It was 30 years ago last month that my father died – not long in historical terms, yet he’d hardly recognize the Boise and the world of today.
Dad grew up poor in Cripple Creek, Colo., and left in his early teens to escape a life of drudgery working in the gold mines there. He never graduated from high school, but he was smart, hard-working and had a good head for business. He started a food brokerage company and sold groceries to, among others, Joe Albertson. He started another company that exists to this day. And he was a keen observer of the local scene and the larger world, which in some ways bear little resemblance to the ones he left.
How much has Boise changed in three decades? Obviously, it’s a lot bigger. The city-limits population has almost doubled, and growth outside the city has transformed the county. Most of what was farmland between Boise and neighboring cities 30 years ago is now subdivisions. Dad predicted that would happen, but never would he have believed that Nampa and once sleepy Meridian would pass Idaho Falls and Pocatello as the state’s second and third-largest cities. Or that Eagle, then an agrarian backwater, would now be an upscale community of 20,000.
He was a Boisean by choice, forsaking Colorado and later Washington state for the place he came to love above all others. He was a bit of a booster when it came to signs of Boise’s growth and progress, modest as they were in his time. If a big new building was going up, he’d be one of the old guys standing on the sidelines watching the workers. That’s something you don’t see much anymore, old guys gawking and commenting at construction sites.
In that respect, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to die.Thirty years ago, most of downtown was an urban renewal wrecking zone. Building after building was torn down with little but weedy parking lots and cavernous holes in the ground to show for it. Since then, most of the city center we know today has been built: the Grove; the Washington Mutual, Zions Bank, Wells Fargo and Banner Bank towers; BODO, the C.W. Moore Plaza building, the Aspens, JUMP, the new Simplot headquarters … The old guys would have been gawking overtime.
The frequency and variety of entertainment options have skyrocketed. Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman or Mikhail Baryshnikov in Boise? No way.
Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ringo Starr, the Rolling Stones performing in the Treasure Valley? Forget it.
The Boise State Broncos playing on national television in a major bowl game? Dream on.
Boise Towne Square and the Connector didn’t exist 30 years ago. Boise State has gone from a fledgling university to Idaho’s largest. The number and diversity of students and degrees, the new buildings, the Stueckle Sky Center and other additions would have left Dad gaping.
As would quantum leaps in technology. If I’d told him that one day I’d have a phone that would fit in my pocket and allow me to see people while talking to them, shoot photos and movies, send messages to people anywhere in the world and hear back from them in seconds, make and send recordings, pay bills, check the weather, board a plane, record the number of steps I take each day, answer questions, give directions and a whole lot more, he’d have thought I’d slipped a cog.
And what would he have made of a device that allows you to pause, reverse or fast-forward television programs, record them to watch later and zap through commercials?
Or movies you can take with you and watch anywhere?
Or cars that are built largely by robots, get 50 mpg and stop themselves when collisions are imminent? Or, for that matter, cars that drive themselves?
My father was diabetic. He also suffered mightily from acid reflux disease, propping himself up in bed each night with multiple pillows and popping antacids like popcorn. Medical advances of the last three decades have made diabetes easier to live with and would have eliminated his nightly suffering.
If only other changes in Boise and the world were so positive. Dad lost his driver’s license late in life due to failing vision. He didn’t know the meaning of gridlock. Inversions were a new phenomenon that surely wouldn’t last. Red air alerts? What are those?
If you had told him about 9/11, he would have wept, just as we did. If he could have known a time was coming when mass shootings of innocent people – college students, movie audiences, even children – would regularly make news, words wouldn’t have been able to express the horror he would have felt. The horror we all feel far too often.
And if he could somehow have known that the same Internet we now use for so many beneficial purposes is also used to steal identities and life savings and convert people to ideologies that perpetrate acts of mass horror … again, there are no words.
For better and worse, the world never stops changing. My New Year’s wish for all of us is that we learn from the changes and that the decent, honorable people of the world find ways to make goodness and sanity prevail.

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.

Everyone loves a mystery. They’ve kept everyone from Arthur Conan Doyle to Sue Grafton in spending money.
But no one loves a mystery in the same way that genealogists do. That was one of many discoveries relating to my column of two weeks ago a bout a Christmas mystery. My in-box has been awash ever since with messages from genealogy buffs itching to solve it.
For those who missed the first column, the mystery’s subject was a man who showed up on my family’s porch each year during the Christmases of my youth. Well dressed and distinguished looking, he would hand me a gift, say it was for my sister and leave me wondering who he was. I was halfway through my teens before learning that my parents had been married before and that my sister was actually my half sister. The mysterious caller was her father.
Over time, I learned a little about him. His name (or so I thought) was Ben Coppes. My mother said he had worked at Hannifin’s Cigar Store in downtown Boise. And, obviously, they had divorced. But who was he besides a guy who worked at a cigar store and came bearing gifts at Christmastime? What was his relationship with my mother like, and why hadn’t their marriage worked out?
That brings us to the genealogy buffs, who seized upon the puzzle like a dog on a bone. The first thing I learned from them was that I was spelling the mystery caller’s name wrong. It was Ben Koppes, not Coppes.
The subsequent plunge into genealogical websites, old newspaper clippings and public records revealed things about my mother that I never suspected. To understand how surprising some of them were, you need to know a little about her.
Born Marguerite O’Leary in 1913, she was the youngest of three children in a staunchly conservative family. The O’Learys were hard-line, old-school Catholics, which my mother remained until her death at 92. Appearances and propriety counted for a lot with her. She would sooner have swallowed lug nuts than broken a tenet of her faith or done anything remotely scandalous.
I was 16 when she sat me down and told me that she was married and divorced before marrying my father. She added that she married young the first time, but didn’t say how young. Now I know that she was just 17. It’s not hard to imagine how the proper, straight-laced O’Learys would have reacted to their youngest child and only daughter marrying a man three years her senior while she was still in high school.
Christmas mystery? She and Koppes were married on Dec. 25, 1930 – Christmas Day. Though both lived in North Boise, they drove to Canyon County for the ceremony.
Why? At 17, she would have to have had her parents’ permission to marry, and the answer almost certainly would have been no. Did they elope?
Another surprise: on her 1940 census questionnaire – she’d have been 27 then – she wrote that she had completed two years of high school. In all the
decades I knew her, she never once mentioned that she didn’t graduate.
She and Koppes were divorced on Jan. 14, 1941. By then, according to the 1940 census records, they had been separated for nearly a year. She sued on grounds of desertion and was awarded custody of their three-year-old daughter and $35 a month alimony.
Koppes remarried just six months later, my mother nine months later. Census records show that she’d been working in Boise as a “saleslady” at a department store. But her and my father’s marriage license lists her place of residence as Portland.
Portland? She never got around to mentioning that, either.
Wherever she was living, it’s not difficult to imagine her predicament – a newly single mother trying to support a child on a saleslady’s salary. Her 1939 income, including sales commissions, was $810. My father, himself recently divorced, may well have struck her as a shining knight in businessman’s armor.
Thanks to the genealogy buffs – particularly the dogged efforts of Boisean Julie Gustavel Johnson – I now know more about my family’s Christmas visitor. He was born in Centerville and lost his father, who was killed in a fall from a horse, at age five. He served in Italy during World War II. He managed the Bouquet Cigar Store (not Hannifin’s) for over 30 years, was secretary of the local Bartenders and Culinary Workers Union and worked for the state as manager of its liquor warehouse. He and his second wife raised two sons, one whom I was able to reach. Jim Koppes, of Hermiston, Ore., remembered his father as “likable and easy going,” but knew as little as I did about his first marriage.
“He was a very private person,” Jim Koppes said.
Ben Koppes died in 1970 and is buried at Dry Creek Cemetery.
So, while the mystery of the Christmas caller is solved, the old records uncovered new mysteries about my mother. Why did she marry so young – on Christmas Day – almost certainly against the wishes of her family? And why didn’t she finish high school? The easy answer is that she was pregnant. But my half sister wasn’t born for another six years. It’s possible our mother lost a baby in her teens, but I’d rather not think that.
And why did she and her first husband remarry so quickly after their divorce – less than a year for both of them? Were they already seeing their future spouses? Was that the reason for the divorce?
I’d rather not think that, either. The mother I knew was an exemplary role model and a paragon of propriety. Her old-school parents would have been proud of the way she lived her life and raised her children. I’ll always think of her with respect and affection, regardless of what did or didn’t happen in her early years.
It’s best that some mysteries remain mysteries.

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 a woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

My apologies for being late posting this week’s column. I had surgery Monday, the day I normally post, and will be moving slowly for a while. Will shortly be posting this week’s blog, the second part of the Christmas Mystery Visitor – with intriguing details about my mother that readers/genealogists unearthed  and that I never suspected. I hope you enjoy it.

If you have friends or relatives who’d be interesting in getting my columns by blog, I’d be grateful if you asked them to click on http://www.woodwardblog.com and then on subscribe. As always, it’s free and they’ll get the columns by e-mail every other Monday. The blog is especially handy for people who live outside The Statesman’s circulation area, as evidenced by its subscribers in states as distant as Alaska and Florida.

As you know, recent years have been hard on the newspaper industry.  The more subscribers I have, the better the chances would be of getting a sponsor for the blog and continuing it in the event The Statesman should be forced to cut costs and discontinue my column. I’m not saying that will happen, have heard absolutely no indication that it it will  and hope it doesn’t, but as mentioned, these are uncertain times in this business. I love writing the columns and hope to do so for a long time, both for the Statesman and for those of you who subscribe here. Thanks for reading,

Tim

Every year at this time during my growing-up years, a few days before Christmas, a mysterious man would knock on our door.
It was always at night – he most likely worked during the day – and in my memory of his brief visits it was always snowing. We seemed to get more snow in Boise in those days. The image of the mystery man appearing in the glow of our porch light on snowy evenings is indelibly etched in my memory.
He was a nice looking man and was always impeccably dressed – a suit and tie, a dressy, knee-length overcoat. A fedora lent a distinguished air, heightening his aura of intrigue.
For some reason, probably that I was the youngest in the family and quicker than everyone else – I was almost always the one who answered the door. His greeting never varied.
“Hello,” he would say, politely removing his handsome hat. Then, holding out a package, “This is for Joan.”
The packages were beautifully wrapped. I was young and self-centered enough to wonder why he never had one for me, but never asked about it. In some vague way, I understood that he was a part of Joan’s past that was as much a riddle to me as the gifts he brought each year.
Joan was my older sister and only sibling – ten years older and in some ways as much a second mother as a sister. She helped me with my homework, paid for braces on my teeth, went halves with me on my first guitar. A good sister. But why did she get a Christmas present from the enigmatic man who came to our porch every year and no one else in the family did?
In addition to being beautifully wrapped, his gifts were tasteful and expensive – perfume, jewelry boxes, a Bulova watch. Gifts chosen to please a teenage girl. The only one in the family he seemed to care about was Joan, or Joanie as she was known to almost everyone else. He never asked to speak to my parents, who perplexingly stayed in the background when he came to call, and he didn’t seem remotely interested in me. Who was this guy?
I was 16, my sister married and gone, when my mother finally let me in on the family secret.
“There’s something I want to tell you about,” she said one morning before leaving for work. “It won’t take long. You might want to sit down.”
It sounded serious, and it was.
“Did you know that your father and I were both married before we were married to each other?” she asked.
She might as well have asked if I’d known that they were both vampires. There had never been so much as a whisper of a clue.
“Joanie isn’t your sister,” she continued. “She’s your half sister. That man who brings a Christmas present for her every year is her father. Any questions?”
Not one. The power of speech had left me.
In bits and pieces over time, I learned a little more about the mysterious caller. By then, with my half sister no longer living there, he’d stopped coming to our house at Christmastime. Maybe that was why Mom waited till then to tell me about him. If she’d done it while he was still popping by with presents, I might have asked embarrassing questions. He was clearly a part of her past that she had no interest in sharing.
My father’s first wife was even more of a conundrum. Not once did he or my mother mention her. I never saw a picture of her, never knew her name.
As the years passed and my mother acquired the nonchalance of old age, some sketchy details emerged. Her first husband’s name was Ben. They’d fallen in love at a young age, married, had Joan. He worked for a time at the iconic Hannifin’s Cigar Store in downtown Boise. His last name was Coppes. Ben Coppes.
The rather conspicuous subject of why they divorced was never touched upon. In their own ways, each of my folks was a private, old-school person. Some things simply weren’t discussed, and failed previous marriages were at the top of the list.
After Joan died, in 2012, one of her sons gave me an old photo album that belonged to her and before that to our mother. It was filled with pictures of her and Ben and their friends when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. Even allowing for the poor quality of the old photos, Ben and my mother at that age were striking people.
The pictures in the scrapbook made me want to know more about them. What was their relationship like? What were they like all those years ago, and why didn’t their marriage last? Most of all, who was Ben Coppes other than a guy who used to work at Hannifin’s and showed up at our door, clothed in mystery, once a year at Christmastime?
If any of his descendants or anyone else who knew him read this, I’d love to hear from them. Solving the puzzle of the man on the porch could be one of the best Christmas gifts ever.

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

One of the things parents hope for is that their children will like some of the same things they do. It helps bridge the generation gap.
This is especially true for grandparents – and doubly so in the digital age of kids barely tolerating their technologically challenged elders. With this in mind, my wife and I bundled up our grandson Grayson Saturday and toddled him off to the model railroad show in Old Boise.
This wasn’t the first such outing. A lifelong train buff, I have tried and failed to interest any of our other kids or grandkids in model trains – a pastime I enjoyed almost obsessively in my own childhood. Reasoning that part of the trouble could have been that the kids were too old, usually between the ages of four and six when carted off whining or pouting to train shows, I vowed to start Grayson off at an early age. He is one.
Well, almost two, actually. Old enough.
The show is in the basement of the Pioneer Building at Sixth and Main streets. It was in an upstairs room of the building for 13 years, but ran out of space; thus a recent move to larger quarters downstairs. This year’s display is three times larger than the old one. It has towns and woods, a gas station, a church, a hobby store, a Pillsbury factory. It has freight trains and passenger trains, steam and diesel trains, two switchyards, 120 switches, 1,200 feet of track …
The display is operated by the Old Boise N-Scale Model Railroad Club, which club member Jim Brostmeyer describes as “a group of about 15 guys and gals who love trains.” Though not always open, it’s a permanent display. That allows club members to make improvements year-round.
It shows. The structures, scenery and train layouts are meticulously planned and executed. N-Scale is the second smallest model-railroad gauge, allowing a lot of elements to fit in a compact space. By comparison, the Lionel trains popular with children are about three times as large. Club members have operated trains more than 100 cars long.
Impressive as the display was, I had misgivings about how it would go over with Grayson. Was he too young to appreciate the hard work and attention to detail that made it possible?
Probably, but it didn’t matter. He loved every minute of it. We stayed for an hour, and he smiled non-stop. Only afterwards did we learn from his mother that one of his favorite cartoons is “Thomas the Train.” The kid is a born train buff. That’s my opinion, at least, and no amount of logic is going to talk me out of it.
Surprising as it may be to traditionalists, model trains have gone high-tech.
“The lights are LED lights,” Brostmeyer said. “They make the scenery and figures pop, and they’re totally green. Two years ago, we went to a digital command control system. Every locomotive has a computer chip and its own address. There are no limitations; we can run as many trains at once as we want. You can even run them off of your cell phone. It’s a mix of old-school and today’s technology.”
Today’s surprising fact: an early form of digital command control was the brainchild of singer-songwriter Neil Young, himself an avid model-train buff.
It’s no secret, however, that old-school toys such as model trains have lost popularity with recent generations. The club is working to turn that around, and if the response to Saturday’s show was an indication, it’s succeeding. Train geezers were outnumbered by young parents with small children, and all of them appeared to be having a marvelous time.

One of the show’s displays is a game that teaches kids what trains do by matching railroad cars with the loads they carry. Another asks them to find elements of the display – signs, a Union Pacific repair shop, a windmill, etc. Videos play non-stop, kids can check out train-related materials from a small library, and there’s the occasional visit from Santa.
“Santa loves trains,” Brostmeyer said. “He comes here on his breaks.
“… We try to have things here for little kids to pique their interest in trains. One thing trains have going for them, unlike video games, is that they’re real. When kids see these trains and understand that they’re scale models of real trains and you see that spark in their eyes, that makes it all worthwhile.”
To help him make the connection, we took Grayson after the show to see Big Mike, the 1920 steam locomotive at Boise’s depot. He seemed a bit overwhelmed, which wasn’t surprising, actually. For such a little boy, Big Mike is probably just too much train.
But there was no doubt that a connection of some sort was made. From the time we got home until the time his mother picked him up, he said the word “train” roughly 116 times.
One of his Christmas gifts from us, a Thomas the Train set, arrived on our porch Tuesday. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he opens it on Christmas morning.
Unless some shameless train junkie has already opened it with him first.

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.

Most columns generate a modest response, but some strike a chord. That’s how it was with one published in August about my granddaughter the honor student – and drug addict.
The column detailed her years of Oxycontin addiction, stealing to support her habit, jail time and, ultimately, the glorious day that she graduated from Ada County Drug Court. She’s been drug-free since and – knock on wood – has her life back.
Few of my columns have had a greater response, much of it from recovering addicts or their family members. Many of the responses reiterated the August column’s point that addiction knows no boundaries. It’s a genetic disease striking families of every socioeconomic background.
John (last name withheld) wrote to say that his son, “a high school honor student, valedictorian, captain of three sports, college graduate and business owner – got hooked on opiates,” and was awaiting sentencing. “Despite cautioning my children that all four of their grandparents were addicted to either tobacco, alcohol or both, Oxycontin hijacked his brain during his last year of playing college football … If it can happen to my son, it can happen to anyone. And statistics show that it does so without regard to gender, ethnicity, religion or socioeconomic status.”
Chuck wrote that he and his wife were shocked to the core to learn that their daughter – a wife, mother of two and a respected professional – was addicted to meth and alcohol. A career military pilot, he added that he could “not begin to tell you how many times I preached no drug use in this family. Don’t even think about it.”
An Oregon reader shared a story of parental heartache caused by his young nephew, a heroin addict: “He got there through Oxycontin after a sports injury. … Heroin and opiates are a huge national problem in every socioeconomic rung.”
The stories, many of them heartbreaking, had a common theme of addiction at an early age and a system that too often fails to address the underlying problem of addiction as a disease. Some excerpts:
“As a grandmother, I am dealing with this disease hitting the third- generation victim, my 23-year-old-grandson.”
“The disease is always in control, and you would sell your soul to keep it that way.”
“My daughter is dealing with drug problems with her 16-year-old son, and it is heartbreaking for her and all the family who love him so much.”
“I am a 42-year-old woman who became addicted to prescription opiates at age 17. I’ve been in recovery for three years.”
“The real tragedy is that with few exceptions, our legislature, judiciary and law enforcement still see addicts as moral failures that need to be punished instead of treated. … we continue to lock them up at great expense to taxpayers and with no end in sight.”
Ginny Gobel wrote about her experience with her teenage son, which led to her ongoing role as an activist working to help other families and correct misconceptions about addiction and the stereotypes associated with it.
Gobel’s son started using marijuana at 14 and went from there to other drugs. He’d been popular and a good student with wholesome interests – pets, soccer, skiing, diving – he dove the Great Barrier Reef at 11 – but lost interest in them and became, in his mother’s words, “dark, secretive and nasty.”
Unable to find adequate services for him in Boise, she and her husband sent him to a therapeutic boarding school in another state. It helped a lot, but returning to Boise was problematic for a 15-year-old in recovery.
“Just when he started making new friends, his old friends started seeking him out and he started using again. Drugs robbed him and us of his high school years.”
Her son is grown now, lives in another state and is doing “all right,” she said. “But he knows what his life could have been without drugs. He’d have played sports and gone to college. … Drugs derailed those dreams, at least for now.”
These days Gobel devotes much of her time helping others deal with drug-related problems. She started a blog, http://www.blindersoff.org, on drug-use awareness for parents of adolescents. Boise High School is using it with positive results.
How widespread is drug use among teens? The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that one in four have used an illegal drug by the time they graduate from high school.
Is yours one of them? Red flags, Gobel says, include lying, irritability, changes in interests, sleep patterns, friends, health and acceptance of responsibility. If grades are plummeting and responsibilities at home are being neglected, you have reason to be concerned.
Help is available. Gobel’s blog has useful information, as does Dr. Ruth Potee’s video, “Addiction is a Brain Disease,” https://youtu.be/qjyvRQFbseQ. If you’d prefer a book, Gobel recommends “What’s Wrong with My Kid: When Drugs or Alcohol Might Be a Problem and What to Do about It,” by George E. Leary, Jr. Help also is available from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Behavioral Health Services and from private treatment centers.
Idaho is making some progress on treating addiction as a disease rather than a failure of morals or willpower. Boise is training police officers to deal more sensitively with the mentally impaired. Idaho will soon be the first Western state to have a chapter of Learn to Cope, a peer group for parents. Rep. Raul Labrador is supporting sentencing reform for non-violent offenders, many of them suffering with untreated substance-use disorder, and Idaho Atty. Gen. Lawrence Wasden is on record as supporting the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.
Much more remains to be done, however. Idaho has one of the country’s highest rates of opiate abuse among teens. One in five Idaho teenagers has taken a prescription drug belonging to someone else, usually a relative. We rank 21st among the states in deaths from opiate overdose.
We have a long way to go in fighting a disease that’s erasing the promise and threatening the lives of too many of our young people.

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.

So many people came to Grace Arnold’s birthday party that it was held at her church because they wouldn’t fit in her home. They came from as far away as Seattle and California.
She was turning 100, but that wasn’t my reason for being there. People live so much longer these days that 100th birthdays aren’t as newsworthy as they once were. I wanted to meet her to learn more about the early years of our mutual alma maters, Boise High School and Boise Junior College. That she had made history at BJC was an unexpected bonus.
Arnold and I had never met, but recognizing her in the crowded church hall shouldn’t have been a problem. How many people there would be a century old?
Actually, it was a problem. A number of the guests were getting up in years, and no one stood out as looking the way we expect centenarians to look. There was a white-haired woman seated at a table with a birthday cake big enough for a marching band, but she didn’t look anywhere close to 100. That couldn’t possibly have been her.
It was. Even after being introduced and conversing with her for a while, I had trouble believing how old she truly was. She walked unassisted, her hearing was better than some people’s half her age and her mind was clear and bright. We should all be so lucky.
It didn’t take long to realize that she was a force of nature, and had been all her life. At Boise High School, she was an “art girl” and a “letter girl,” a member of the art club, history club, home economics club and library staff, an honor student and a member of the National Honor Society. She didn’t tell me any of this herself; it was all in her 1933 Boise High School yearbook.
Then as now, students’ senior pictures were accompanied by predictions of what they’d end up becoming. Hers was “Old Maid.”
“I’m not sure how they came up with that,” she said, laughing. “I certainly wasn’t.”
Hardly. She was married twice, had three children and is a grandmother many times over. Her grandkids call her “GG,” for great grandmother.
I know. You’re wondering how she made history at BJC, now BSU. We’ll get to that, but first a wee bit more about Boise High in 1933.
Teachers stuck around in those days. My mother and one of my kids had the same English teacher I did – the redoubtable Inez Woesner. She was one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer.
“She influenced a lot of us,” Arnold said.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Woesner was her English teacher, too. The number of students she influenced would be in the thousands.
That brings us to BJC and Arnold’s role in its history. For years, I’ve heard that it was a woman who suggested blue and orange as the school colors. Every attempt to track her down, however, came to a dead end. So you can imagine my surprise upon learning that it was indeed a woman – namely Grace Arnold.
“There was a committee of us,” she said. “He wasn’t my husband yet, but my first husband and I were on it along with several others.”
BJC then was nothing like the BSU of today, which offers over 200 degrees to more than 22,000 students. It opened its doors (or quite possibly door, singular) in the fall of 1932 with 70 students and a full-time faculty of eight. It wasn’t even in the same place that the university is today. It was in the former St. Margaret’s Hall, an Episcopalian women’s academy on Idaho Street between 1st and 2nd. It was there that Arnold enrolled in the fall of 1933.
“We thought Boise was a big city then, but it was only about 25,000 people,” she said. “It wasn’t the Los Angeles of Idaho like it is today. And the school was very small. You knew just about everybody.”
A committee was formed to choose the school colors and a name for its athletic teams. Committee members thought that a Western theme would be appropriate, and chose the name “Broncos” for the wild horses of neighboring Owyhee County.
The first mascot was “Elmer,” a paper-mache’ horse that was cremated after every game. Belying a winning tradition that would span decades, the Broncos lost their first football game: St. Joseph’s Academy, 6; BJC, 0.)
A real horse as a mascot didn’t come along until 1965. By then, the word “cremate” undoubtedly had been used – figuratively, of course – to describe what the Broncos had done to opponents on the field.
When the time came for choosing school colors, Arnold suggested blue and orange because “Boise High School had red and white, and other schools had most of the other colors, but nobody had blue and orange.”
She still cheers for the Broncos and proudly wears blue and orange on game days.
One of her birthday gifts was a football signed by the coaches and players.
Appropriate. If not for her, they might be wearing pumpkin and puce.

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: Tim recently returned from Virginia and North Carolina. This is the second of two columns from the trip.

OUTER BANKS, N.C. – A recent segment on the evening news featured interviews with people on a beach about the approach of Hurricane Joaquin. That was “our” beach. We’d spent several nights in a house nearby and had left only the day before.
On previous visits to North Carolina, I’d seen little but cities and densely wooded hills and “hollers.” The Outer Banks couldn’t be more different. Topographically, ecologically and in just about every other way, they’re a world apart.
For readers unfamiliar with them, the Outer Banks are a strip of barrier islands and peninsulas separating three sounds from the Atlantic Ocean. The narrowest part, near Cape Hatteras, is about the width of two football fields. A baseball player standing in the middle could throw a ball to the sound on one side and the ocean on the other.
The house where we stayed was at Kitty Hawk, where motorized flight was born. It was a place I’d wanted to see since taking flying lessons as a teenager in hopes of becoming a dashing airline pilot. To go there is to appreciate the enormity of what the Wright Brothers achieved.
Until they made their first flights in 1903, most people thought human flight was patently impossible. The Wrights were ridiculed, dismissed as loonies.
They started out by studying birds and progressed to gliders, flying them with ropes, like kites. Above all, the brothers were scientists. They disproved existing theories of flight and devised their own. They made wind tunnels, built wings, propellers and other parts based on their theories, invented the first airplane engine.
And they were courageous, risking their lives with every flight. They never flew together, the rationale being that if one was killed the other would survive to carry on the work. When success made them “overnight sensations” after years of work, study and ridicule, their fans ranged from everyday people to kings and presidents. A towering monument to them was built at the summit of Kitty Hawk’s Kill Devil Hill, so named because buccaneers there favored rum “strong enough to kill the devil.”
One side of the monument bears a single word: genius.
A nearby museum features a replica of their plane, historic photos and other oddments, but to me the most interesting thing was the field where they made their early flights. Markers show the starting and ending points of successively longer attempts. You can walk the actual flight paths. The first was 40 of my footsteps. Forty steps that changed the world.
Fifty miles down the narrow highway that threads the Outer Banks is Cape Hatteras. A framed poster of its famous lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in the world, graces a bathroom in our house and we were looking forward to seeing the real thing. Getting there, however, was a bit of a challenge.
If you saw the news reports, you know that Joaquin eventually changed course. But it was bearing down when we were there, and there had been so much rain that the road had reopened only the day before. Parts of it were still under nearly a foot of water.
After the towns of Kitty Hawk and Nags Head (combined population about 6,000), the character of the barrier islands changed. Vacation rentals and strip malls were left behind, and the highway became a lonely road lined by marshland, sound and ocean. It was a foggy, rainy weekday; ours was one of a very few cars on the road.
We spent a long time looking for a place my wife’s smartphone touted as a great restaurant but turned out to be a raw fish takeout, then stopped for lunch at Sunny’s Cafe in Hatteras Village. It was anything but sunny. By this time it was raining hard. We began to worry that the road, underwater in more and more places, might close again.
Sunny’s was downright dismal on this stormy, September day. Between the approaching storm and the absence of summer tourists, the lunch crowd was limited to us and a smattering of regulars. We ate, watched the rain through a window by our table and speculated about the course of the hurricane. It was a little like being in a scene from “Key Largo.” We paid the bill and, not wanting to chance the road closing, reversed our course and hurried “home” to Kitty Hawk – with one quick stop along the way.
The stop was the lighthouse. It looked exactly the way it does on our bathroom poster, but the setting was totally different. The foreground on the poster is sand and seashells, but all we could see were grass and trees. A National Park Service guide explained why. In 1999 (the poster is older than we thought), the lighthouse was moved 2,900 feet inland because of shoreline erosion.
How do you move a lighthouse that’s 193 feet tall and weighs 4,800 tons more than half a mile?
Slowly and carefully, on beams and rollers. The actual move, not counting years of planning and preparation, took a little over three weeks.
We spent four days in the Outer Banks and enjoyed every minute of it – Kitty Hawk, the Cape, the history, it was all great. But my favorite thing was standing on the beach, looking out at the eight-foot waves. There’s just something about the ocean, especially during a storm. I could have stood there all day, soaking it up – no summer crowds, no gridlock or honking horns – just the wild, natural beauty of the place.
Thanks, Joaquin, for sparing it.

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 http://www.woodwardcolumn.com.

Editor’s note: Tim recently returned from Virginia and North Carolina. This is the first of two columns from the trip.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Idahoans are known for their friendliness, but we’ve got nothing on Virginians.
My wife and I and some friends recently returned from Virginia, where people not only were friendly but Idaho-Virginia connections seemed to be everywhere.
Monticello, for example. I’d been to Thomas Jefferson’s home once before, to cover the opening ceremonies of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and have never been colder. The grounds were buried under a foot of snow and ice. Taking notes was all but impossible – the ink in my pens froze.
This visit was more congenial. We’d come to Charlottesville for the Boise State-University of Virginia football game. But our BSU shirts made us targets not of hostility, as happens in some cities civility prevents me from naming, but of southern hospitality.
“We’d like to welcome the Boise State people who are with us today,” a Monticello guide said to our tour group. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, they’re the ones who are going to beat the University of Virginia tomorrow night.”
That was a surprise. Hospitality is one thing, but predicting victory for the visiting team?
No one in the group – many of them Virginians – seemed to mind.
“Are you going to go easy on us tomorrow night?” a man in a UVA T-shirt asked us.
“I hope not,” one of his friends said. “I hope you beat us good. Then maybe we’ll get a new coach.”
A bigger surprise, however, was Ed Imhoff, our guide.
“I know Boise State better than you’d think,” he said. “I taught geology there when it was Boise College. It was only about five buildings then.”
Imhoff painted a different picture of Monticello than the one I’d come away with in 2003. Then it was all about Lewis Clark (and avoiding hypothermia). This time the weather was perfect, the grounds verdant and productive. Trees, over 160 species, showed the first hint of fall color, flowers bloomed along the walkways and harvest was in full swing in the sprawling garden.
In Jefferson’s time, Monticello was a cottage industry. Hundreds of workers, from artists and craftsmen to housekeepers and gardeners, built and maintained it. Many were slaves. Enlightened as he was in most ways, Jefferson was a paradox, condemning both debt and slavery while enjoying the luxuries they made possible. Our third president lived very well – French cuisine and fine wines, a butler and staff of servants, the best of everything. Even with the benefit of free labor – he inherited some 200 slaves – he died so deeply in debt that his grandson struggled much of his life to pay it off.
Monticello is four miles from Charlottesville, where a couple wearing BSU shirts gave us the standard “go, Broncos” greeting in a parking lot. Nothing unusual about that, except that they were Virginians.
“Our son works at BSU,” they explained. “And the Broncos are a great team so we wanted to show our support. Welcome to Virginia.”
In downtown Charlottesville, a coffee vendor outside a cafe was sporting a “Welcome BSU fans” sign on a chalkboard beside his cart.
“I’ve been a BSU fan ever since that game where they beat Oklahoma (the 2007 Fiesta Bowl),” he said. “That was one of the best college football games ever. Good luck tonight.”
Inside the cafe was the trip’s most colorful character. The specialty of the house was homemade ice cream; she was the dipper. She was in her 70s, had lived in Virginia all her life and had an accent thicker than Virginia sorghum molasses.
“Y’all are from Boise, huh? Y’all ever get out to Vegas?”
Without waiting for an answer, she added that she went “mostly to Atlantic City, but I like Vegas better. Y’all gamble? I do, but I’m not any good at it.”
With that she went on to say that she had won $19,000 on a dollar slot machine and $9,000 on a penny slot machine.
But she’s not any good at it.
Virginia all but reeks of history. In Richmond, we visited the Edgar Allen Poe Museum and learned that in addition to writing chilling tales, Poe was a boxer, set a school record in the broad jump and swam six miles upstream in the James river, a feat said to have never been duplicated.
We also ran into the grandmother of a BSU player there, and a woman from Idaho City who knew one of our daughters.
The most admirable example of Virginia hospitality came from a man we met in a restaurant. When a member of our group saw his UVA T-shirt, he couldn’t resist asking him what he thought of the game. The man hung his head and looked as if he was about to cry. When he noticed a couple of BSU shirts in the group, he smiled ruefully.
“Y’all beat us good,” he said. “But no hard feelings. I hope y’all have a wonderful trip.”
The Broncos had defeated his team on the field, but the Virginians’ hospitality was unbeatable. Some schools closer to home could learn from them.
Next: North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

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.

Tastes remembered for life – everyone has a few.
Just thinking about New Mexico-style chili relleno burritos at the defunct LaFiesta on Boise Avenue makes me salivate. The same for pizza at the old Louie’s in Ketchum, garlic salad dressing at Buddy’s in Pocatello, anything at the lamentably departed Danskin Station in Garden Valley …
And rum raisin ice cream at Leopold’s. My wife and I went there during visit to Savannah, Ga., after learning that Leopold’s was rated the fifth best ice cream shop in the world. One taste of its rum raisin and I was hooked for life.
Rum raisin, however, is not your everyday ice-cream flavor. It might be sold in Boise, but if so I haven’t found it. So you can imagine my delight while in neighboring Washington last month at finding it on an ice-cream company’s website there.
The Olympic Mountain Ice Cream site lists more than 200 Washington retail outlets, which suggested a sprawling factory in Seattle.
Not so. The “factory,” so to speak, is conveniently located about 30 miles from my in-law’s house on Hood Canal. The rum-raisin quest was on.
I envisioned a short, routine drive.
Right.
The directions on the company’s site said to head south on Route 101, turn onto the Skokomish Valley Road and follow it for a little over seven miles before turning onto Bambi Farms Road.
Bambi Farms Road? So much for the sprawling factory in Seattle.
The road wound through picturesque farmland, passing an enterprise called Hunter Farms, a “linger longer” sign and a “fresh corn” sign. Clearly this wasn’t a road leading to anything industrial.
A detour and temporary bridge took me over a mountain creek. From there the road led from lush farmland to deep forest. Ferns lined the road; brooding evergreens all but shut out the sun. Sudden twilight; semi spooky. Had I taken a wrong turn?
Then, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sign – Bambi Farms Road.
Bambi Farms Road did not inspire confidence. It was narrow, one lane, dirt. Here the woods closed in even more. Longfellow’s forest primeval came to mind. The road was so narrow and tortuous that the speedometer fell from slow to crawling speed to barely moving.
After multiple twists and turns, the road forked. Exactly in the middle of the fork was an enormous tree. Steps made of boards leading to a treehouse were nailed to its trunk. Nowhere was there the sort of directional sign you’d expect for an operation that supplied ice cream (or anything else, for that matter) to over 200 businesses. Worse, there was nowhere to turn around in the event that I was lost, which was seeming more and more like a possibility.
Only after looking for the second or third time did I spot the sign, such as it was, scrawled in minuscule letters on one of the treehouse steps: ice cream. Just those two words – no company name, no indication of distance, nothing but handwritten letters and a faded arrow pointing to the left. Compared with it, the Bambi Farms Road sign was flashing neon lights.
More twists and turns, and a clearing with a small parking lot and several buildings appeared. Two of the buildings were virtually festooned with flower pots and baskets. Above one of their doors, all but hidden by flowers, was yet another modest sign. Again, just two words. No company name, no slogan, just “ice cream.”
On the front porch of one of the buildings, a man was busy watering flowers. He turned out to be Karl Black, who with his wife, Bev, started the business 31 years ago. Looking for a quiet place where they could live and raise their children close to nature and on their own terms, the Blacks opened an organic truck farm in the beautiful Skokomish Valley. That led to a gelato shop and what eventually became Olympic Mountain Ice Cream.
It was a hot day. I sweltered on the porch while Karl watered the flowers and expounded on the lack of quality in mass-produced foods. Some so-called “premium” ice creams, he said, have a shelf life of one year.
“A year!” he practically shouted. “They have lists of preservatives a foot long. We use minimal preservatives. Our shelf life is two weeks. It would last longer than that, but the texture changes so it has to be eaten while it’s fresh.
“You won’t find any ice cream fresher than ours. We get our cream from a dairy in Oregon. When they’re in season, we use fresh, local peaches and berries and other fruits.”
While Karl continued to watered the flowers, Bev showed me the “production room.” It was about the size of a large kitchen. Three employees were making ice cream. Slowly.
“We make it three gallons a time, over and over,” she said.
All of her and Karl’s children have worked there. Twenty employees help them make and deliver ice cream and sorbets to shops and restaurants. It’s not sold in supermarkets.
Two-hundred-plus retail outlets notwithstanding, it’s still a Mom and Pop operation. The bottom line is secondary to making tastes remembered for life – over 200 ice cream flavors and nearly 100 sorbets: from lemon lavender and chocolate Grand Marnier to Irish freckles and zabaione.
“With a couple of days notice, we’ll make anything you want,” Karl said.
In an age of mass-produced everything, it was a treat to discover a family-run business almost obsessively passionate about quality and innovation.
Even if it is on a primitive road in a forest primeval.
Oh, you’re wondering about the rum raisin.
Let’s just say it was worth the trip.

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.

As parties go, it was memorable.
Even though I forgot most of it.
What happened that evening was the sort of thing you don’t think will happen to you. It’s something you don’t think about at all because it’s off-the-charts weird. You think you could be in a car wreck someday, or have a heart attack or suffer any of the other misfortunes that commonly befall people, but losing your memory? Not even on the radar.
I’m lucky – well into my 60s and yet to spend a night in a hospital. That can make you complacent. You sail along from day to day and year to year assuming life will stay pretty much the same, but there are no guarantees. All of us are only one doctor’s visit away, one compromised cell or artery or stupid accident away from our lives changing dramatically.
My wakeup call wasn’t dramatic. Most of the people around me didn’t know anything was wrong. I’d just finished playing at a CD release party with my group, the Mystics, when things got fuzzy. I had to think hard about which instruments and other gear were mine, how to put them away and where to pack them in my car – things normally done on autopilot. I worried that I might not be able to find my way home.
That turned out not to be a problem, but once home my wife confirmed that something was seriously out of whack.
“Were you kidding?” she asked.
“About what?”
“The CD sales. When I asked you how they were going, you said ‘Are we selling CDs?’ You guys had been signing them all night and you didn’t remember? How do you think all those people in the crowd got CDs? Did you think you were throwing them out like Frisbees?”
The next morning, we left on vacation. We’d been on the road for about an hour when she mentioned that a friend’s brother-in-law had died the night before.
“What?” I asked with genuine surprise. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
She almost ran off the road.
“Are you serious? You don’t remember talking to Judee (the friend) about her brother-in-law dying? You don’t remember giving her a hug and telling her how sorry you were?”
Nada. Zilch. It was as if it never happened.
“This is getting scary,” she said. “You’ve been asking me the same questions over and over this morning and don’t remember the answers. You need to call your doctor.”
No argument.
If I could just remember his name.
We were just out of Baker City, Ore., when the fog lifted. My doctor’s name returned, along with the names of the medications I take and had been struggling to remember. (At least enough of my marbles were left to know that whatever doctor I ended up seeing would want to know about them). But virtually all of the night before was still a blank. Fifteen hours of my life virtually gone.
Halfway to our destination we met our younger daughter, who was returning from her vacation, for lunch. A registered nurse, she said I might have had a transient ischemic attack or TIA, a small stroke.
“If that’s what it was,” she added, “there could be more coming. You really need to get hold of your doctor.”
It was a Sunday (why do these things always happen on weekends?), but I used St. Luke’s online messaging to contact my doctor. His response was prompt, unequivocal. Get to the nearest E.R. Right away.
Expecting the usual, long wait, we were surprised when the folks at Mason General Hospital in Shelton, Wash., rushed me from check-in to an exam by the E.R. doc in less time than it takes to read the patient privacy brochures.
“There are buzz words,” said our other daughter, a paramedic who was with us for the vacation. “When they hear those, they get you right in. Your buzz word was stroke.”
At the hospital equivalent of warp speed, they drew blood, did an EKG and a CT Scan and had the results read by a radiologist. (I silently gave thanks that one thing I didn’t forget was to bring my health insurance card.)
After asking lots of questions and seeing the test results, the E.R. doc rejected what had seemed to be the logical diagnosis.
“I’m not buying the TIA,” he said. “You didn’t have any numbness, no drooping muscles or speech problems, and your test results are normal. I think it was Transient Global Amnesia.”
That sounded even worse.
“It’s pretty rare,” he said. “Including yours, I’ve only seen three cases.”
That figured. Nothing normal ever happens to me.
“The good news is there’s no damage and it isn’t likely happen again.”
Good news? It was the best possible news.
He added, however, that it would be wise to see a neurologist when we got home to confirm the diagnosis and make sure a stroke wasn’t lurking. I have. He’s ordered another test.
Maybe my luck will hold. Maybe the whole was nothing more than a scary wakeup call.
A wakeup call to do the things on the bucket list, to do more for others, to make the most of whatever time is left. If there’s a lesson to be learned from a medical scare, it’s that luck is uncertain and life can change in a heartbeat. Every day matters.

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

It was the most emotional graduation any of us had attended. That it was for drug court rather than high school or college only intensified that. Even the strict, no-nonsense judge was in tears.
One of the graduates was my granddaughter Hailey, whose troubles were hinted at but not identified in a previous column.
She was – is – a drug addict.
There, I’ve said it in print. My first grandchild – the bright, promising kid we all doted over – is a drug addict.
You don’t think it can happen in your family, but it can. It’s happening in families of every socioeconomic background. You could be a model citizen with a PhD and a six-figure income and have a kid in jail for drugs. Idaho has one of the nation’s highest rates of opiate abuse among young people. Ada County Drug Court has nearly a thousand graduates now, most in their early 20s. And for every graduate, more young people either are in prison for drug-related crimes or are using and haven’t been caught yet.
Oxycontin, a prescription pain killer, was Hailey’s drug of choice. She was hooked at 16.
No one in the family suspected. We noticed that she was withdrawn and that she looked pale and haggard. We thought it was a physical problem.
Until the stealing started. Cash, her mother’s ATM card, her aunt’s jewelry, my wife’s 25th anniversary necklace. She hocked them all, along with her own laptop and her beloved Canon camera, to buy drugs.
“I remember cringing when I stole my mom’s ATM card,” she said. “I cringed when I took it and again when I put it in the machine. I stopped and tried not to do it. I felt sick about it, but I couldn’t not do it. You need the drug like you need oxygen. You’d do anything to get it.”
An expensive stint at a private treatment center changed nothing.
“I knew everything they taught me. I knew all about addiction, and I still wanted the drugs. My mother had rules to try to keep me safe. She thought that if I had rules and a schedule I could stop. But I was beyond that kind of help. It has to come from within and from a higher power than yourself.”
The road to drug court and recovery started with my wife and Hailey’s aunt. It nearly killed them, but they pressed charges for the stolen jewelry. if they hadn’t, she’d have kept stealing, kept doing drugs. Hailey later said that it probably saved her life.
Seeing a child you love led to jail in shackles is something you don’t forget , or get over. Judge Cheri Copsey sent Hailey to jail four times during her three years in drug court – three for breaking no-contact orders for people she wasn’t allowed to see and once for having diluted urine at a drug test. The test didn’t find drugs, but she went to jail anyway. Altogether, she spent a little over four months there:
“You have to shut off your emotions and not think about being there, because if you do think about it it’s one of the most miserable feelings in the world. You feel so alone. The boredom, the anxiety, the missing everyone – it’s suffocating. But now, looking back, without that I wouldn’t have had the willingness to surrender to the program and get what I needed from it.
“Those moments were so dark and I felt so broken that I was willing to do anything. That’s the biggest thing, that moment when you surrender. When you say to yourself you’ve lost control and are powerless to help yourself so you’re going to listen to people who can help you and follow their rules.”
That would be the drug court people.
Drug court is voluntary. If they’re eligible – preference is given to first-time offenders – those arrested for drug-related felonies can choose between drug court and criminal prosecution (often leading to prison). The program includes regular court appearances, drug testing, home inspections, individual and group counseling, recovery classes and community service. Graduates to date have done over 33,000 hours of community service.
It can be strict to the point of seeming harsh. Participants are praised for obeying rules, but break them and they suffer consequences.
“Straight punishment doesn’t work and voluntary programs don’t work,” Copsey said. “We’ve had some stellar failures in drug court, which are very sad. But drug court also has the best success rate of anything – over 60 percent. And that’s not just drug free but crime free.
“… It works because of the role of the judge. You have the ability to put people in prison. I hate doing that. It’s heartbreaking. I have a reputation for being strict, but it’s like being a parent. If you just want your kids to like you and are always nice to them, you’re giving them what they want but not what they need. It’s the same with drug court. If there are no consequences, the behavior isn’t going to change.”
The program includes a weekend of sharing and education for participants and their families, and it’s an eye opener. Until then, I thought addiction was a weakness. Grow a backbone. Get over it.
It isn’t a weakness. It’s a disease.
“I was born an addict,” Hailey said. “From a very young age I felt like I was different and something was missing. Drugs and alcohol were my solution. I felt like I’d found what was missing, but at some point it stops working. That’s when desperation kicks in. You’ll do anything to get the drugs that you think can make it start working again.”
Even Copsey had to be convinced that addiction is a disease.
“I didn’t believe that at first,” she said. “I thought it was a cop-out. Then I realized that it really is a disease. It’s genetic. They’ve done brain images showing that parts of the brain are different in addicts. They’re stimulated differently. Addicts can’t just walk away (from drugs or alcohol) like other people can. They can’t ever use any mind-altering substance, not even alcohol. Not even once.”
Like Hailey, a lot of kids today get hooked on legal drugs.
“You’d be surprised how many get their first opiates from parents’ or grandparents’ medicine chests,” Copsey said. “It’s legal so it has the false aura of safety. But it’s very addictive for someone with an addict’s brain.”
Those whose addictions are most difficult to detect, she said, tend to come from “what we call good families, families that are intact and professional. They have the same issues as other kids; they’re just better at masking them.”
For Hailey, and for all of us in her family, it was a long haul. Setbacks, frustration, anger, heartache. But it was worth it. Unlike many of those who choose criminal prosecution or fail in drug court, she doesn’t have a felony to haunt her for life. She’s mentoring others with drug problems and studying to become a counselor. In her first year at BSU, she made the dean’s list.
Now all she has to worry about is the rest of her life.
“The biggest challenge is getting complacent,” she said. “If I were to stop doing the things I learned in drug court, stop going to meetings or mentoring or doing service work, I’d be lost. The illness is completely selfish. Selfishness and neglecting responsibilities are part of it. Even now, I have to fight that. And I can’t ever touch drugs or alcohol again.”
Her advice to others struggling to overcome addiction:
“Let yourself be vulnerable. Let yourself ask for help. Realize that you don’t have any power or control. You’re never going to get better without something bigger than yourself.”
In her case, multiple somethings. Her judge, her counselors, her higher power. To all of them, a heartfelt thank you.

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.

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For most of last month, the Woodward household ran on adrenaline.
The reason ostensibly was a visit from out-of-state friends we seldom see; we wanted the house and yard to look extra nice. But it became more than a mere cleaning, even a spring cleaning. It became a purge. Think Bob Villa and Martha Stewart on steroids.
My wife and I have been in our house 27 years now, raised three kids and helped raise two grandkids there. You collect a lot of stuff with that much living, and the place where it happens gets its share of scuffs, scars and scratches. Occasional overhauls are needed. And every so often you have to bite the bullet and do things you’ve been putting off for too long.
Topping our to-do list was the garage. It wasn’t as if it never gets cleaned; garage cleanings are semi-regular occurrences at our house. But over time things accumulate. Things you either can’t bring yourself to throw away or that are impossible to throw away.
The former included boxes of children’s books, baby shoes, skis, special-edition newspapers and magazines, career mementos and other flotsam, all of which we had in abundance. The latter covered the spectrum from hazardous-waste materials to … you’ve heard the expression “everything but the kitchen sink?” We had one of those, courtesy of a remodeling. Cast iron, gut-wrenchingly heavy. At risk of rupturing something, I loaded it into the trunk. A recycling center gave me three bucks for it.
A grinding day of work liberated a corner unseen in 20 years. That our visitors were unlikely to see it was irrelevant. The garage was functional again.
The downstairs office was another story. These days it doubles as a nursery for our grandson, meaning that unused office trappings were competing for too little space with too many toys and a play pen. Something – a lot of things, actually – had to go. Out went old files, letters, brochures, catalogs, business cards, bank statements, a metric ton or so of books, investment papers dating to roughly the Carter administration, floppy discs, the mimeograph machine …
Okay, I’m kidding about the mimeograph machine but you get the idea. The books went to the Idaho Youth Ranch, but a lot still remained to be hauled away. Our recycling bin was as tightly packed as Donald Trump’s hairspray cabinet.
The Youth Ranch also was the beneficiary of 16 (this is not a misprint) bags and several boxes of old clothes, thanks to multiple closet purges. I hated to give up my tie-dyed shirts and bell bottom pants, but you can’t save everything.
The family room couch had seen better days so we ordered a new one, which the salesman assured us was likely to arrive before our guests did.
It didn’t.
The flat-screen TV I bought my wife for Christmas was still in its box, so we decided it was time to hook it up to replace the one on the kitchen counter. It was old and clunky, but the one thing I was sure the Youth Ranch would be happy to accept.
It wasn’t. If you can use a clunky, 13-inch color TV in working order at a reasonable price – free – let me know.
The yard had projects I’d been putting off until next year for roughly a decade. Taming the ivy, for example. For years it had been trying to worm its way under the siding, strangling flowers and otherwise misbehaving. It was all I could do to keep it at bay. What was needed was an all-out assault, possibly involving powerful explosives.
For the uninitiated who are thinking of planting ivy, a word of advice. Don’t. Ivy, especially Boston Ivy, is the botanical equivalent of termites and pythons. It destroys siding. It wraps itself around trunks of trees and chokes them. It’s been known to demolish brick chimneys. You’d be better off planting noxious thistle.
English Ivy is almost as bad. The hosts of a banquet my wife and I attended some time ago gave us a basket of English Ivy that had been used as our table’s centerpiece. I planted it in the front yard. By this spring, the erstwhile centerpiece covered roughly 30 square feet and had a death grip on one of my favorite trees.
Wrestling the ivy monsters involved more hard work than I wanted to do, so we took the easy way out and hired someone. He was young and strong, and it was grueling even for him.
In the back yard, I power-washed the deck and happily recalled that it was made of redwood. It had been weathered-gray so long I’d forgotten.
With the yard work finished, we focused on some jobs we’d been putting off indoors. I prepped and painted window sills and molding that were showing their age. My wife cleaned the refrigerator. She was bent over the vegetable drawer and I was on my hands and knees furiously scrubbing a baseboard under a kitchen cabinet when one of our daughters popped in.
“I wish I had a video of you guys,” she said. “You’re working like dogs to do all this stuff your friends will never see.”
She was right. They would never see most of what we’d done.
But we would. Their visit went well, and now that it’s over we’re enjoying a brief interlude of doing next to nothing in a house and yard that require nothing.
Life, where is thy sting?

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.

One of the pitfalls of being human is that if we live long enough, we reach a point at which we spend extraordinary amounts of time looking for things that were securely in our possession moments earlier.
We’ve all done it. One minute you have the pen you were using, the charger for your device, your sunglasses, your temper … and the next – poof! Gone – often for an infuriatingly long time.
I once spent over an hour looking for a pair of shoes I’d absentmindedly stashed in the refrigerator while grazing. I was a teenager then, so senility wasn’t a factor. Now, from the perspective of greater age, I know that the chilled shoes were but a harbinger of things to come.
These days, I can lose almost anything in almost no time and with no effort whatsoever. It’s remarkable, and more than a little annoying, how quickly indispensable possessions vanish and how difficult they are to find.
Wallets, for example. I lost mine a couple of years ago, looked everywhere (including the refrigerator) for it and, failing, canceled my debit and credit cards. A few hours later, a woman called to say she’d found it in the middle of a downtown street.
The most frequent offenders, as we all know all too well, are keys, glasses and remotes. A day seldom passes without my losing one or more of these things. One of our remotes is smaller than an iPod and is programmed – the evidence is indisputable – to burrow into the depths of the couch, dematerialize and inexplicably transport itself from room to room.
It doesn’t help that our toddler grandson likes to hide it in the laundry hamper.
One novel and highly successful method of losing things is to put them on the roof of your car and drive away. This was the likely explanation for my lost wallet that was found in the middle of the street. It also has been my method of choice for losing not one but two library books.
If there’s one thing you don’t want to lose, it’s a library book. I learned this the hard way a number of years ago by putting one on the roof of my car and driving off to a destination now forgotten. The consequences, however, are remembered indelibly.
Some books would be almost criminal to lose – classics, first editions, out-of-print books, books signed by their authors … Happily, this was none of those. It was a novel by Fannie Flagg. “Fried Green Tomatoes,” the movie, was big at the time and it made me want to read another of her books, which happily was in print, not a classic or first edition and not autographed.
But replacing it was, shall we say, a process. An expensive process. When a librarian explained how much it would be for the library to purchase a new copy, put one of those impregnable library covers on it and do whatever else is required to put it into circulation, my knees got weak. Fillings have been replaced for less.
Granted, it was a hardcover edition. But still …
“How much would it be if I bought a copy and brought it in to you?” I asked the librarian.
“Well, that would save you some money.”
This was in the days before almost any book you think of could be purchased with a couple of keystrokes. The options then were yard sales and used book stores. It took a while – quite a while, actually – but luck was on my side. Triumphantly, I returned to the library with a used but serviceable copy and waited while the librarian totaled up the fees.
They were less than replacing a filling, but considering that I’d bought the book myself, still a bit of a shock. I vowed never to lose a library book again – and didn’t.
Until a recent trip through Oregon. We stopped in Baker City for lunch at a restaurant with a model railroad running from table to table, something you don’t see every day, and reached our destination uneventfully that evening.
Well, not quite uneventfully.
“Have you seen my library book?” I asked my wife.
“No. When’s the last time you saw it?”
“In the car when we stopped in Baker City.”
That’s when her sister, who was following us in her car when we left the restaurant, dropped the bomb:
“I wondered if that was your book?”
“What book?”
“The one lying in the road right after we left the restaurant. The car behind you ran over it.”
Once again, I’d left a library book on the roof of the car and unwittingly driven away.
Even an old blind dog gets a bone once in a while, though. The library’s total this time, book and fees: a comparatively trifling $16. Apparently Fannie Flagg commands a higher price than Larry McMurtry.
Speaking of the library, I was there a few days ago, reached for my library card in my wallet and noticed that my driver’s license was missing. Retracing my steps and checking with lost-and-found departments yielded nothing. Another case of just plain gone. Poof! Thin air!
Which is why this must end. I have to get to the Department of Motor Vehicles before it closes.

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.

When the organizers of the USS Peleliu’s decommissioning wondered what to do with the ship’s flag, the answer was obvious. They sent it to Art Jackson.

It was a small gesture compared with what they had initially planned, offering to send a plane to fly Jackson and his wife to San Diego for the ceremony. They were flattered, but declined. At age 90, travel isn’t easy for him.

This is a week late — last Sunday was Flag Day — but Jackson’s service on the island of Peleliu and his thoughts on our flag are relevant any time.

For those unfamiliar with them, U.S. Navy ship decommissionings are stirring but sad ceremonies. Crew members join dignitaries in honoring the ships’ service, knowing that soon it will be scrapped and little will remain but souvenirs and memories.

The Peleliu was an amphibious assault ship. It was deployed 17 times, traveled over a million nautical miles and conducted more than 178,000 flight operations. It was decommissioned this spring after 35 years of service.

The ship was named for the Battle of Peleliu, one of the hardest fought of World War II. A Pacific island, Peleliu was held by Japanese soldiers entrenched in caves. Fighting for control of it lasted two months. When it was over, 1,800 Americans had been killed and 8,000 more wounded. Nine Marines were awarded the Medal of Honor for their roles in the battle. Jackson was one of them.

Nineteen at the time, he saved his platoon from almost certain destruction. A book about the battle described him as “a one-man Marine Corps.” His Medal of Honor citation credits him with single-handedly confronting enemy barrages and contributing to “the complete annihilation of the enemy in the southern sector of the island.”

So he knows something about fighting for freedom, America and the flag — which has a special meaning for him. And he’s dismayed by the way the flag that he and so many others fought for is sometimes treated these days.

The flag at the old U.S. Assay office at 2nd and Main, for example.

“It doesn’t have a light, they don’t take it down at night and they leave it out in all kinds of weather,” he said. “That’s not the way the flag should be treated.”

I went to the former assay office, now the State Historic Preservation Office, for a look Monday evening. There was no light, and the flag was still up well after dark.

I spoke with the preservation office’s Tricia Canaday, who said a solar-powered light is supposed to illuminate the flag but apparently has malfunctioned.

“We didn’t know until you called because we leave work during daylight at this time of year. We’ve notified maintenance, and until it’s fixed the flag will be taken down at night.”

Jackson and his wife sent a note to a bank that was neglecting its flag. Nothing changed.

Once in a while, however, someone listens. When the Idaho Fish and Game Department was notified that the flag at its office in East Boise was in bad shape, it had a new flag installed with a light to show it off at night — as required by regulations.

And the Jacksons can’t say enough about Dillabaugh’s flooring store on Federal Way.

“They have a great big flag, and they take good care of it,” Art said. “They take it down on weekends and light it at night. It’s beautiful.”

But for every flag that’s treated well, he says, many more are neglected: “You see flags that are in terrible shape because they’re never taken down and left out in bad weather. A lot of people died for that flag. And lot of people today, especially young people, don’t seem to appreciate it. It isn’t right, but I don’t know what can be done about it.”

One thing might be to teach respect for the flag in schools — a few minutes each year devoted to what the flag symbolizes and how it should be treated.

For those who don’t know the rules or have forgotten them, these are the highlights, condensed from the U.S. Code:

•  Flags should be displayed on buildings and flagpoles from sunrise to sunset only. They may be displayed at night only if properly illuminated.

•  Flags should be taken down during bad weather unless they’re all-weather flags.

•  Flags may be flown every day, but especially on holidays and other special occasions. For the complete list, Google U.S. Code, flag regulations.

•  Flags should be displayed at or near polling places on election days and in or near schools on school days.

•  The flag never should be displayed upside down except as an emergency signal and should never touch the ground.

Those are the main rules to remember. There are others for every imaginable situation, but they all come down to one thing: respect.

“The flag represents our freedom, our courage and our national pride,” Jackson said. “We should treat it accordingly.”

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

The two high school functions I attended this graduation season couldn’t have been more different. One was for some 400 students at Taco Bell Arena. One of the speakers told her classmates it was the last time many of them would see each other and that never again would they all be together in one room.
The other, very different function was a 70-year class reunion at a restaurant in Nampa. Seven members of Wilder High School’s Class of 1945 attended. Four of the surviving 11 couldn’t make it. More than half of the original 25, once as fresh-faced and dream-smitten as the Timberline kids, are no longer with us.
Mildred Hickman, who organized the reunion, invited me to attend in hopes that I’d write about it. She thought the bond that continues to bring her onetime classmates together after so many years was special. I agreed. Fifty-year class reunions happen all the time. Every high school in the valley has one. Seventy-year reunions are another story.
Far from not seeing one another after their graduation or never being in the same room together again, members of the Class of ’45 have held reunions every year since 1995.
One of the reasons for their enduring bond, obviously, was that their class was so small. In a class of hundreds, you know your friends and a small percentage of your other classmates. In a class of 25, you know everybody.
But it wasn’t just that. Another, more significant reason had to do with the times. Wilder, and America, were dramatically different places then.
“If you saw an airplane in the sky, you stopped what you were doing and watched until it was out of sight,” Hickman said.
“There were 30 to 40 businesses in Wilder then, all active and prosperous,” Phil Batt added. “There were two gas stations, a truck stop, two barber shops, a doctor’s office, movies …”
And how many businesses now?
“Hardly any.”
A familiar story. As family farms gave way to corporate farms, families and the businesses they supported faded from the scene throughout rural America. And scarcities, common in 1945, have given way to abundance that would have been unimaginable then.
“There were so many things we couldn’t get,” Betty Cook said. “Gas, tires, sugar, meat, clothing … And you had to stand in line for a lot of what you could get. Now I can go to the store and get everything on my list. We take that for granted now, but what a luxury!”
“We had canvas shoes with hard, rigid soles,” Alice Roberson recalled. “It was hard to walk in them, let alone run. That was what we wore to play basketball.”
Butter was rationed, so they made do with oleomargarine and added coloring to make it yellow. But it still tasted like lard.
They learned to work early, and hard.
“My first job was working in the fields for 25 cents an hour,” Hickman said.
For entertainment, they listened to the radio, went to dances, wiener roasts and movies. A movie only cost a nickel, but Cook remembers having to gather eggs, walk two miles along a railroad track without breaking them and selling them to a grocer to earn a nickel.
World War II was almost over by the time they graduated, but it affected them nonetheless. Batt joined the Air Corps Reserve while still in high school, Mary Brown the Cadet Nurse Corps. And though the graduates missed combat duty, all served on the home front.
“We started high school the year the war began and graduated the year it ended, but that didn’t curb our enthusiasm,” Hickman said. “We had paper drives, war bond drives … We did whatever we could to help. And we didn’t have much so we re-used everything. We weren’t a throwaway society.”
“We all worked together,” Cook added. “It was like a big family. And we were problem solvers. We had to be. If today’s kids have a problem, they can look up the answer on their Smart Phones. We had to work to find answers.”
Hard times tend to produce good people. Cook was Boise’s first woman police officer. Batt, the class salutatorian, went on to become one of the best governors Idaho has had in recent years.
“It was hard times when we were in high school, but everybody made the best of it,” he said. “People made do. My dad made a school bus out of plywood.”
Bertha Tarr remembers those hard times as “a good life. We knew everybody, and a lot of us became lifelong friends.”
Friends who continue to see each other every year – in the same room – seven decades after finishing high school. I wonder if any of this year’s graduates will be able to say that. And if not, are we as a society better or worse off for it?

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.

You wouldn’t think a wheelbarrow could ruin your life.
It can’t, obviously, with the possible exception of a large wheelbarrow filled with, say, cement, falling on you from a great height.
But a wheelbarrow can complicate your life, as I learned after borrowing the Wheelbarrow from Hell.
The Wheelbarrow from Hell belongs to our neighbor Rick, at my mother-in-law’s cabin in Washington. We go there every spring to get the place ready for summer, needed a wheelbarrow to move some gravel for a landscaping project, and, being the good neighbor he is, Rick cheerfully lent us his.
It’s a big wheelbarrow. A very big wheelbarrow. It’s also a very old wheelbarrow. Rick bought it used more years ago than he remembers and keeps it outside beside his garage, where it’s exposed to the weather. Its wooden handles have weathered gray and are rotting inside. We didn’t know when we borrowed it that they were rotting; we found that out the hard way.
I was moving a load of gravel when the right handle snapped, spilling the gravel and putting an abrupt end to the landscaping project. But what bothered me more was that I’d broken Rick’s wheelbarrow. Breaking borrowed tools is one of my pet peeves.
It goes back to a long-ago neighbor who repeatedly borrowed my power tools and returned them broken. He did this without so much as an explanation, let alone an apology. He was an editor at The Statesman at the time, and occasionally my boss, so there wasn’t a lot I could say. At least not what I wanted to say, which was along the lines of “are you really as clueless an oaf as you appear to be?”
The experience left me with a deep and abiding distrust of people who borrow tools and don’t take care of them. I would fix Rick’s wheelbarrow if it took all day.
It did.
And then some.
If you’ve never needed one, you wouldn’t believe how hard it can be to find a replacement wooden handle for a wheelbarrow. There may be more difficult things to purchase, but very few come to mind. Gull-wing doors for a DeLorean, perhaps, or maybe a Vladimir Putin teddy bear.
The clerk at the hardware store in the nearest town looked at me like I had three heads.
“A wheelbarrow handle?” he said, as if I’d asked for a porthole handle from the Titanic. “Gosh, we don’t have any of those. But I could sell you a board. You could cut it to the right length and turn the handle on a lathe.”
Right. All I’d have to do is buy a $500 lathe. No problem.
The store in the next closest town stocked wheelbarrow handles, but none were the right size.
“No problem,” Rick said. “Just get one when you’re back home in Boise and bring it with you the next time you come over.”
Back home in Boise, I checked at two big-box stores and three Mom and Pop hardware stores. Zilch. The Mom and Pop stores could order one, but it wouldn’t arrive before we returned to the cabin to continue our adventures in home improvement.
An online store sold replacement wheelbarrow handles for $15, but shipping was $50. Is it just me, or is something wrong with that picture?
Bottom line: we still didn’t have a handle when we returned to the cabin to finish the project. Desperate, I searched online for hardware stores, found one an hour away with the right wheelbarrow handle and immediately drove there and bought it. By then I wouldn’t have cared if the store was a day away. Anything was better than skulking around like a criminal, hoping Rick wouldn’t spot me and delicately inquire about his wheelbarrow.
As the proud owner of a shiny, new replacement handle, I figured the worst was over. Now it was just a matter of installing it.
How hard could it be?
Right. The pyramids were built in less time than it took to install that handle. The remains of the broken one were secured with nuts and bolts that had rusted tighter than Kim Kardashian’s girdle. It took a hammer, an assortment of wrenches, two pair of Vise-Grips, an ocean of WD-40 and some spirited cursing to get them off.
The new handle was only slightly less cantankerous. Supposedly a perfect fit, it was anything but. It’s a good thing no one was around to see me tearing my hair and throwing wrenches or the whole sorry episode would have ended up on Facebook.
Then, the final insult …
We only spend a few weeks a year at the cabin, which until several years ago was my wife’s parents’ home. It’s still furnished and filled with their belongings, and occasionally we find a surprise – as my wife did while pruning the blackberry bushes out back behind the shed.
“You’re not going to believe what I found out there,” she said, moments after I’d finishing installing the handle.
It was my late father-in-law’s wheelbarrow – with unbreakable metal handles. It was buried under the overgrown blackberry vines the whole time.

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.

Some of the things single mothers have to teach small children are tougher than others.
The difference between up and down or right and left? Easy.
The difference between right and wrong? Harder.
The hardest of all may be the concept of death.
Just ask Amelia Turcotte.
Turcotte, 26, is a single mother of two daughters. Kyra, who is six, understood what it meant when their father, Pete Hoxie, died in December of complications from pneumonia. He and Turcotte had separated, but the kids continued to have a relationship with their father. Kyra knew she wouldn’t see him again. She understood the finality of it.
For Morgan, who is three, the reality of it was elusive. Turcotte did her best to explain, but when Morgan started talking about daddy over lunch at IHOP recently, she knew that yet another difficult conversation lay ahead:
“She still wasn’t understanding the full concept. She said that when daddy came back from heaven, she’d go to his house. I told her that that’s not how it worked, that daddy wouldn’t be coming back.”
Though her father had been gone for several months, Morgan may not have fully understood until that moment. She began to cry.
“I told her that that was okay,” Turcotte said. “It was okay to be sad. It was okay to cry. It was hard for me, too, but it was all part of being her mom – just another day of trying to deal with it.”
By then they’d finished eating, so she dried Morgan’s tears and went to pay the bill. But when she opened her purse, the manager stopped her.
“He said, ‘Your bill is already paid. Somebody overheard your conversation with your little girl and wanted to tell you you’re doing a good job and to keep your head up. And if you go over to the Ross Store, there’ll be a gift card waiting for you.”
Turcotte was stunned. Who wouldn’t be?
“We went out and got in the car and I sat there thinking ‘did this really happen?’ You hear about things like that. You read about them or see them on TV, but you don’t think they’ll happen to you.”
At the Ross store, the gift certificate was waiting. She asked who the person was who purchased it, but came up empty.
“They said a new shift had come on and that nobody on that shift had any idea who’d done it,” Turcotte said. “They couldn’t even tell me if it was a man or a woman. I’d asked the manager at IHOP, too, but he wouldn’t give me any information.”
Most likely at the donor’s request. Giving to have your name splashed around and get accolades for it is one thing. Giving anonymously is a better thing.
If you’ve been a single parent, you know how welcome unexpected money is. Turcotte used it to buy clothes for the kids.
“It was nice for them, and it was nice for me,” she said. “You have little kids who are dealing with grown-up stuff, and it’s hard. So it was great to have that reminder – to find out that somebody you don’t even know says ‘you’re doing okay. You’re doing good and keep your head up.’ That meant a lot.”
It’s tempting to wonder what sort of person the mystery donor was. Someone else who lost a parent as a child? Another single parent who appreciated what Turcotte has to deal with every day? A grandparent with a soft spot for kids?
She’ll probably never know. But if she did, this is what she’d say to her benefactor:
“First, I’d say ‘thank you.’ It was such a thoughtful thing for someone to do.
I’ve met a lot of nice people in the six years I’ve lived in Boise, but to have somebody go out of their way to do that? All they heard was that Dad wasn’t coming back and they went out of their way to make things better. That was beyond nice.
“I’d tell them how much it meant, too. They already knew that doing something like that is kind, but they might not have realized how much little stuff like that matters. It meant more than they know, and I’ll always be grateful to whoever it was that did it.”
I heard about Turcotte’s story from another single mother. She thought it was a pretty big deal, and she was right. It is a big deal. But not the sort of thing that usually makes news. Sure, we read about random acts of kindness or see stories about them on TV now and then, but by nature the news is more bad than good. War, crime and tragedy trump random acts of kindness almost every time.
That’s why I wanted to share Amelia’s story with you on this Mother’s Day. At a time when we’re bombarded on a daily basis by grim news – Ferguson and Baltimore, the seemingly endless supply of natural disasters, the latest folly at the legislature – it helps to know that there are still good people doing good things and asking for nothing in return.
And they far outnumber the the Tsarnaevs, the Michael Vickses, the Megan Huntsmans.
If you’re feeling grumpy about the state of the world today, it might not hurt to remember that.

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 woodward column@hotmail.com.

Dear Mr. McCartney,

Or should it be Sir McCartney?
Your Excellency?
Never mind – let’s skip the fancy stuff and make it Paul. We go way back.
Not that you have the slightest idea who I am. We’ll get to that later.
I’m writing because a recent column in our local newspaper raised a glimmer of hope that you’d come to Boise on your next tour. Boise is the capital of Idaho, Paul. You’ve been in the neighborhood because you’ve visited Steve Miller at Sun Valley, a couple of hours away.
But you’ve never played in Idaho. Not once.
In what, 51 years?
That’s how long it’s been since the Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan changed America. Of course the Beatles never would have done a concert in a city the size of Boise. The Beatles were way too big, and Boise was way too small. Especially then.
You have done shows in the Northwest, though. Salt Lake City, Portland, Tacoma and Seattle come to mind. And last year you played in Missoula, Mont.
Missoula? Missoula is less than a third the size of Boise. The stadium where you played isn’t as big or as nice as the one here, either. Perhaps you’ve been channel surfing and caught a glimpse of a football game played in a stadium with a blue-turf field? That’s us. Our blue turf not only is unique; it’s moderately famous. And how often have do you get a chance to play on a blue football field?
The column suggesting the possibility of a McCartney concert there was written by this newspaper’s Michael Deeds. He reasoned that the first concert at Albertsons (blue turf) Stadium in decades recently could lead to bigger things and quoted a promoter who repeatedly had tried to get you here.
As he noted, some pesky details such as scheduling conflicts and alcohol sales, normally prohibited, would need to be addressed. And the biggest detail of all – persuading one of the most successful composers and musicians ever that it’s worth his time to come here.
Would fans from Boise and the surrounding area turn out for a McCartney concert?
Would starving dogs show up at a barbecue?
The Beatles were huge in Boise, Paul. Really huge.
You’re probably thinking that the Beatles were huge everywhere. Understandable, considering that you were at the epicenter of Beatlemania. Understandable, but not necessarily true.
One of my biggest revelations during six months spent in the American South as a guest of the U.S. Navy was how few people there listened to the Beatles – or any other British Invasion group. They listened to soul music and Bobbie Gentry singing “Ode to Billy Joe.” Incessantly. I happened to be in a club in Pensacola, Fla. the night the Beatles did the worldwide broadcast of “All You Need is Love,” and the crowd demanded that the bartender switch the channel. You could have knocked me over with a peace symbol.
This was the antithesis of what was happening in Boise at the time. A local record store printed a weekly list of its ten best-selling records, and for over a year they were overwhelmingly Beatles songs. Local bands were obsessed with learning Beatles songs. Everyone here loved the Beatles.
Well, maybe not everyone. My neighbor Howard Snyder didn’t love the Beatles. But he dressed like the Maytag repairman and listened to Lawrence Welk.
In time, even parents came around. My folks weren’t keen on the early Beatles music, but when you came out with “Rubber Soul” they admitted that the lads from Liverpool might have something after all. My mother, who was raised on Rodgers and Hammerstein, listened to that album repeatedly and was given to breathless remarks about how beautiful it was.
I was smitten even before the Ed Sullivan Show. I played in a band then (still do) and our deejay manager let us listen to Beatles’ songs before they were on the radio. We’d never heard anything like them. They were so different from what had gone before. We worked hard to learn those early classics and became lifelong fans.
You probably don’t remember and maybe never knew, but I came close to interviewing you once. You played in Tacoma, Wash., in 2002, and I worked with your then publicist Geoff Baker to set up an interview. It was looking good right up until the day of the show, when I called Baker from Tacoma and he said it was off.
The same thing happened with Ringo when he played here. So my lifelong dream of interviewing a Beatle remains a dream.
But that’s not why I’m writing. The main reason is that you have thousands of devoted fans here who have never had the opportunity to enjoy a McCartney concert. On the blue turf or anywhere else in Idaho. I hope you’ll consider doing it for them, Paul.
And if you can squeeze in an interview, or even a couple of quick questions … well, that would be a dream come true.

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

 

In few other countries are people as attached to their cars as Americans are. We develop intense hatreds for cars that betray us and affection bordering on silliness for those that prove faithful.
We even name cars. My late mother’s last car – she was in her 80s – was a sports car, “Blue Baby.” My wife all but drove the wheels off of a car she called “The Unit.” A friend’s truck is less than affectionately known as “The Slug.”
I go through cars the way most people go through shoes. A year – a year and a half tops – and I’m bored with them. There have been only two exceptions, and both were Saabs. The first served faithfully for four years, and the last was a record-setter – five years. I traded it recently for a newer car and knew the instant the papers were signed how Benedict Arnold must have felt. It’s fair to say that I loved that car.
Saabs had a reputation for being quirky. Past tense, “had” rather than “have,” because the company has gone the way of the Packard, the Studebaker, the Oldsmobile. That was part of why it was time for a change. Cars no longer manufactured lose their cachet, parts become harder to find … It was time.
That quirky reputation? It was deserved. How many other cars had wipers on the headlights?
Instead of being on the steering-wheel column, the norm for just about every other car on the planet, a Saab’s ignition switch was on the console between the bucket seats. It took a while to get used to reaching down instead of up to engage the key, and vice versa. Even after several months, I still catch myself pushing the key into the cup holder of my new car.
Made in Sweden, Saabs were one of the first cars to use rack and pinion steering. They popularized turbocharged engines, used front-wheel-drive decades before it was widely available on American cars, and their styling was unique. Saabs looked and drove like nothing else. They were sturdy and rock solid. When other cars were blowing across the center line in crosswinds, a Saab held the road like a Sherman tank. They felt heavy, but got good fuel economy. And they were comfortable, even luxurious.
America’s early Saab dealers included Kurt Vonnegut. This was before he had established himself as one our greatest (and quirkiest) writers. Vonnegut was captivated by the innovative style and technology of the 1956 models, which his daughter likened to spaceships.
Truth compels me to admit that my last Saab – four have graced my garage – had a couple of quirks that did not inspire affection. The antics of the trunk lid, for example, were a source of continuing frustration.
They were one of those inexplicable things cars do that baffle mechanics because you can’t make them happen. They happen sporadically and only when they feel like it. (A Fiat my wife and I owned when we were newly married comes to mind. It howled like a dog for no apparent reason and never at predictable intervals.)
The Saab’s trunk malfunction operated on a similar schedule. I’d get in the car, sit down and the lid would pop open. Then an annoying chime would sound to alert me that something was amiss with the trunk (as if it weren’t obvious). It didn’t happen every time I sat down, or every third time or tenth time. Sometimes it wouldn’t happen for weeks, then three times in a single week. Mechanics, predictably, were confounded.
Another of the car’s eccentricities had to do with the aforementioned ignition switch. It’s easy to forget about the key when it’s practically on the floor instead of in plain sight on the steering column, which makes it easy to leave it in the ignition if you get distracted.
Note to its new owner: NEVER DO THIS.
If you leave the key too long in a Saab ignition – overnight, for example – you can’t get it out. I managed to do this three times in five years and each time had to have the car towed to the shop for the key to be removed using wizardry known only to mechanics.
“What would happen if I just pulled hard enough to force it out? I asked Michael, my mechanic, the first time this happened.
“Instead of a little check, you’d be writing me one for about $1,200,” he replied.
Not once, however, did that car force me to write a big check. Other than routine maintenance, the only expense in five years was to replace a part that was leaking when I bought it.
This brings us to the new car. New for me, at least; it’s a couple of years old. So far, I like it pretty well. It’s sleek and shiny. It’s the color I wanted, it gets great gas mileage and it has some impressive digital features. I may never learn to use them, but they’re impressive.
Actually, I like it better than pretty well. It’s a great car. But it takes a while to warm up to a new car. No matter how stylish or economical or technically sophisticated a car is, it takes time to earn your trust. It has to prove itself over years and miles before it has your full confidence and, yes, affection.
I like the new car just fine, thanks.
But I loved the old one. Breaking up is never easy.

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