Note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the first of two columns from the trip.

MAZATLAN, Mexico –  There was a time early in my column-writing days when I was best known for writing about travel mishaps. Readers liked my vacation-disaster stories because they made their own vacations look good by comparison.
The Woodwards of those days had a genius for getting sick on the first day of a two-week vacation, breaking down on mountain passes during howling blizzards, pitching tents on red ant hills … On one memorable odyssey, my daughters gave me the chicken pox.
A trip to Mexico last month was, to borrow from Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again.
At our destination airport in Mexico, travelers were instructed to push a button while passing through customs and immigration. If a red light flashed when you pushed the button, your luggage was searched. The only time we ever saw the red light flash for anyone was when my wife pushed the button. If the immigration inspector had known that searching my wife’s luggage is roughly equivalent to searching the contents of the Titanic, he’d have waved her through.
He didn’t. By the time he’d pawed through her clothing, DVDs, medicines, lotions, ointments, cosmetics, magazines, laptop, chargers and the collected works of James Patterson, the other passengers were having Margaritas on the beach.
But the real trouble was yet to come. It was a sneaky sort of travel disaster; we didn’t even know it had happened until we were in the checkout line at a grocery store after checking into our condo.
“OMG!” my wife said, rummaging through her purse with increasing alarm. “My debit card isn’t here! I must have left it in the ATM machine at the airport.”
This was a big deal. A very big deal. Our debit cards were our only way of getting cash and otherwise paying for things in Mexico. The pesos she’d gotten at the airport ATM wouldn’t last more than a couple of days. Without our cards, it was only a matter of time before we were sleeping on the streets.
“We’ve got to go back to the airport,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way to get the card back.”
True, in theory. Security officers can unlock the machines and retrieve lost cards. Back at the airport, however, we asked every security person we could find and were met with shrugs and apologetic smiles. Either they didn’t understand us, didn’t care, or were getting even for the guy who wants to build a wall along their border and trick them into paying us back for it.
Happily, I’d written down the number to call and cancel the debit card. Unhappily, it was the one number we were unable to call from Mexico.
We could FaceTime home to watch our grandson show us his new light saber.  My wife could call her mother to discuss the latest “Gunsmoke” rerun at the senior center. But no combination of country codes, area codes or voodoo incantations would allow us to call our credit union.
“No problem,” my wife said. “I’ll just call one of the kids and have them call the credit union from home.”
She called both of our daughters. No answer.
She called both of our granddaughters. No answer.
She called our son, who always answers his phone. No answer.
Desperate, she called her 91-year-old mother, who took time out from “Gunsmoke” to call and cancel the card. (We later learned that none of the kids answered their phones because they were all out of cell range. While we were in panic mode trying to reach them, they were frolicking in the hot springs at Idaho City.)
With the card canceled, we breathed easier. But our remaining pesos wouldn’t last long, and there was no way I was stuffing my debit card into another ravenous ATM. The good news was that one of our daughters would be arriving the next day with her debit card so we’d have backup.
Expecting to be met with waves and smiles when we picked her up at the airport, we got neither. She looked as if she’d lost her luggage, been pressured into buying a timeshare and struck by lightning.
“What’s wrong?” we asked.
“The ATM ate my debit card!” she said, practically steaming.
What were the odds of that? Two debit cards eaten by two different ATM machines in less than 24 hours.
Pretty good, actually. It’s a security measure. If you don’t retrieve your card in a reasonable amount of time from a Mexican ATM machine after the cash comes out, the machine sucks the card back in. One of our neighbors at the place where were were staying, said it had happened to him three times.
“The banks’ security people open up the machines, take out all the cards and cut them in half,” he said. “That way nobody can use your card to make charges to your account. I just call my bank, order a new card and have them Fed-Ex it to me. It takes about five days.”
Five days? What were we supposed to do for five days with no money in a foreign country? Wash dishes? Bag groceries at WalMart? Pole dance?
Out of the question. I haven’t pole danced in years.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” my daughter said. “We’ll go to an actual bank, find a teller who speaks English and say we’ll only use their ATM machine if they can absolutely guarantee that they can open it up and get Dad’s card back if the machine eats it.”
A good plan, except that the teller at the first actual bank where we stopped said it was possible only at the bank’s downtown branch, many confusing miles away.
“You can try our ATM here,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee it will work.”
Considering that two of our cards had already been eaten and digested, this was a little like an airline captain who had crashed twice saying that he couldn’t guarantee a safe landing.
At the downtown branch, a teller assured us that the machine would work, and that she could open it and get my card back if it didn’t.
“Do you have the key?” my daughter asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to see the key.”
Demanding? Yes. But you couldn’t really blame her, considering that she’d be staying in Mexico for two weeks and her only source of cash had been devoured in the first ten minutes.
The teller did have a key, but it wasn’t necessary. The machine worked, and the millisecond it spat my card out, I pounced on it like a starving hyena.
Cash at last! And it had only taken four days of our vacation.
That night while trying to fall asleep, I ruminated over all the things that had happened and gave thanks that we were solvent at last.
One thing bothered me, though.
Do they really cut up all those cards lost in ATM machines so no one can use them fraudulently? It would be the right thing to do, of course, but given the current state of Mexican-American relations it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity missed.
I think they’re going to use them to pay us back for building that silly wall.

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.

His newspaper friends used to joke that he’d live to dance on all their graves, and he almost did.
Boise art icon John Collias, one of my oldest friends in more ways than one, was a few months short of 99 when he died Wednesday night.
He was of most vibrant, most “alive” people you could hope to meet. He grew up in a Greek-American family, emphasis on Greek. He was fluent in the language and, like many Greeks, he had strong opinions, loudly voiced. He peppered his conversations with frequent, emphatic gestures, was fiercely proud of his family and his work and was passionate about nearly everything, from his artwork to the lunch specials at his favorite restaurant.
We met at an Idaho Press Club New Year’s Eve party. The new Statesman reporter in Canyon County, I’d been with The Statesman for all of six weeks. The press club had asked him to do watercolors of some of the journalists who would be attending, this one included, to decorate the ballroom for the party. I was chatting with another reporter when someone grabbed my arm, spun me around and studied my face.
“You don’t have blue eyes!” he said, practically shouting.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He identified himself as the artist who had done the painting of me.
“All I had to work from was a black and white photo,” he said. “They told me you had blue eyes.”
That was the unlikely beginning of a friendship that lasted 46 years.
We were from different generations, but it didn’t matter. Soon we were having regular lunches at one of his favorite hangouts, the La Fiesta Restaurant on Boise Avenue. He called it “Hank and Marie’s,” the names of its owners. We must have had a hundred lunches there, by ourselves, with other Statesman friends, and once with someone famous.
“TIM!” he shouted one day over the lunch special, stabbing the air with a pointed finger. “This food is so good we need to bring Bill Kay here.”
Kay, producer of the Shrine Circus that came to Boise every summer for nearly 30 years, was a connoisseur of restaurants from Boston to San Francisco. The next time he came to town, we took him and a friend of his to Hank and Marie’s. The friend was Karl Wallenda, star of the famed Flying Wallendas. It was hard to say who was the most colorful character – Kay the matchless storyteller, Wallenda the high-wire artist or Collias the true artist, himself an adroit storyteller.
One of my favorite Collias stories was about the time he went out for football at Ohio State University. His only play was catching a kickoff. The ensuing tackle rendered him unconscious. Later, in the locker room trying to decide whether to quit the team, he noticed a player doing something to his eye.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “What are you doing there?”
“Putting in my glass eye.”
“Did you lose your eye playing football?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. You just made up my mind for me.”
The Ohio State washout was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., went to art school and worked in Chicago, and settled in Boise because it was home to the love of his life. He came to Boise by train during World War II with his brother Nick, both newly minted army recruits. Sick when they arrived, he looked down at the city from the depot and said, “Nick, what the hell did we ever do to deserve a place like this?”
It was a statement he would regret. While stationed at Gowen Field, he met Lily Kepros, and was instantly smitten. She was six years younger than he was, the daughter of a protective, old-school Greek who was less than enamored with the soldier who had taken a shine to his daughter. The soldier had to ask repeatedly for permission to date her.
That was the beginning of a storybook romance. By the time the army sent him to England, he had won her heart, if not her father’s. He had a flower sent to her every month, mailed her a letter every day.
Every single day, until he came home from the war.
They were married for 70 years.
That was more than enough time for him to become a Boise institution. He did hundreds of drawings, mainly portraits, for The Statesman. He painted miners and sheepherders, governors and senators. He painted “the big three” of corporate Idaho – Harry Morrison, J.R. Simplot and Joe Albertson. He designed the Idaho Bicentennial Medal. His drawing of a Bronco graced the 50-yard line at Albertsons Stadium. His drawings and paintings are in public buildings and private homes throughout the state.
He loved fine portraiture, the work of Picasso, Rembrandt and El Greco; blues and big band music, pastries from Pastry Perfection, Smoky Davis’s pepper-bacon burgers, city bus rides, the Boise State Broncos and the Chicago Cubs.
Most of all, he loved people. Borderline dangerous behind the wheel, he walked everywhere, meeting people on the street, chatting them up, having coffee or lunch with them. He was the quintessential man about town.
Occasionally he accompanied me on my trips to interview column subjects. On one of them, he found a painting subject.
“STOP!” he said, finger stabbing the air.
It was a deciduous tree, its autumn colors vibrant against an evergreen forest. His painting of it, reproduced in a coffee-table book of his work, is striking.
He was his own harshest critic. If he didn’t think a drawing or painting was good enough, even if he’d spent months on it, he scrapped it and started over. Reminiscing over the paintings in his coffee-table book last week – portraits, landscapes, abstracts; clowns, cowboys, Christmas cards – I was reminded once again of just how good he was.
“TIM! I’m as good as (he would name a famous artist). If I’d lived in New York, I’d have made a lot of money. I might have been famous. But I don’t have any regrets. I can’t say enough good things about Boise. The people of Boise couldn’t have been better to me.”
How many times did he tell me that? He knew he might have made a name for himself in a big city, and I think it haunted him that he didn’t try. But he came to love the city that the sick soldier of his youth disparaged from the train station, and his gratitude to those who helped him make a name for himself in his adopted home was boundless.
The last time I saw him was the day before he died. He was barely conscious; it was hard to know whether he even recognized me. For lack of anything better to say, I told him we’d have lunch in a better place one day with Hank and Marie. He opened his eyes, gestured weakly and mumbled something that sounded like a very faint version of “TIM!”
The call telling me that he was gone was what prompted me to reach for the coffee table book. It had been several years since I’d looked at it, and I’d either forgotten or never noticed the inscription he’d written on the first page:
“Tim, (it was easy to imagine him shouting it). To my very best friend for many years. – John G. Collias.”
That was when the tears came, not just for his passing, but for the passing of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. (Except this week. Am posting on Sunday as an experiment.) Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

How many times had I passed the old building, once so dear, without stopping?
It’s graced the corner of Sixth and Idaho streets for over a century. I’d walked or driven past it countless times, invariably with memories drifting back, but always in too much of a hurry to stop and venture inside to see how it had changed.
Until now. It was a slow day, no need to hurry anywhere, and the building seemed to beckon. Why not?
Now the Eagles Center, it was built in 1912 as the Fraternal Order of Eagles building. It had a beautiful hardwood dance floor on the second floor, which eventually led to its becoming an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. For much of the 1960s, it was known as the Fiesta Ballroom.
For its patrons, the Fiesta was a teenage dance hall. For me and my friends who played in a band there on Saturday nights, it was a clubhouse, a second home.
By the time we started playing there, in the mid-1960s, the ballroom had been closed for a couple of years. We were desperate to find a regular venue, but the man who previously ran it had had his fill of the dance business. No amount of reasoning or pleading would convince him to reopen it.
My father, who was more susceptible to inordinate pleading, agreed to sign the lease with the understanding that we, the band members, would run the place. It would be our responsibility to pay the rent and other bills, hire security and maintenance people and not lose our shirts. He made it clear that we were on our own. If we failed, there’d be no bailing us out.
We didn’t fail. We advertised on the radio, hired cops and one of the toughest kids in town to work as bouncers and paid friends to run the soft-drink bar and do the janitorial work. For two of the best years of our lives, the old ballroom was packed with teenagers every weekend, we made more money than we’d dreamed possible and we had an idyllic hangout. It was perfect for everything from rehearsals to parties to telling ghost stories while the vacant third floor creaked and moaned above us.
Fast forward to today. The building has been renovated and is now mostly offices, housing enterprises from the Snake River Alliance to the American Bird Conservancy. The former Idaho Street entrance is now an exit. Instead of taking two flights of stairs from there to the ballroom, now office space, you enter the building on Sixth Street and take an elevator to the second, third and fourth floors.
The fourth floor came as a surprise. Before the renovation, which significantly increased the useable space, there were only three floors. The first was a dress shop and tobacco shop, the second the ballroom, the third storage. I took the elevator to the new third floor, about where the ballroom used to be, and stepped into a hallway finished in muted greens and earth tones. Locked offices lined either side. Where hit songs once played and hundreds of people danced, it was absolutely silent.
A window on the north wall provided a view of the building across the alley, now an office building but then Boise’s jail and police station. On hot summer nights when the fire-escape door overlooking the alley was open, prisoners shouted song requests from the jail windows. Through some mystery of atmospherics, our amplifiers picked up police radio transmissions – a source of amusement to most in the audiences and of occasional strategic value to those planning illicit activities.
A window in a deserted conference room offered a view of a concrete ledge and the roof of an adjoining building. Both triggered memories.
The adjoining building also used to be a dance hall, where our primary competitors played. When some of our gear mysteriously vanished, we blamed them and decided to get even by breaking into their clubhouse and swiping some of their gear. The obvious choice to squeeze through an open window on the alley and let us in was our keyboard player, who was small and had experience in such matters. It might have worked, too, except that he got stuck halfway through the window. It was at this inopportune moment that a police car entered the alley.
The officer driving it was Vern Bisterfeldt, later a city councilman and county commissioner but then a cop who, among other things, patrolled our dances. Asked what we were doing in the alley, we told him we were waiting for someone to let us in so we could rehearse.
“Oh,” he said, seemingly satisfied as he started to drive away.
Then, stopping after a few feet: “Why is Vance stuck in the window?”
He’d recognized our keyboard player from his stubby legs, which were flailing madly. We made up a cover story, which he pretended to accept and drove away. We avoided jail (conveniently just a few yards away), and our one and only fling with attempted burglary was mercifully terminated.
The aforementioned ledge was our “emergency entrance” to the Fiesta when we’d forgotten the key. From the top of the fire-escape stairway, it was possible to half leap-half swing to the ledge. Then it was just a matter of prying up a window to get inside. The dangerous part the leap to the ledge. A fall to the alley would have meant broken bones or worse. Between that and some of the other stupid things we did, I sometimes wonder how we survived our teenage years.
Another elevator ride led to the fourth floor and more offices. It was late on a Friday afternoon; virtually all of the office workers seemed to have gone for the day. The fourth floor, like the third, was almost spectrally quiet.
Until an unexpected sound broke the silence.
Someone was playing a piano.
This had once been the part of the building that creaked and moaned, inspiring ghost stories. My first thought was of Vance, our late keyboard player. The music was coming from an office down the hall, but the view through its door window revealed … no one.
The song, haltingly being practiced: Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.”
Vance?
I’m glad the developers saved our old clubhouse. Instead of being torn down, it was tastefully restored and is home to dozens of new tenants.
And maybe a ghost or two.

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

I’ll be gone a lot this month and won’t have access to my computer to post the columns. I’ll post both of them for March late in the month.

Stay tuned. A Woodward travel disaster story is always a possibility!

Thanks for subscribing,

Tim

 

It was a birthday party that once would have been almost unimaginable.
A reserved room at a restaurant. Tables pushed together, decorated with helium balloons and lined with presents. Pizzas baking in the kitchen, kids playing games in an adjoining room, grownups catching up since the previous get-together a year earlier.
The guest of honor took it all in stride. This was his third birthday party, and for him pretty much the normal order of things.
For some of the older members of the family, however, it was a case study in how much the normal order of things has changed.
The guest list was long and diverse – little kids, big kids, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. Conversation topics ranged from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to sports to politics. A striking contrast to what family birthday parties once were, and to what families once were.
Grayson, the birthday boy, is the son of single parents. They share the responsibilities of caring for him; they just didn’t get married to do it. That’s not uncommon now.
When I was their age, it was anything but common. Women who were pregnant were expected to be married or to get married as quickly as possible. Most of those who had babies without getting married gave them up for adoption. You didn’t hear much about single mothers then.
That’s changed, as have expectations of what constitutes a family. A typical family in those days was a mother, a father and one or more kids. Fathers were the breadwinners, mothers the “homemakers.” With the exception of a childless couple who lived across the street, I can’t think of a single family in my childhood neighborhood who didn’t fit that mold. It was what families were expected to be, the ideal family model.
But was it? Fathers spent most of their time working. When they were home, they tended to be the family disciplinarians. All of my childhood friends were, to one extent or another, afraid of their fathers. I was, to some extent, afraid of mine. This is not to say that they were cruel men. My father was a good man, and in his later years a gentle soul loved by all who knew him. But, like all the fathers in the old neighborhood, he was a strict disciplinarian in his younger years.
My mother, like the other mothers in the neighborhood, was in charge of running the household. She kept the house immaculate. She cooked most of the meals. She did the heavy cleaning, the laundry and changed the sheets on the beds every Saturday. She did all the decorating, from choosing the furniture and carpets to stripping the walls and hanging wallpaper.
My sister and I helped with the housework and yard work, but the lion’s share of the responsibilities fell to our parents. I’ll never forget coming home from school and finding my mother in tears because a cake she baked had fallen. Or my father walking the floor at night, worried about paying the bills. Both had separate burdens, which they shouldered pretty much on their own.
Birthdays were minor events – dinner with the immediate family, a small cake, a modest number of presents.
Fast forward to today, and a different world.
Both of Grayson’s parents are single, but they are far from raising him on their own. The kid is being raised by a village.
Both of his parents are in college; both have part-time jobs. On the days when his dad has him, his family helps out while Dad is working or in school. They take him bowling. They’ve taken him to high school games, and his grandfather on that side of the family is teaching him the finer points of hitting a baseball. They look forward to spending time with him.
On our side of the family, no less than ten family members help share the load while Mom is working or in school. My wife and I have Grayson one morning a week and occasionally overnight. We’ve taken him to basketball games and are regulars at the neighborhood playground. My former office is now a toy repository.
It’s not all fun and games, of course. We’ve all shared in the illnesses, the tears, the frustrations of potty training and trying to keep up with a kid who makes the Energizer Bunny look like a slug. Anyone who thinks raising kids is easy never had any.
But I think we’d all agree that for the most part it’s been a joy. I’ve laughed more in the three years since Grayson was born than I did in the previous ten. True, he wears us out. But it’s a weariness that gladdens the heart.
His grandfather on his dad’s side may have put it best:
“He has his life with his mom, he has his life with you and he has his life with us. And everywhere he goes, he’s marinated in love.”
The results speak for themselves. He’s a happy, well-adjusted kid. He smiles a lot, laughs a lot. He makes the people around him happy.
I’ve always thought I had a happy childhood. I grew up in Boise when it was an idyllic place to grow up. I had good parents, good friends, good teachers. But with all the societal changes since then, good and bad, I think Grayson may be a happier kid than my friends and I were in our early years.
There are things to be said for being raised by a village.

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.

My younger daughter went on a tear recently and purged every room in her house of unneeded items, a.k.a. junk. It inspired my wife and me to do do the same. The results were impressive, and surprising.
Out went the seldom-worn clothes, the little-used blankets and old pillows, the unwanted knick-knacks and curiosities that had been wasting space and gathering dust. Bags upon bags of things discarded, breathing room in closets, shelves with extra space for the first time in years.
And an almost giddy feeling of accomplishment.
There was a time when we followed these semi-annual purges with yard sales. Now we just put everything in bags and boxes, take it to the Good Will and write it off on our taxes. When you consider that yard-sale shoppers expect to get things for pennies on the dollar, and usually do, it comes out about the same.
Some things, obviously, you can’t sell or give away. Cherished books, family photographs …
And the surprise – a forgotten package of memorabilia from my Statesman years.
I was absolutely certain when preparing to retire from full-time journalism that I’d cleaned everything out of my desk and assorted boxes, nooks and crannies around the newsroom. So I couldn’t have been more surprised while in purge mode to find an unopened package of newsroom flotsam lurking on a shelf in a bedroom closet.
A former co-worker had mailed it to me (in 2013, according to the postmark) with a note explaining that the contents had been found in the newsroom. I must have put the package on the shelf intending to open it later and forgotten all about it.
The contents included letters, cards, photos … memories.
One of the cards was from Fern Graham, the longtime postmaster of Bruneau. It was a thinking-of-you card, written when our oldest daughter was recovering from cancer. Her card took me back to the day we met, in the tiny Bruneau Post Office.
I had a letter with me that day that needed to be mailed, and after debating whether to wait and mail it after returning to Boise I took a chance and pushed it through a slot in the post office wall. Immediately, someone on the other side tugged it out of my fingers, a door opened and I watched as my letter was tossed into a rolling cart and whisked away by a waiting truck.
“That was quick!” I said to the woman overseeing the process. “I almost waited to mail it from Boise.”
“It’ll get where it’s going faster from here,” she said with conviction.
That was my introduction to Bruneau’s beloved postmaster, and the beginning of an enduring friendship. I’d stop to visit when passing through Bruneau; she introduced me to half the town. I drove 150 miles to attend her wedding in Mountain City, Nev.
One of the letters in the package was from a woman named Mary. Postmarked a decade ago, it was a pitch for a story, accompanied by a photo of Mary. She asked that her picture be returned if I didn’t do the story.
I know what you’re thinking, Mary. You’re thinking that that jerk Woodward lost your picture. So you’ll be glad to know that it isn’t lost, looks every bit as good as it did ten years ago and that I’d be happy to return it. It would make me feel better about some of the family treasures readers used to send me in the misguided hope that I wouldn’t lose them.
A Thousand Springs Scenic Byway postcard had me laughing once again at the humor of the late Tom Trusky, BSU professor extraordinaire and director of the Idaho Center for the Book. Trusky, who died in 2009, was forever sending me postcards supposedly ”signed” by late Idaho author Vardis Fisher. This was one of them.
“Damned fools!” it said. “First they plug ’em up, then they sell ’em on a postcard shaped like Oregon! — Vardis.”
Most of the springs were indeed “plugged up,” to develop hydropower, and the card was in fact shaped like Oregon. But at least it wasn’t the usual mistake; the card wasn’t shaped like Iowa.
It was always a pleasure to receive one of Trusky’s “Vardis” cards, which he mailed from as far away as Albania. They never failed to make me laugh. This one, however, was bittersweet. With him gone, it was as sad as it was funny.
Some of the package’s contents were routine – a card thanking me for speaking to a class, a letter from my late sister, a note from a former publisher. Others gave pause:
Oliver Gregerson’s memorial card, for example. Ollie owned and lived at Gregerson’s Wildlife Park, near Barber. He was publicly known for his legal battles to protect his privacy, which he guarded with singular intensity. The antithesis of a public park, his property was blocked by a locked gate and dotted with no-trespassing signs. There were rumors of rude welcomes for uninvited visitors, so I was skittish about going there to do a news story when his home burned.
My fears were unfounded. Gregerson turned out to be one of the sweetest people you could meet. He was in tears over his loss, and it would have been difficult to have imagined a more gentle soul. All he’d ever wanted was be left alone to care for his animals. The picture on the funeral card was of him cradling a baby badger in his powerful hands.
An eight-year-old card from an Elvis Gallagher was equally touching. It was in response to an interview I’d done with a survivor of a Nazi POW camp. Gallagher, who helped liberate the camp, had read my story and contacted him.
He was “bowled over,” Gallagher wrote. The two went on to meet and embrace 51 years after making history.
Re-reading his card, and the other cards and letters found in the forgotten package on the shelf, made the time spent worth it. An occasional purge is good for the soul.

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

Idahoans have little cause to complain about the weather. Even this year. We’re blessed with a pleasant, four-season climate and virtually none of the floods, hurricanes and other weather disasters that plague some parts of the nation.
But it sure would be nice to see the ground again.
How long has it been since we’ve seen the ground without snow or ice on it?
Forty-six days and counting. Not a record, but we’re getting there. The record is 63 days, in 1986.
Except for time in the Navy and college, I’ve lived in Boise all my life and this winter has given me a new experience. Never before have I had to hoe my roof. (Every store in town was sold out of roof rakes, which must be some kind of a record.)
Snowmagadden wasn’t entirely without redeeming factors, however. Kids enjoyed the snow days (though they used them somewhat differently than those of previous generations. More on that presently.) And the mountains of snow and ice, followed by rains and partial melt-offs, brought neighbors together.
Hunkered over shovels, picks and hoes, the folks in our neighborhood shared a sort of gallows humor about the unusual winter weather. Neighbors who had never previously met introduced themselves and commiserated over icy streets and rivers of slush. We helped clear each others’ gutters, push each others’ stalled cars. A neighbor named Mike – didn’t catch his last name – patrolled the streets with a snowplow and became an instant hero.
How bad is the winter of ’17?
For decades, old timers have rhapsodized about the snowy winter of 1948-49. It assumed almost mythic proportions. To see how the two winters compared, I spoke with Meteorologist Jay Breidenbach of the National Weather Service.
“The unusual thing about this year is that this is some of the deepest snow we’ve ever had in the valley,” he said. “The amount of snow on the valley floor is much more normal.”
More than in the winter of ’48-49?
That depends on how you look at it. That winter, Breidenbach said, had more snowfall than we’ve had so far this year – including a two-day storm beginning on Valentine’s Day that brought 13 inches of snow. But the snows melted more quickly that year; the maximum snow depth in Boise was nine inches. So far this winter: 15 inches.
“We had two storms of seven inches a week apart, and it was never above freezing so it didn’t melt or compact much,” Breidenbach said. “That’s very unusual. We’ll be talking about the winter of ’17 for a long time.”
Hard winters aren’t without benefits, of course. Snow has insulating qualities. Our house seems to have stayed warmer, even during the below-zero temperatures. Skiers, snowboarders, and snowmobilers love the snow. And it tends to bring out the best in people. I had surgery on the day of the Big Melt, and I can’t tell you how many friends, neighbors and relatives came by and helped or offered to help keep the gutters and storm drains clear.
That brings us back to the kids. Kids have always enjoyed snow, always will. But they love it differently in the digital age. Most of them don’t spend as much time outdoors so they aren’t as inventive when it comes to outdoor activities. When I asked my granddaughter Chloe, who is 10, if she’d ever made a snow fort, she looked at me as if I had three heads.
Snow forts used to be common during hard winters in Boise. They were made with snowman-sized snowballs arranged in a circle with an opening for a “door.” Snow forts were great for hanging out, making plans, cementing friendships over cups of steaming cocoa on winter afternoons. Their primary purpose, however, was to wage snowball wars – glorified snowball fights with opposing sides occupying forts, stockpiling “ammo,” and letting fly. If a particularly deadly projectile hurtled your way, you could duck and the fort would protect you.
Kids don’t do that sort of thing much any more, which brings me to something our state legislators might want to consider when they aren’t debating the finer points of sexual favors.
Everywhere you go, people have been complaining about snow that has made just getting out of the driveway an achievement. The snow has closed schools, hurt businesses, caved in roofs. Even kids don’t love it the way they once did. The only ones who are truly passionate about it are winter sports enthusiasts.
Therefore, in the interest of the majority of us who could do without snow, I hereby propose a winter-recreation tax. The tax would be imposed on skis, snowboards, snowmobiles, snowshoes and anything else related to winter sports. The proceeds would be used to transport excess snow in cities to the mountains, where it belongs. There’d be plenty of snow up there, clear roads and streets down here. Everybody’s happy.
I’m kidding, of course.
But one way or another, it sure would be nice to see the ground again.

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.

When I saw the obituary, my initial reaction was surprise. A nanosecond later, guilt.
It was somewhat surprising that I saw it at all. Perusing the obituaries isn’t a regular part of my morning routine. The news, the editorials, sports, features, weather … yes. Fixating on obituaries, however, has always struck me as being a tad ghoulish. I skim the page and, rarely seeing a familiar name, move on to other things.
But there she was, smiling from the page where none of us are in a rush to be: Anita N. Bader, 1920-2016.
One of the sweetest women I’ve ever known.
She was my favorite neighborhood mom, apart from my own, during my growing-up years. The guilt was over a voicemail she left several years ago. It had been decades since I’d heard from her. The voicemail asked me to return her call, but I got sidetracked and lost her number. I had every intention of tracking it down and calling her back but didn’t get around to it. One of those things you mean to do but don’t, and then it’s too late.
Mrs. Bader, as she was known to the neighborhood kids, had four kids of her own. Bill Bader, Billy in those days, was one of my three best friends in the neighborhood. She also had a daughter Michaele (pronounced Michael), a daughter Janie and a son Danny, the baby of the family.
The Baders lived in one of the neighborhood’s largest and nicest homes, on the corner of 25th and Lemp streets. It was rumored that Mr. Bader made $1,000 a month, an impressive sum in the mid-1950s. The average U.S. income was less than half of that. Whatever he was making, it was enough to be able to afford what was, for the neighborhood boys, one of the reasons for hanging out at the Baders’ house. Billy’s model train set was flat out the nicest, most elaborate on the block, and most likely for blocks around.
We spent hours in his basement with all the lights turned off, mesmerized by the lights of the trains and the signals, the smoke, the whistles, the clatter of the trains on the tracks. Knowing how difficult it was for young boys to tear themselves away from that kind of enchantment, Mrs. Bader would bring us snacks and sandwiches to keep up our strength without missing any of the fun.
Occasionally she’d issue a dinner invitation. Dinner with the Baders qualified as an event. It meant not only sharing a meal with the wealthiest couple in the neighborhood but sitting at the same table with beautiful Michaele, who was several years older and with whom all the neighborhood boys were hopelessly infatuated. And on least one occasion, it was the setting for an incident that, had it been caught on camera today, would have been a sure winner on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
The main course that night was lima beans and ham, served from a large kettle in the center of the dinner table. Dinner was just getting started when the family dog, a cocker spaniel named Sandy, leaped from a sitting start on the kitchen floor into the lima beans. It was rather graceful, actually, a perfect arc from the floor to the main course, ending with a clunk, a splash and beans flying everywhere.
Mr. Bader was furious, but his wife took it in stride. I think she might even have laughed a little. And in years to come, Sandy’s belly flop into the lima beans was laughed at countless times in the old neighborhood.
The Baders were unique in the neighborhood in belonging to Hillcrest Country Club. None of the other neighbors could have afforded such a thing. Howard Snyder may briefly have belonged to Ducks Unlimited, in the faint hope that it would allow him to bag an unlimited number of mallards. Roy Moore belonged to the Bartenders Association, and several of the neighbors belonged to bowling leagues. None of them would have dreamed of joining a country club. It was about as likely as one of them attending the G8 Summit.
For friends of the Bader kids, however, the country club was a summer jackpot. Mrs. Bader would load us into the family car, a DeSoto if memory serves, and treat us to an afternoon at the country club pool – a far cry from the noisy, crowded public pool to which we were accustomed. It was beautiful, the people who frequented it were beautiful and Mrs. Bader invariably sprang for country-club delicacies for all of us. It was there, I think, that I came to understand the difference between the haves and the have-nots.
That’s not to say that she was a snob. Far from it. She was friendly to everyone – on good terms with all of the neighborhood women, a second mom to a lot of the neighborhood kids. The Baders lived in Utah after leaving Idaho, and it was no surprise to learn from her obituary that she was voted Utah Mother of the Year in 1986.
She didn’t even get mad when I knocked Billy’s front teeth through his lip. We were playing baseball in his back yard. He was pitching; I hit a line drive that hit him in the face with a sickening smack and sent him to the E.R. I felt terrible about it and was certain I’d be punished, but aside from a few moments of panic Mrs. Bader couldn’t have been nicer. She even hired me to water the family’s lawn when they left for a week’s vacation later that summer, paid me the unheard-of sum of $15 for doing it and complimented me in front of the other moms by saying “the grass grew a foot while Woody (my childhood nickname) was taking care of it.”
She had her share of heartache during her life, losing both her husband and two of her children too soon, but remained a cheerful, positive force. Ninety-six when she died, she was the last of the moms from the old neighborhood. Mrs. Hally, Mrs. Robertson, Mrs. Moore, my mother, all gone now.
Her passing reminded me of a survey of elderly people who were asked what they regretted about their lives. Very few said they regretted things they’d done. Almost all said they regretted things they hadn’t done.
Not returning her call is something I’ll regret. Now I’ll always wonder what she wanted. We tend to let months and years go by, thinking there’ll always be time to return the call, mend the fence, set things right … later. Chances are there won’t be. Quicker than we realize, later is too late.

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 onetime president of the National Fruitcake Makers Association – yes, there actually was such a thing – is making Happy Cakes in a better place now.
Actually, he’s been making them there for some time. Dick Rodby – past president of the defunct fruitcake makers association, director emeritus of the Arizona Memorial Foundation and creator of the Hawaiian Happy Cake – passed away at his home in Hawaii in 2012.
I discovered his obituary online while trying to come up with an idea for a Christmas column. It had been years since I’d heard from him and I wondered what had happened to my old friend the Happy Cake maker.
I know – nobody is supposed to like fruitcake, let alone admit to it. Fruitcake has become the universal butt of Christmas jokes. People use it as doorstops, shoot it out of cannons. Fruitcake fusillades became so popular at one point that local practitioners made the news, chortling with glee as they fired flaming fruitcakes into the night sky at Quarry View Park.
But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when fruitcake was actually respectable.
Which brings me back to the Happy Cake maker. We became friends following a column I wrote in defense of fruitcake. Former Statesman columnist Judy Steele and I had had a friendly feud over fruitcake in our columns. Hers was anti-fruitcake; mine was pro-fruitcake. Rodby, fruitcake’s number-one cheerleader, ended up with a copy of mine and reprinted it in his newsletter. He had relatives in Boise, who had sent him the column, and whenever he came to town to visit them we’d meet for lunch or coffee. We became friends through a mutual love of fruitcake.
Fruitcake wasn’t merely his passion; it was his business, or at least a good part of it. He managed a rural Hawaiian restaurant, described in his obituary as “a refuge where time stood still and the gracious Aloha of old Hawaii resided.” The Kemoo Farm Restaurant was known for, among other things, Hawaiian Happy Cake.
He sent one of them to me every Christmas for several years. Happy Cakes are a uniquely Hawaiian twist on fruitcake. They’re made with pineapple and macadamia nuts. Think pineapple upside down cake with nuts and sprinkled with grated coconut. (My wife liked them, and she hates fruitcake.) They’re made with fresh ingredients that, if memory serves, were grown on Rodby’s Kemoo Farm. He invited me to visit there any number of times. Now I’m kicking myself for not taking him up on it.
His love of fruitcake began on Kemoo farm, where he grew up surrounded by tropical fruits. Mine began with my great grandmother Susie.
Grandma Susie was the kind of grandmother everyone wishes they had. She looked like a Norman Rockwell grandmother – aprons, old-fashioned dresses, a jolly face that belied a hard life. She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children, survived three fires that claimed everything she owned and somehow remained a cheerful, positive person, admired by all who knew her.
Her culinary skills were good enough to get her a job running the kitchen at what was then known as the Old Soldiers Home, in what is now Veterans Park. None of the old soldiers were ever known to complain about the cooking.
Her extended Christmas visits were a highlight of the year at our house. They were the happiest time of the year – old-fashioned lights gleaming on an old-fashioned tree, George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy” album playing on the stereo, the aroma of my mother’s and Grandma Susie’s baking filling every room.
My mother’s specialties were Christmas cookies and fudge. Grandma Susie’s piece de resistance was, of course, fruitcake.
Forget the fruitcake sold in supermarkets, the kind with the jellied candy that everyone loves to hate. This was real, homemade fruitcake, similar in texture to good zucchini bread but with Grandma Susie’s special blend of spices and dried fruit. She may or may not have doused it with rum or brandy. I was too young to care about such things in those days, but it’s a good bet that she did. Good fruitcake needs a dose of Authority, and she was too good a baker not to have known that.
Whatever the ingredients were, the result was almost sinfully delicious, a Christmas confection destined to become a cherished memory. In a perfect world, Grandma Susie would have included the recipe in her will. By now it would be a family treasure, at least at my house.
I thought of her and my late friend Rodby recently while passing a display of fruitcake at Costco. It was a bit of a surprise to see it there. It hasn’t been all that long since fruitcake’s reputation was at such a low ebb that it was almost impossible to find. The memory of asking for it in a store during that dark time and having a smart-mouthed employee shout that “this guy is looking for fruitcake,” as if I’d asked for illegal drugs or pornography, is still painfully fresh.
If it isn’t sold out (not likely), I’m going back to Costco this week to buy some. Christmas isn’t Christmas without fruitcake. And it’s the least I can do for Grandma Susie, and my departed friend the Happy Cake Maker.

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.

Many of you may know this, but for those who don’t, I’ve been working with Wide Eye Productions again this year in making the sequel to 2012’s Emmy-winning “Idaho the Movie.” “Idaho the Movie 2” was released last week and is available now in stores and online.

The sequel features places we missed the first time around. ((Idaho is so big and has so many beautiful and interesting places that it’s impossible to fit them all into a single documentary.) As beautiful as the first film was, the new one is in many ways even better. Technological advances in photography allowed the team to do things that were impossible four years ago. The new movie was shot in ultra HD for greater resolution and clarity, and many of the scenes were shot from a helicopter equipped with gyroscopically mounted cameras. The result is breathtaking aerial shots of Idaho as it’s seldom seen. Imagine skimming the peaks of the Sawtooths or White Clouds and you’ll have an idea of what they look like.

As with “Idaho 1,” I wrote and narrated the film, researching and writing about lesser known Idaho settings – the Magruder Corridor, the Hiawatha Trail, Hell’s Half Acre, Selway falls and others – in addition to some of the state’s more iconic attractions. The movie premiered at the Egyptian Theater in Boise and a theater in Idaho Falls and aired on  Boise’s KTVB Channel 7, but the public viewings are finished for the holidays so if you want to see it, check it out at any of the locations listed below. It makes a great stocking stuffer or gift to send to friends and relatives outside Idaho to show them just how beautiful our state is.

It’s available now at all Idaho Costco, Winco and Albertsons stores, Idaho Mountain Touring in Boise and Meridian and online at idahothemovie.com. I’ll be doing signings at the Boise Costco from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday Dec. 17 and the Nampa Costco on Sunday Dec. 18 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Hope to see you there, and Merry Christmas!

Tim

 

A recent Statesman restaurant review of the Owyhee Tavern noted that it lacked “campy remnants” of the Gamekeeper, the restaurant that previously occupied its space.
Campy as it may have been by today’s standards, the Gamekeeper occupied a space in the hearts of countless Boiseans. For more than half a century, it epitomized fine dining in Boise. It was also the setting for one of my earliest jobs and most memorable blunders.
Like the Owyhee Tavern, the Gamekeeper was upscale for its time. But how the times have changed! The Owyhee Tavern bears virtually no resemblance to its storied predecessor. It’s muted grays and browns, open and airy. The Gamekeeper was dark wood and red accents, dimly lit. Its heyday, as the reviewer noted, was “during a time when flaming cherries jubilee and lobster Thermidor were in vogue.”
My second job was working as a busboy there. My first job was on the end of a shovel, working for my father’s and uncle’s lawn-sprinkler company. I thought busing tables at a fancy restaurant would be a cinch compared to digging ditches in the hot sun. But I was 15 and knew diddly about the restaurant business.
First, a bit more about the Gamekeeper itself. It was the sort of place you went with your date to the senior prom or your parents toasted you for your college graduation or you celebrated paying off the mortgage. It was one of the most if not the most expensive restaurant in town, the sort of place most people went for a rare splurge.
And the sort of place where the wealthy and powerful dined as a matter of course. The lunch crowd typically included a millionaire or two, city council members, state legislators, corporate executives, an occasional governor or U.S. senator … these were the folks whose tables I’d be busing.
The first clue that the job might not be as easy as expected had nothing to do with the clientele. My shift started early in the morning. By 10 a.m. or so, my feet were starting to hurt. By the time the lunch crowd was filtering in, they were killing me. This had never happened on the ditch-digging gig.
“Hold your foot up so I can look at your shoes,” one of the waitresses said.
I obliged, giving her a closer look at the stylish-but-cheap shoes purchased to create a proper impression in my opulent new surroundings.
“No wonder!” she said. “There’s no support in those things. You need better shoes.”
She was right. My ditch-digging boots would have been more comfortable, if less appropriate.
Our boss was an imposing gentleman named Andy Horton. I was never sure of his title, either head waiter or maitre d’. Whatever his title, he was not a man to be trifled with, at least not if you were a lowly busboy. He wore an air of authority that had little to do with his neatly pressed black slacks, immaculate white dress shirts or elegant waist coats, of the sort favored by generals for formal dinners. As far as I was concerned, he may as well have been a general. I don’t recall ever speaking to him. Concerns that merited his attention were relayed through the chain of command, meaning the waitresses.
The waitresses were themselves a fairly formidable lot. You didn’t get a job waiting tables at the Gamekeeper fresh out of high school. Its wait staff consisted of veterans who had proven themselves at lesser restaurants and were hired for their efficiency and table-side manner. They were pleasant enough, but they had little patience with busboys who broke the rules, meaning me.
My first shift ended with a mixture of agony and elation. Never in my life had my feet hurt so much. But compared with digging ditches, the money was great.
The waitresses, on the other hand, were something less than elated.
“I’ve never seen such a cheap crowd,” one of them said.
“Me, neither,” another replied. “I didn’t get a single tip. Not even from my regulars.”
“You’re kidding!” I told them. “I did great!”
To prove it, I pulled a fat roll of bills from my pocket.
Imagine a pack of hungry wolves closing in on a strutting peacock and you’ll have an idea of the scene that followed. The only thing that saved me from annihilation or, worse, having to answer to Horton, was my total ignorance of the rules. The waitresses wasted no time informing me that the bills I’d happily pocketed were their tips, not mine, and that my cut was 10 percent. The only things that saved me were my youth and innocence. If they’d thought for a second that I knew better and was stealing from them, the result would have made me long for the relative bliss of digging ditches.
Later in life, I came to know the Gamekeeper as an occasional customer on special occasions. Horton and the waitresses I’d known were long gone, but there was a plaque in the lobby honoring his many years of service and his status as a Boise institution.
To its credit, the Owyhee Tavern is giving a nod to local history by featuring photos of old Boise street scenes as part of its decor. If one exists, it would be a nice addition to include a photo of the Gamekeeper in its prime. It had a place in our hearts, it was part of our history and it deserves to be remembered …
Almost as much as some of its former waitresses would like to forget a certain busboy.

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

With one of the most brutal presidential campaigns most of us can remember finally behind us, I’d like to offer some suggestions that could make the next one easier on long-suffering voters.
The campaign just-ended was one of the longest and most rancorous ever. Yes, the candidates did occasionally focus on the issues, on what they hoped to accomplish if elected. But they spent far more time brawling in ways that would bring reprimands if they happened at any respectable kindergarten. There were reports of parents not allowing their children to watch the debates, putting them off limits as they might with violent horror films (which at times the debates resembled).
The voters were subjected to hearing about the size of Donald Trump’s hands, and by extension other parts of his anatomy. We were forced to sit through reruns of his and Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties and Hillary Clinton’s e-mail improprieties. This more than any other campaign in memory was marred by irrelevant comments, rude remarks and outright violence. Can you imagine supporters of, say, JFK or Ronald Reagan punching each other out during their campaign speeches?
Part of the problem is that campaigns have become absurdly long. This one started almost two years before the election and seemed almost endless. How many of us even remember Jim Webb, George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, Lawrence Lessig or Mark Everson on the campaign trail?
Okay, so political junkies remember them. But most of us don’t. This despite the fact that at one time all were candidates for one of the major political parties. Campaigns have gotten so long and tedious that we either forget candidates and what they stood for, or wish we had. It tests both the limits of the candidates’ endurance and the patience of the electorate. (In neighboring Canada, a country known for moderation and common sense, presidential campaigns are measured in weeks rather than months, let alone years.)
In the interest of making campaigns more bearable, here’s my first suggestion. Limit them to six months. Pass a law stating that no candidate should be allowed to begin campaigning earlier than six months prior to election day. Six months is plenty of time to discuss and debate the issues without sending the public into a politically induced coma. If the candidates can’t win us over in six months, they clearly don’t have the smarts or communication skills needed to run the country.
Second suggestion: Force candidates to stay on track during debates. Limit them to debating relevant issues that are meaningful and important to the American people. Any candidate who strays from relevance by criticizing the opposing candidates’ – or anyone else’s – gender, ethnic background, hand size or hairstyle should be given a warning. Those who fail to heed the warnings would be ejected from the stage in a fashion similar to that with which pilots are ejected from doomed aircraft.
Third suggestion: It’s an understatement to say that neither of the candidates this time around was universally popular. Not only were they not admired by a majority of Americans in the way that popular presidents have been, but the election results brought protests that in some cases bordered on rioting. All this could be avoided with a simple addition to the ballot.
After listing the presidential candidates for the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Independents, Libertarians, Green Party, etc., we add “None of the Above.” If None of the Above wins, we have a do-over. Candidates who failed to get more votes than None of the Above would be excluded from running the second time around.
Campaigns and elections are, of course, expensive. But they don’t have to be. In the United Kingdom, political parties are limited to spending $29.5 million during the course of campaigns. No figures are available for the cost of Donald Trump’s campaign, but according to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton had raised almost $300 million by April – before the general election campaign even started.
In Germany, candidates are limited to one, 90-second television commercial.
Even without spending limits, expenses would be reduced if campaigns were shorter. Is the system really working for us if the major-party candidates have nearly two years to campaign and a sizable percentage of the American people still can’t stand one or the other of them? How many times did you hear people say the election was a choice between the lesser evil or ask whether this was the best the system could do?
I’d be willing to bet that if it had been on the ballot this time, “None of the Above” would have won easily.
Who knows? We might even get a better slate of candidates. We might get truly qualified people who are turned off by the thought of putting themselves and their families through grueling, seemingly endless campaigning. There might be a potentially great president out there right now who chooses not to run because the process is such a mess.
If we don’t do something to make campaigns shorter, less expensive and more focused on the issues, what will the next one be like? Will it start before painful memories of the last one have faded? Will multiple candidates fade from contenders to has-beens, leaving us with another distasteful choice? Hulk Hogan vs. Lady Gaga, perhaps?
Here’s hoping for the best for the next four years. May the new president grow into the job and the country regain some badly needed civility.
And next time around, may the campaign take a higher, shorter road.

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.

 

When they read the news of Ken Robison’s passing, most people recalled his many years of service as an Idaho state legislator. I remembered him as one of my early bosses.
Robison, who died recently following a long illness, served one term as a state senator and nine as a state representative. He was best known for championing conservation causes and education funding and was a leader of the the campaign to give homeowners the property tax exemption we still enjoy today.
Before he was a legislator, Robison spent a decade as The Idaho Statesman’s editorial page editor. His appearance reminded me a bit of an absent-minded professor – loosened tie, shirttail hanging out, a preoccupied expression that suggested weighty thoughts.
There was nothing absent-minded about his work, however. He was a meticulous researcher whose knowledge of tax codes, land use, the environment and other public issues was encyclopedic. His editorials won national awards for conservation writing and were instrumental in building support for protection of the White Clouds, designation of the River of No Return Wilderness (now the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness) and ending construction of dams on the Snake River.
This was the illustrious figure who, toward the end of his journalistic career, took on a rookie editorial writer as his assistant. My background included a brief stint as The Statesman’s Canyon County Bureau reporter, several years of covering Boise and Ada County government and a few months writing a personal column. Journalistic wisdom of the time had it that if you could think but couldn’t write, they made you an editorial writer. If you could write but couldn’t think, they made you columnist. As both, I was something of an oddity – one about to receive a baptism by fire.
I’d been Robison’s assistant for a week when he announced that he was going on vacation.
For a month! He would be spending it in a remote stretch of back country. There would be absolutely no way of reaching him in case of a problem. The editorial page would be mine for four weeks – four times the total amount of my experience as an editorial writer.
And I’d be doing it without an assistant. Looking back, it’s hard not to wonder whether his decision to acquire an assistant, something he’d never previously done, was based at least in part on his desire to take an extended vacation.
It wasn’t just a matter of writing editorials. The editor (acting editor in my case) had to do the editorial page layouts, choose the columns that would be on the page, handle Letters to the Editor and field complaints, which, given my lack of experience, were likely to be numerous.
Page layouts weren’t a problem. You blocked out spaces for the editorials, the editorial cartoon, a column or two and the letters to the editor, hoped your measurements were accurate or, if they weren’t, that the composing-room denizens who pasted up the pages would help make the necessary changes. Normally a cantankerous bunch, they took pity on me and did.
Writing the editorials was a challenge, especially when my opinion conflicted with those of the other editorial board members. A case in point was an editorial endorsing capital punishment. I was the only one on the board who was against it. A week or so after it was published, a letter to the editor called it “the most left handed endorsement I’ve ever read.” I was rather proud of that.
Surprisingly, there were few complaints – not counting the guy who screamed at me that it was my job to fight for his unprintable letter to the editor. He was later arrested for indecent exposure.
The proudest achievement of my time as acting editor was getting Mike Royko’s column on the editorial page. The late Chicago columnist was one of the smartest, wittiest columnists of the time.
I also tried to get Russell Baker’s column, but for that The Statesman would have had to buy the entire New York Times wire service. Baker was a marvelous columnist and the author an autobiography that won the Pulitzer Prize. Not long after my stint as acting editor, I received a letter from him thanking me for my failed attempt to get his column and adding that if we’d bought the Times wire just for that, “it might have been enough to get me a $10 raise around here.”
Robison dropped Royko’s column not long after returning from his adventure in the wilds. A serious man with lofty goals, he didn’t think it was a fit for his editorial page.
Disappointed as I was, it took nothing away from my admiration for him. He was a brilliant, driven journalist with a long and distinguished record of fighting for the environment and the little guy. No rookie editorial writer ever had a better role model.
Even if he did take long vacations.

***
The Ride to the Wall Benefit scheduled for Veterans Day, a subject of this column in June, has been postponed.
The purpose of the Ride to the Wall Foundation, begun by late rock and roll icon Paul Revere and Boisean Larry Leasure, is to help needy veterans. The benefit, featuring singer-songwriter Pinto Bennett and my group, the Mystics, was to have been at a venue that initially offered the space for free, then raised the price to four figures plus a guaranteed, four-figure minimum in drink sales.
So much for philanthropy.
The plan now is to postpone until Jan. 7 – Revere’s birthday. Funds raised will go toward opening a Paul Revere House for homeless veterans. They could stay there for up to a year while they got back on their feet.
The musicians are donating their time, and it would be nice to think that there’s a concert venue in Boise that’s more interested in helping our veterans than in making a buck.
If you know of such a place, please e-mail me at the address below.

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: This piece ran was published in The Idaho Statesman today,  the opening day of the World Series. A Cleveland Indians fan wrote an opposing view.

 

The Cubs will win the World Series.
In most years, that would be a rash if not absurd prediction.
This year is different.
This year’s Cubs are different. They won 103 games during the regular season, the best record in either league. They have one of the best starting rotations in baseball, one of the best bullpens, some great defensive players and some of the game’s best young hitters.
Several years ago, I had lunch with one of my childhood heroes. Bob King – he was known as Bobby King then – was a standout player for the Boise Braves, a Milwaukee Braves minor league team. He’s been a scout for the Houston Astros for over 25 years, and over lunch that day he told me about a young player he tried to sign for the Astros.
“He’s the best pure hitter I’ve ever seen,” King said.
This from a guy who has seen them all, in a career spanning more than six decades.
The player is now Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant, last year’s National League rookie of the year and a contender for the league’s most valuable player award this year. Bryant’s signing, combined with other moves by Cubs President Theo Epstein, kindled hope in my futility-battered heart that after years of disappointment, things might actually be changing for the Cubs. The curse might be broken, the heartbreak at an end.
A visit to Wrigley Field in September confirmed that. At others games I’ve attended there, the atmosphere was one of gritty pessimism. Even when the Cubs were doing well and the mood was buoyant, there was a sense that the sky could, and probably would, fall tomorrow.
The September visit couldn’t have been more different. New spirits are afoot at Wrigley. It was like being at a party with 41,000 optimistic friends. Even with the Cubs trailing for most of the game, the fans were uncharacteristically confident that they’d win.
And they did.
And who are they playing in their first World Series of my lifetime?
The Indians! It’s perfect. A Series for the ages, the curse broken at last.
The Cubs will win it all.
And if not, there’s always next year.

The voice on the phone said my computer was a mess. It was practically crawling with infected files. Immediate action was necessary.

I trusted the voice on the phone. It wasn’t as if it was a call from someone trying to scam me. I’d called him for help. The number I called was that of a reliable, well-known company that had provided me with dependable service for years.
At least that’s what I thought. Until it was too late.
Everyone worries about hackers, viruses, Internet scams … Corporations are hacked, the government is hacked … It’s reached the point you halfway wish you didn’t have a computer. We take precautions and hope we’re safe – until a scam with a different twist catches us off guard and suddenly we’re victims. That’s what happened to me.
Maybe telling my story will keep it from happening to you.
It started with a window that opened whenever I tried to use my e-mail. It said that my computer was unable to connect to e-mail and that I needed to enter my e-mail password. I did – repeatedly. The password didn’t work.
What to do? The logical thing seemed to be to call my e-mail service provider’s help line. Google provided a telephone number.
The person who answered said the only way he could help was for me to give him access to my computer. No problem. This, after all, was my e-mail provider – a respected company whose name you’d recognize instantly. A pillar of the cyber world.
With my permission, he installed software that gave him remote access to my computer.
“I’m doing a scan now,” he said. “You have a lot of infected files.”
That was a surprise. The computer had been operating normally. Nothing had been locking it up or slowing it down. The only problem was connecting to e-mail.
“You should be able to see the infected files on your screen now,” the voice said.
I could. A bar on a graphic showed the quantity of files growing steadily.
“They’re at .4 gigabytes,” he said. “That’s a lot!”
The bar continued to grow.
“Almost a whole gigabyte now. No wonder you were having problems. I’ll need to clean up your computer.”
The bar’s progress continued: 1 gigabyte, 1.2, 1.4 … It eventually stopped at 1.8.
“That was slowing your computer down a lot. When I’m finished, your computer will be a lot faster. It will work like it did when it was new.”
That was unsettling. The computer had always worked the way it did when it was new. And the program he was using for the scan was one I vaguely remembered being warned against. But he had to know what he was doing, right? He was a tech for an industry leader.
Once the “infected files” were removed, he said a firewall would need to be installed to keep the problem from happening again. He offered me three payment options. I chose three years for $299.99, and with a growing sense of unease gave him my credit card number.
Sleep didn’t come easily that night. The next morning, I took the computer to the store where I’d purchased it, a shop where the techs had skillfully solved problems for me in the past without charging a nickel. It took about 30 seconds for the problem to be diagnosed.
“You’re a victim of fraud,” the tech said. “You basically bought $299.99 worth of nothing.”
Worse, the guy I thought was fixing my computer had installed malware that made it vulnerable to things I didn’t even want to think about. The tech deleted the bad stuff and told me to call my credit card company immediately, dispute the charge and cancel the card.
I hated to do that. I’d had the credit card for years, had the number memorized. And companies that use it for payments would all have to be notified.
A hassle. But better than having scammers use it to charge a big-screen TV or a trip to the Bahamas.
Told what happened, a friend said the same thing had happened to a friend of his in Seattle. In his case, it was close to being a financial disaster. He didn’t have his credit card with him when the scammer asked for it, so he gave him his bank account number. If he hadn’t had second thoughts and called his bank right away, his previously sizable account would have had a zero balance.
To find out how common this sort of thing is, I spoke with Dale Dixon of the Better Business Bureau.
“It’s more common to have the scammer call you,” he said, “but the scammers also know how to push their phone numbers high into the Google search results for legitimate companies. I’m sure the companies are out hunting these guys, but it’s too pervasive a problem to effectively do much about it. The minute one is taken down, another five pop up. It’s the nature of the world in which we live.”
How do we protect ourselves?
“When you search for a number to call, make sure that you’re on the official website for the company you’re looking for,” Dixon said. “Don’t rely on the first results of a Google search. Once you’re on the official site, you’re going to find a legitimate phone number.”
Another important thing to remember, he said, is that “customer service for legitimate companies is never going to charge you an exorbitant fee for a service you may already have (like the firewall my computer already had). They’ll be very up front about any fees. They’ll tell you right away about any charges, and you can make the decision whether to go ahead.”
I was lucky. Like the guy in Seattle, I dodged the bullet before the scammers could wreak havoc with my computer and my credit card. Here’s hoping you’ll learn from my mistake.

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.

CHICAGO – Regular readers of this column know that I’m a fan of the longest-running failures in baseball and perhaps all of sports.
That would be the Chicago Cubs. My mother’s family was from Chicago, and rooting for underdogs builds character. Anyone can root for a perennial winner.
Someone once observed, accurately, that Cub fans are 90 percent scar tissue. After decades of heartbreak, however, it looks as if this just might be our year. If you follow baseball, you know the Cubs had the best regular-season record in either of the major leagues this year.
Decades of heartbreak? I watched at the Red Lion Riverside in 1984 when, for the first time since 1945, the Cubs were a mere one game away from advancing to the World Series. They’d won the first two games of a five-game playoff by a combined score of 17-2.
And lost the next three games.
I watched the 1989 playoffs at Wrigley Field when they took one of two games in Chicago – and went on to ignominious defeat in San Francisco.
The 2003 playoffs are still painful to recall. That was the year the Cubs were up by a score of 3-0 and just five outs away from winning their first pennant in 58 years. In a moment that will live in infamy, a fan named Steve Bartman deflected a ball that otherwise would have been caught for one of the five outs. The Cubs ended up losing the game and were eliminated the following night, sending their fans into apoplexy followed by extended mourning. Bartman is currently living in exile on the International Space Station.
It took a long time to heal after the Bartman debacle, but Cub fans are nothing if not resilient. Last month, I made my first, hopeful visit to Wrigley Field since then. This year’s young, talented Cubs were wrapping up a phenomenal season, and if they are in fact the team destined to break the infamous curse, I wanted to see them in person at least once.
The game was the reason for the trip, but my wife and I, our daughter and her significant other went learned things on a tour of the ballpark that we didn’t know about Wrigley Field, baseball history and even football history.
Our guide told us that the concession stands that are fixtures at everything from Boise Hawks games to major sports events worldwide originated at Wrigley Field? Before there were concession stands, vendors there sold food from carts they pushed through the stands. The carts, which had smoke or steam from the food cooking and umbrellas to protect the vendors from sun and rain, blocked fans’ view of the game.
Until some inventive soul came up with the idea of having fans go to the food instead of taking the food to the fans. The world’s first concession stand was at Wrigley Field. Something to think about next time you order a Bronco dog at Albertson Stadium.
In Wrigley Field’s early days, an insane asylum was just outside the left field fence. Patients watched the games from their windows and shouted bizarre, sometimes insulting things to the players. When young players took them to heart, the veterans told them not to worry because “it came out of left field.” An expression now in general use for far more than baseball.
When they hear the name Wrigley, most people think of chewing gum. But according to our tour guide, the Wrigleys weren’t always synonymous with it. William Wrigley used a stick of banana-flavored gum (now known as Juicy Fruit) as an incentive for customers to buy his main products – soap and baking powder. When he saw people keeping the gum but throwing away the soap or baking powder, he made chewing gum his main product and an empire was born.
A bit of trivia for football fans: The Chicago Bears played at Wrigley Field for nearly half a century. When they started, in 1921, the trademark, red and white marquee over the ballpark entrance was green and yellow. Bears founder George Halas was adamant that it be changed because those were the colors of the Bears’ arch rivals, the Green Bay Packers. (The back side of the marquee is still green and yellow.)
A little known fact among today’s NFL fans is that the Bears owe their name to the Cubs. Before they were the Bears, they were the Staleys. When the decision was announced that they’d be playing at Wrigley, a reporter asked Halas if they’d change their name to Cubs because of it. His response was that they were too big and strong to be Cubs; hence, the Chicago Bears.
When friends learned that we’d be going to Chicago, they asked if that was wise given the epidemic of shootings there. We were a bit concerned ourselves, but the Chicago we experienced was nothing like that seen in news segments about the violence. People were picnicking in parks, boating on the river, sailing on the lake … Locals told us the violence was largely confined to certain neighborhoods.
At Wrigley Field, it seemed far away. The Cubs were behind most of the game we attended but tied it in dramatic fashion in the bottom of the ninth inning and won with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the tenth. They’d clinched their division late the night before when the Giants beat the Cardinals, and with the winning home run the fans went wild. The party at the ballpark lasted over an hour. In the rest of the city, it went well into the night.
They could still blow it, of course. They are the Cubs. Regardless of season records, all true Cub fans know from bitter experience to be prepared for epic disappointment.
But by any measure, 108 years without a World Series victory should be enough. Whatever the transgression may have been that led to the notorious Cubs curse, the players and fans have more than paid for it. If there is a god of baseball, maybe he or she will finally give us a break.
We’ve had more than enough heartbreak.

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.

LAFAYETTE, La. – Some youthful friendships last a lifetime.
Others come and go.
Still others lie dormant, waiting to be rekindled years or decades later.
That’s how it was with me and my friend Kermit Duhon. Our friendship was rekindled this month after many decades. In the boy I had known I discovered a man of accomplishment, and in him, his family and his friends a kind of hospitality and generosity of spirit I’d never experienced.
Kermit and I became friends while stationed in Germany as communications technicians in the Navy. We were part of a group of sailors who enjoyed traveling and used the four-day breaks between our watches to travel to the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
He’s one of only two Navy buddies I’ve been able to find. Most had common names – Jim Thomas, Mike Dwyer, Greg Burt – names shared by too many people to narrow them down to the right one. But how many Kermit Duhons could there be? Thanks to the Internet, we’ve been in touch for several years now.
I remembered him as a happy-go-lucky teenager from Louisiana, a kid who laughed a lot, enjoyed life and didn’t seem to let much of anything get him down. So it was a surprise when he told me during a visit to his hometown of Lafayette, La. this month that he had been terribly homesick in Germany. He recalled sitting on a North Sea dike outside of our base and praying to be delivered from there when he looked up and saw a cruise ship with people smiling and waving at him.
“And if you could fix it so that someday I could be one of those ships,” he told the Almighty, “that would be good, too.”
Fast forward to today. Kermit Duhon, the sailor who prayed to go to sea on something other than a warship, has been on over 100 cruises all over the world. He’s now in the process of retiring from the highly successful travel company he started and turning the business over to some of his employees.
When my wife and some friends of ours decided to go to the BSU game in Lafayette this month, I e-mailed Kermit to ask if he could recommend some good Cajun restaurants there.
“Forget the restaurants,” he e-mailed back. “You’re staying with us. Minimum three-day stay.”
I wrote back to say that there were five of us, possibly seven, and we couldn’t expect him and his wife to put up that many people for three days. We could stay in a hotel and meet them at the game.
That was before we were introduced to Cajun hospitality.
He replied to my e-mail by saying that he and his wife, Margaret, lived on multiple acres with multiple homes for themselves and their grown children. We were staying there, and that was that.
On the day we arrived, they were just home from an extended trip. Their flight had arrived the night before. They had to have been exhausted, but you wouldn’t have known it.
“Come in and we’ll get you settled,” he said. “Then we’ll go over to Hardy’s for the party.”
Hardy is Kermit’s brother. He and his wife, Maudrey, were hosting a party to welcome us to Lafayette. It would have been more than gracious in any case – they’d never laid eyes on any of us before – but given the circumstances it was remarkable.
The Louisiana flood that made news for weeks this summer hit Lafayette hard. Hardy’s and Maudrey’s home had water in two rooms, his workshop was ruined and they were housing their daughter and son-in-law whose home was completely flooded.
And they were giving us a party.
There must have been 30 people there. One had caught and cooked enough sac-a-lait (Cajun for Crappie) to feed everyone. Others had made pork jambalaya, roux, courtbouillon and other Cajun delicacies.
One of the Duhons’ friends put on a brave face and showed up to welcome us despite suffering from a nasty sinus infection from mold caused by the flood. But the bravest face was that of Sid Janise. He’d just lost his wife of 52 years, but he was there for the party and had even planned a tour for us.
Everyone we met made a point of welcoming us to Lafayette. More than a few apologized that the flood had made it impossible to give us a full-blown Cajun welcome – as if the one we got was anything short of phenomenal. We were complete strangers to these people, but for them it was enough that I was Kermit’s friend.
Over the next few days, we were treated to a Cajun tailgate party, a swamp tour and a tour of the quaint brick buildings and beautiful grounds where Tabasco sauce is made. It was all wonderful. But they saved the best part, or at least the most moving, for last.
On the morning that we had to catch our flight home, they surprised us with a going-away party. People had gotten up early to make a gigantic pot of jambalaya and fill tables with side dishes and coolers with beverages.
Maurice and Paulette Premeaux came from nearby Abbeville, La. Maurice had just finished three years of work on the dream home where they planned to retire. He did it himself so everything would be exactly the way they wanted it. They watched in tears as the rising floodwater destroyed it, room by room. They lost everything. But they showed up for the party and put on smiles to welcome us.
Just before we had to leave, Kermit’s daughter Nicole surprised us with the final touch of Cajun hospitality. She’d made a cake and decorated it with the words, “Until We Meet Again.”
There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
At least not among the visiting Idahoans.
We left Louisiana feeling like we had about 30 new friends.
And an old one that it took far too long to find.

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.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic – Prague has been on my bucket list forever. It started with a National Geographic article describing it as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’ve wanted to go there ever since.
Like many places on our bucket lists, however, it was one you’d like to see someday but doubt that someday will ever come. For one thing, it’s not exactly around the corner – 5,311 air miles from Boise, to be exact. And until recent years, it was behind the dreaded Iron Curtain.
The Iron Curtain, for the benefit of younger readers unfamiliar with it, was the term once used for the political barrier separating the Communist nations of eastern Europe from the so-called Free World. For something that didn’t physically exist, the Iron Curtain was an extraordinarily scary thing. On one side freedom, on the other tyranny and oppression.
My first experience with what lay behind it was in what was then Communist East Berlin. The first person I met there was a woman in tears. She was crying because her boyfriend had been shot to death trying to escape to the West. Imagine Boise with a wall around it and anyone trying to escape being shot and you’ll have an idea of what cheery places the Iron Curtain countries were.
So it was with a certain unease that my wife and I rode the rails to Prague. True, it was liberated from Communist rule a generation ago. But those regimes were so repressive and lasted so long that the memories are hard to shake. Was Prague the lovely, lively city we hoped to find, or one haunted by reminders of its dreary past?
The first impression was positive. The streets were busy, the sidewalks crowded, the atmosphere vibrant. The desk clerk at our hotel, whose name was Lucia, was friendly and helpful. She seemed perfectly happy to answer questions she’d probably been asked a hundred times and went so far as to load us up with brochures and maps and write out directions to places we wanted to go.
“You’re not at all like people we were afraid we’d meet here,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“We thought it might still be a little bit the way it was under Communism. You know, when people were scared and depressed all the time.”
“Oh,” she brightly replied. “I’m too young to remember that!”
Of course. The Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule was in 1989. Lucia couldn’t have been older than her early 20s.
For a firsthand look at the way things used to be, we visited the aptly named Museum of Communism. It was all there: Stalin and other thugs, food shortages, beatings, executions, a culture of fear
And now? Prague today reminded us a little of Paris. Busy sidewalk cafes, magnificent architecture, cosmopolitan people who couldn’t have been more welcoming. When we asked for directions or information, they were not only willing but seemed genuinely pleased to help.
On our first evening in Prague, we asked Lucia if it was safe to go out at night.
“Of course!” she replied. “There are policemen everywhere.”
There were policemen. But they seemed less like enforcers than participants in an ongoing party. They smiled and laughed along with everyone else enjoying the festive summer evenings. I’ve felt less safe at night in parts of Idaho.
You have to wonder what the henchmen who enforced the brutal Communist regime were thinking. And what do they think now when they see the bustling sidewalks, the prosperity, the crowds of people enjoying their freedom?
Do they admit that their system was wrong? Just one generation after its demise, it couldn’t be more obvious.

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A lot of years had passed since I was last in Bremerhaven, Germany, my home for a year while stationed there in the Navy. Seeing it again also ranked high on my bucket list.
It was a place fondly remembered. To a kid from Idaho who had never been much of anywhere, it was impossibly picturesque – quaint buildings; winding, cobblestone streets, Old World charm all but oozing from the bricks and mortar.
The dollar was stronger then, and even on sailors’ pay we lived well. I bought a seven-year-old Mercedes for $400 and drove it all over Europe. Good German beer was the equivalent of 25 cents a glass. And sidewalk stands with bratwurst and French fries to die for were omnipresent.
At our duty station, we lived in red brick buildings around a grassy quadrangle lined with stately trees. For a military base, it was almost pretty.
And now?
The spacious lobby with the beautiful woodwork I remembered at the train station has been partitioned into a small waiting room and an Asian restaurant. Outside, the only thing that looked familiar was a church in what was once the heart of a charming downtown. The inviting shops and other businesses I remembered have been replaced by an antiseptic mall.
In a city that once seemed to have a busy bratwurst stand on every corner, we saw exactly one. And it was closed.
A woman at a tourist information booth answered affirmatively when asked if she knew how to get to what had once been our base.
“It’s an expensive taxi ride from here, and you wouldn’t recognize it,” she said. “It’s a housing development and a hospital now.”
She was more right than she knew. Almost everything had changed, and I recognized almost nothing. The quaint city I remembered so well has become more modern, less charming.
I’m glad we went there. It’s off of the bucket list now.
But Thomas Wolfe was right. You really can’t go home again.

This is the last of a series of five travel stories. Tim’s column will now resume its normal schedule of every other Sunday and be posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

NAIROBI, KENYA – Kenya was never remotely on my bucket list. It was a place that in in my wildest imaginings I never expected to be. The odds of my flying to Nairobi seemed about as likely as those of boarding a shuttle to Pluto.
Boisean Vincent Kituku, however, has a way of making the unlikely happen. He beat long odds by turning a dream of helping poor children in his native country into a life-changing high school. So it was nothing for him to get me and my wife on a plane to go there. He wanted us to teach the high school’s students from an American perspective. She had the advantage of actually having been a teacher, and he figured I might be able to teach the kids a little about writing, or at least not get in the way of people who knew what they were doing. He is an optimistic man.
So what was Kenya like? It was a country that never stopped surprising us.
“Look at all the signboards in English!” I said as we drove from the airport to the hotel on our first night there.
“Tim!” Kituku said in a tone of voice normally reserved for small children. “Kenya is an English speaking country!”
Actually, I knew that. But for some reason I was expecting more Swahili, Kenya’s second official language. Members of all 42 of its tribes are required to learn it. But every single sign was in English.
Some, from our perspective as Americans, were funny; others had us scratching our heads: Good Luck Hardware, Jazzy Hardware, Semi Divine Hardware, God’s Favor Butchery, Next Level Pub, Ready Meat Hotel, Overboard Investments (and haven’t we all had a few of those?).
It’s true that Kenya is an English speaking country, but “translation” is frequently required. A University of Wyoming graduate, Kituku jokes that he has a Wyoming accent. Well, everyone in Kenya has a Wyoming accent as thick as pine tar. Add to that the fact that many of the girls and women are taught to speak just above a whisper and we were continually asking people to repeat themselves.
We expected Nairobi to seem more exotic, more foreign, but American influence was everywhere: KFC, McDonald’s, Subway, Heinz Catsup, Tabasco Sauce, American movies, Budweiser beer, Hershey’s chocolate …
It was winter there – cool nights, warm days. The temperature most afternoons was in the 70s. Pleasant for us, but not for Kenyans acclimated to their steaming hot summers. Comfortable in shirtsleeves, we were continually surprised to see people bundled up in sweaters, parkas and stocking caps.
We drove to the schools Kituku wanted us to visit through countryside that was constantly changing. We’d be in lush green hills dotted with tea and coffee plantations, and an hour later in desert reminiscent of the drive from Boise to Mountain Home.
Miles from anything resembling a settlement, you’d see a dapper man in a suit and tie standing by the roadside waiting for who-knew-what? A woman in an elegant gown walking a red dirt pathway to who-knew-where? Who were these people, and what were they doing in the middle of nowhere?
We went to places that made the middle of nowhere seem like Times Square, on roads that defied belief. Take the worst road in Idaho, throw in shards of granite protruding from the dust every few feet and an occasional stream masquerading as a mud hole and you have Kenyan wilderness roads. Negotiating them requires extra heavy duty tires and suspension, special transmissions and full-time four-wheel drive. Even with all of that, reaching your destination can seem like a small miracle.
In cities, including Nairobi with a population of over 3 million, you see very few traffic lights. Traffic is controlled mainly with roundabouts and speed bumps. Most of the time, it works. But in rush hour, L.A. has nothing on Nairobi’s gridlock – or its smog. Emission controls aren’t required. Life would be healthier and more pleasant for its citizens if they were.
It’s an understatement to say that Nairobi has experienced dramatic growth. We were driving through one of its suburbs one morning when we passed a sign that said simply, “Karen Blixen House.”
Karen Blixen? Pen name Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa” and some other perfectly wonderful books? When she lived there, it was a pastoral coffee plantation. Now it’s completely surrounded by a teeming city.
“Can we go inside?” I asked Sam, our driver.
“No, it’s a private residence.”
Talk about missing a bet. A foundation could buy it, charge admission and make a fortune for a charity. Dinesen was one of the 20th Century’s great writers. I’d happily pay to see the place where she lived and worked.
This was on one of the days off that Kituku gave us from working with the students, and the day’s itinerary included an African dance exhibit. I was more interested in seeing real life than tourist attractions, but the end of the performance was unexpectedly moving.
To the surprise of everyone but the performers, giggling audience members were dragged onstage to try to dance with them: Africans, Americans, Europeans, Asians, Hispanics … Their smiles and laughter and genuine good will left me misty eyed. This was at a time when terrorist attacks and racial tension were dominating the news back home. And here, for a few moments at least, people of every creed and color were simply having fun and enjoying life together. How sad, for all of us, that it can’t be that way more of the time.
Visits to the schools could be emotional as well. The students were beyond grateful for small things we take for granted – pencils, pens, shoes, underwear. Some of them live in homes smaller than many Americans’ closets. And those are the ones lucky enough to have homes. We met a girl at Kituku’s school who came from a home made of sticks and slept on a bed of sticks. Some Kenyans have virtually nothing but the clothes they wear.
Weeks earlier, Kituku told us that going to Kenya was a transforming experience, that we would return as different people.
Did we? Yes and no. We’re the same people, but our gratitude for what we have increased exponentially. We Americans don’t always appreciate how truly lucky we are. What cosmic force allowed us to be born into relative luxury while so much of the rest of the world barely has enough to eat?
My wife and I volunteer at a shelter in Boise and thought we knew what poverty was before we went to Kenya. We had no idea. Seeing it made us more grateful for what we have and more committed to sharing. We can’t afford to add a wing to a school or a hospital, but we can help more students go to a school that means the difference between a good life and one of destitution. We can afford $400 for eye surgery that will prevent a child from going blind. I’ve spent more than that on guitars.
Did Kenya change us? No, not dramatically.
Did it change our commitment to helping those less fortunate than we are? Absolutely.

Next: Misadventures in Europe by rail. Tim’s column appears in The Idaho Statesman on Sundays for the next two weeks and every other Sunday after that. It’s posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Tim Woodward recently returned from Kenya, where he spent time at Caring Hearts High School and several primary schools. Donations from Boise support or help support all of the schools. This is the second of two stories from the trip.

YATTA, KENYA – Kikeneani Primary School is a series of block buildings with rusting, corrugated metal roofs and dimly lit, overcrowded classrooms. Some of its students are from families so poor they pay their children’s tuition in goats.
The school is one of those that supply students to Caring Hearts High School, where tuition, board and room are paid by donations from Boise. Caring Hearts students have adequate living quarters, regular meals, dressy uniforms. Many Kikeneani students don’t have shoes.
The government gives the school $13 per year per student.
“It’s enough for chalk and some repairs,” Principal Joshua Ngumbo said.
The school’s singers and dancers were good enough to qualify for a national competition, but couldn’t go because there was no money for matching costumes.
“Parents support us with what little they can,” Ngumbo said. “They don’t have much.”
Parents with enough food provide their children with a modest lunch to take to school. Students whose families don’t have enough food go hungry at school.
Christopher Mumo, who went to school at Yatta and now teaches math and physics at Caring Hearts High School, worries about the overcrowding at Kikeneani Primary.
“It’s difficult for the teachers,” he said. “They are very good, but the classes are so large (11 teachers for 380 students). There is a desperate need for more teachers .”
Yatta is in an arid part of Kenya. During a recent drought, many of the plants and animals died. Boise’s Caring Hearts and Hands of Hope sent the school $2,000, enough to feed the students for three months.
Boisean Vincent Kituku, CHHH’s president and the founder of Caring Hearts High School, has no trouble relating to the Kikeneani students. He grew up not far away, in similar circumstances.
“I was the firstborn of 12 children,” he told the students, their teachers and a small contingent of parents standing or seated on portable chairs outside the school for an assembly. “I grew up in a house of mud. My mother taught me to write with a stick in the dirt. When I was 13, my mother brought me something all wrapped up. Can you guess what it was? It was underwear. I was 13 when I got my first underwear, 17 when I wore my first pair of shoes. I was nine before I saw a watch. It was noon when I couldn’t see my shadow. It was three when I cried for water.”
His point, that he once was as poor as the Kikeneani students but through years of hard study rose above poverty, found its mark. Where music, dancing and cheers had punctuated the hot afternoon moments before, the only sound was the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees.
“As long as you have a dream, you are not poor,” Kituku told his audience. “A little dream can make a big difference in your life and the lives of those you love.”
Dedan Mutua’s dream is to attend Caring Hearts High School when he’s old enough. Seven but small for his age because of malnutrition, he lives near Kikeneani Primary School but isn’t a student there. Dedan is the son of a single mother who died of AIDS. He took her death so hard that for a long time he wouldn’t sleep anywhere but on her grave. His grandmother took him in, and CHHH built her a home and pays for him to live at private boarding school where he has enough to eat. His grandmother walks two kilometers to visit him there.
Kituku delivered 100 new school uniforms to the Kikeneani students on a July day when he visited with a group of Caring Hearts sponsors. The clothes’ recipients immediately ran inside and changed out of the frayed, faded uniforms they’d been wearing. The only things brighter than the vibrant blue of their new sweaters were the smiles on their faces. You’d have thought it was Christmas morning.
The uniforms cost $15 each.
Before they left, Kituku and the sponsors were invited to sit at outdoor tables with lavender tablecloths and treated to a display of the school’s award-winning dancing and singing and a feast of bananas, oranges, chicken livers, bread, bottled water and tea. It was more than the students had to eat all day. Visitors who had grumped about the heat, dust and bumpy roads during the drive to the school were reduced to silence by the realization that their visit was a highlight of the school year.
“We have no words to thank you,” Ngumbo told them. “We hope that you will come to visit us again and that someday one of us can go to America.”
When school ended for the day and it was time for the visitors to leave, every student walking the road that led to their homes waved, smiled and shouted “bye bye.”
Every single one of them.
Another of the schools CHHH helps support is the primary school at Kangundo, Kenya. Families of 300 of its 1,100 students can’t afford the equivalent of $5 a month for school lunch, so the kids go hungry at school. Another 100 are orphans.
The school accepts blind children from several counties. Sixty of its 1,100 students are blind, virtually all of them penniless. A few have multiple disabilities. One blind boy has a condition that affects his equilibrium. To keep his balance, he constantly has to move his head.
Some of the blindness is caused by malaria, some from a type of cataracts that occur in children. Treatment that would prevent those with cataracts from losing their sight costs $200 per eye. Few families are able to afford it.
Patrick Mbauni lost his sight when he was 10. He dropped out of school because of it, but never lost his desire to learn. He is now a 24-year-old fourth grader at Kangundo Primary.
“Normally he would be far too old to be at this grade level,” Principal Bernard Kivava said. “But he works hard and gets along well with the others. He is like an older brother to the younger boys and girls.”
Mbauni’s developmental disabilities are severe enough that he’ll have almost no chance of academically qualifying for high school. Kituku hopes to enroll him in a vocational school where he’ll be trained for a job working with his hands.
The blind students use braille textbooks to pursue their studies. A braille textbook costs 1,200 to1,500 shillings ($12 to $15), Kivava said, compared with 270 shillings for normal textbooks. CHHH does what it can to help. Donations from Boise have paid for school supplies, walking canes for the blind, several computers and new mattresses.
“There needs to be uniformity for all of the students,” Kituku said. “Social discrimination, where kids whose families can afford it have expensive mattresses while the poor languish in rags, is not encouraged.”
Nine graduates of the school are now enrolled at Caring Hearts High School, where they are being educated for good jobs. Many of its students will go on to universities.
A jolting, six-hour drive from Kangundo, over roads that make travelers feel as if they’ve spent the day in a blender, is the Masai Mara (Masai Plains) Game Park. Safaris that draw wealthy tourists to Masai Mara cost more than the Masai people who live in a village there will see in their lifetimes.
The village’s ten families live in dwellings made of cow manure, housing an average of 11 people each. The structures are roughly 130 square feet. There are no windows and one, four-inch hole for ventilation. The heat and smoke from the fires used for cooking, and for warmth in the southern-hemisphere winters, are stifling.
The reality of contemporary life there is nothing like the romanticized version of the Masai seen in “Out of Africa” and other Hollywood films. The days when the tribe was self reliant and reigned proudly over a harsh environment are, if they ever existed, a fading memory. Today the Masai conduct tours of their village, carry visitors’ bags, sell blankets, jewelry and trinkets.
“A few of them would like to keep their traditional culture, but the Masai see the writing on the wall,” Kituku said. “They are surrounded by so much wealth. There are probably 5,000 people a year from all over the world who come here for safaris. A lot of the tourists would like the Masai to stay traditional, but the Masai can see how the rest of the world is. They are ashamed of their poverty.”
Poor as it is – its students are thrilled with gifts as basic as pencils and pens – the village’s school may be its inhabitants’ best hope for a better future. Entrance requirements at Caring Hearts High School are less stringent for Masai children. Three are now students there.
“They struggled at first,” Kituku said. “They were at the bottom of their class. Now they are catching up and have passed a few of the other students. Being poor doesn’t mean that they are not bright.”
Few of the Idahoans and others who donate to CHHH will ever see those students, or those at Yatta or Kangundo or Caring Hearts High School. They’ll never see their radiant smiles or hear their heartfelt expressions of gratitude. If they could, they would know that their generosity is making a difference.

Tim Woodward’s regular columns, beginning with a column on his personal experiences in Kenya, will return next Sunday. HIs columns are posted on woodwardblog.com on Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.