Art Jackson finally got the respect he deserved.
He had to die for it to happen.
A World War II Medal of Honor recipient, Jackson was honored with tributes at the White House and a ticker tape parade in New York City, but made a mistake that haunted him for the rest of his life. He was dismissed from the Marine Corps for it – by President John F. Kennedy – without a chance to tell his side of the story. He died last month at 92, seemingly forgotten by the country he served.
Until his memorial service.
Several hundred people, representing the military, veterans’ groups and police and fire departments among others, turned out to pay their respects at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery. The Marine Corps sent an honor guard and its band from Washington, D.C. When the band played the Marine Corps and Navy hymns, battle-hardened veterans brushed away tears. Marine Corps jets were dispatched from Yuma, Ariz., for a flyover. Marines in their distinctive dress uniforms seemed to be everywhere.
Perhaps it was the Marine Corps’ way of apologizing.
President Harry Truman pinned the Medal of Honor on Jackson’s uniform in 1945 for his role in a battle – known as “the bitterest battle of the war for the Marines” – on the Pacific Island of Peleliu. Then a 19-year-old private, Jackson singlehandedly took out a dozen Japanese machine-gun emplacements, repeatedly risking his own life and saving his platoon from almost certain destruction.
The fateful mistake happened 17 years later. By then a captain in the Marine Corps, Jackson was stationed at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was escorting a suspected Cuban spy off of the base when the man lunged at him and tried to take his weapon. Jackson shot him in self defense.
Self defense, terrible timing. It was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis; tensions between the U.S., Cuba and the Soviet Union couldn’t have been higher. The shooting of a Cuban national by a U.S. Marine would have become an international incident. Instead of reporting the shooting, Jackson decided to hide the body.
“People disappeared there all the time,” his wife said. (She asked that her name not be used because of privacy concerns.) “He buried the body and hoped the whole thing would just go away.”
It might have, but for a fellow Marine who helped bury the body and told the story over drinks at the officers’ club. Jackson was ordered to Washington D.C., where Kennedy told the Medal of Honor recipient he could no longer be in the Marine Corps.
He also was ordered never to talk about what happened at Guantanamo, and didn’t until he told me the story in 2013. He was in his late 80s by then, Kennedy and almost everyone else involved was long dead and he figured it was time. Even so, he had misgivings. That long-ago night at Guantanamo and what happened because of it still troubled him.
But the full extent of how much it bothered him didn’t become clear until after his death.
While she was going through the files in her late husband’s office, Jackson’s wife found letter after letter that he’d written in hopes of returning to the military. He wrote to military officers, congressmen, anyone he could think of in hopes of getting a chance to clear his name and return to the military life he loved.
“He never had a chance to tell his side of the story,” she said. “He never had a court martial or a hearing or anything. They just booted him out.”
His side of the story was that he had little choice but to try to hide the suspected spy’s body. He was convinced that if he’d reported the shooting, he would have been tried in a Cuban court and sent to a now abandoned Cuban prison, which a history website describes as “a den of horror.” He believed to his dying day that he’d have been tortured and died in that prison.
All of his attempts later in his life to clear his name and return to active duty were denied. The tersest rejection letter found in his office files was from Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary and later a U.S. senator. The most sympathetic responses were from California Rep. Charles Gubser (Jackson was living in California at the time) and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy H.C. “Barney” Barnum.
Gubser wrote that “quite frankly, they are afraid of the public relations which would result from the press stories (about Jackson returning to the military after the Guantanamo incident). I feel this is entirely wrong since you have been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and have not been court martialed. This is like convicting a man after he has been proven innocent.”
Barnum’s letter to Jackson was equally candid:
“I understand the pain in your heart, and if it’s any consolation I remember you for the great Marine you were and still are in your heart. Life’s a bitch sometimes – real justice sometimes doesn’t prevail.”
Barred from returning to the military, Jackson worked as a mail carrier, at a liquor store and for the Veterans Administration. He worked multiple jobs and slept on a floor for seven years to pay off an ex-wife’s debts.
He spent his later years living quietly, almost anonymously. The Marine who was nicknamed “Bull” because of his physical prowess and courage in battle had a soft side. When a baby bird fell from a tree at his family’s cabin, he cared for it until it could fly. When he whistled, the bird flew to him.
Every now and then, a local reminder came that he was an American hero. He was honored on the blue turf at Albertsons Stadium. Gov. Butch Otter proclaimed a statewide Arthur Jackson Day in 2016. The Boise Police Department named one of its K-9 dogs Jackson after him. The name was suggested by a local boy, now 14, who befriended him and intends to become a Marine because of him.
At Boise’s VA Medical Center, doctors and nurses returned after hours to hold a ceremony honoring him on the night he died, and immediately lowered the flags to half mast. They didn’t know, or care, about what happened at Guantanamo. They knew their patient, and to know Art Jackson was to admire him. I knew him because he was my neighbor. I’ve never know a finer person.
National recognition came belatedly, at the end.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, paid tribute to Jackson on the Senate floor, saying that although he was gone, his example “will inspire future generations of Americans for decades to come.” (There were no such tributes from Idaho’s senators.)
Four Star General Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote shortly before Jackson’s death to say he’d heard that he was facing some health issues and wanted him to know “that the Marines are standing with you during this difficult time. … You played a vital role in shaping the warrior ethos of our Corps.”
Neller made sure that the Marine Corps pulled out all the stops to honor in death the hero it was unwilling or unable to acknowledge in life. No one, his wife said, would have been more surprised by the memorial service than Jackson himself:
“He would have been absolutely delighted.”

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

 

One of the things I was known for writing about early in my time as a columnist was Maintenance Manor, a scene of ongoing misadventures in home improvement.
Maintenance Manor was a 90-year-old house that the Woodwards, displaying poor judgment of colossal proportions, purchased in hopes of turning into a North End dream home.
Nearly everything about the place was a nightmare. It had one bathroom, accessible only from the back porch. The front porch was sagging. The roof, the plumbing, the wiring, nearly everything needed to be replaced. It had an oil furnace dating to Herbert Hoover, zero insulation and zero charm.
In our defense, I can only say that we took the real estate agent’s “location, location, location” advice too seriously. The one good thing was the neighborhood, which was beautiful.
Except for our house. We spent 13 years fixing the place up. The more colorful misadventures ranged from falling off of the roof into a rose bush to an electrical shock that catapulted me from a ladder and knocked out the power to most of the neighborhood. Medical highlights included soot and fiberglass inhalation, a nail through my foot and hammered thumbs and fingers, accompanied by a lavish amount of spirited cursing.
One of the rules I’ve lived by since we sold Maintenance Manor and moved to the house we’re in now is to avoid do-it-yourself home improvement projects, in the way that most people avoid timeshare salesmen or rattlesnakes. This is not to say that I haven’t done a few things around the “new” house – built the deck, done some painting and woodworking projects, but nothing really daunting.
Until now.
With the furniture in storage while we sweated out the flood threat posed by this year’s record snowpack, the timing was perfect to install the wood floor we’d been wanting in the living room. The problem was that everyone else in the valley seemed to have the same idea. Floor installers were booked solid for weeks. If a help-wanted sign at one of its Boise stores was an indication, even Home Depot is having trouble finding enough floor installers.
So … I decided to do it myself.
How hard could it be?
The salesman who sold us the materials said that a fair number of his customers had installed their floors themselves. It could take a while to get the hang of it, he added, but after that it should be smooth sailing.
Online videos of composite wood floor installation seemed to confirm that. In fact, they made it look ridiculously easy. Simply prep the floor, put down the underlay, cut the pieces to fit and click them together. The installer in the video clicked the boards together with the ease of someone snapping a pop tab on a beer can. There was no reason the floor couldn’t be finished in a day, with time left over for a nap and a cocktail.
The first step, obviously, was to take out the carpet. It had to be pulled loose from the tack strips, rolled up and carried outside. It weighed approximately as much as a small elephant. An elephant probably would have been easier to maneuver around a corner and out the front door.
Then the tack strips and carpet pad had to be removed. We’ll skip over this part except to say that the pad was attached to the sub floor with enough staples to supply a home office for several lifetimes.
With the baseboards removed – more on them presently – the new floor was ready to be installed. This was when the difference between the videos and reality became painfully apparent. Nothing I did would get the pieces to click together. They either didn’t click at all, or, if they did, they pushed the row of pieces next to them out of alignment. It took a day of hot, hard labor to do a pathetically small part of the room, most of it embarrassingly out of whack .
Sensing the desperation in my voice over the phone, my son-in-law stopped by and suggested starting over in a way that should have eliminated the problem.
It didn’t.
The guy who had done such a nice job on on our kitchen floor several years earlier was in the middle of a job when I called, but graciously gave me a couple of tips. (He could probably tell that I was near tears.)
His tips made a lot of sense.
But they didn’t work. Absolutely nothing worked.
Two and a half days I spent sweating like a pig over that easy-to-install floor. Two and a half days – before admitting bitter, ignominious defeat.
The guys who sold the floor to me couldn’t have been nicer. They checked around and found an installer who was willing to work us into his schedule on the Fourth of July.
“A nice square room!” he said when he arrived. “This shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
It took him less time to install the entire floor – perfectly – than it took me to sand and repaint the baseboards on a 101-degree day, in a garage hotter than the hubs of hell.
The installer, Tim McHail of Payette River Flooring, made me feel a little better about my do-it-yourself debacle.
“You didn’t have the right tools,” he said. “You need wall anchors so you have something solid to push against. And a special pounding block to pound the ends together.”
So it was all my tools’ fault!
Right.
Even with the right tools, however, it would have taken me longer and wouldn’t have looked as good.
And who knows? If I’d bought a pounding block, I might have smashed a thumb or a finger.
Or both.
Some things are best left to a professional.

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

I’m writing this one day before increased flood insurance on my house became effective…
And one day after reports that the flood threat had all but passed.
The Woodward timing.
It turned out that we didn’t need the increased flood insurance – and didn’t need to do any of the other things we did to prepare for the flood. We could have left the coverage at its former level, or, for that matter, had no flood insurance at all. We could have left all the furniture where it was instead of moving it to a storage unit. We could have done absolutely nothing and been just fine.
That’s okay, though. The flood that didn’t happen wasn’t without an up side.
Flooding did happen in low-lying places along the Boise River in Eagle, of course, and in other parts of the state. For the folks whose homes were flooded, there wasn’t an up side. Those of us who live in the flood plain in homes that stayed dry should keep that in mind. But for good luck with the weather and the expertise of those who manage the river flows, we’d be in the same predicament as those who were less lucky.
The neighborhood where I live dodged the flood bullet by a scant few inches. There were places along the bike path on the southern border of the neighborhood where the river was all but lapping at the path’s edges. If it had risen those additional inches, it would have flowed over the path and into our homes.
If the water managers had had to raise the flows those critical inches, the city was prepared to build a wall of sandbags on the bike path. Rob Bousfield from the city’s public works department fielded calls and emails from worried neighbors and spoke at a neighborhood meeting on what the city would do to protect us. Department employees walked the bike path every day to monitor the water levels and keep neighbors up to date. An example of local government at its best.
The flood that came within inches of us helped neighbors get to know each other as never before. People who had never previously met stood in groups on the streets and sidewalks, discussing the likelihood of flooding and their preparations for it. Many of us met for the first time on a neighborhood website, exchanging flood-related information. Neighbors helped one another move belongings to storage units. I’m on a first-name basis now with neighbors I wouldn’t know if not for the flood we so narrowly escaped.
The Woodwards moved furniture and other belongings in mid-May to the the last available 10- by 20-foot unit at a storage facility safely located on high ground. An employee there told us they’d rented dozens of units to potential flood victims.
Not everything was moved – you have to keep a few things if you’re staying in the house until you absolutely can’t – but we moved almost everything on the main floor and what we could from the finished basement. The move brought family and friends together and way more offers of help than needed. To those who did help – Andie, Jenny, Mark, Christian, Wally, Ryan, Chloe and Shawn – a heartfelt thank you.
The furniture and other oddments pretty much filled the storage space. Surprisingly, we didn’t miss a lot of it. It’s amazing how little you can get by with when have to.
The move was a perfect opportunity to cut down. We threw away or donated unused things that had been taking up space forever. Between that and moving things to storage, it was surprising how much bigger some of the rooms looked. The crowded dining room and the living room we’ve wished were bigger suddenly seemed spacious. We liked the dining room without dining-room furniture so much that we decided to turn it into a TV and reading room.
The absence of furniture also created opportunities. With the furniture out of the way, I stripped the outdated dining-room wallpaper and painted the walls.
We’d been talking about replacing the living room carpet with a wood floor for a long time, and what better time than with the furniture gone?
There was a bit of a hitch, however. The installer who did such a great job on our kitchen floor was booked six weeks out. If you’ve followed the news about Boise’s shortage of construction workers, you know that long delays are common.
So … I broke one of the rules I’ve learned to live by – don’t do it yourself – and tackled the living-room floor.
It did not go well. More about that in a future column.
Flooding, of course, would have been infinitely worse.
Now, with the record snows and the spring of our discontent behind, we’ve finally stopped worrying. The furniture came home last week. (Thanks, Matt, Jen, Cameo, and Andy for helping.) The level of the river has dropped so much that the inches that separated us from disaster have become feet. For the first time in weeks, we can’t hear the rush of the river from our back yard at night. The pools of standing ground water have even dried up.
Now all we have to worry about are mosquitoes.

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

The line begins to form the minute the word gets out.
“The burritos are here!”
“Hey, everybody! The burritos are here!”
They line up with their backpacks, grocery bags and sleeping bags. Some have children; some are in wheelchairs. On the busiest days, the line stretches to the back door and beyond. For some, it’s the first good meal in a long time.
At the front of the line is a table with coolers of steaming breakfast burritos, jars of salsa, jugs of orange juice. Richard Jackson and his wife, Sharman, smile as they serve it up.
The scene plays out Saturday mornings at Corpus Christi House, a day shelter for the homeless at 525 S. Americana Boulevard. Cooper Court, the tent city that made headlines for weeks before the city shut it down in 2015, was in the alley immediately behind the shelter. The Saturday burritos had their beginnings in Cooper Court.
And in a calling. The Jacksons believe a higher power was responsible.
“One day Richard said he thought he knew that we were supposed to go and feed God’s people,” Sharman said. “We took some food to Ann Morrison Park because that’s where we thought we’d find homeless people, but it was a Saturday and there weren’t any homeless people there.
“Then we drove by Cooper Court and saw all those people sleeping in tents and Richard said, ‘I think that’s where we’re supposed to be.’”
In addition to being homeless, many of Cooper Court’s residents were addicted to alcohol or drugs. The irony wasn’t lost on the Jacksons, both of whom are recovering addicts who have been homeless themselves.
“I was an addict for 30 years or more,” Sharman said. “I got in trouble and went to jail because of drugs.”
Richard was “addicted to meth and marijuana for 35 years. I was pretty much an everyday user. If I didn’t have it, I didn’t get out of bed or do much of anything. All I cared about was myself and my wife, and she was addicted, too.”
The Jacksons are fortunate. They’re among the small percentage of people who overcome chronic addiction. They are also deeply religious. They say their lives turned around when they found God, some seven and a half years ago.
“That’s when I stopped doing drugs, Richard said. “And I still have my faculties about me. That’s rare for someone who did it as long as I did.”
Not only do they have their faculties about them; Richard is a successful businessman. He does network marketing and owns a maintenance and remodeling company. Sharman is retired, but helps with both businesses.
The’ve been feeding the homeless on Saturday mornings for nearly two years now. They started with sack lunches.
“When we went there on that first day, we had no idea that so many people would be there,” Sharman said. “We ran out of food way too soon.”
“We had about 30 sack lunches,” Richard added. “The size of the crowd when we got there was jaw-dropping to me. We didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the alleyway before we ran out of sandwiches.
“When we first started walking through, we were getting scowled at. When we came back a second time carrying more sandwiches, the people who were scowling were smiling and friendly. That one act of kindness changed the atmosphere completely.”
When the city shut down Cooper Court, he said, “we spent a couple of weeks looking for the people who had been there. Then we came here (to Corpus Christi) and asked where they’d gone. When the people here realized that we were the burrito people, they invited us to come here on Saturdays. We’ve been here ever since.”
On a typical Saturday, they make and serve from 120 to 150 burritos. On busy days – when its cold or wet outside or late in the month when the people in line are low on money – it can be close to 200. They make sausage, ham and plain burritos, plain being a relative term. All of the burritos contain eggs, potatoes and cheese.
The ingredients initially cost the Jacksons $150 to $170 a week.
“The Love Center Ministry supplies us with about 80 percent of the food now,” Richard said. “Because of that, it’s only costing us about $60 a week.”
Their church, Life Church in Meridian, lets them use its kitchen to make the the burritos. Volunteers help. It takes about two hours. The Jacksons arrive at the shelter between 8:30 and 9 a.m. By then, the crowd is waiting.
“They’re here even when it’s snowing,” said a homeless woman who asked not to be identified. “I don’t think they’ve ever missed. Their burritos are all freshly made and tasty, and they’re always pleasant and have an encouraging word for people.”
Rick Bollman, Corpus Christi’s operations manager, says the Jacksons bring more than food:
“They give our guests validation. It’s validating for them to know that someone cares enough to do this for them every week.”
A guest named Samira added that they “don’t care what race or religion you are. They don’t ask you about your ancestry or what God you pray to. They do this for the love of humanity.”
The perspective from the other side of the table?
“We can see the joy in their faces,” Richard said. “We can see the hope there. It makes us feel amazing. Sometimes it makes me get tears in my eyes.”
“It gives you a good feeling inside to help people,” Sharman added. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it?”

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

If you’ve lived in Boise long enough, you probably think you know the story of the iconic Westside Drive-in and its owner, Chef Lou Aaron.
You don’t.
The story you do know is that the North Boise drive-in has been around forever – it’s celebrating its 60th anniversary this week – and that Aaron gave up being a chef in fine dining establishments to run a drive-in. That story has been told by every media outlet in town and on network television.
The story few people do know is actually several stories. One is that the drive-in has become something of a haven for troubled souls. Another is that its owner has battled alcoholism, cancer and the loss of his home and come out on top. Yet another is the evolution of the man himself.
Aaron left his job at the now-defunct Murphy’s, a fine dining establishment on Broadway Avenue, for the Westside gig. He had previously been a chef at Top of the Hoff, a Hilton hotel, upscale restaurants in Texas and a country club in Aspen, Colo. John Denver was one of his customers there. Martina Navratilova was the tennis pro.
“I wanted to have my own restaurant,” he said of the switch from the upper crust to burger buns. “I was going to open a restaurant by Hawks Stadium but the deal fell through, and one day I was driving by Westside and saw a little for-sale sign. I grew up on 27th, just a few blocks away, so it interested me.”
He, his wife and her father bought the drive-in in 1994. By then Westside was a North Boise institution. A Westside Grocery store occupied roughly the same location early in the 20th Century. The drive-in opened in 1957.
Aaron and his wife, Renee, have been Westside’s sole owners since 2004. One of the changes under their tenure has been the addition of menu items seldom seen at drive-ins. You can get anything from a rack of barbecued ribs to a peanut ginger chicken salad at Westside.
Another change has been an emphasis on employing those down on their luck.
“We have 15 cooks here,11 cashiers and three dishwashers. We train the cooks in-house. Some of my best cooks used to be dishwashers. If they’re good at that, we move them up quickly. We hire a lot of people who are struggling. We have four women who were in prison, two people who were homeless and one refugee from Africa. We kind of look at this as a ministry.”
Aaron knows what it is to struggle.
“I was a drunk all through the 80s and up until 1993. I was gifted as a cook so I could get away with it. I’d come home drunk from Murphy’s and then drink at home. I was drinking a case of beer a day, vodka, Long Island Teas …
“On April 26, 1993, I came home from work and my wife asked me why we had so many beer cans in a cubby hole behind the refrigerator in the garage. I said it was because I was an alcoholic. I’d prayed for months that I’d stop, and that night I did. I just celebrated 24 years of sobriety.”
Alcoholism isn’t the only thing he’s had to battle. On October 28, 2015, he was diagnosed with an incurable type of lymphoma. Instead of chemotherapy, which was recommended, he studied alternatives and changed his diet, eliminating sugar, white flour and most dairy products and relying heavily on juices.
“My latest CT scan, in October, showed that my tumors had shrunk 25 percent in a year and my blood counts are almost perfect. I’ve lost weight and feel better than I ever have. My doctor laughs when I tell him I’ve mainly been drinking celery juice, carrot juice and Japanese green tea.”
On November 6, 1996 – he doesn’t forget the life-altering dates in his life – his family’s house burned down.
“We lost our house, our car, our pets … We lost everything. We found out what it was like to not have anything. But we were alive. We were okay.
“That’s when we started going back to church. We realized that the important things are our relationships with other human beings and with God. That spiritually changed our lives forever. It was six months of hell, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
Now 55, he’s a deacon in his church and a different man from the one I interviewed in the same room of the Westside complex 24 years ago. The red hair is mostly gone; the beard is mostly gray. He seems less driven, more at peace.
“I’ve mellowed,” he said. “I used to get so mad about things. Now I realize that in the bigger picture those things don’t matter at all.”
He’s proud that Westside has been around for 60 years, and of what he’s done to make it unique in the drive-in world.
“We make almost everything from scratch. We roast our own meats, make our own stocks and sauces, and we don’t use anything pre-battered. It’s more work, but you can tell the difference.”
The most popular menu item – it is still a drive-in – is a bacon cheeseburger, closely followed by ice-cream potatoes. In addition more conventional fare, its offerings range from salads to focaccia sandwiches to prime rib.
And more.
A lot more.
The concept has been successful enough that in addition to the original Westside at 21st and State streets, the Aaronses’ son, Josh, is using it at the new Westside on ParkCenter Boulevard.
Looking back, Aaron says his decision to leave the world of haute cuisine for a drive-in was one of the best he ever made:
“Most of my employees weren’t even born when I started at Westside. I love it when people drive up and say their first job was here. Both of my kids grew up in the business, and there’s nothing like having your kids with you every day at work. It’s been a blast. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

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

(Note to subscribers:  Sorry this is a day late. The Statesman is now posting videos with my columns, the first of which ran Sunday, and I’m working on posting them with the blog. Hope to post the one for this column as soon as we can work it out. — Tim)

The first reward for the feverish activity at my house these days was my Navy watch cap, missing since fall.

It was under a pillow on a closet shelf.
Next was the case for my prescription glasses. It was under a bed in a downstairs bedroom.
Then, the “woo-hoo” moment – the missing recipes: my late father’s spaghetti sauce and buttermilk pancakes, a friend’s killer chili, another friend’s “devil dog egg nog” and other favorite recipes. Paper-clipped together, they’d fallen behind a desk drawer that had to be moved.
The reason for the feverish activity and reappearance of missing oddments is a short walk from our house: the raging Boise River. Like many other southwest Idahoans, we’re getting ready for The Flood.
This is not meant to alarm anyone. Maybe there won’t be major flooding in Boise. Not even the experts know for sure. That said, this spring is the first time I can remember actually hearing the river from my house. Not a background murmur, but a deep, powerful sound audible from a sobering distance away. And even with the high flows, water is coming into the reservoirs faster than it’s going out. Where I live, it would be foolish not to prepare.
Friends who don’t live in the flood plain ask if we really think our house could flood. They ask in polite but skeptical tones, as if the threat were remote and the real issue is our sanity.
We haven’t gone round the bend yet, thank you. Another few thousand cubic feet per second and all but a few rooms of our house could be partially underwater.
Like many who live near the river, we naively had our house built in what is now designated as part of the flood plain. We worried at the time that it might be too close to the river, but the building lot was approved so it had to be safe, right?
It wasn’t long after that that the flood plain maps were redrawn, with our then new house lying just inside the flood-plain boundary. We worry every year that there’s a big snowpack, but never have we had a snowpack like this year’s. If the weather turns hot and stays hot …
So, we’re preparing.
In February, with the snowbanks waist-high, we increased the flood-insurance coverage. In April, after crews sealed the manhole covers in our neighborhood to prevent floodwater from getting into the sewers, we started moving things upstairs. This month, we continued moving things and signed up for the county’s Code Red alerts. Last week, I rented a storage space.
Nothing can fully protect you from the ravages of a flood, of course. I covered enough of them during my Statesman career to appreciate how devastating they are. Still, there are things you can do to soften the blow.
Flood insurance covers only the building, not the contents. Even if you have enough insurance to repair the damage to your house, you’re on your own for replacing damaged furniture, appliances, paintings, televisions, clothing … And some things – photos and other personal treasures – can never be replaced.
The first things to go to the second floor were my guitars. It’s not that they’re worth a lot of money, but they’re worth a lot to me. I’ve played them on recordings, at gigs from Christmas parties to the governor’s ball, at venues from Pengilly’s Saloon to the Stueckle Sky Center. They’re part of who I am.
Then came the “irreplaceables.” High school and college yearbooks. Photos of the kids growing up. A folder of photos that belonged to my father, with pictures dating to when he was a boy. A scrapbook my mother made when she was young. Important documents: tax returns, insurance policies, contracts, tickets, birth certificates, passports, medical records, warranty papers.
Next were things that aren’t especially valuable or crucial, but you’d still hate to lose: CDs, DVDs, stereo components, memorabilia.
The “oh, well” stuff stayed where it was. Food, small appliances, furniture not worth the trouble to move … Things you wouldn’t want to lose, but “oh, well” if you do. Things no longer needed went to the Youth Ranch. Things that couldn’t be donated or recycled went to the trash.
If the flood predictions become more dire, we’ll move the TV and its accessories upstairs. We’ll put some things up on blocks and, if dire turns to inevitable, move as much as possible into storage and decide where to live till it’s over.
Disclaimer: I’m a worrier. I tend to over-prepare for things like this. Don’t start sandbagging or moving your furniture around just because you read this. Get the best information for where you live and decide for yourself what you need to do.
It’s possible that we’ll dodge the bullet. I’ve lived in Boise most of my life and remember very few floods that could be considered remotely serious. My dad and I stood in ankle-deep water piling sandbags around St. Luke’s Hospital during my growing-up years. Decades passed before a flood caused limited damage in North Boise.
If the flood doesn’t happen, the preparations won’t have been wasted. There is, in fact, something liberating about them. Clutter is eliminated; space is created. And there is comfort in knowing that everything recycled or carried to safety is a thing saved.
The generosity of friends and family can’t be overrated. A friend of one of my daughters helped move furniture and brought over a bilge pump. One of my friends offered his truck and his time for a sandbagging party. Others have offered to help if the authorities warn that we’re running out of time.
Here’s hoping the weather cooperates and those of us who live in the flood plain stay high and dry. And if not, here’s hoping we’re as ready as possible.

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

This is a few weeks late. I was committed to some travel columns when he came to Boise, but I can’t not write about Brian Wilson, one of my early musical heroes.
The former Beach Boy played at the Morrison Center on April 6. This isn’t intended to be a review of the concert. It’s too late for that, and other Statesman writers are far more qualified to write reviews. I’ll include some impressions from the concert, but this is less a review than an overcoming-adversity story. Those who struggle with mental illness or substance abuse can learn a lot from the life of Brian Wilson. His is a success story for the ages.
Success in the usual sense came to him early. He was virtually a kid when the Beach Boys, of whom he was a founding member, started making hits. The first time I saw them was when they played at, of all places, the Boise High School auditorium. We won’t get into how long ago that was except to say that I was still a student there.
Actually, it wasn’t surprising that they played at a high school auditorium. The Morrison Center, Taco Bell Arena, CenturyLink Arena, the Idaho Center and other venues we enjoy today didn’t exist then. The auditorium was one of the larger venues around, and the Beach Boys were one of the hottest groups in the country then. Every seat was filled.
My most vivid impression of the show that night was how effortless Wilson made it look to play music. He played bass as if he were on autopilot, rarely looking at his guitar. He sang his signature falsetto parts as easily as you or I hum in the the shower, without grimacing, straining or breaking a sweat. His voice when he was young was a phenomenon. No one else, with the arguable exception of his brother Carl, could come close to making the high vocal parts that were so much a part of the Beach Boys sound sound as good as he did.
How wrong impressions can be. Performing onstage was anything but effortless for him. What the audience at Boise High didn’t know that night, and audiences wouldn’t know for years, was how ill he was. His memoir, “I Am Brian Wilson,” details a lifelong struggle with mental illness. Drugs, alcohol and an incompetent doctor compounded it. Mere stage fright, though he certainly experienced it, is insignificant compared with the other demons that haunted him.
Then as now, it took courage for him to join his brothers, cousin and a friend who comprised the band at their performances. Even now, he has to psych himself into going onstage for every show.
One of the symptoms of his illness is that he hears threatening voices that are only in his head. They compete with his own voice and that of his bandmates. A serious problem in a group known for intricate vocal harmonies, but not the only problem. When he was a child, a kid in his neighborhood hit him in the ear with a pipe. He’s been deaf in that ear ever since. If his stage monitor isn’t placed perfectly for his good ear, he can’t hear himself or the other band members singing above the instruments and the voices in his head.
Effortless? Anything but.
As if that weren’t enough, he had to overcome the abuse of a violent father and the Beach Boys’ troubled history. His illness often alienated him from the group, leading him to stay home and write songs while the band toured without him. He lost both brothers, one to heavy drinking and an accident, the other to lung cancer.
In 2012, his cousin Mike Love, who owns the Beach Boys’ name, opted to tour without Wilson and founding members Al Jardine and David Marks. This would be like Ringo Starr touring as the Beatles without John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Wilson shook it off and started his own band, the one that played in Boise last month, and it’s as good or better than any Beach Boys band.
I went to see them because he was one of the last geniuses on my bucket list. I’d seen three of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan and others, but not Brian Wilson. Not since he was a kid yet to prove his genius.
His current band is what the Beach Boys of that time may have wished they’d been. In addition to the usual drums, bass and guitars, the 12-piece group has a grand piano, multiple electronic keyboards, percussion, a xylophone, harmonicas, woodwinds …
At their worst, they sounded okay. At their best, they sounded magnificent. Wilson can’t hit the high parts anymore, but Matt Jardine, Al’s son, covers them. (Al is in the band, too.) Vocal harmonies were one of the best things about the Beach Boys, and at times in the Morrison Center they all but enveloped you. One song had nine harmony parts, arranged by … who else?
When the group played “God Only Knows,” the beautiful Brian Wilson ballad that McCartney says is one of his all-time favorite songs, you didn’t have to look far to see tears streaming down faces.
I have mental illness and addiction in my family so I know something about the difficulty of overcoming them. The percentage of those who do is small.
Wilson is one of those who has. He’s fragile and his voice isn’t what it used to be. He limps on and offstage, sometimes leaving before a song is finished. He clearly isn’t the kid who once made performing look easy. But at 74, he’s put together a band that more than makes up for the limitations of age and illness and does justice to the music he’s created.
He deserved credit just for walking onstage at the Morrison Center. But he did much more than that. He overcame his demons, made his audience feel young again, gave us goosebumps and moved us to tears. If that isn’t overcoming adversity, nothing is.

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

MAZATLAN, Mexico – At one time or another, those of us with even a trace of adventure in our souls dream of chucking it all and living the good life in a tropical paradise.
Few are immune. Even my cautious, conventional parents dreamed about it for decades. At one point, they and my cautious, conventional aunt and uncle hopped on a plane to check out the possibilities in Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica for a sun-drenched escape from the routine of daily life at home.
It didn’t happen, of course. They came home, resumed their old lives and never looked back.
Except for my mother the romantic. Mom occasionally waxed wistful, declaring with a faraway look in her eye that she wished they’d pulled it off.
Gene Morgan is one of the relatively few who have.
A Texan by birth, Morgan served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, worked in marketing for Holiday Inns in the United Kingdom and at one point was making $200,000 a year as a hospitality-industry executive on Hilton Head Island, S.C.
For the last 14 years, he’s lived in Mexico. His home there is near Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast, but he travels all over the country. When he tires of the routine at home, he packs a bag and spends several months in whatever part of Mexico sounds good to him. He’s had extended visits in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa, Zihuatanenajo …
What does he do there?
In the big cities, he enjoys the cultural attractions. In the resort cities, he does pretty much what he does in Mazatlan. He meets people and makes friends. He goes to the beaches. He plays golf, drinks beer, enjoys life.
“My home in the states is Memphis, Tenn., but I haven’t been there in a long time,” he said. “I like it here too much. I love living in Mexico, and from here I can go anywhere in the country. I can fly to Mexico City round-trip for $150. I can take a bus to Guadalajara for 650 pesos ($35). And it’s not a Greyhound, either. It’s a beautiful, first-class bus with big, comfortable seats, wi-fi and a complimentary lunch. You eat lunch, watch a couple of movies and you’re there.”
I asked him which of all the places he’d been in Mexico he liked best.
“Right here,” he said. “When I come through that gate, I’m home.”
The gate is the entrance to the resort community where he lives and works as a real estate resales specialist.
Translation: he resells condominiums when their owners decide to make a change. He shows properties, answers e-mails, handles the details of closings. He keeps busy, but it’s not what you’d call a high-stress job. He makes a point of spending an hour every day on the beach with his iPod and a cooler of beer.
The beach, from a point on the north to another on the south, is five miles long. On a busy day, you might see eight or ten people there, swimming collecting shells, building sand castles. On a slow day, there might be two or three people. Or none at all.
“Some people wouldn’t like it here,” he said. “They’d rather be in town, where they’re closer to restaurants, stores, clubs, that sort of thing. But I love it here. I love the peace and quiet, the tranquility of it.”
In July and August, when most of the condominium owners have gone back to Canada or the U.S., he’s virtually alone at the resort. You’d think it would get lonely, but he doesn’t mind.
“I like it then, too,” he said. “We get lightning storms every day, and you’ve never seen such a light show. The lightning strikes light up the sky for miles. It rains so hard you can’t see those buildings over there (about 50 yards away). The storms make it lush and green. When the sun comes out, you can’t believe how beautiful it is.”
No argument. It’s beautiful even in the dry season. But it has to get at least a little bit lonely rattling around a resort development with almost everyone else gone for the off season.
“I never get lonely,” he said. “I have lots of friends here, and lots of girlfriends.”
Living there is cheap, especially when the exchange rate for Americans is as favorable as it’s been recently.
“You can get a pretty good car down here for $3,000 to $5,000. And there are guys here who can fix anything that goes wrong with it for a fraction of what it costs in the U.S. Groceries are cheaper, the cost of going out to dinner is cheaper … everything costs less here.
“… A lot of the locals live on 200 pesos a day (about $11). They’re poor, but they’re happy. If they like you, they’ll do anything for you. People are out walking at night, enjoying life. Everybody knows everybody and takes care of everybody. If a kid has a birthday here, everybody chips in and buys a present. It’s like a big, extended family.”
So … are there any drawbacks to living so far from what used to be his home in the U.S.? He is an American, after all.
“I miss certain people in the states. I go visit them every now and then, but I don’t impose. I’m the guy who comes to visit but stays in a hotel so I don’t put you out.
“When I’m through visiting, I come back. These days, this is where I’m happiest. Maybe I’ll live in the U.S. again someday; anything’s possible. But for now I really love being here. Here, every day here is another day in paradise.”

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