Tim Woodward recently returned from Kenya, where he spent time with students, their sponsors and teachers at Caring Hearts High School. The school was founded by a Boisean and is largely supported by donations from Boise people. This is the first of two stories from his time there.

NGLUMI, K enya – Brenda Muinde wakes up every weekday to the ring of her dorm matron’s bell at 4 a.m. She has half an hour to bathe, dress and get to a study hall. Of the the next 17 hours, all but three will be devoted to study and classes.
She’s grateful for every one of them.
At home, the first sound she heard would have been her grandmother telling her to get up and gather firewood. She’d have had no daily bath, no medical supplies or modern sanitation, not enough to eat.
“I don’t know what I would do without Caring Hearts High School,” the 16-year-old sophomore said. “I would have no future. I would have to work as a maid or a prostitute.”
Most of the school’s 137 girls have similar stories. Details vary – some are orphans, some victims of abuse or other family tragedies – but the common denominator is poverty.
Juliet Mutua’s father is dead, her mother mentally ill. Prior to coming to Caring Hearts High School, where she lives in a dorm neat enough to satisfy a drill sergeant, she lived in a house made of sticks and slept on a bed of sticks. The Caring Hearts Foundation built a home for her and her mother so she’d have a place to study. Painfully shy but exceptionally bright, she passed her entrance exam the first time and has the highest grade point average in her junior class of 30 students. She wants to be a doctor.
The school year lasts 11 months. The newest student, Grace Kimeu, doesn’t want to go home between terms because there is virtually nothing there for her. An abusive father, not enough to eat, not enough of anything.
“Thank you with all my heart!” her mother, Caroline Kimeu, tearfully said to student sponsors visiting from Boise. “Thank you for saving my daughter.”
Winfred Nduku didn’t have enough to eat at home and suffered from malnutrition. She passed the public high school entrance exam three times, but her family couldn’t afford tuition. Now, with her tuition funded by donations from Boise, she’s a 19-year-old freshman at the high school.
“It breaks my heart to think of that,” Vincent Kituku, the school’s founder, said. “I have a son the same age who is a junior in college.”
One student was trying to care for her mother, who died of AIDS. Caring Hearts transferred her from another school following her mother’s death to give her a better chance to succeed. Such stories are common in rural Kenya, where few can afford medical care.
Public high schools are available, but they cost from $350 a year for the bottom tier to $3,000 a year for schools only wealthy families can afford. Most families can’t afford $350. Daughters of families too poor to send them to high school face bleak futures. The luckiest end up doing menial labor. Those not as fortunate can be sold at puberty to older husbands – polygamy is legal in Kenya – or become prostitutes. High school makes all the difference, leading to relatively good jobs or university educations and professional careers.
Caring Hearts is the only high school in the country where donations, virtually all from Boise, pay the fees of students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend high school.
Dollars go a long way in Kenya. Large donations – a $100,000 donation from the Morrison Foundation helped get the school up and running – but a $500 donation pays for a year of school, including room, board and school uniforms. (University tuition is about the same.) It’s the first time in many of the students’ lives that they’ve had nice clothes, a good bed, enough to eat and adequate medical care.
Kituku, a native Kenyan who has lived in Boise since 1992, started Caring Hearts High School two years ago. He remembers the night that led to its creation, and that changed his life:
“It was in 2010. I came to Kenya to visit my wife’s sister whose son had been kicked out of school for an $80 balance. Eighty dollars! His family couldn’t afford to pay it, and that was exactly what I was paying for a hotel. What I was paying for one night would have kept him in school. I left that hotel and never went back. From that time on, I have been working to help these kids go to school.”
A writer and public speaker, he raised enough money through donations and speaking engagements over four years to pay for 240 needy students’ tuition at public schools. But he was convinced that he could help more students more effectively by opening a school himself.
By 2014, Kituku had raised enough money to purchase a school with eight classrooms, a dormitory, athletic field, garden, kitchen, dining hall and a duplex on an eight-acre compound near Nglumi town – 90 bone-rattling minutes from the capital of Nairobi on roads more than generously supplied with potholes and speed bumps.
Boisean Carrie Barton became a major donor to the school because she “liked the fact that Vincent was so intimately involved and that there were almost no administrative costs. Virtually all of what you donate is used to help the kids. That, and I could be involved. I help with some of the administrative work, and I can go to Kenya to help at the school and interact with the students.”
Barton spent long days at a desk in the school parking lot last month, interviewing students about their younger siblings.
“All of the siblings who pass the entrance exam will go to school here,” she said. “I only asked the girls about their siblings, but they kept throwing in cousins, nieces, nephews … It was touching.”
When the Caring Hearts Foundation purchased the school in 2014, Kituku said, it “was run down and overgrown with weeds. The teachers weren’t qualified, there was no discipline and the dorm was dirty and messy. There was no library, no computer lab or science facilities. Seven students shared one book.”
Most of the students, he added, were from wealthy families and lacked motivation. Some were selling drugs. One tried to burn the dorm down because he wanted to quit school and go home.
The difference between then and now is night and day. All but one of Caring Heart’s nine teachers are college trained, and the ninth is working on his degree. No books are shared. Every student has textbooks and access to a library, a science lab and a computer lab with 40 computers. A new well supplies the school with safe drinking water.
Students are attentive in class, respectful to teachers. Infrequent disciplinary problems are referred to Principal Pamela Atieno Ndongo, a commanding figure who teaches math and business and nips unacceptable behavior in the bud by merely raising an eyebrow or changing her tone of voice. She lives in the campus duplex.
“It’s more than a full-time job,” she said. “I need to be here all the time for things that can come up after school hours.”
By American standards, the campus is modest. The classrooms are spartan; the study hall is a converted chicken coop. But the classrooms are airy and well lit, the grounds and buildings neat and tidy, the students hard working and unfailingly polite. They speak softly and tend to look away when addressing grownups. In their culture, loud voices or looking directly at a person while speaking are considered disrespectful.
In addition to studying physics, geography, biology, chemistry, math, reading, history, government, English and Swahili (plus electives), they do their own laundry and grow their own fruits and vegetables in the school’s garden.
A sign outside the classroom building encourages them to “think big; it doesn’t hurt.” Another cautions, “Silence! Learning taking place.” The girls study hard, but smile easily and often. They’re clearly happy to be here.
Though their backgrounds may be all the motivation they need, the administration isn’t shy about reinforcing their work ethic.
“Work twice as hard, three times as hard,” school treasurer Bernard Kivuva admonished them during an assembly. “The way you can repay your parents and your sponsors is to be successful. If you are, they will be happy. If you are not, they will cry.”
The school slogan, “Youth empowered to serve, lead and influence,” is meant to be taken literally. Graduates are expected to go on to universities and use their educations to improve lives in their communities and beyond. A majority of students interviewed hope to become doctors, engineers, scientists or teachers.
Improving the community doesn’t wait for graduation. On a hot day in July, the schedule included a rare break from classes to pick up litter in Nglumi, the nearest town. It was hard, dirty work, but there were no complaints. The girls sang, chatted and giggled like teenagers everywhere.
The contrast with their former lives couldn’t be greater, but for Kituku it’s just a beginning. He plans to add another floor to the dormitory, build another classroom building and add a Life Skills program and an improved kitchen and dining hall. A typical day’s fare: bread, porridge, corn, beans, fresh vegetables and tea.
He’s also negotiating for land to build a school for boys. Using education to alleviate poverty in his native country, with help from caring hearts in his adopted country, has become his mission in life.
It extends even to a Massai village inhabited by the poorest of the poor, where a lucky few students now have a chance to escape poverty that can reduce visitors to tears.
“Caring Hearts has introduced me to human suffering I never knew existed,” Kituku said. “And to caring people I never knew existed.”

Next Monday: The poorest of the poor. Schools that make Caring Hearts High School seem like an educational paradise.

Note: Sorry to be posting this one late. I just returned from almost three weeks in Kenya and Europe. This ran in The Statesman before I left, but my Statesman deadline is five days ahead of the publication dates and I can’t post columns on the blog until after they’ve run in the newspaper. Thanks for your patience. — Tim

 

Twenty-some years ago, at a party in the Owyhee Hotel, a man in a billowing, bright orange mumu approached me and struck up a conversation.

Mumu isn’t the right word, but it’s the the closest I can come to describing his attire, which was from his native Kenya. He’d recognized me from the photo that runs with my column and figured it was time we got to know each other. Little did I suspect that one day he’d be leading me on one of the great adventures of my life.
His name was Vincent Kituku. You may know him from the occasional Faith columns he writes for this newspaper, or as a motivational speaker. He’s traveled to towns and cities throughout the state giving motivational lectures. He’s given motivational lectures to, among others, the BSU football team. He’s a motivated fellow.
We’ve stayed in touch ever since that night — e-mails, coffee, the occasional lunch. I’ve interviewed him for a column or two; he interviewed me for a radio program. In recent years, most of our conversations have had to do with the high school he started in Kenya.
Think about that. Imagine trying to start a school – a high school, no less – in a poor country on the other side of the world, relying mainly on donations. Only someone as motivated – driven might be a better word – as Kituku could have pulled it off.
Caring Hearts High School, in the rural area of Kenya where he was raised – has 120 students, mainly girls. It’s made an enormous difference in their lives.
This is a place so poor that at ages when most American kids are taking junior high for granted, girls can be sold to much older husbands. Here, where that kind of poverty is all but unknown, we’d say that was unthinkable. There, it can mean survival.
Knowing a few of the things that motivated Kituku might help you understand: A promising college student, an orphan, who couldn’t attend college because he couldn’t afford the $200 tuition. A student who had to drop out of high school because he didn’t have $105 to pay for his senior year. A mother of six who hanged herself because she couldn’t afford her daughter’s high school tuition.
Caring Hearts High School’s students’ fees are paid by donations, mainly from people here in Boise. Saved from lives of drudgery, or worse, most of the students go on to good jobs or to college and even better jobs – teachers, accounts, engineers, doctors … The school has made all the difference for them.
That brings us to my great adventure. A few years ago, my wife and I started sponsoring a girl at the high school. Her name is Elizabeth. Her picture is on our refrigerator; we got a nice letter from her last year. Sponsoring a student there is, by U.S. standards, ridiculously cheap – $500 a year, including room and board.
We thought it would be nice to meet Elizabeth one day, but never thought it would happen. Kenya is over 9,000 miles from Boise. Other “long” trips we’ve taken – Mexico, Hawaii, the eastern U.S. – have been comparative joy rides. And Nairobi, where we’ll be landing, has never been on our bucket list.
But, we’re going. Kituku asked me to teach writing to the kids at Caring Hearts. My wife, who has the benefit of actually having been a teacher, will teach other subjects from an American perspective.
I cannot tell you how much this at once excites and intimidates me. Yes, it could be the trip of a lifetime. But what do I know about teaching? Zip, that’s what. And the thought of traveling all that way, especially with my history of travel mishaps, is, frankly, a bit daunting. It wouldn’t be out of character for me to misread or misunderstand something, get on the wrong plane and end up in, say, Dingo, Australia or Catbrain, England.
You don’t just get up one day and go to Kenya. We started getting ready in March, with vaccinations. The people at St. Luke’s Travel Clinic couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful. In addition to inoculating us for typhoid, yellow fever and hepatitis, they gave us prescriptions for malaria pills and antibiotics and sent us off with friendly advice and a sackful of useful travel information.
I won’t bog you down you with all of them, but a few of the things you need to do to go to Kenya are applying for visas, setting up international plans for your phones, getting adaptors and voltage changers to charge your phones, making sure your bank and credit card companies know where and when you’re going, making copies and backup copies of important documents, and – my favorite – spraying every garment you’ll be wearing with three ounces of insect repellent. Even socks. We went through an ocean of the stuff.
And those are just a few of the things.
Our flight home included a four-hour layover in Amsterdam that we were able to stretch into a week. Amsterdam is a short train ride from the city where I was stationed in Germany in the Navy, and returning to see old haunts there has been on my bucket list for years. We’ll also spend a couple of days in Prague, also on our bucket list, and a day in Munich before flying home.
You can read all about it, starting Aug. 14 and each Sunday thereafter for four weeks: two feature stories about the school and the students in Kenya, and three columns from the rest of the trip.
No one is more curious than I am about what they’re going to say. I’m told that Africa has a way of changing people, and that no one goes there just once. This, in fact, will be the fourth trip for one of the Boiseans who’s going with us.
Kituku calls a first visit to Kenya “a transforming experience.”
I can’t wait to tell you more about that.

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

 

Dear subscribers:  I’m posting this one a few days early to make up for posting the next one a few days late. The reason is that I’ll be out of wi-fi contact for a while. To find out why, be sure to read the one after this, which I’ll post early next month. — Tim

HOOD CANAL, Wash. – When my wife and I returned this year from our annual trek to the family cabin to keep the weeds (and to an extent the neighbors) at bay, I wondered for the first time whether it was worth it.
Not that we aren’t lucky to have the place. Usually it’s wealthy people, or those whose parents or grandparents built cabins when vacation property was ridiculously cheap, who are fortunate enough to have such getaways.
Ours came to us more or less by default. My wife’s folks built a place on Hood Canal in Washington state when it could be done inexpensively. They built it with their own hands, spent summers there until its flights of stairs became too much for them, then sold it and bought another one, without stairs, a short distance away.
We joined them there every summer to go boating, clamming, beaching and otherwise enjoy ourselves. It was the best time of the whole year.
When my father-in-law died and my mother-in-law’s health problems kept her from going there anymore, things changed. Now, the responsibilities are ours. Days of glorious loafing have given way to paying the bills and doing the maintenance work. Giving up loafing to pull weeds, sand and repaint the deck, scrape moss off of the roof and other chores made us realize how good we had it as guests all those years.
Keeping a place where you spend only a few weeks a year from looking like it’s been abandoned is challenging at best. The biggest problem – weeds. I don’t know if it’s true but have heard that an evergreen tree that takes 300 years to grow to a certain height in Idaho takes 30 years in Washington – the Evergreen State. All that rain – our part of Hood Canal can get more rain in a month than Boise does all year – makes for weeds of shocking proportions.
When we arrived for Weed War One last year, the grass and weeds were three feet tall. This year, we had schedule conflicts and couldn’t make it until later in the season. A slow learner, I naively hoped that somehow we’d get lucky and the weeds wouldn’t be three feet tall again.
They weren’t. They were four feet tall.
“It’s a jungle!” my wife said as we parked the car. “No wonder we got that thing in the mail.”
“What thing in the mail?”
“The property owners’ newsletter. It said that some people had been letting their yards go and needed to take better care of them.”
Our yard clearly had to be at the top of the list. Hoping the neighbors weren’t forming an impromptu lynching party, we hustled our things inside and locked the doors for the night. If we could make it till morning without the more volatile neighbors knowing we were there, there was a chance for redemption.
In the bright, hopeful light of morning, the yard looked even worse. Every weed known to exist in Washington, and possibly then some, was there and thriving. Did I say four feet tall? A few were five feet tall. More than a few had stalks almost as big around as my wrist. I’m fairly certain that some of them had fangs.
That was in the front yard. In the back yard, the grass was knee deep and billowing in the breeze like a Kansas wheat field.
There isn’t any grass in the front yard any more, thanks to our ingenious attempt a couple of years ago to achieve year-round weed control. We were so mortified by the yard’s appearance on our spring visit in 2014 that we devised a “permanent solution.”
First we sprayed the front lawn with weed and grass killer. Then we put down weed-barrier fabric guaranteed to stop everything but a nuclear attack. On the front half of the yard next to the street, we put six inches of gravel on top of the weed barrier. On the other half, next to the house, we put bark over the weed barrier. To brighten things up a bit, we made rings of block and planted flowers in them. Then, feeling smug and righteous, we we drove home to Boise and celebrated our solution.
What we didn’t realize was that our week of grinding labor to banish weeds forever had instead created an ideal planting medium for airborne weed seeds. They quickly outdid themselves at sprouting in the bark and gravel (probably the minute we left for Boise), resulting in the debacle that had us hiding in the house overnight like criminals.
Early the next morning, we were up and pulling weeds. Some had roots so deep they had to be dug out with a shovel. That was in the bark. The gravel, meanwhile, had hardened into something like concrete. Pulling the roots there was next to impossible – with a shovel or even a crowbar. Those we sprayed. The tall grass in the back yard was brought into submission with a weed eater. Getting the place to look respectable again took three long, hard days. By then the neighbors had called off the posse and were speaking to us again.
And I was beginning to wonder whether it would make sense to sell the place. The kids and grandkids would never speak to us again, but they weren’t the ones nursing blisters and and slipped discs every spring. We had, in fact, gone full circle. Like my wife’s folks before us, we were now the ones doing the work while the kids did the loafing. And from a practical standpoint, how much sense does it make to pay the bills every month and try to keep a house and yard looking presentable when you’re only there a few weeks a year?
On our last night before heading home, I decided to go for a walk to get the kinks out and decide how to approach the clan about selling the place. As usual, my footsteps took me to the dock.
The dock is one of my favorite places anywhere. It’s at the end of a long pier that stretches far out over the water. A ramp angles down from the pier to the dock itself, which rises and falls with the tide and has room for a few deck chairs.
There I sat. The dock creaked and rocked with the waves and the tide; the salt breeze was almost palpable. I could see for miles – boats bobbing on the sparkling water, evergreen forests on either side, the pressures of everyday life far away.
On second thought, what are a few weeds?
Sell the place? What was I thinking?

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.

For a lot of Boiseans, this one included, the news that North Boise’s Marian Pritchett School could be sold this summer was a little like learning that an old friend was terminal.
The Salvation Army, which has owned the school forever, plans to sell it to raise money for a larger campus in West Boise. The school has long been a home for pregnant and parenting teens, for whom the news had special meaning.
It had special meaning for me in more ways than one. I grew up a few blocks from the Marian Pritchett School, then known as Booth Memorial Hospital (for William Booth, the Salvation Army’s founder). It was common for those of us who lived in the neighborhood to see young, expectant mothers walking past our homes.
We’ve come a long way since those days, when teenage pregnancy was hushed up – particularly in the presence of children. If neighborhood kids asked their parents about the young women strolling by in various stages of pregnancy, we were told that they were “bad girls” and ordered not to talk to them. Today that seems outrageous, but those were very different times.
Kids, of course, are nothing if not curious. The girls didn’t look so bad to me, and I wanted to know more about them. In spite of my parents’ admonitions, I’d sometimes greet them and try to engage them in conversation. But only if Mom wasn’t watching, and then I’d feel guilty about it. That’s probably hard for younger readers now to understand, but it’s the way it was.
To a kid, the Booth building’s appearance was daunting. Built in 1921, it was an imposing brick structure set back and apart from the rest of the neighborhood on grounds that covered an entire city block. A friend of mine lived about a block away from it. Walking from my house to his, I tended to give the place a wide berth. At night, it could be almost spooky looking.
You don’t outgrow such impressions easily, or quickly. Fast forward thirty-plus years. By then my wife and I had two daughters, one of whom became pregnant at 16. Our reaction to the news no parent of daughters wants to hear was fairly typical. We told her we loved her and that nothing would change that. We told her we’d get professional advice, consider all the options and do whatever we could to help her make the best decision. Then we panicked.
“What are we going to do?” my wife and I asked each other in private after putting up a calm front for our hysterical 16-year-old. “What will she do about school? What if the neighbors find out?”
“Oh, no!” my wife gasped.
“What?”
“Ann and Maurice are coming next month. She’ll be showing by then.”
Ann and Maurice are my wife’s aunt and uncle from Washington. Their daughter and their grandkids were perfect. How would we hide our embarrassment?
It’s embarrassing now to admit it, but that’s exactly what we did. When they showed up sooner than expected at our front door, our then obviously pregnant daughter ran out the back door and hid at a friend’s house until they left.
Life has taught us better since then. We’ve come to understand that a teenage pregnancy not only isn’t the end of the world but can be a cause of great joy. Even if it takes a while to get past our hangups enough to realize it.
Sixteen and desperate, our daughter almost terminated the pregnancy. Only at the last minute – she was in the doctor’s office – did she reconsider and decide against it. And with that, I can unequivocally say, a tragedy was averted.
She continued to live with us after the baby was born, and words can’t begin to describe what a joy that child was for all of us – smart, funny, good-hearted and all the other things a parent hopes for in a child. She’s a mother herself now – an excellent mother, I might add – and her two-year-old son makes my day every time I see him.
When her mother was in a bad accident recently, it was the daughter from the pregnancy we once tried to hide who more than anyone came to the rescue – feeding her, bathing her, staying at her side through the night. Without her, our lives would be less than they are.
Without the Marian Pritchett School, then Booth Memorial, I don’t know what we would have done when her mother was pregnant with her. The teachers there kept her academically up to date during her junior year, sparing her slights from insensitive students at her regular high school and allowing her to graduate with her class on time the following year. They taught her birthing and parenting classes. They gave her a safe haven to continue her education and her life.
Her experience was far from being unique. In nearly a century of existence, the school has helped thousands of girls, thousands of families, in the same situation. More than a school, it’s been a lifesaver. Sometimes literally.
We don’t say thank you often enough. To the good folks who have made such a difference in so many lives at the Marian Pritchett School, an overdue and heartfelt thank you.

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

(Note to subscribers:  Sorry this one is a few days late. The blog had a glitch, which should be fixed now. Thanks for your patience. — Tim)

You didn’t have to be a fan of boxing to be touched by the magic of Muhammed Ali.
Almost everyone, it seems, has an Ali story. We’ve been reading them for two weeks now. But, late as this is with my biweekly deadlines, I couldn’t not write about him. Like JFK, the Beatles and other towering figures of his era, Ali changed what we thought and felt. He was a force in changing our world.
Boxing was more popular when he first came on the scene. Football was yet to become the juggernaut it is today, and though not as widely embraced as baseball, watching boxing on television was a common pastime. The Friday Night Fights of the 1950s were a television staple at a time when boxing’s brutality was all but overlooked. Fathers and sons bonded over the weekly matches. I watched them with my dad and can still sing the jingle used by the Gillette Razor Co., the show’s primary sponsor.
Then came the ‘60s, and Ali. No one else, in boxing or anywhere else, was like Ali.
At first people didn’t know what to make of brash, young Cassius Clay, the Olympic champion who adopted the Muslim faith and changed his name, confidently predicted victory over the world’s best boxers – in poetry, no less – and went on to defeat them all.
“I used to root for someone to beat him just to shut him up,” a friend said. “But I grew to like him.”
Not everyone did. Some hated him for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, or, as he put it, to “put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville (his hometown) are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights.”
Ali was one of those who made us question the war and reject the rampant discrimination of the times. Like most agents of change, he was polarizing. People loved or hated him for his beliefs, for which he was stripped of his title, banned from boxing and sentenced to prison for draft evasion. Many condemned him as a traitor. History, however, was on his side. In time a majority of Americans joined him in opposing the war, and the Supreme Court overturned his prison sentence, ruling that he was entitled to conscientious-objector status.
A simple man in some ways, he reduced the complex, four-year legal proceedings to simplicity itself – no one had the right to make him be what he didn’t want to be. It was vintage Ali, no backing down even when it hurt. And it hurt a lot, costing him what could have been the best years of his boxing career.
In and out of the ring, he was an almost mythical figure, widely acknowledged to be the most famous person in the world. Wherever he went, people lined up to get autographs, shake his hand or just get a glimpse of him. When he came to Boise in 1985, the room where he spoke was so crowded with journalists you’d have thought it was a presidential press conference. I was was part of the throng and considered myself lucky just to holler a question at him from across the room.
My wife and son had a closer encounter. She was shopping at Vista Village when she saw a yellow limousine parked outside a magic shop. In the Boise of those days, there weren’t a lot of limousines, yellow or otherwise. Curious, she pushed the stroller and two-year-old Mark into the shop to see who the celebrity was.
The first person she saw was Ali. When Ali saw Mark, she said, his eyes sparkled. Without asking permission – he was, after all, the three-time heavyweight champion of the world – he scooped him up and held him high above his head.
To everyone else in the shop, he was a star. To Mark, the big guy lifting him almost to the ceiling was just a stranger. He started to cry.
Unfazed, Ali put him down and directed everyone within earshot to “watch my feet.”
“We all watched really closely,” my wife said. “And I swear he levitated about three or four inches off the floor.”
Boisean Daryl Martin was one of Ali’s bodyguards during his Boise visit.
“I was working out at a club at the time, and they asked me and another guy there if we’d like to do that,” he said. “They didn’t have to ask twice.”
This was after Ali had retired from boxing and developed Parkinson’s
Disease. His step had slowed, his voice had softened, but one of the most fundamental things about him hadn’t changed.
“He’d sign autographs for hours, for anybody who asked,” Martin said. “It didn’t matter who they were or how long it took. I remember this one little kid about this high (five or six) who came up and asked for an autograph. It was busy and hectic, but Ali stopped everything just for this one kid. He gave him a hug and held him close, with the little boy’s head on his shoulder. I remember thinking, ‘that’s greatness. That’s true greatness.’”
Years later, I read in a biography of Ali that the “levitation” that had so impressed everyone at the Boise magic shop was something he did often, a sleight-of-foot. A magic trick.
But Ali’s real magic had nothing to do with tricks. It went much deeper. The man who transcended the sport of boxing with his pugilistic skills, braggadocio and larger-than-life personae had a larger-than-life connection with all of us. It made a poor kid from Louisville the most famous person on the planet. It brought thousands to pay their respects at his memorial service, moved presidents and other celebrities to pay tribute to a man once reviled as a draft dodger, made the entire world stop to mourn his passing.
No magic trick can do that. Ali’s magic was the real thing.

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.

You didn’t have to be a fan of boxing to be touched by the magic of Muhammed Ali.
Almost everyone, it seems, has an Ali story. We’ve been reading them for two weeks now. But, late as this is with my biweekly deadlines, I couldn’t not write about him. Like JFK, the Beatles and other towering figures of his era, Ali changed what we thought and felt. He was a force in changing our world.
Boxing was more popular when he first came on the scene. Football was yet to become the juggernaut it is today, and though not as widely embraced as baseball, watching boxing on television was a common pastime. The Friday Night Fights of the 1950s were a television staple at a time when boxing’s brutality was all but overlooked. Fathers and sons bonded over the weekly matches. I watched them with my dad and can still sing the jingle used by the Gillette Razor Co., the show’s primary sponsor.
Then came the ‘60s, and Ali. No one else, in boxing or anywhere else, was like Ali.
At first people didn’t know what to make of brash, young Cassius Clay, the Olympic champion who adopted the Muslim faith and changed his name, confidently predicted victory over the world’s best boxers – in poetry, no less – and went on to defeat them all.
“I used to root for someone to beat him just to shut him up,” a friend said. “But I grew to like him.”
Not everyone did. Some hated him for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, or, as he put it, to “put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville (his hometown) are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights.”
Ali was one of those who made us question the war and reject the rampant discrimination of the times. Like most agents of change, he was polarizing. People loved or hated him for his beliefs, for which he was stripped of his title, banned from boxing and sentenced to prison for draft evasion. Many condemned him as a traitor. History, however, was on his side. In time a majority of Americans joined him in opposing the war, and the Supreme Court overturned his prison sentence, ruling that he was entitled to conscientious-objector status.
A simple man in some ways, he reduced the complex, four-year legal proceedings to simplicity itself – no one had the right to make him be what he didn’t want to be. It was vintage Ali, no backing down even when it hurt. And it hurt a lot, costing him what could have been the best years of his boxing career.
In and out of the ring, he was an almost mythical figure, widely acknowledged to be the most famous person in the world. Wherever he went, people lined up to get autographs, shake his hand or just get a glimpse of him. When he came to Boise in 1985, the room where he spoke was so crowded with journalists you’d have thought it was a presidential press conference. I was was part of the throng and considered myself lucky just to holler a question at him from across the room.
My wife and son had a closer encounter. She was shopping at Vista Village when she saw a yellow limousine parked outside a magic shop. In the Boise of those days, there weren’t a lot of limousines, yellow or otherwise. Curious, she pushed the stroller and two-year-old Mark into the shop to see who the celebrity was.
The first person she saw was Ali. When Ali saw Mark, she said, his eyes sparkled. Without asking permission – he was, after all, the three-time heavyweight champion of the world – he scooped him up and held him high above his head.
To everyone else in the shop, he was a star. To Mark, the big guy lifting him almost to the ceiling was just a stranger. He started to cry.
Unfazed, Ali put him down and directed everyone within earshot to “watch my feet.”
“We all watched really closely,” my wife said. “And I swear he levitated about three or four inches off the floor.”
Boisean Daryl Martin was one of Ali’s bodyguards during his Boise visit.
“I was working out at a club at the time, and they asked me and another guy there if we’d like to do that,” he said. “They didn’t have to ask twice.”
This was after Ali had retired from boxing and developed Parkinson’s
Disease. His step had slowed, his voice had softened, but one of the most fundamental things about him hadn’t changed.
“He’d sign autographs for hours, for anybody who asked,” Martin said. “It didn’t matter who they were or how long it took. I remember this one little kid about this high (five or six) who came up and asked for an autograph. It was busy and hectic, but Ali stopped everything just for this one kid. He gave him a hug and held him close, with the little boy’s head on his shoulder. I remember thinking, ‘that’s greatness. That’s true greatness.’”
Years later, I read in a biography of Ali that the “levitation” that had so impressed everyone at the Boise magic shop was something he did often, a sleight-of-foot. A magic trick.
But Ali’s real magic had nothing to do with tricks. It went much deeper. The man who transcended the sport of boxing with his pugilistic skills, braggadocio and larger-than-life personae had a larger-than-life connection with all of us. It made a poor kid from Louisville the most famous person on the planet. It brought thousands to pay their respects at his memorial service, moved presidents and other celebrities to pay tribute to a man once reviled as a draft dodger, made the entire world stop to mourn his passing.
No magic trick can do that. Ali’s magic was the real thing.

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.

In a normal spring, most of my waking hours are devoted to writing columns and documentary movie scripts, getting the yard ready for summer and spending time with friends and family. Not this year.
Since March, most of my waking hours have been devoted to producing a rock and roll show and auction.
The auction was the first of what ideally will be many fund raisers for the Ride to the Wall Foundation, begun by late rock and roll icon Paul Revere and Boisean Larry Leasure. Its original purpose was to raise funds for needy Vietnam veterans, but it’s since been expanded to include homeless and at-risk veterans of all wars.
Ride to the Wall is the main reason for this column. It helps those who have sacrificed greatly for this country, and more people need to know about it. But first, bear with me while I tell you a little about the rock and roll show.
As longtime readers of this column know, I play in a group called the Mystics. One of the rules I live by is not to write about the band because it would be a conflict of interest – using my column to promote our performances. This column is an exception because it isn’t promoting a performance. Nobody’s going to rush out and buy a ticket to the show after reading this because the show is over.
It started out as one of my crazy ideas. Fifty years had passed since the group’s heyday in the ‘60s, and an anniversary party seemed like a good idea.
Not everyone thought so.
“Do you think anybody would come?” a fellow band member asked when the subject was broached.
He had a point. With all the other entertainment options happening in Boise on a given weekend, how many people would go see a bunch of aging rock and rollers? It’s not like we’re the Rolling Stones.
Some things you do on faith, however, and with that in mind I naively forged ahead. If I’d known how much work it was going to be, I probably would have settled for a nice nap instead. Among other things, it was an education in how to produce an event – setting up bank, PayPay and Brown Paper Ticket accounts, distributing posters, writing news releases, lining up guest performers and volunteers, posting photos and countdowns and otherwise working with social media. There was seldom a day that I wasn’t shamelessly sending e-mails or working Facebook.
A lot of people helped. Special thanks to Martha Hopper for helping with Brown Paper Tickets and Will Call and Jordin Hill for assisting this technologically resistant baby boomer with the intricacies of Facebook.
The party itself was a joy. People did come, some 500 of them. Among them were nine former band members, four of whom joined us onstage to play or sing. It was the first time some of them had performed live in years, but you wouldn’t have known it to see them.
Auction Frogs’ live auction raised $4,000 for Ride to the Wall, and its online auction added another $$$$$$. The money will be used to help needy Treasure Valley veterans.
Ride to the Wall is better known in other parts of the country than in Idaho – Revere’s home state. Paul Revere and the Raiders did Ride to the Wall benefit concerts in Washington, D.C. and other cities around the country, but he died before they could work one in here.
Revere himself was such a force of nature that it’s still hard for me to believe he’s gone. A rock and roll pioneer, he started making records in the ‘50s, when rock was young. He sold millions of them, and he made audiences laugh like no one else. He performed almost to the end, even when he was so sick he had to be carried on and offstage. For his courage, his wit and a career spanning all or parts of seven decades, he should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Though not a veteran, he had a powerful connection with them. I was with him during a ride to the wall (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) in 2005. Hundreds of vets lined up to have him sign CDs in the Pentagon parking lot. Many tearfully expressed their gratitude for what he was doing for them. One took off his motorcycle jacket and gave it to him. If you know much about bikers, you know how much that meant.
As Revere’s health declined, Ride to the Wall became less active.
“When Paul was diagnosed with cancer, we of course had a huge reduction in the ability to raise money,” Ride to the Wall Executive Director Cheryl Miller said. “… He was the major fundraiser. He was so funny and so good at it. He’d tell people to ‘help a veteran; make sure you go to Heaven.’ The dynamic really changed when he died.”
One of the things on his bucket list, she said, was a Ride to the Wall benefit concert at the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts. That didn’t happen because of his illness, but now the foundation “wants to get into action and start raising money again, probably on a local basis here in Idaho to start with. We’d like to build mini-houses – four-bedroom homes where we could provide shelter for four veterans for up to a year.”
The anniversary party and auction were a start – but just a start.
“We’re extremely anxious to move forward and expand the original mission beyond Vietnam veterans,” Leasure said. “Since Iraq and Afghanistan, we have a lot of young veterans that we want to help. We’re looking forward to doing that, and we’re excited to do the next concert in the fall.”
Tentatively planned for Veterans Day, it will feature several acts. When I told singer-songwriter Pinto Bennett about it over lunch recently, the words were hardly out of my mouth when he said to count him in.
“Anything for the vets,” he said.
My guess is that many of you who are reading this feel the same way.
See you on Veterans Day.

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

Some of you who subscribe to my blog know that I play in a band called the Mystics. What you may not know, especially if you live outside of Idaho, is that part of the group’s 50th anniversary celebration is an auction to benefit the Ride to the Wall Foundation, which helps needy veterans.
Ride to the Wall was founded by late rock and roll Icon Paul Revere, of Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Boisean Larry Leasure. Its original purpose was to help Vietnam veterans, but it’s since been expanded to include veterans of all wars. All of the proceeds from the live auction at our anniversary party Saturday night – and those of the ongoing, online auction – will be used to help needy Idaho veterans.
You might not be interested in the rock and roll items being offered in the online auction, but because you subscribe to my blog I’m hoping that some of you will be interested in the complete collection of my books. All are autographed and all are now out of print.  These are among the very last copies from my personal collection. The titles are “Shirttail Journalist,” “McCracker Takes a Vacation,” “Here in Curmudgeons’  Corner,” “The Department of Yarns,” “Is Idaho in Iowa?” “Destination Idaho” and “Tiger on the Road; the life of Vardis Fisher.”
You won’t find these books anywhere else.

In addition to autographing them, I’ll personally inscribe them to the winning bidder if requested. Every penny of the winning bid will be used to assist veterans who are struggling.
The online auction ends May 29. To find out more or to bid, click on mysticsauction.afrogs.org. If you decide to bid, click on “Create an Account.” Don’t worry; the information requested is basic and only takes a few seconds. You’ll be prompted to create a password, but again don’t worry. The password doesn’t have to be elaborate, and it will vanish after May 29.
The starting bid is $100 – considerably less than the total retail price of the books when they were new, and the early ones are now collector’s items. As of this morning, no one had bid on them, which frankly is a little embarrassing. I’m hoping that’s because most of those who have visited the auction site are more interested in rock and roll than books, and that’s why I’m contacting you. You’re readers. Here’s hoping one of you will spare me some embarrassment and give a helping hand to needy  veterans in the process.

Thanks,

Tim

Every year at this time, I catch myself getting nostalgic about the Memorial Days of my youth.
Not the holiday itself, but two of my favorite things about it. Both were only marginally related to the purpose of Memorial Day, to remember and honor those who have gone before. Chalk that up to the priorities of youth.
The first was my Aunt Amy’s fried chicken. Every year the clan motored to her farm to lay flowers on relatives’ graves and enjoy a dinner that began with chasing down chickens in her barnyard. The chase was the first step in preparing what is, to this day, the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted.
The second was the opening of Lowell Pool, next-door to Lowell School in Boise’s North End. It opened every year on Memorial Day weekend. For families who lived in that part of the town, Lowell Pool was the neighborhood pool – and a magnet for every kid old enough to dog paddle.
I happened to be in the old neighborhood last week for a Little League baseball game at Lowell School. The team we’d come to cheer was running away with it, and with the outcome seemingly assured I decided to walk over and have a look at the old pool where so many carefree summer days were spent.
If the changes in it were an indication, my last visit was longer ago than I’d thought. When we were kids, the pool was new. We were there, towels and nose plugs in hand, when it opened for the very first time. Now, it’s ancient. Brown smudges stain its cinderblock walls, and despite ongoing maintenance the overall impression is one of benevolent decrepitude.
Curious, I walked around to the northwest side to see if the old pine tree was still there, the one we used to sneak before the annual opening on the holiday weekend. The days were hot, the nights sultry. Waiting for a swim was patently impossible.
Readers familiar with Lowell Pool know that it’s one of the above-ground variety, identical to the one at South Junior High School. To get to the pool level, you passed through the shower rooms on the ground floor and climbed a flight of stairs to the pool itself. The pine tree had a long, lower limb that ended above the circular walkway around the pool. With the help of an accomplice providing a boost to get to the limb, it was possible to crawl its length, drop to the walkway and enjoy a dip.
This was the method my buddies and I used to sneak in under cover of darkness and have the pool all to ourselves. There was an element of risk, of course. You could fall from the limb or, worse, get caught and be grounded until you were middle aged. This lent the delicious aspect of danger to the proceedings and made the payoff even better. Cold as the water was that early in the season, the memory of those forbidden moonlight swims remains a thing of beauty.
The limb is gone now, removed long enough ago that the scar on the trunk has long since healed. A skeptic would question whether there was ever a limb long enough to facilitate trespassing. Some limbs higher up are plenty long enough, however, and a call to one of my former partners-in-crime confirmed the story. He remembered the exquisite pleasure of the illicit swims, too.
The pool’s high dive is gone now, or perhaps taken down for the off season. How many trips did we make to the end of the diving board and stand there, shivering, only to chicken out before taking the transformative leap that brought instant admiration from lesser mortals?
Across 28th Street, Hamburger Korner also is gone.
Hamburger Korner was almost as popular as the pool itself. It served a zillion varieties of flavored Cokes, but was best known for its signature sandwich – the Belly Buster. Anyone who ever had one will tell you that the Belly Buster was among the greatest burgers ever made. It was a sad day when Hamburger Korner closed, giving way to a succession of businesses in the diminutive, flat-roofed building it once occupied, the latest being North End Nails.
The Little League game was winding down by the time I ambled across the decades back to the ball field, having stayed longer than intended. That night, I dreamed about those sun-drenched afternoons at the old pool.
Billy Bader was there, giving as good as he got in a water fight. Timmy Hally was practicing cannonballs off of the low dive. Ruth and Kip, two of the lifeguards with whom every boy in the neighborhood was hopelessly infatuated were as gorgeous and unapproachable as ever. They were a few years older and to us they were goddesses. To them, we were obnoxious pests.
We were there virtually every summer afternoon from the day the pool opened until the sad day in September when it closed and school started. We couldn’t get enough of the place, often returning after dinner and swimming until the pool closed for the night. It was easily our favorite summer haunt, the scene of happy moments beyond counting.
Kids today have so much more than we did. Nicer homes, better schools, infinitely more entertainment options. They’re beneficiaries of a digital world we couldn’t have imagined.
But at risk of being curmudgeonly, I wonder if they have as much fun.

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 mother has been gone nearly nine years and a day seldom passes that I don’t think of her in one context or another.
Her colorful expressions:
“She made me feel like two cents waiting for change.”
“I read it in The Daily Blab (her moniker for newspapers.)”
“You need to have sticktoitiveness, Tim.”
Her sense of humor. Little things that tickled her, made her laugh and even now make me laugh remembering them.
Her meticulous housekeeping and her penchant for getting rid of anything that wasn’t being used – including my baseball card collection. (I’m over it now.)
Some things, however, she saved for life. One was a box of old photos, a gift from one of my nephews after my sister died. They gathered dust on a closet shelf for a long time before I got around to looking at them, and was treated to unexpected glimpses of my mother’s life.
The photos spanned more than a century. Many were of the sort you’d expect – snapshots taken on family outings, vacation pictures, group photos … Others were intriguing, funny, mysterious:
A photo of my mother, her brother and his wife, for example. It could have been taken on another planet. They were surrounded by eerie, steaming rock formations. Yellowstone Park came to mind, but I’ve been to Yellowstone in virtually every season and not seen anything remotely like the scene in the photo.
A photo of the same uncle at Yosemite Falls, on a road now gridlocked throughout the tourist season. His was one of two cars.
A winsomely smiling woman and a boy in a scout uniform. A dour-looking woman and two girls on a porch. An elegantly dressed woman seated on the deck of an ocean liner. All of their identities lost in time. People in the pre-digital era should have written names and dates on the backs of photos, for those of us who would come after them and wonder.
A postcard to my mother, postmarked a month before Pearl Harbor, featured an idyllic winter scene at “Sun Valley Village.” In those days, and for a long time afterwards, a village was exactly what it was. No condos, no mansions, no traffic. It was isolated, self-contained, magical.
On the back of the card, my father had written “Wesson you could be here with me.”
No, he wasn’t a terrible speller. But he was, for a time, a traveling salesman for the Wesson Oil Co.
My parents married for life after brief first marriages. One of the funnier pictures, to me at least, was of Mom’s first husband holding hands with a mystery woman. Mysterious because someone (my mother?) had cut all but her arm and hand out of the picture. I could picture my Irish-American mother – her maiden name was O’Leary – doing something like that.
Some of my favorite photos were of long-gone relatives. My Aunt Helen and Uncle Wayne, who seemed exotic to me because they had lived in Peru and he’d been the foreman of a mine there. I could listen forever to his tales of working deep in the Andes.
My Great Aunt Amy, who chased chickens around her barnyard as the first step in making what is still the best fried chicken I’ve ever had
My Great Grandmother Susie, cherished by all who knew her. She came across the plains in a covered wagon, outlived three husbands and three of her children, survived three house fires and somehow remained the jolliest of all the relatives. Mom counted the days till her grandmother’s visits. She’d come and stay with us for a week or two at Christmastime, filling the house with the aroma of baking and the joy of the season.
There were, of course, pictures our mother had saved of my sister and me when we were growing up. Mom used to complain that I ruined every picture she took by making goofy faces. Now I know what she meant.
In addition to the loose photos in the box was a scrapbook, meticulously assembled by my mother when she was in her early 20s. Her beautifully penned captions raised more questions than they answered.
Several of the photos are of couples posing on the road to Idaho City – on Easter Sunday, 1929. They looked so young, so happy – blissfully unaware of the economic catastrophe that waited just a few months down the road.
I’ll say this for my mother and her crowd: they got around. The scrapbook documented trips to Coeur d’Alene, San Francisco, Catalina Island, Dillon, Mont., Hollywood … She spoke wistfully of the California trip for the rest of her life, often saying that she didn’t want to come home.
This was the first time I’d seen pictures of her and her friends from that odyssey, and they were stunning – the men robust and handsome, the women svelte and beautiful. Some of the names and faces were familiar, but many were complete mysteries: Archie, Ed, Jack, Bud, Charles, Jida, Gertie, Skeet, Roberta. Their images appear again and again – never with last names.
Who were those people? My mother never mentioned any of them, and by now everyone who knew them is long dead. If you’re truly gone when the last person dies who knew who you were, my sister in this case, then those once striking people are truly gone.
I should have asked Mom about them.
I should have done a lot of things. I should have spent more time with her in her last years. I should have thanked her for all the times she made me laugh, for the long talks that helped get me through troubled times, for being the one person who was always there for me – from the first moment of my life till the last of her own – no matter what.
Most of all, I should have told her how much she meant to me. How much she still means. I couldn’t have asked for a better Mom.
Even if she did throw away my baseball cards.

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.

No, this isn’t one of my columns. And yes, I know that many of you don’t live in Boise. But I wanted to tell those of you who do live in the area or may be here soon about an event that’s coming up.
The Mystics’ 50th Anniversary Party will be May 21. I’ve played in the group most of my adult  life, and my fellow band members and I decided that before one of us keels over we should do something to observe half a century of playing music. So we’re pulling out the stops May 21 at the Mardi Gras Ballroom – special guests Jake Blues of the Blues Brothers Rock ’n Soul Revue, three of the surviving 1966 Mystics, prizes for best ‘60s attire, rock and roll trivia questions and a live and online auction to benefit the Ride the Wall Foundation begun by the late Paul Revere. Auction items will include Paul Revere and the Raiders memorabilia, the Mystics playing at the winning bidder’s event, a week at a condo in Mexico and an autographed set of my books – all of which are now out of print. Auction proceeds will benefit needy local veterans.
We’re hoping for a sellout, and with two weeks to go advance ticket sales look like we just might make it. People are coming from as far away as Beaverton, Ore.
If you live in Boise or plan to be in Boise on May 21, please consider  joining us. Advance tickets, $10, are on sale at brownpapertickets.com. That’s $5 less than at the door.
It should be a night to remember. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

— Tim

One of our cultural icons looks to be going the way of the horse-drawn carriage.
If you follow the automotive news, you know that time could be growing short for one of our beloved institutions. The Statesman recently reported that Tesla is likely to have trouble meeting demand for its new electric car. And Time reports that Tesla’s self-driving electric car, and those of other manufacturers following its lead, are poised to replace the cars Americans have driven, relied on, loved and hated for nearly a century.
And sooner than you’d think.
With humans in the driver’s seat in case of emergencies, Tesla’s driverless cars have gone from Los Angeles to New York in two days – with the car driving itself 96 percent of the time. Tesla predicts that its electric cars will be entirely self-driven within three years.
Think of that. We’ll hop in our cars and go from coast to coast with nothing to do but enjoy the ride. Or read … play a game … take a nap.
“Today,” Time reported, “you pay higher insurance premiums to drive a zippy roadster than a dowdy minivan. Tomorrow you could well be paying a steep price for any steering wheel at all.”
Such predictions aren’t new, of course. A Life magazine article predicted driverless cars decades ago. I remember the illustration, a drawing of a family cruising down a highway playing cards. No one was at the wheel because there wasn’t one. The same article also predicted heated highways on mountains passes (something a Sandpoint company is pioneering) and mowers that cut grass automatically without human assistance.
Then those things were in the realm of science fiction. Now they’re reality, or close to it. Self-driving cars offer significant benefits. But how willing will people be to give up driving themselves? Our love affair with the automobile – the kind we drive ourselves – is beyond well-documented. Virtually everyone has had cars they loved to drive, and favorite driving stories.
My first car was one of those zippy roadsters with higher insurance premiums. Zippy when it was new, that is. Its better days were history by the time I paid $400 for it at a used car lot and drove away with the wind in my hair – it was a convertible – and a song in my heart.
The bad news: it cost another $400 to keep it running for a year. But gosh was it fun to drive! And it had a secret weapon – a crack in the floor on the passenger’s side that, when adroitly maneuvered over puddles at a good clip, drenched whoever the passenger happened to be. Handy for getting the last word in an argument.
Everyone who drives has drives remembered for life. My first was a solo trip in an old VW Bug. I was 19, had a couple of months left before leaving on active duty in the Navy and was out for new experiences. One summer night, feeling more restless than usual, I decided on the spur of the moment to jump in the bug and drive to San Francisco. The trip was financed with the money residing in a pocket of my jeans, if memory serves about $40. (You could fill the tank of a VW for three bucks then.)
This was before my fear of heights kicked in, and nothing seemed quite as exotic or thrilling as driving across the Golden Gate Bridge into the beautiful city by the bay. I ate at Fisherman’s Wharf, bought trinkets in Chinatown, roamed the streets of North Beach. Running low on gas late at night in Nevada on the way home, I stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere and surprised an attendant and his girlfriend taking advantage of the solitude in a back room. He probably still talks about the time an embarrassed customer pumped his own gas and left the money on the desk.
The fear of heights had kicked in and then some by the time my wife and I drove the aptly named Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park – dizzying drop-offs, switchbacks rising to the clouds. My fingernail marks are probably still on the steering wheel. A self-driving car would have been a godsend; my eyes could have remained tightly closed till we reached a civilized altitude.
Our cars become cherished companions, or, in some cases, bitter enemies. I’ve owned half a dozen VWs and four Saabs and loved every one of them. The same was true of a briefly owned BMW. I sold it because I didn’t like paying for premium gas or insurance surcharges, but it was almost sinfully fun to drive.
Bitter enemy? No question about that one. A Fiat. It was one of the few new cars I’ve ever owned, and in less than a year it went through three sets of rear tires, burned out two batteries and left trails of glass from rearview mirrors falling off and shattering on the pavement. It also howled. Really. Imagine the mournful howl of a woebegone dog and you’ll have an idea of what it sounded like. That car hated me, and the feeling was mutual. I sold it cheap and celebrated with a stiff drink and a cartwheel.
If in time we’re forced to give up driving, according to Time, the number of traffic accidents will plummet. More than 90 percent are the fault of human drivers, with causes ranging from drunk driving to talking on cell phones to fumbling with a sandwich. Self-driving cars will maximize fuel economy, dramatically improve traffic flow and are even better at finding parking spaces.
All things considered, we’ll probably be better off for it.
I for one, however, would miss driving. For many of us, giving it up would be downright painful.
So what about a sweetener, something to ease the pain of giving up something we love? If technology has reached the point that cars can drive themselves, where are those self-driving lawnmowers?

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays (but is a tad late this week). Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

When woodwardblog.com started almost four years ago, I told subscribers I might be doing occasional “extra” posts in addition to the Statesman column. This is one of those.
As some of you know, I was fortunate to write the scripts and narrate Wide Eye Productions’ “Idaho, the Movie” back then. A hit by any measure, it won an Emmy and inspired viewers to ship it to every state and to more than 60 foreign countries.
Now we’re working on the sequel, “Idaho, the Movie 2,” to be released for this year’s holiday season. Viewers who loved the first movie have been asking whether we’d do another one, and we wanted to film some of the beautiful and intriguing parts of Idaho that we missed the first time around. Idaho is too big to fit into one documentary film.
This time we’ll go to the newly designated Boulder White Cloud Wilderness, the weird but wonderful Shoofly Oolite formations and the rugged Magruder Corridor. Viewers will meet Henrietta the long-billed curlew, visit geothermal hot springs, see other-worldly landscapes like Hell’s Half Acre. And much more.
As stunning as the photography was in ITM1 (as the writer-narrator I can’t take any of the credit for that), the sequel promises to be even more of a visual treat. Technological advances of the last four years are allowing Wide Eye photographers to do things that weren’t possible then, and they want to raise the bar even further by shooting scenes from a helicopter. Scenes that can’t be photographed any other way.
That’s nosebleed expensive, so Wide Eye is launching a Kickstarter campaign. Supporters will help its photographers film remote areas of Idaho  in a way it’s never been seen.
Why not use a drone? They will where possible, but in many cases it isn’t. Drones can’t be more than half a mile from the operator on the ground, and parts of Idaho’s back country are so remote and difficult to reach that putting operators there is virtually impossible. Also, drones are prohibited in wilderness areas. Cutting-edge, gyro-mounted cameras on helicopters will help the photographers film remote, rugged parts of Idaho with absolute smoothness and breathtaking resolution.
What’s in it for those who support the Kickstarter campaign? For starters, donors will receive a DVD of the movie and have the satisfaction of knowing their support helped make it better. Increasing levels of support come with posters and T-shirts, Wide Eye nature films and multipacks of Idaho the Movie 2 DVDs  up to joining the team on a shoot and seeing yourself in the finished film.
We could make the movie without helicopter photography, and it would still be beautiful. But we hope to use the best technology available to take it beyond beautiful. We want it to be jaw-dropping. I’d be honored if any of you choose to help make that possible.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s a link to a short video that will tell you more:

This is a few weeks late; I was committed to writing travel columns when he died. But I knew George Kennedy too long not to tell you about one of the most interesting and perplexing friends I’ve ever had.
There were at least two George Kennedys. The first was the one everyone who goes to movies knew – the bear of a man who could play anything from villains (“Charade”) to endearing heavies (“Cool Hand Luke”) to the straight man in the “Naked Gun” movies.
That was the Hollywood George Kennedy. The one I knew was very different.
I’d been a fan of his films forever. I must have watched “Cool Hand Luke” half a dozen times on movie nights in the Navy, and “The Dirty Dozen” was one of my wife’s and my favorites during our courting days. So it was a big surprise when I picked up my phone in The Statesman newsroom and heard the rich, baritone voice that couldn’t have belonged to anyone else.
“Tim, this is George Kennedy. We don’t know each other, but I’ve been reading your column since I moved to Idaho and I have an idea for a television series based around the sort of colorful characters you’ve written about. Is that something that would interest you?”
Would it interest me? I’d have been less interested in winning the lottery.
We met to discuss it, teamed up with a local production company and spent a little over a year working to bring his idea to fruition. We shot a demo about a colorful character in Owyhee County, worked with a producer’s agent in Portland and had two cable networks vying to come aboard. A major corporation was on the verge of signing as the primary sponsor when it all blew up in our faces.
More on that later. First, the George Kennedy I came to know along the way:
He could be the most charming of men. Maybe that’s part of why he became a star. He’d smile that winning smile of his, give you a compliment or make you a proposition in that signature voice, and he had you. I don’t mean to imply that any of it was insincere. It wasn’t. He wholeheartedly believed in everything he said.
Until he didn’t.
Ours was a business proposition that went beyond business. He didn’t need to spend time with me apart from the business end of it, but he did and we became friends. Maybe he needed a friend, isolated as he was in Idaho from his Hollywood friends. Whatever his reasons were, he invited me almost weekly to share meals with him – breakfasts at the recently departed Rodeway Inn across the street from The Statesman, lunch at the Sandbar in Marsing, dinner with our wives at Murphy’s, Italian feasts at Georgio’s, leisurely trips to Danskin Station in Garden Valley. George loved good food and good conversation, and conversations with him could be endlessly entertaining.
So many stories, so many stars: working with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, companionable dinners at Jimmy Stewart’s house, a life-changing moment with John Wayne, falling in love with Audrey Hepburn on the set of “Charade.”
“We were all a little in love with her,” he said. “We’d go to her place after work just to spend time with her.”
Things were different with the star of “Cool Hand Luke.”
“Members of the cast and crew would go out together after we were finished shooting. Everybody but Paul Newman. There was a star on his door, and there was never a doubt that he was the star and not the rest of us.”
Kennedy, of course, won an Oscar for “Cool Hand Luke.” Newman didn’t.
My favorite Kennedy yarn was about a scene he did with Clint Eastwood for “The Eiger Sanction.” As an acrophobiac, I had no trouble relating. The two of them were perched atop a needle-like rock spire, hundreds of dizzying feet above the desert floor of Monument Valley, their legs dangling over the edge. Weeks later, Eastwood called George to say the scene had to be re-shot because the cameraman had been so frightened that his hands were shaking.
The actors for whom he had the highest praise: his pal Jimmy Stewart and – this will surprise you – Margaret Hamilton, a.k.a. the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.
He’d led such an interesting life that I propositioned him to write his biography. He immediately accepted, and for months we met regularly for breakfast interviews. It went well until we reached his service in World War II, when he seemed to get cold feet. Not surprising; a lot of WWII veterans didn’t talk about the war. What he didn’t say was that he’d decided to write the book himself, and did. Frankly, he could have used a ghost writer.
He told me something one day that I’ve never forgotten. He said that every morning when he woke up, his first words were, “please, God, don’t let me hurt anybody today.”
So it was beyond surprising when he marched into the office of the producers who had worked so hard to make his television series a reality, told them they were subverting his idea, said hurtful things and walked out. That was the end of the project.
His reasoning didn’t make sense. Nobody was trying to subvert anything or had ever been anything but respectful and accommodating with him. My theory was that once it looked like the series was actually going to happen, he realized how much time, travel and work it would mean and in his 80s wasn’t comfortable committing to that.
For a while, we stayed in touch. We went to dinner a few more times, drank wine, solved the world’s problems. It wasn’t the same, though, and gradually our relationship sputtered to an end. Even after the painful way he ended the television project, I missed him. I wasn’t there to see it happen, so I never saw that side of him and couldn’t help missing the George Kennedy I knew and liked. It isn’t often you get to be friends with a movie star, and I was lucky to have had him in my life, however briefly.
The last time I saw him was a little over a year ago, in a Costco store. He was riding a motorized cart. He told me his wife had died, and he himself had aged considerably. Knowing it might be the last time I’d see him, I was tempted to ask the real reason why he abruptly ended what could have been a beautiful relationship.
I didn’t ask – it would have been awkward – and now I’ll never know for sure. The Hollywood George Kennedy was a man of many personae, and so was the private one. He could charm my socks off one day, dash my dreams the next, and somehow made the charming part what I’ll always remember about him.
A captivating, complicated man.

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.

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

STONE ISLAND, Mexico – It’s a shame that so much of the news about Mexico is bad. Drugs and cartel violence give the impression that it’s an unwelcoming and dangerous place.
That can be true in parts of Mexico, including the state of Sinaloa, where I spent a recent vacation. The Sinaloa Cartel is Mexico’s most powerful organized crime organization.
What rarely makes headlines, however, is that visitors often experience warmth and hospitality that’s exceptional. Sometimes over-the-top exceptional. It happened to us in a little place called Isla de la Piedra. Island of the Stone.
One of our neighbors at the place where we were staying recommended a restaurant there called Carmelita’s. He went on to add that the jungle road that led there was a little daunting, which was an understatement. It was under construction and in places all but non-existent. In a couple of spots, we were in mud up to our hubcaps. And those were the good spots.
We were hoping to make it there by sunset, but it wasn’t to be. The road, obviously, was one reason. The other was that the plastic cup I was holding in my teeth while trying to buckle a back-seat seatbelt cracked, drenching me with Cuervo and OJ. The only thing that didn’t get soaked was my hat. That meant going back to change, and by the time we got to the restaurant it was closed.
“Is the place next door open?” we asked some people who were still chatting at a table there.
“No,” one of the women replied. “All the restaurants are closed. People come here mainly for breakfast and lunch and spend the day on the beach. By this time, everyone’s gone.”
Her name was Anna Hayden. She and her husband, Gary, own Carmelita’s. We told them why we were late (spilled drink, car-eating road). After hearing our story and seeing our crestfallen expressions, she spoke briefly in Spanish to her husband and another woman at the table, then turned a thousand-watt smile on us.
“No problem,” she said. “We are closed, but for you we are open. I’ll go call Carmelita.”
Carmelita is the matriarch of the family. She’d gone home for the day, but in five minutes she was back. Anna put a tablecloth on a table and took our orders.
We were, as you can imagine, impressed. I’m not saying this sort of thing doesn’t happen at home, but it hadn’t happened to us before. I’ve arrived at stores, restaurants or other businesses just after closing any number of times and apologetically been turned away. And that’s okay. Too late is too late; closed is closed.
But not at Carmelita’s, at least not on this night.
While Carmelita and Carmelita Cecilia, Anna’s sister, were in the kitchen cooking our dinners, Anna told us her family’s story:
Anna is the daughter of the Carmelita who was cooking dinner and the granddaughter of Carmelita’s mother, who was also named Carmelita – obviously a popular name there. (I’m not using their full names because they’re only slightly shorter than the Gettysburg Address.) The first Carmelita started the restaurant in 1938. She grew up in California and came to Stone Island on a vacation with her family in1936. It was a stopover on their way to Guadalajara. At least that’s what it was supposed to have been.
They stayed a month, during which Carmelita met her future husband, Rodrigo. Rodrigo was working to build a jetty in the Stone Island harbor. When the rest of her family left for Guadalajara, she stayed. She never went to Guadalajara, never went back with her family to California. She was then 16.
It’s not hard to see why she stayed. The place is beautiful now – sandy beach, gentle surf, a smattering of homes and businesses. Its population, Anna told us, is about 8,000. But in 1936, it was an undiscovered paradise.
“There were about 20 people here then,” she said.
Carmelita was bewitched by the beauty and tranquility. (Rodrigo, the strapping jetty worker, may also have been a factor). She soon became popular with the people who lived there and the occasional visitors.
“They were happy to have someone who spoke English,” Anna said. “My grandmother earned some money by making tortillas and selling them.”
She also found time to marry Rodrigo. Together they opened Carmelita’s, little suspecting that they were launching a family business that would span three generations and continue into the next century. Carmelita died in 2011 at 93.
In 1996, a young American blew into town on a Jet Ski and came to the restaurant in hopes of finding a bathroom. No one seemed to be around so he helped himself to the facility. On his way out, he ran into Carmelita, told her how much he liked the area and said he hoped to start a Jet Ski business there.
An enterprising idea, but there was a problem.
“He was an American, and you have to be a Mexican citizen to start a business here,” Anna said.
That would have been the end of it, except that Carmelita had a granddaughter – Anna – who was studying law in the U.S. She reluctantly agreed to help the newcomer who was passionate about starting a Jet Ski business. In the process, he became passionate about Anna.
“He asked me out three times,” she said, laughing. “I said ‘no’ every time.”
“Three times she turned me down!” Gary Hayden added, feigning outrage. “But I don’t give up easily.”
They were married within a year.
It wasn’t long after that that Carmelita began to receive offers for her property.
“Pacifico Beer offered her a lot of money,” Anna said. “I told her she should be happy, but she started to cry. She wanted to keep the business in the family.”
Gary and Anna talked it over and made an offer of their own. In 2007, they took over the restaurant and a nearby hotel. They expanded the hotel, now a popular place for tourists on a budget.
“It’s a lot of work,” Anna said. “Gary handles the bookings and a lot of the other things at the hotel. I work in the office (she got that law degree) and help in the restaurant.”
It doesn’t take long to see that Carmelita’s is something special. We went back two nights later for a family-style dinner with a group of about 20 Canadians who were staying at the hotel, and seldom have we met a happier group of people. The same went for the locals who passed by. To a person, they smiled and waved. The place seemed to radiate happiness.
When we left, Anna hugged us as if we were old friends. The cartels and anything resembling violence seemed far away.
Until then I’d been thinking that maybe we’d been to Mexico too many times, that maybe we should try someplace different next time. The Bahamas, perhaps.
“Come here,” Gary said as we headed for our car. “I didn’t give you guys a hug yet.”
“Don’t be strangers,” Anna added. “You have our e-mail and our phone number. Call us any time.”
Bahamas? What was I thinking?

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.

SINALOA, Mexico – It’s hard not to like Mexico. Leave home on a cold, bleak February day and a few hours later step off of a plane to instant summer.
The Woodwards returned from there last week. But for a few panic-stricken moments while boarding the plane in Boise, it looked like the vacation would end before it began.
It was my fault, of course. Tired of groping for passports and boarding passes with busy TSA agents waiting for them on previous trips, I bought a murse.
A murse, for those unfamiliar with them, is a purse for a man. A manly purse. It has a strap so you can sling it over your shoulder, and it keeps the important stuff handy. We’d boarded and were stowing our carry-ons when we realized that the murse was nowhere in sight.
Panic? My blood pressure was rising faster than a Canaveral launch. Passports, reservations, wallet, everything we couldn’t do without was in the murse. Without it, we’d have to cancel the trip.
Reasoning that I must have set it down in the boarding area, I began fighting my way to the front of the plane like a fish swimming upstream against the tide of boarders. Then …
“Here it is, Dad.”
It was our son, Mark, who had spotted it on the seat in front of ours – absentmindedly left there by … let’s see, who could it have been?
“All right, Dad,” our daughter said in the tone of voice young people use to address doddering parents. “From now on, all four of us are watching the murse.”
With four sets of eyes eyeing the murse, like hungry dogs watching a pot roast, we made it to our destination. The place where we were staying was south of Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast. South as in approximately the distance from Boise to Horseshoe Bend – far enough from town, and virtually everything else, that we had to rent a car to get around.
Driving in Mexico isn’t like driving in the U.S. It’s something akin to every man for himself. Make that every man, woman and child. We were driving to a store to buy groceries when a car and a motorcycle simultaneously careened around us on either side, missing us by inches. On the motorcycle were a man, a baby, a woman and a toddler.
Seconds after that – I swear this is true – a man standing on a traffic island blew a scorching blast of fire at us. A fire eater, working for tips.
We were still reeling from the fire eater and four-person motorcycle when a man on a bicycle ventured into three lanes of heavy traffic pulling – again I am not making this up – a wooden cart carrying five little girls in what appeared to be First Communion dresses. We held our breath till, miraculously, they reached the other side.
The next day, a winter escapee from Canada reacted nonchalantly to being told about it.
“Things like that happen all the time here,” he said. “The way everyone drives is crazy. But you never see an accident.”
He was right. Lots of close calls. No accidents.
Because we were so far out of town, the store we were driving to while dodging fire eaters and families on speeding motorcycles wasn’t one of those catering to tourists. Everything from labels on packages to signs identifying products sold on the aisles was in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary would have lessened the confusion, but we’d forgotten ours. What would have been half an hour of shopping at home stretched into nearly two hours, highlighted by the Micodin Fiasco.
Micodin (at least that’s what I thought it was called) is an essential product for those doing their own cooking in Mexico. It’s a chemical for soaking fruits and vegetables. You put a couple of drops in a bowl of water, soak them for 15 minutes, and the microscopic demons responsible for Montezuma’s Revenge are vanquished.
“Por favor?” I asked a young store worker in my atrocious Spanish. “Donde esta Micodin? (Where is Micodin?)
“Micodin?” he asked, looking at me as if I had three heads.
“Si. Micodin.”
“Micodin?”
I wrote it down for him.
“Ah, Micodin! Follow me.”
We walked roughly half the length of a store to the pharmacy, where he proudly pointed to a display.
“Here is Micodin!” he said.
It was a display of … reading glasses.
Armed with grocery bags containing everything we needed but Micodin, we drove to the condo – where a bottle of it was waiting on the counter. The correct name: Microdyn.
The grocery bags’ contents included a package of hot dogs, which my wife bought to feed to the dogs that frequent Mexican roadsides. My grinch-like reaction was that it was a waste of money. Hadn’t the dogs been able to fend for themselves before we got there?
As we turned off of the highway onto a side road, the hot-dog lady shouted at our daughter to stop the car.
“Why?”
“A dog!”
The dog, a black and white collie mix, looked at us indifferently – just another carload of gringos.
Until he saw the hot dogs. Seldom had any of us seen a dog, or anything, eat so enthusiastically. Forget chewing; it was straight from the mouth to the stomach. My wife had made a hungry dog’s week. For him it was like winning the lottery. Whatever we paid for those hot dogs was worth it. In the face of my wife’s kindness, I was suitably chastened and vowed to try to be less of a grinch and more like her.
The condo’s remoteness turned out to be a blessing. We’d waited so long to make reservations that everything in Mazatlan proper was either booked or not in our budget. The condominium development may have been isolated, but it had a first-class golf course. We aren’t golfers, but that proved to be an advantage.
The place was beautiful – a pool as long as a football field and a beach that went forever – and almost no one using them. If half a dozen people were at the pool, it was crowded. Everyone but us was golfing.
On our first morning there, I walked to the beach and marveled at what, for me at least, was the chief benefit of being so far out of town. The beach was empty. I don’t mean empty as in not crowded. It was literally deserted. From a point on the south to another on the north, a distance of several miles, I was the only person. Miles of pristine beach – sand and surf, pelicans and dolphins – and not another human in sight. It was like walking into “Robinson Crusoe.”
For the rest of the clan, this was a minor attraction. They prefer the bustle and attractions of the city. For me, it was Shangri-La. I went to the beach every day and never tired of it.
The city is fine; it has its place. But for some, there’s no better company than nature – untrod, untrampled. It was the perfect antidote to missing murses, itinerant fire eaters and motorcycle daredevils with babies on board. A deserted beach, a good book and a cold beer – life, where is thy sting?

Next: Over-the-top Mexican hospitality.

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.

(Note:  Apologies for posting this a week late. I’ve been in Mexico and was unable to access the site. — Tim)

No one who ever met him forgot Gordon Peterson.

His appearance was roughly equal parts cowboy and aging hippie – full beard, white hair cascading over his shoulders, Western shirt, cowboy hat. He was known on occasion to wear chaps. His look was somewhere between those of Neil Young and Buffalo Bill. If you didn’t know him and saw him on the street, you might have given him a wide berth.

If you did know him, you knew that wasn’t necessary. His appearance was arresting, his demeanor curmudgeonly, but lurking under the cowboy exterior were a good heart and a rare intelligence. He was smart, principled, perceptive. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his commitment to excellence uncompromising.
Peterson, who died this month at 79, was a longtime Statesman copy editor. In the pre-digital age, which comprised the bulk of his career, copy editors worked nights at a large, shared desk shaped like a circle. The circumference was the “rim,” the center the “slot.” Editors working on the rim edited stories, wrote headlines for them and sent them to the editor in the center, the “slot man.” The slot man was the last stop on a story’s way to being set in type, the last line of defense against errors. Peterson was an editor/slot man extraordinaire. If a mistake made it into the paper, the odds were good that it wasn’t on his watch.
Former Statesman reporter and editor Tom Knappenberger, now of Vancouver, Wash., recalls his introduction to the newsroom and “an ‘older’ man dressed in a cowboy hat, vest, jeans and boots, with a silver keychain dangling from his belt. He had long white hair and a white beard, yellowed by the nicotine of countless cigarettes. ‘Is that the janitor?’ I asked. ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘That’s the chief copy editor.'”
He came by the cowboy look honestly. Prior to his long Statesman career, he was editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, the newspaper that covered Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. They were before his time, of course, but even then – perhaps especially then – his attire wouldn’t have been out of place.
Like all of us who worked with him, Knappenberger came to know Peterson as a mentor, confidant and friend. The crusty slot man who quickly became one of my mentors was the first person I met after being hired as The Statesman’s new Canyon County reporter.
“You get the job?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, flushed with success.
“How much they paying you?”
He tactfully refrained from laughing when told my starting salary.
“Did the boss pause for about ten seconds after telling you what you’d be making?” he asked.
“Yes … now that you mention it, he did!”
“That was your chance to complain. If you had, you’d have gotten another ten bucks a week.”
Former copy-desk denizen Tom Menzel, now of the Seattle area, recalled that on meeting Peterson, “he scared the hell out of me. But then he started talking, warmly and slowly, defying all appearances. Gordon was the boss of the English language – one of us but still very much in charge. I quickly knew I had a lot to learn from this character.”
As we all did. Among other things, he was a master grammarian. Time and again, reporters’ stories were returned with their mistakes noted. I learned more from Peterson than anyone else about correct usage, and about thinking twice before making careless mistakes.
A long-ago column about Japanese balloon bomb attacks during World War II comes to mind. In it, I wrote that some picnickers in Oregon were “the only war casualties on U.S. soil.” Peterson gently reminded me that there were “a few during the Revolutionary and Civil wars.”
Al Bunch, who worked on the copy desk with him before running his own newspaper in Alaska, knew him as a demanding boss who worked hard and played hard.
“He asked me one night if a page had moved (gone from the copy desk to production). I said I thought it had. His response was ‘dammit, Bunch; we don’t pay you to think. We pay you to know.’ He was also the only boss I ever had who’d come to my house and drink up all my whiskey.”
There was, in those days, still an element of truth to the stereotype of the hard-drinking newsman. Peterson liked Jack Daniels, Black Russians, and if they weren’t available, he liked whatever was. There was a rumor in the old days that someone on the copy desk kept a bottle in a desk drawer – strictly against company policy – for emergency use when things got crazy. I never knew for sure who it was or whether it was true, but if it was true my money was on Peterson.
That’s not to imply that he was a drunk or that he let drinking – or anything else – get in the way of doing his best work. In Menzel’s words, he was “calm and cool” under deadline pressure, “working toward perfection, helping his charges do the same. Gordon Peterson was a treasure – a gentle but demanding teacher, a perfectionist without pretension, a unique man who never seemed to change.”
It was a sad day at The Statesman when he retired because of a medical condition that caused occasional blackouts, “spells” as he called them, and kept him from driving to work from his home in Emmett. He lived on Frozen Dog Road. Even his address was colorful.
Menzel is correct in saying that he never seemed to change. He looked the same the last time I saw him, sipping a mint julep at a Kentucky Derby party last year, as he did on the day I met him half a lifetime ago, dispensing advice on how to make an extra ten bucks a week.
Behind the cowboy garb and crusty demeanor were a sharp wit and piercing intellect, a rare breadth of knowledge and a commitment to make each day’s newspaper the best it could be. We couldn’t have had a better last line of defense, a better teacher, or a more unforgettable friend.

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

Some of my earliest memories of the Twin Dragon restaurant, a Boise institution soon to be a memory, are of going there as a teenager in a rock group. That’s how long it’s been a Boise icon.
We went there after the dances we played, which ended at midnight. Boise was much smaller then; there weren’t many places that stayed open that late. Milo’s Torch Cafe and the Twin Dragon, 2200 W. Fairview Avenue, were night-owl magnets in that part of town.
Our orders invariably included Chinese pork and seeds, served with the fiery Chinese mustard for which such establishments are famous, or, in my case, infamous. No meal at the Twin Dragon was complete without my bandmates and our girlfriends egging me on to slather a slice of pork with way too much of the stuff. I sneezed; my eyes watered. Steam was said to have risen from the top of my head.
If a buyer isn’t found, the Twin Dragon will close in March. Owner James Lam, who has kept it going for 32 years, is hanging up his apron.
“I’m getting older now, and I need to take it easy,” he told me. “I want to relax and spend some time with my family instead of working every day.”
Thirty-two years is a long time in the restaurant business, but the Twin Dragon has been around even longer than that. Its family tree dates to the old Louie’s Golden Dragon, a Boise institution at the corner of Eighth and Grove streets. It closed in 1964. Larry Louie, whose father started the Golden Star Restaurant on Orchard Avenue, said that one of the Golden Dragon’s four partners returned to China, another started the Golden Star and the other two started the Twin Dragon – each taking half of the Golden Dragon name. Both opened in 1965.
The Golden Dragon was my parents’ favorite Chinese restaurant. Nothing if not consistent, I invariably ordered pork and seeds with mouth-scorching mustard even then. When my mother wanted to get me out of the way on days when she invited friends over to play Bridge, she’d bribe me with Golden Dragon pork and seeds and a new, one-dollar Hardy Boys book. That bought her a few hours of quiet time while I curled up in my room with the Hardys and Louie’s takeout. Nirvana.
Louie’s was the scene of a brief but unforgettable conversation with my father during my junior high years. For reasons now forgotten, my mother and sister weren’t there; it was just the two of us. He used the occasion to ask, as a father will, what I wanted to do with my life. I’d progressed from the Hardy Boys to John Steinbeck by then and answered without hesitation.
“I want to be a writer.”
His response was equally swift.
“You don’t want to do that, son. You need to do something practical. There are writers starving in the streets.”
I struggled with that dichotomy – the wide-eyed desire to be the next Steinbeck versus something that would pay the bills – well into college before settling on journalism as a kind of compromise. I sometimes wonder how life would have been different if Dad had encouraged my impractical dream.
It was a sad day when the Golden Dragon closed, but the Twin Dragon and Golden Star ably carried on the tradition. Both look and act the way local Chinese restaurants should. The Twin Dragon isn’t fancy – the decor consists of a few Chinese paintings and well-worn booths and tables – but the food is good, the menu extensive, the prices reasonable. You get hot tea and hot mustard without having to ask for them. It has a fiercely loyal clientele.
“Our customers feel like they’re getting something special that they don’t get anywhere else,” Lam said. “It’s not like they won’t get Chinese food when we close, but some of the dishes won’t be the same as we make them here.”
Something unique in my experience happened at the Twin Dragon shortly before my college graduation. You know how the fortunes in Chinese fortune cookies virtually never come true? My folks and I were at the Twin Dragon one night when one did. My wife and I had signed up for a ridiculously cheap flight to Europe, sponsored by our universities, and my parents were on the wire about whether to join us. Mom wanted to go, but Dad was resisting.
His eyes widened as he read the words printed on the strip of paper: “You will soon leave on a long trip.”
That did it. He could argue with Mom, but there was no arguing with a fortune like that.
Another memorable, though less positive, incident happened to us years later in the Twin Dragon parking lot. We’d had dinner and were walking to our car when another car sped around a corner in the parking lot and bumped one of our granddaughters. The driver panicked and took off. An off-duty cop who witnessed it joined me in pursuit. Happily, there were no serious injuries. The embarrassed driver was apprehended and was appropriately remorseful.
Lots of memories. For old times sake, I went to the Twin Dragon last week for a last lunch, slathered a slice of pork in hot mustard and enjoyed every bite of it. I sneezed; my eyes watered. Steam rose from the top of my head.
It seemed the least I could do.

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.

My appearance is grim. I’m wearing a puce-colored robe over gray sweat pants with a blue and orange Bronco logo and a pink, Manley’s Cafe T-shirt. My feet are resplendent in fuzzy ankle socks, canary yellow. Dangling from my neck are reading glasses on a lanyard and a battery-powered reading light. My hair looks like I was electrocuted and lived.
I am recovering from surgery. The first major surgery of my life. A plumbing problem common among men my age.
As men my age go, I’ve been uncommonly lucky. This was my first time spending a night in a hospital, and the lab tests found no cancer. The outlook is good. Soon life will be back to normal, only better. So … no complaints.
That said, one thing people who have had surgery can agree on is that recovering from it is not the most fun you can have. To get an idea of what lay ahead, I asked my doctor prior to the operation what restrictions there would be on my activities.
“You can’t do anything,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Not much. You can’t lift anything heavier than a newspaper.”
“What about walking? How far can I walk?”
“You can walk around inside the house. You can walk to the mailbox and work up to walking around the block if it’s not too big of a block.”
Clearly my pentathlon days were over.
I’d been considering the surgery for a long time because I’d been traipsing to the bathroom multiple times a night for years. When my doctor did a test last summer showing that if nothing was done there was a risk of bladder failure, I couldn’t sign up fast enough. On the list of Health Adventures To Avoid if Humanly Possible, bladder failure is right up there.
The operation was scheduled last summer for early this month. With that much time to think about it, you can turn something as simple as trimming a hangnail into open heart surgery. Your mind conjures up all sorts of things. I read too many grisly (and inaccurate) stories online and was looking forward to the whole thing with, if not dread, a goodly dose of apprehension.
It was totally unwarranted. The surgery went well, and thanks to the nurses who took smashingly good care of me at St. Luke’s Downtown, my first night in a hospital was as peaceful as can be expected.
The recovery, however – due in large part to one of its necessities – was another matter. I hesitate even to write the word. A catheter isn’t the most pleasant thing to write about so from here on I’ll refer to it as Larry, after a plumber I knew. Larry was my constant companion for a week. Ours was a close but not cordial relationship.
Larry was a pain, literally. Not excruciating – far from it – but relentless. There was almost no way to get comfortable while trying to sleep with Larry. Lying on either side was painful, sleeping on my stomach was out of the question and I’m no good at all at sleeping on my back. If not for the pain pills the doctor gave me and an occasional sleeping pill, I’d look like an extra from “Night of the Living Dead” by now.
Late one night, it seemed that Larry wasn’t doing his job properly. (Why do these things always happen at night?) Fearing trouble and not wanting to bother my doctor or hobble to the E.R. at that hour, I called my daughter Jennifer, an R.N. at the hospital where the surgery was done. Her husband, Wally, also is an R.N, with experience in these things.
“It sounds like the port needs to be flushed,” she said. “Don’t worry. Wally will be right over.”
The problem was scientifically diagnosed as an overactive imagination on my part. Everything was working fine. But never in my wildest imaginings had I envisioned a scenario in which I’d be lying naked on a bed with my son-in-law brandishing a syringe over my nether regions.
Life improved dramatically on the one-week anniversary of Larry’s and my relationship, when it was mercifully terminated. Liberated from Larry, I felt free as a bird – ridiculously thankful for simple things like sleeping in un-contorted positions and wearing actual clothes instead of slogging around in a bathrobe and slippers. I’m still not supposed to lift anything heavier than a newspaper, exercise or walk faster than a stroll for another week, but that’s okay. The hard part is over.
It would have been considerably harder without the kind and capable ministrations of anesthesiologist Raphael Streiff, recovery room nurse Jerry Johnson, nurses Brie, Grayson and Heidi (didn’t catch their last names) of St. Luke’s Six East, and especially Dr. Kara Taggart. I couldn’t have asked for a more skilled or caring surgeon.
Bottom line: If you’re a guy with symptoms that are worrying you, have it checked out. You may or may not need the surgery, but if you do, get it done. If I can get through it, you can, too. And the odds are that it will improve your quality of life.
You could even avoid having a permanent Larry.
Speaking of which, the nurse who removed mine unceremoniously dumped it in a trash can.
It was the first time I smiled all week.

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.

Hi,

Instead of the Mondays following the Sundays that my columns are published in The Statesman, I’m considering posting them a week later, on the Sundays after they’re in The Statesman. I think it might be more convenient for you to get the columns on Sundays, when you have more free time to read. And for those of you who live outside Idaho or for other reasons don’t take The Statesman, it wouldn’t matter whether you got them one day or one week after they appear in the newspaper.

The bottom line: Sunday is just a lot better day to spend time relaxing and reading over coffee or breakfast than Monday is. But I don’t want to make this change without hearing how you the subscribers feel about it.

Good idea? Bad idea? Please let me know your thoughts by e-mailing me at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Thanks!  I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Tim