There was a time early in my years as a columnist when I was best known for two things – home remodeling disasters and vacation disasters. Today, friends, we return to those halcyon days.
I’d forgotten how much readers enjoyed my travel fiascos until we were in the Phoenix airport on our way home from Mexico this month and ran into several of them waiting to board the plane to Boise. Told that our trip had been great until disaster struck on the last day, they literally squealed with delight:
“Ooooh! We can’t wait to read about it.”
The disaster was the “travel blunder extraordinaire” referred to at the end of my column two weeks ago. It’s embarrassing to write about it, or, for that matter, even to think about it. But maybe reading about it will keep someone else from making the same, boneheaded mistake. Call it a cautionary tale.
Our first-ever trip to Mazatlan last was – until the last day – an unqualified success. Thanks to my chiropractor, Jim Kranz, we stayed in a drop-dead gorgeous condo that his sister couldn’t use and needed to sub-lease for two weeks. We read books, swam, walked on the beach … If we’d been any more relaxed, we’d have been dead.
Until the e-mail from hell arrived on my phone.
The e-mail was from Expedia, which I’d used to book our flights. To fully appreciate my reaction upon reading it, you need to know that I am borderline obsessive-compulsive when it comes to making travel arrangements. I double- and triple-check everything. I make printouts of reservations and itineraries – even copies of the printouts – and re-check them once or even more while at our destination.
But not this time. There is such a thing as being too relaxed.
So it’s not exaggerating to say that Expedia’s e-mail came as something of a thunderbolt.
“Your flight from Mazatlan to Phoenix has been canceled,” it said.
Canceled? CANCELED?
Reading further, “Your flight from Phoenix to Boise has been canceled.”
The e-mail included a number to call in the unlikely event that we found the prospect of being stranded in Mexico unsettling:
“Our flights are canceled? How can you cancel our flights? What are we supposed to do, get jobs selling Señor Frogs T-shirts?”
“Your flights are canceled because they’ve left,” an infuriatingly cheerful operator replied. “You weren’t on them.”
This was patently impossible. And I could prove it. The printout of the itinerary I hadn’t bothered to check lately was in my suitcase. It would show beyond any doubt that we were booked to return the next day.
Only we weren’t. It is and will forever remain a mystery how it happened, but I’d booked our return flights for Friday March 6 instead of Saturday March 7.
Even when this was undeniable, it didn’t compute. We’d booked the condo until that Saturday. I’d been telling everyone for two months that we were returning that Saturday. There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in the mind of the guy who triple-checks everything that we were coming home that Saturday. I’d have bet my firstborn and my last dollar on it.
So certain was my faith that not even when a friend e-mailed a red flag did my conviction waver. His e-mail said he’d checked our itinerary online and was wishing us a pleasant trip home on Friday.
… To which I confidently replied that he must have mis-read the itinerary because we weren’t coming home until Saturday.
As you can imagine, the mistake put me into a bit of a funk. The night before, we’d had dinner at a place where the waiter offered us shots from a gallon jug of tequila with a rattlesnake in the bottom. We declined, but now I considered going back and chugging the whole thing, rattlesnake and all. Our condo was on the fifth floor and had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the sea – a running jump would put me out of my misery. Mexican work permits and a cheap apartment were a somewhat less drastic option.
As is often the case, however, our dilemma was nothing that a whole lot of money wouldn’t fix. The airline was willing (and probably delighted) to change our reservations so that we could come home Saturday as planned if not for my lame brained mistake.
The price: a little over what the drop-dead gorgeous condo cost for two weeks! Missing your flight isn’t as expensive as oral surgery, but it’s close.
Yes, now that you mention it, it does still sting.
There are, however, a couple of bright spots. One is that I’ve relieved myself of the responsibility of making future flight reservations. From now on my wife, who is smarter, will make them.
The other bright spot – this would be the cautionary-tale part – is that in the future everyone who’ll be traveling with us will check and double-check the reservations. It shouldn’t be up to one fallible human (some of us being more fallible than others) to make sure everything is correct. Take it from someone who has learned the hard way. If you’re booking a trip for you and your spouse, have your spouse back you up. If friends or kids old enough to read are going, have them check the details. If the dog is going, have the dog check the details.
And now you’ll have to excuse me. It’s time for me to leave for the McDonald’s job I got to pay off the credit card.

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.

 

MAZATLAN, Mexico – Including a day trip to Tijuana while in the Navy at San Diego, I’ve been to Mexico eight times and somehow missed Mazatlan – one of the closer resort cities to Idaho.
Until last month.
Our trip got off to a shaky start in the Boise airport. The agent checking us in was blowing her nose and sneezing on our luggage tags, driver’s licenses, boarding passes … We fought her off with hand sanitizer, but upstairs at our gate there she was again. And once we were on the plane – re-sanitized – she joined us to do a head count. We half expected to see her, soggy Kleenex in hand, clinging to the wing when we took off.
Mazatlan, however, was great. For starters, the dollar was almost 50 percent stronger against the peso than it was a year ago. Most of the breakfast and lunch choices at the place where we stayed were under $4. Mexican beers that cost $4 in restaurants in Boise were about 70 cents.
Mazatlan is unique for having two things – the world’s third largest Mardi Gras celebration (after Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans) and pulmonias. We missed Mardi Gras by a few days, but we became instant fans of pulmonias, which exist nowhere else in the world.
Pulmonias are overgrown golf carts, made with Volkswagen parts and used as taxis. Drivers of regular taxis were jealous of the fanfare the open-air taxis received when they were introduced, so they told customers they’d get pneumonia riding in them. Pulmonia is Spanish for pneumonia.
Humberto Valasquez, who has been driving the same, meticulously maintained pneumonia for 20 years, took us on a tour of the city in it. Because we’d just missed Mardi Gras, I asked him what it was like.
“A big parade on the Malecon (one of the world’s longest). Lots of people – 400,000 visitors in town wearing masks and drinking. Nine months later, a lot of babies are born.”
About like New Orleans, in other words.
Humberto used to work in a restaurant, but he likes being outdoors driving his pneumonia better.
“A lot of the restaurants aren’t doing well,” he said. “The all-inclusive resorts have hurt them. People eat for free there, so they don’t go out to dinner as much. They don’t even go out for drinks because the drinks at the resort are free.”
Pacifico beer is made in Mazatlan. That, and myriad varieties of tequila – from regular agave tequila to coffee tequila, almond tequila, mango tequila …
“Tequila is our national drink,” our gregarious tour guide said, laughing. “That and beer, and vodka, and rum …”
Like many of the people we met in Mazatlan, Humberto truly seemed to enjoy life. Except during Mardi Gras, the city is low key, laid back. The street and beach vendors are almost sedate compared with those in other places we’d been, and in two weeks we met exactly one guy who was pushing time shares. In Puerto Vallarta, you see more than that before you leave the airport.
Add perfect weather and friendly, helpful locals and you have a textbook winter getaway. In fact, we had such a good time we wanted to go back.
Until the next to the last day of our vacation – and the e-mail from hell.

Next: A travel blunder extraordinaire.

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:  Am posting this column a week late because I’ve been out of the country for two weeks. Sorry for the delay. — Tim

The Brian Williams story has bothered me ever since it broke. If you’re a journalist, especially one who has spent time in a war zone, it can’t help but bother you.
It disturbs me for a number of reasons. First, I liked Brian Williams. Liked, and trusted him. He was authoritative as a reporter and anchor and as likable as a favorite uncle. He had a sense of humor. He liked sports (even at the risk of sometimes over-reporting them). He seemed like a guy you could sit down with in a pub and enjoy a lively chat about anything from Washington gridlock to football.
So it bothered me that such a seemingly good guy fell so far from grace – and that it was so unnecessary. He had everything going for him. He was enjoying greater success that 99 percent of journalists ever do. He didn’t need to lie. All he had to do was keep doing everything he did so well and he’d have cruised to an idyllic retirement.
Everything, that is, except lying. As a liar, he’s clueless. Did he really think he could tell those whoppers in the digital age and that no one would
notice? Being hit by enemy fire isn’t something you “misremember.” You misremember where you parked your car. Being shot at is something you absolutely remember – vividly, and for life.
Perhaps most distressing for journalists is that Williams’s fondness for embellishment is a hit to the profession. If someone as trusted and respected as he was fabricated stories, viewers are entitled to wonder, who else is doing it?
But what bothered me most is the why? Why, when he had nothing to gain and everything to lose, would he do such a thing?
And he most definitely had nothing to gain. I know this from personal experience.
That’s not to say that I’ve been in combat. When the Navy was sending virtually every graduate of the communications-technician school I attended straight to Vietnam, it sent me to Germany. In a 40-year career at The Statesman, covering everything from plane crashes to buffalo hunts, only once was I anywhere near a war zone. And it was more than enough to teach me the futility of embellishing what happened there.
It was 1999. The Kosovo War. The Statesman sent photographer Gerry Melendez and me to Sicily and Albania, ostensibly to write about Idahoans involved in the war. In Sicily, we covered Idaho Air Guard crews who were conducting bombing missions against the Serbs. In Albania, we were to cover Idaho volunteers who were helping Albanian refugees of the war.
It took roughly five minutes, however, to realize that the best stories were those of the refugees themselves. They were living in camps where conditions approximated camping with several thousand of your closest friends. Many had lost everything in the war.
Gerry and I did some of the best work of our careers in Albania, but you wouldn’t have known it from what appeared in print. (I can write about it now because The Statesman has different and better management.)
Our second-best story, one we sweat blood over for two days, was never published. When we got home, we were told that it had mysteriously disappeared after being read by one editor. The story that did appear that day was a few hastily written paragraphs from a 30-second interview with an Idaho volunteer who would barely speak to us.
Our best story was about Albanian women and girls who gathered each evening to weep and wail under a tree in one of the camps. The Serbs had killed all the men in their village – their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, lovers. It may have been the most powerful story I ever wrote, and it was rewritten and combined with wire copy to be almost unrecognizable.
What I remember most, though, isn’t the anger we felt about the way our stories were handled. It was gut-wrenching fear.
I’m not a Bob Simon or a Richard Engel; I’ve never been closer to a shot fired in anger than one from the rifle of a German guard who caught me sneaking under a base fence after a night on the town. But I have no trouble at all imagining how those courageous reporters feel when being sent into harm’s way.
Before Gerry and I went to Albania, we were told there was a chance we could get close to the fighting and that we could opt out of the trip if we chose. And Albania at the time had been the most isolated and and one of most oppressed places on the planet – terrorism, executions, suppression of the most basic rights. If that weren’t enough, there was the war. Neither of us opted out, but I’ll never forget lying awake all night before we left, wondering whether we’d see home and our families again. It was as scared as I’ve ever been.
Once in Albania, work took over and fear was forgotten. Nothing bad happened to us there. And, here’s the thing – even if something terrible had happened, it wouldn’t have meant that we were one whit more courageous. What takes courage isn’t surviving things that happen in dangerous places, it’s choosing to go to places where bad things can happen to you. Brian Williams did that. He didn’t need to embellish.
So why did he?
My guess is that his next appearance – his anchor job is history – will be on the cover of a book telling his side of the story.
It should be quite a read.

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

 

The guest of honor didn’t know what to make of the proceedings.
When a birthday balloon charged with static electricity stuck to his hair, he walked in circles trying to catch it.
When he saw that one of his presents was a pair of shoes, he tried to eat them.
His birthday cake, specially made with ingredients he’s not allergic to, was another story. A couple of exploratory nibbles and he quit eating in favor of rubbing frosting on his shirt.
The guest of honor was my great grandson, Grayson. The occasion was his first birthday party.
Around him, chaos. Empty bags and boxes, shredded wrapping paper, presents, pizza, and, amid the general uproar, the resident dog, Idgy, barking at will. At the height of the festivities, a dog no one had ever seen before and that happened to be passing by took advantage of an open door to join the party and scavenge for leftovers.
At a time when a lot of people our age have joined the snowbird set, my wife and I have become elder statesmen of the day-care set. My home office is home to a play pen. A walker, a toy grocery cart and a Johnny Jump-Up grace the dining room. Kitchen shelves once lined with condiments now hold bottles and formula.
It’s an understatement to say that no one in the family was ready for all this. My wife and I were enjoying our retirement. The younger of our two daughters was dumbfounded at the prospect of becoming a grandmother at 37. And all of us were convinced that Hailey, Grayson’s mother, wasn’t ready to be a parent.
All of which shows just how wrong those of us who think we know everything can be. And … here’s the thing. While all of us – on both sides of his family – have shared the responsibility of caring for Grayson, it’s not so much what we’ve done for him as what he’s done for us.
Aside from Hailey, the one whose life has changed most in the last year is our older daughter, Andie. Single with no children, she was enjoying her immaculate home and independent lifestyle. But Hailey, also single and at the time Grayson was born jobless, couldn’t afford the rent on a suitable place to raise a child. So meticulous Aunt Andie thought hard, swallowed hard and had them move in with her.
“I knew I needed to take a chance,” she said. “Hailey is so smart, and something inside me said that if I didn’t do this she’d be struggling just to survive and would never get an education. That’s more important than having a perfect house.”
So far, it seems to be working. In addition to having a job and taking care of Grayson, Hailey is taking a full load and getting excellent grades at BSU – due in no small part to her new reason for living.
“Having Grayson has made me more responsible,” she said. “A lot of my friends go to concerts and college parties, and now I don’t care about those things. I’d rather stay home with him and sing songs and watch annoying Disney movies. And when school seems overwhelming, I think about how excited I am to give him a good future. It gives me the energy to keep pushing through because he needs me to be the best I can be.”
Now 21, she’s the first to admit that as a teenager she made poor choices. She made mistakes she’s still paying for, but having a child turned her life around. Her mother, our younger daughter Jennifer the new grandmother, was “worried sick about the direction she was going. Now I don’t worry about that. Her whole focus is on being a good mom. It’s brought me so much closer to her. She understands now how much I love her as a mother because of the love she feels for Grayson.”
Brad Peterson, Grayson’s dad, added that for him fatherhood “epitomizes what it’s like to put someone else’s welfare ahead of yourself. I hadn’t experienced that and didn’t know how rewarding it is, or about the love that comes with it.”
One of the biggest reasons for the success story of Grayson’s life so far is Grayson himself. In three generations, we’ve had our share of difficult babies and easy babies, but none quite like him. The kid is almost never cranky. He’s cheerful, easy going and has a smile that could light a small city. He hardly ever fusses, thinks almost everything is funny and unfailingly makes us laugh. He could make John Boehner laugh.
The lad is insatiably curious. The phrase “into everything” was invented for him. He easily undoes the baby locks on kitchen cupboards and takes out everything from spices to mixing bowls. He throws things down the stairs, hid my ball cap in the trash, empties the bathroom wastebasket in the tub, buried the Blu-ray remote in the laundry hamper …
And none of that matters. As daughter Jennifer said, “he could destroy everything in my living room and I wouldn’t care. He’s more important than those things.”
That will change as he learns about boundaries. But for now, we’re content to let him enjoy being a baby and brighten our days. Seeing him never fails to lift my spirits. He makes me laugh even at my grumpiest. Our lives have been enriched just by having him.
A year into his life, it’s hard to believe that we ever saw Hailey’s announcement that she was pregnant as bad news. Grayson is the best news, the best gift, we could have had.

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.

President Obama’s trip to Idaho last month was the first presidential visit I’ve missed. Even in red, red, Idaho, the tickets went faster than sliders at a tailgate party.
I did see Obama when he was here in 2008, though, so my streak is still intact. As a recent Statesman story on presidential streaks noted, every president since Lyndon Johnson has visited Idaho while in office. I’ve seen every one since Truman (though some were yet to become president and one had recently left office) here in Idaho, and all but one of them in Boise.
That’s one of the nice things about living here. Boise is big enough to rate occasional presidential visits but small enough that the chances of seeing the president – sometimes close enough to touch – are better than in larger places.
When Dwight Eisenhower gave a campaign speech on the Statehouse steps, half the town turned out. It was, of course, a much smaller town then. I sat on the steps, close enough to Ike that he’d notice if I tried to get his attention. In fact, he probably ignored the fact that I was desperately trying to do so. The price of a bottle of soda pop at our neighborhood grocery store had recently doubled from a nickel to a dime, and I thought the president should intervene and stop inflation in its tracks. I was five and knew everything.
A funny thing happened during that visit. Eisenhower spoke at a banquet in the old Hotel Boise. Five-year-olds weren’t invited, but I’ve since seen photos taken of him that night. He was wearing a name tag as big as a saucer. This was the man who had led the Allied invasion of Europe that defeated Hitler, a former five-star general, a national hero and a shoo-in for president. He was probably the most famous man in the world. And someone thought he needed a name tag?
Historians record that JFK spoke at the Jefferson-Jackson Day banquet in Boise the year before he was elected president. My recollection, however, is of him speaking on a blustery day on the tarmac at the airport. He wore a tan overcoat and the wind was whipping his bushy hair. Unlike Ike, he was young, dashing, charismatic. For the briefest of moments, Camelot was visiting Boise.
LBJ also spoke at the airport, wearing, as I recall, a cowboy hat. No Camelot that day.
Richard Nixon visited Boise as vice president, riding from the airport to downtown in a limousine. Those were more innocent times. Presidential assassinations were thought to be ancient history, and the windows were down so the VP could shake hands with bystanders lining the route. I was one of them. My staunch Republican parents were giddy with delight.
Gerald Ford was one of our more athletic presidents, once a starter for the University of Michigan football team. So it was fitting that I interviewed him on the golf course at Sun Valley. He was then our newest ex-president. He answered my questions courteously but laconically, rarely taking his eyes off of his game.
His golfing partner that day, baseball great Hank Aaron, was even tighter-lipped, confining his answers to a few words. Considering that a brash young reporter was interrupting their golf game, it was decent of them to have answered at all.
It’s not a coincidence that so many small-city encounters with presidents or presidential candidates happen at airports. They have just enough time for a brief speech and a few questions; then it’s off to the next town. Reporters are lucky to get in a single question. That was the case with me during two Ronald Reagan visits. But with his immediate predecessor, Jimmy Carter, I got lucky.
Carter’s handlers had budgeted two-minute interviews for each of the local TV stations, but for some reason overlooked The Statesman. Wondering whether my editor would resort to thumb screws, the rack or the guillotine if I returned empty-handed, I watched with rising panic as Carter’s entourage headed for his plane and then, as if sent by God, returned.
“We have plane trouble,” his publicity minion said. “How would you like 40 minutes with the next president of the United States?”
So it was just Jimmy and me and a Statesman photographer in a private office. Carter couldn’t have been more pleasant. Or relaxed. The photo that ran on the next day’s front page was of the soon-to-be president kicking back in a reclining chair, his hands behind his head and his feet on a desk with a sign reading, “Don Duvall, airport manager.”
My encounter with one of his successors, George H.W. Bush, was even closer. He spoke at the Expo building at the fairgrounds, where his path to the podium took him through the waiting throng. He came close enough that his sleeve brushed my jacket as he passed. In those days I carried a pocketknife on my key ring. I was close enough to touch the president of the United States – did touch him, in fact – and I had a knife in my pocket. So much for security.
No such problems with Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Clinton didn’t come closer than 50 yards from the crowd as he crossed the tarmac at the airport, and security for Bush was so tight that a guard insisted on accompanying me to the men’s room at the Idaho Center. (No, I did not make that up.) Statesman staffers didn’t get anywhere near Bush that day. But I almost collided with his senior advisor, Karl Rove, as he headed for the presidential helicopter after the speech.
That brings us to Obama, and the question of who’ll follow him. Whoever it is, I’ll look forward to seeing him or her up close and personal – right here in Boise.
I promise to leave my pocketknife at home.

Tim Woodard’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.

 

Don Campbell knows a thing or two about adversity.
He got cancer and spent the better part of a year in hospitals.
He almost died, and the treatments left him blind in one eye.
He’s 70, unemployed and has medical bills that rival the national debts of some countries.
“Sometimes I wake up and think maybe I died when I was in the hospital and that my life now is actually hell,” he said.
But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, for much of his life, Campbell was living his dream. He had a job he loved. He was a local celebrity. A pioneer in the early days of rock and roll radio, he brought new sounds to eager listeners when radio was a big part of young people’s lives. Campbell was a cornerstone of the era, and people like that shouldn’t be forgotten when life wears them down.
He grew up in Nampa with radio – and then Nampa station KFXD – in his blood.
“I was fascinated with that place ever since I was a little kid,” he said. “It was such a big deal. It had offices in Boise, studios in Nampa and Caldwell and a transmitter in Meridian. To me, it was the ultimate.”
But it had a problem. At a time when groups from Paul Revere and the Raiders to the Beatles dominated the charts, KFXD didn’t play rock and roll. Campbell, who went to work there as news director in the mid-1960s and later worked as a deejay, ad salesman and general manager, changed that.
“His role at KFXD and in local radio history is huge,” Idaho History of Broadcasting Foundation President Art Gregory said. “Don was a groundbreaking figure. He was the first person at that station to realize that rock and roll was big, that it was going to get bigger and that the station needed to start playing it. He made it happen, and that made KFXD a powerhouse. It became unstoppable.”
“When I went to work there,” Campbell said, “they were playing old people’s music. I thought that was ridiculous. And so did all the kids in the valley.”
One of those kids was Tom Scott, now a television sports personality and the owner of an ad agency but then a student at Boise High School.
“I wrote anonymous letters telling KFXD what it should play,” he said. “… They tracked me down and asked me my thoughts.”
That led to an internship at the station and eventually to a job as a midnight deejay, launching a career that made Scott a household word. It was Campbell who started it all, he said, “by getting me my first job, on the midnight show. I owe Don a lot.”
By then Campbell had transformed the station. He started by playing rock and roll for a few hours a day. It was so popular that gradually it took over the station’s entire schedule – 24 hours a day.
A big part of his success was something called the Red Steer Rocket Request Line. If you were a teenager who lived in southwest Idaho then, you remember it. Campbell didn’t invent it, but after another station dropped it and another KFXD deejay aired it for a short time, Campbell took over and made it a staple of teenagers’ lives.
“It was hellaciously popular,” Gregory said. “Every kid in the valley listened to it. … There were people who met their spouses through the show and are still together.”
The show used a simple but successful formula. Teenagers decided what songs would be on the radio by turning in request slips at Red Steer drive-in restaurants.
“There would be a girl who liked a boy and would put in a request for him,” Gregory said. “Or vice versa. Or sometimes people would use it to get even, by doing something like making a request from a family for a boy who broke their window and claimed he didn’t. The song would be ‘Liar Liar’ (a ’60s hit by the Castaways).”
For its deejay, the show was a lot of work:
“I’d go by every drive-in and get the request forms. I’d spread them out on the floor and put the records on top of them. Then I’d queue up a record, read the requests and play the record. It got to where there were so many requests that I’d have to split them up and play the record again later.”
Just getting records could be a problem.
“The record companies ignored Boise. I spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get them to send me new releases.”
He still laughs about a former sheriff who tried to stop him from playing songs about drugs.
“He thought Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ was a drug song. He thought ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was a drug song. But he missed all the songs that actually were drug songs.”
As the request line’s popularity grew, Campbell became more than an ad salesman and deejay. He booked local bands and organized battles of the bands. He booked name acts like Chicago and the Doobie Brothers.
And, in a way, he became a friend to every teenager in the valley.
“I discovered that if you talked like a friend, like you were just having a conversation with a bunch of kids, it clicked. I wasn’t a stranger on the radio. I was a friend on the radio.”
KFXD became so popular he couldn’t imagine it ever changing. Until it did.
“It was sold in (1983),” he said. “They said I could stay, but everything was going to be run out of Green Bay, Wisc. It would all be structured and computerized. So I quit.”
He found other work, but radio remained the love of his life.
“It was so personal then,” he said. “Kids, not computers, decided the music we played. Radio was a big part of kids’ lives, and kids were a big part of radio. It was hard work, but I didn’t mind that. I loved it so much I could have worked 24 hours a day and never gotten tired.”

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

 

 

No one else in their neighborhood celebrates the holidays the way Phil and Marcia Myers do. As far as that goes, very few people anywhere celebrate the holidays the way they do.
Phil Myers starts to get ready in November, moving most of the furniture out of their living room and replacing it with his annual Christmas display. It takes him about 40 hours to assemble it. The result is an interactive Christmas train show. Emphasis on “interactive.”
And how does Marcia feel about losing her living room?
“I like it because Phil likes it,” she said. “And it’s how we meet people. This is what we do for the holidays.”
The free shows start each year on Dec.1 and go through the Christmas season. Phil Myers runs the electric trains with help from the guests. (Quite a lot of help, actually.) Marcia serves Christmas goodies. They’ve done this most years since 1977. He figures that since then they’ve entertained about 4,000 guests.
The display is built around a Christmas tree. It takes up the entire living room floor – and it’s a big living room. It has multiple trains of varying lengths, from a few cars to yards and yards of cars. It has passenger trains and freight trains. It has trees, bridges, trestles, derricks, water towers, houses, a farm, a church, industrial buildings …
“I can’t run it all myself,” its owner said with a wink at my granddaughter Chloe, who is eight. “I have to have help.”
She was happy to oblige, throwing switches and operating accessories as if she’d been doing it all her life. He likes showing children how to run his trains because he wants kids of the digital age to experience what once was at or near the top of countless kids’ Christmas lists.
“The heyday was in the 1950s,” he said. “There are actually more trains being sold today than there were then, but the population is larger now.”
So the market penetration is smaller now. A lot smaller. Today, most buyers of electric trains are men who had them as boys. Relatively few contemporary kids have them, which is why I wanted Chloe to see them. But there was an ulterior motive as well, namely that all the trains in the show are Lionels.
That’s a bit unusual. Most of the enthusiasts I’ve known prefer American Flyer brand trains, which use realistic-looking, two-rail tracks. Lionels use three-rail tracks and are larger and more durable. A Lionel locomotive is like a ’56 Buick – solid, heavy, built to last. In the neighborhood of my youth, it was Lionels that made kids’ eyes dance and our hearts beat faster.
In those days, every boy either had an electric train or wanted one. If you were lucky enough to have one, you wanted more – more cars, more tracks and switches, more everything. And a display like the one Myers lovingly assembles every November would have been almost beyond imagining – a Lionel Nirvana. Until he and Chloe put them through their paces, I had no idea of all the things electric trains could do.
They loaded cows into a cattle car. (The cows mooed.)
They unloaded logs from a freight car and dropped them into a sawmill, Chloe giggled as boards came out the other end.
They supplied a train with water from a tower.
They loaded and unloaded coal, milk cans, culverts, barrels … Chloe got to throw switches, operate a crane, drive a fork lift.
“It was fun,” she said. “I liked it.”
But she wasn’t bewitched the way kids used to be, which isn’t surprising. When Myers was a boy, trains were an everyday part of life. Now a lot of kids who can do everything but back flips with a Smartphone or a tablet have never seen a train outside of a movie, let alone had a chance to play with a toy train.
A retired Air Force pilot, Myers credits model railroading with teaching him much of what he knows about electricity and mechanics. His father bought him his first locomotive when he was five.
“It cost $3.50,” he said. “But that was a lot then. Dad was only making $14 a week.”
My dad got me my first train, too. He helped me install it on a ping pong table in the basement. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are of running the train at night with the lights off, which, coincidentally, is one of Myers’s pastimes.
“Let’s turn the lights off now,” he said toward the end of the one-hour show, switching off the lights and turning back time.
It was deja vu – the electric smell, the glow of the train lights pushing back the darkness, the clatter of wheels on tracks … And to that nostalgic brew he added sounds of nocturnal animals – frogs, crickets, owls, an occasional watchdog. It was wonderful.
And, increasingly, it’s an anachronism.
Today’s children, he said, “do not seem to have much interest in trains. … In all the years I’ve done train shows, I can’t point to even one child who has become an enthusiast as a result of seeing our show. They love the show, but that doesn’t translate into a lifelong hobby.”
Casualties of modern life, toy trains just can’t compete in the digital world. That’s a shame because, once upon a time, they were magical.

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.

 

There is not, to the best of my knowledge, a Guinness Book of World Records category for the longest-running Christmas practical joke. But if there were, the record would have to be held by two Idahoans.
It began decades ago, when they were a young couple in the early years of their marriage. The inspiration, curiously, was a piece of junk mail.
Then as now, greeting-card companies and charities flooded the mail with Christmas-card samples in hopes of soliciting orders or donations. These particular cards were unusual in that they could be ordered with their owners’ names – printed in gold, no less – in the space normally reserved for signatures. The young couple enjoyed a rollicking laugh over one from “The Captain and Tracy Gallup.”
“You don’t even know what kind of captain he is,” they hooted. “Army? Navy? Fire Department? The Turkish Gendarmerie? …”
“Or what his first name is. Who sends a Christmas card with a rank and no first name?”
The card was so beautiful and expensive looking that they couldn’t bring themselves to throw it away. This was either a good or a bad thing, depending on your perspective, because, in a flash of diabolical genius, it launched a practical joke of unexpected proportions.
“I know! We’ll send it to Elsa!”
By now you’ve guessed the identity of the young couple. Elsa is Elsa Ryan, my mother-in-law. When it comes to solving a mystery, she’s like a pit bull with a T-bone. We addressed the card to her home in Olympia, Wash., and mailed it to a friend in Virginia to send from there so it wouldn’t have a Boise postmark. Trying to figure out who the captain and Tracy were, and why they failed to include the return address of their home in Virginia, would turn Elsa into Miss Marple on steroids. It was perfect.
The best part was that we’d be spending Christmas with her and her husband in Olympia that year so we’d be there when the card arrived. Our expectations regarding her reaction did not go unfulfilled:
“Who are these people?” she asked approximately every hour. “He’s a captain so it must be somebody we knew in the Navy. (Her husband, John Ryan, was a Navy officer during World War II.) John, do you remember anyone named Gallup who had a wife named Tracy?”
“Gallup? I don’t think so, but it’s possible. We knew a lot of people in the Navy.”
“I don’t remember any Gallups, though. Or anyone at all named Tracy. The card talks about all the great times we had with them at beach parties so it must be somebody we knew when you were stationed in Florida.”
“Maybe so. If he’d stayed in the Navy he could be a captain by now.”
The card was the subject of continuing but mild consternation that Christmas. It wasn’t until the following year that things started to get exciting. By then we’d invented a family for the Gallups – a daughter and two sons, one of whom was a junior officer in the Navy.
“We got another one of those stupid cards from the Gallups!” Elsa told us when she called that Christmas. “It’s driving me up the walls! We’ve racked our brains and can’t think of a single person named Gallup. I’m going to find out who it is, though. I’m taking the card in to the chief’s office.”
That would be her then boss, the chief of the Washington State Patrol. This was long before the Internet, but even in the Paper Age the state patrol had ways of checking such things.
“There’s no captain named Gallup in the entire Navy,” she later reported. “Someone’s playing a joke on us.”
Undeterred, we kept the treacherous cards coming. For years! My increasingly frustrated mother-in-law was all but certain it was a joke, but there was just enough doubt to keep the pot boiling. We promoted the captain to admiral. We blessed him and Tracy with grandchildren. We moved the Gallups from Virginia to San Diego to Washington, D.C. (promoting the admiral to a job in the Pentagon). Friends who lived in those places mailed the cards. A Boise friend wrote the notes that accompanied the cards and signed them so the handwriting was always the same.
Elsa saved every card, treating them like clues in a murder mystery. She donned surgical gloves to open the envelopes, removed the contents with tweezers. Each card was duly sent to the state patrol and, ultimately, to the FBI for fingerprinting.
We even arranged a visit:
“The admiral and I may be making a trip to Seattle during the holidays,” Tracy wrote in a post script. “If so we’ll be sure to come to Olympia to see you both again and catch up.”
“What kind of woman never calls her husband anything but the admiral?” Elsa fumed. “He has to have a first name, doesn’t he?”
Well, no, actually. That was part of the fun.
We spent every other Christmas in Olympia in those days, and by mere coincidence happened to be there the year of the Gallups’ “visit.” My wife sneaked a sorry we-missed-you note from Tracy (penned by the same friend who signed the cards) into the mailbox. It was waiting when Elsa returned from some errands. Her reaction was enough to make us give her a few years off. We were afraid she’d self-combust.
The last card in the decades-long series brought the distressing news that the Gallups had separated. A friend mailed that one from New Mexico, where Tracy was living in seclusion. A reconciliation was contemplated.
But it never came. We’d run out of material and didn’t have the heart to keep the joke going.
So now you know, Elsa. It was us all along. We’re hereby confessing and publicly begging for forgiveness. None of us are getting any younger, and we don’t want you haunting us in the next life.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and look up the address of the Guinness people.

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.

 

The poorest kid in my grade-school class was a boy who dressed in worn clothes long out of style and occasionally got lunch handouts from other kids because he didn’t have enough to eat. But he was in school every day, got good grades and went on to get a good job.
Contrast that with a place where over half of the families of elementary school children are so poor they can’t afford to send their kids to high school, girls are forced into early marriages so their parents will have one less child to support, and students fortunate enough to attend high school are sent home if their families can’t afford to buy them proper underwear or hygienic supplies.
That’s how it is in parts of Vincent Kituku’s native Kenya. But with hard work and help from Idahoans, he’s changing that.
Kituku was one of the lucky ones in the town of Kangundo, Kenya, where he grew up. He graduated from high school there and attended the University of Wyoming on a scholarship. He came to Boise to work as an environmental scientist but has since become known as a motivational speaker and the author of an Idaho Statesman faith column.
What isn’t well known is what he’s doing to help young people in his native country escape a cycle of poverty and degradation. In 2010, Kituku founded Caring Hearts and Hands of Hope. The organization helps capable but impoverished students attend high school.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of that. In Kangundo, students who don’t attend high school are likely to spend the rest of their lives in poverty, earning less than $2 a day doing manual labor. Forced marriages are common.
“A lot of girls marry very young because their families are desperate and it’s one less mouth to feed,” Kituku said. “Often the families are given a goat or a cow as a dowry. They sell it and use the money to send a son to high school. Girls are given away so boys can go to school.”
High school makes all the difference. CHHH is helping both boys and girls attend high school, but the bleak futures awaiting many young girls in his hometown touch Kituku more deeply.
“Going to school is a protection for them,” he said. “They are less likely to be dehumanized. They learn different values; they learn about different cultures. They’re less vulnerable to things like forced marriage and female circumcision. They learn to practice family planning. We teach them about clean water and hygienic practices. We teach them skills to help them escape the cycle of poverty. And, much more than fathers do, they teach their children. It’s said that when you educate a boy, you educate an individual. When you teach a girl, you educate a community.”
He says he’ll never forget a girl in his own grade school who was sent home in shame because her family couldn’t afford to buy her underwear.
“From time to time female teachers would inspect the girls for cleanliness while male teachers inspected the boys in a separate classroom. A girl in sixth grade was wearing torn underwear, and the teacher lifted it up for the other girls to see. … I still see her humiliated face as she walked home alone. She was summarily dismissed until she could wear decent underwear.”
CHHH helps needy students attend high school by providing tuition and fees, room and board, school and hygienic supplies and, if needed, clothing.
The results go far beyond educating individual students. In Kenya, children who graduate from high school are culturally obligated to help their families and their communities.
“Having a high school graduate in the family is like having retirement, Social Security and Medicare,” Kituku said. “And some of those who graduate help other students go to school. They are happy to do this. It helps break the cycle of poverty and desperation.”
A $500 donation to CHHH pays for a year of high school. Donations are tax deductible, and 100 percent of the money is used to help students. To donate, make checks payable to Caring Hearts and Hands of Hope and mail to: CHHH, P.O. Box 7152, Boise, ID 83707.
CHHH currently pays for its students to attend public schools. But because of tuition increases and other disruptive factors, it’s purchasing its own school for girls. The Harry Morrison Foundation has donated $50,000 and pledged another $50,000 toward the $1.3 million CHHH is raising to buy the school.
In addition to academics, girls who go there will learn practical skills from computer technology to sewing. A girl who graduates but doesn’t go on to college can earn ten times as much making school uniforms as she would doing unskilled labor.
It’s not for nothing that Kituku is devoting his own time and money to help students in his native country. His stories about Kenyan children who are disabled and/or have lost their parents and have little hope of escaping lives of poverty are heartbreaking.
The most telling may be that of a mother of six who committed suicide because she couldn’t afford to send her children to school.
What does he get out of helping? On one of his trips to Kenya, a student asked him his net worth. He answered by telling the story of a disabled boy named Alex. CHHH paid not only for his education but for surgery that alleviated his disability.
“My net worth is the smile on Alex’s face,” he said. “… There is nothing like transforming a life. I don’t have to read the Bible to know that miracles happen. I see it daily.”

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.

 

Winter came overnight this year. One day my next-door neighbor was mowing her lawn; the next we were shoveling snow. If Boise has had another winter that has come so abruptly and with such vengeance, I don’t remember it.
There was a time when the winter’s first snow filled me with a sense of wonder, but not anymore. It would be exaggerating to say that I hate winter, but with apologies to skiers, snowboarders and others who love it, I like each one less than the one before. Granted, it has its own beauty. But my knees are too creaky to ski anymore, I feel the cold more every year and by the time you throw in colds, flu, slick roads and frozen pipes it would be fine with me if spring started the day after New Year’s.
That said, there’s something about getting ready for winter that I like. Don’t ask me why, but the preparations for winter bring feeling of contentment unlike any other. A feeling of all being right with the world, or at least with the home front.
Most people hate raking leaves in preparation for winter. Not me. There are two reasons for that. One is that it brings back memories of my kids playing in them when they were small. I’d rake them into a pile in the back yard; they’d jump in them, throw them in the air, make forts with them … This was in simpler times, of course, before digital devices undermined the youthful joy of playing outdoors.
The other reason is that my father taught me not to stress over raking leaves. He did this by stressing so much himself that the folly of it was self evident. Every year he meticulously vanquished every leaf. The wind and the neighbors’ leaves, of course, undid that in a hurry. Every time new leaves blew into the yard, he fumed and fulminated. By the time the neighbors’ sycamore leaves finally fell in December, he was muttering dark threats involving chainsaws. It taught me to rake till I get tired of it, stop until it’s fun again and mow up whatever’s left in the spring.
I like blowing out the sprinkler lines, too. True, you can hire someone to do it, but it’s easy and more fun to do it yourself. All you need is an air compressor. Mine cost $250 and has paid for itself in annual blowout fees several times over. The same applies to the pump we had installed when the house was built. It’s run 26 summers without a hitch and in that time has pumped a small lake of water.
Every year when frost is forecast, I shut off the power to the pump, fire up the compressor and blow out each sprinkler line. It takes about an hour. Don’t ask me why, but it’s strangely satisfying to watch the water spray and spurt from the sprinklers and know that no matter how cold the winter gets they’ll be ready to do their job again in the spring.
The pump has to be drained, of course, which can be problematic. It involves removing a plug at the bottom and one at the top. There’s just enough room between the pump and the well housing to remove the bottom plug, which is likely as not to fall into the ivy growing around the pump. Dropping anything into that ivy is like dropping it into quicksand, necessitating a visit to the hardware store. The clerks have come to expect me about every other spring.
“I need a half-inch plug, please.”
“Ah-ha! You dropped it in the ivy again, didn’t you?”
This year it went smoothly. With the pump drained, I cleaned the plugs with a wire brush, sprayed them with lubricant and put them back in, finger tight. Skip the lubricant or put them in too tight and you pay dearly. Dearly as in Goliath-sized pipe wrench, hammer, blow torch, penetrating lubricants, everything but a jackhammer. A lesson learned the hard way.
The easiest fall job is closing the foundation vents. A few flips of some levers and the pipes in the crawlspace are as ready for winter as they’ll get.
The hardest job is cutting back all the dead flowers, ornamental grasses and other vegetation – enough to fill both trash cans several times over. The sunflowers alone are as tall as Shaquille O’Neal. But what could be a grueling day of work is made immeasurably easier by none other than … my late father. He’d have worked from dawn until after dark, cramming every last leaf, stalk and twig into bags and trash cans lined up like soldiers along the curb. Taking my cue from him, I work till I’m sick of it, sit down with a cold beer and let the rest wait for another day.
This year the work was finished by early November, a good thing considering the weather that was soon to follow. The house and yard were ready for winter. All was right with the world.
Well, almost right. While putting away the tools, I noticed that the Boston Ivy was attacking the siding and trim on the front of the house again.
A word of advice to new homeowners thinking of planting Boston Ivy to give their house a more traditional look: DON’T. You might as well plant a nest of termites. It burrows under the siding, strips paint and has been known to destroy brick walls and chimneys.
A good tool for removing it is a chisel. I was getting mine out of my toolbox when it happened – one of those household mishaps of the type that the late wit James Thurber described as happening only to the authors of short humor pieces.
The tool box was under a workbench. Two bicycles were parked between the workbench and my almost new car – purchased three days earlier. Reaching for the chisel, I accidentally knocked over one of the bikes and watched in horror as it fell and one of its brake handles made a deep dent in the previously unblemished hood. Then, squeezing out from behind the bikes to move the one that had fallen, I knocked over the other bike – which fell and made a large chip in the previously unblemished hood.
All was not right with the world anymore. I lay in bed for a long time that night, gritting my teeth and dreaming of places where winter doesn’t happen.

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

If you follow this column, you know that the guy who writes it did a fair amount of traveling last summer. I didn’t write all of the travel columns then because there were Idaho stories that needed to be done first, but this is a tale of travel woe that’s still worth telling.
It happened in the Greyhound bus station in Atlanta, Ga. We wanted to go from Atlanta to Savannah and hadn’t needed a rental car while in Atlanta so we took a bus. We’d have preferred a train, but there weren’t any. While other countries have built modern, high-speed train networks, Congress has let Amtrak become almost impossible to take almost anywhere.
Some friends dropped us off – reluctantly – at the Atlanta bus station. One, a former NFL running back, offered to stick around until the bus left. If you’ve been to Atlanta’s bus station, you know why. It was as crowded as Walmart during a chicken-fried steak sale. And the last time we’d seen that many scary looking people was in “Night of the Living Dead.”
One good thing about the place was that it had a grill. We hadn’t had lunch so my wife went to get sandwiches while I kept an eye on our luggage. This seemed advisable in view of repeated announcements to “keep your hands and eyes on your belongings at all times. At all times!” That, and the menacing presence of some of the more sinister-looking passengers, whose photos almost certainly had graced post office walls.
My wife still hadn’t returned from the grill when our bus was called and the boarding line began to form. It was still half an hour before departure time, though, so no worries. How long could it take to grill a couple of burgers?
Too long. My wife later explained the delay, quoting the cook responsible:
“I gotta mop the floor, honey. Ain’t doin’ no more cookin’ till the floor is mopped and dry.”
When the floor was mopped and dry, she was “clean outa’ burgers. Gotta’ go get some from the freezer.”
Meanwhile, passengers were boarding our bus.
Panic. Should I fight through the mob to the grill to get my wife or lug our stuff to the line? The “stuff” included our travel papers, a laptop, books, cell phones, my suitcase and “Bertha,” her suitcase. Bertha is slightly smaller than a refrigerator and festooned with airline “heavy” stickers. Left alone, our belongings would disappear like a six-pack at a fraternity party so I painfully muscled them into the line. (There had been disturbing signs that dragging Bertha across the country was causing my hernia operation to come unraveled.)
At the last possible second, my wife returned with the sandwiches and we boarded the bus.
Correction. We tried to board the bus.
“Y’all gotta have tags on those bags,” the driver said.
“Tags? Nobody told us anything about tags. This is Greyhound, not United Airlines. Nobody loses bags on a bus.”
“Sorry. Y’all still gotta’ have tags.”
“Where do I get them?”
“Back there.”
“Back there” was through a long line, up a ramp, into the station and through the waiting room to a desk that was in the farthest corner and, given the densely packed crowd, might as well have been on the moon.
“You mean I have to fight my way back there with our suitcases?”
“No, y’all don’t need the suitcases. Just show them your tickets.”
My wife dug like a dog through her purse, which is almost as big as Bertha, and found the tickets. I pushed, shoved and elbowed through the human tide to the desk, where another long line had formed.
“Sorry, I need to go to the front of the line. My bus is leaving any second.”
While the other passengers glared and muttered threats, the agent at the desk explained that she needed to see the bags to issue the tags.
“But they told me at the bus that all I needed was the tickets.”
“Sorry. I gotta’ see the bags,” she said with maddening calmness.
“Have mercy! The bus will leave any minute! With my wife on it! And she has all our money! If I miss the bus I’ll have to sleep in the parking lot. And in case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t a model neighborhood.”
“Sorry. Still gotta’ see them bags, darlin’.”
Back to the bus – double time. Then – with my suitcase and Bertha in tow – I charged back up the ramp and through the waiting room, knocking over baggage and several small children along the way. A tattooed giant with six inches of bleached blonde hair teased straight up and the most beat-up electric guitar I’ve even seen threatened to hit me over the head with it. The mother of one of the kids Bertha steamrolled indignantly began to search her purse and pockets, probably for a gun.
Puffing like a racehorse and sweating like a pig, I careened to the front of the line and back to the desk. The passengers I cut in front of – for the second time – stopped muttering threats in favor of shouting them. In several languages.
“Welcome back, darlin’!” the agent said. “Here’s your tags.”
“That’s it?” I asked between heart spasms. “You don’t need to attach them to the bags?”
“No.You can do that yourself, honey. I just needed to see the bags.”
Resisting an urge to flatten her with Bertha, I went back outside. Our departure time had passed, a yellow tape had been strung across the ramp and all but a few of a dozen buses that had been there were gone. I was about to sit down and weep when someone shouted.
It was our driver – patiently waiting by the door of our idling bus.
“You didn’t think I’d leave you, did you?” he said.
And people wonder why the buses are late.
That said, I could have kissed him.
The trip to Savannah was fine. The bus was new, clean, comfortable.
But I sure do miss Amtrak.

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.

You wouldn’t think a drive through a desert would change much, that it would stay pretty much the same from year to year.
You’d be wrong.
My favorite Idaho desert drive is the one from Boise to eastern Idaho. Not the freeway part – the Fairfield cutoff. You leave I-84 just east of Mountain Home and take U.S. 20 through Fairfield, Carey and Arco to Idaho Falls.
It’s not scenic in the usual sense; no evergreen forests or alpine lakes, lots of sagebrush. But there’s just something about it – all those wide open spaces, big skies and long stretches where you can see forever. It’s good for the soul.
I had to drive it this summer to do some interviews at a ranch near Ashton. It had been a few years and I’d missed it, in the way you miss an old friend you haven’t seen in too long.
But my old friend wasn’t the same.
The first surprise was at Tollgate, just out of Mountain Home. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; I knew that the little store named for a frontier toll road to the gold mines north of there had been torn down, but had forgotten. It was a pleasant place to stop for a snack and a chat, and the bend in the road it overlooked seemed lonely without it.
Gone as well were the waggish signs marking the distance to Bennett, Idaho. Probably just as well. Some people found them offensive. But they were the mischievous work of songwriter Pinto Bennett, and because he’s one of my favorite people they never failed to make me chuckle.
Highway 20 crosses more than desert. East of Bennett, it climbs a lovely hillside dotted with quaking aspen to the Camas Prairie, scenic at any time but spectacular in a wet spring when the Camas lilies are blooming. It’s impossible for me to cross it without affectionately remembering a couple of Idaho icons, Bob Ertter and Mannie Shaw.
Ertter and his wife, Mamie, owned the store at Corral, the little, barn-red building with a weathered, three-word sign out front: “It’s Coffee Time.” Somehow it always was.
The unusual thing about Bob, the “prairie captain,” was that for two weeks of each month he ran the little store perched on a sea of rolling prairie and on the alternate weeks worked as the captain of a giant oil tanker on the San Francisco Bay. Lifestyles that couldn’t have been more different. Mannie Shaw was a rancher and revered old-time fiddler. Both first-rate gentlemen, both long gone. The Corral Store is vacant and all but falling down now. I stopped for old time’s sake, but seeing it that way was sad.
At Picabo, an oasis – lush farmland, world-famous Silver Creek and the Idaho Angler, a fly-fishing shop. That’s what it is now, at least. I remember it as the Picabo General Store. You could buy virtually anything there – from gas and groceries to picks and shovels to perfume and lingerie. You could mail a letter, order lunch. Years ago, when I asked the manager if there was anything the store didn’t sell, he thought long and hard and said, “Yes. We don’t sell cars. … But we used to.”
These days you can buy anything you need for fishing Silver Creek there. But don’t even think about asking for paprika or a sledgehammer.
A few miles up the road at Carey were three things I used to look forward to seeing. One was a house surrounded by DeSotos, my favorite cars during my youth. There were over 20 of them. I always wanted to interview their owner, but he was never there. Another person I looked forward to seeing in Carey was the girl with the lion eyes. She worked at a drive-in there and had striking, golden eyes, like a lion’s. And of course, Pete Cenarrusa, who ranched in Carey and served as Idaho secretary of state longer than anyone. One of the nicest men I’ve ever known.
Now … no Pete, no DeSotos, no golden-eyed waitress. Even the drive-in was gone.
Next, Arco – once the home of Grandpa’s Southern Barbecue. Lloyd and Loretta Westbrook ran it out of a little house on the highway into town. Lloyd used his grandfathers’ time-honored recipes to make the barbecue; Loretta baked scrumptious Southern desserts. Grandpa’s made driving to Arco worth the trip. Now, it’s just an empty house.
Dr. Fuzzy Steuart, Harvard- and Johns Hopkins-trained oncologist and a founder of Mountain States Tumor Institute, is gone as well. Tired of dealing with bureaucracies, he moved from Boise to tiny Arco, where he charged $10 for an office visit. If you didn’t have $10, he’d barter – a homemade pie, a six-pack of beer or a song played on a guitar for some of the best medical advice this side of the Mayo Clinic. He died in 2008.
With reminders of absent friends passing like somber signposts, I struck out across the lonesome stretch of desert that ends at Idaho Falls. A range fire and a thunderstorm were brewing; the sky was the color of charcoal, streaked with red and purple. I’d almost forgotten how vast – how empty – that landscape is, nothing but windswept desert and towering, faraway mountains that you never get to.
And that was how I felt – empty. Bob Ertter and Mannie Shaw, the Picabo Store, Pete Cenarrusa and the girl with the golden eyes, Lloyd, Loretta, Fuzzy … All my desert friends were gone, and I didn’t feel so hot myself.

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.

 

It should have been easy knowing what to write about Paul Revere when he died – he was an Idaho icon forever. The trouble was that I knew so many Paul Reveres. Choosing one would be like writing a book with one chapter.
So here’s a little bit about all of them:
My first glimpse of Revere, who died last weekend, was at a Paul Revere and the Raiders dance at the old Miramar Ballroom on Fairview Avenue in the early 1960s. Originally a local band, the group had had some regional hits and were playing mainly in the Portland-Seattle area at the time. They were a big enough name by then that every high school in the valley was buzzing with the news of their return.
The Miramar was so packed that night they could have passed out grease guns to help people squeeze through the crowd. It took a long time to wriggle my way to the stage, where I stood for the rest of the night behind Revere’s upright piano. There wasn’t much choice, actually; the crush of bodies had me pinned. That was okay, though. I could see the entire band and was inches from Revere himself. A rock and roll junkie, I wouldn’t have traded the experience for the keys to a new car. That Paul Revere became my hero that night.
The following year, a miracle. Two friends of mine were playing in his band – Dick Walker on bass and Charlie Coe on guitar. Dick and I had met at Boise High School, and Charlie was my guitar teacher. One day Dick casually asked if I’d like to go to a rehearsal with him. A Raiders rehearsal? That was like asking if I’d like to have lunch with Elvis.
What I remember about that day was one song. Revere ran his band through an instrumental called “Night Train” for most of the afternoon. It wasn’t a difficult song, but he wanted it just so – the arrangement, the balance between the instruments, the tones of the instruments, the way the band members moved while they played.
That Paul Revere was a taskmaster. His Raiders were tight, solid and, by the rock and roll standards of the time, good musicians. Compare their version of “Louie Louie” with the Kingsmen’s. Revere’s was harder-edged, “blacker” sounding. It was a regional hit before the Kingsmen recorded theirs and scored the national hit. As Revere later put it, “I got the ball and went 99 yards and the Kingsmen scored the touchdown.”
The mid-60s brought Paul Revere the teen idol. He and a mostly new group of Raiders had a string of national hits and were the house band in a network television show. It was obvious they’d made it big, but I didn’t appreciate how big until last summer, when a member of that group played recordings for me of its appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Tonight Show and other programs. Johnny Carson called them “America’s number-one band.”
When the band’s run ended, its leader returned to Boise and became Paul Revere the businessman. He had a gift for predicting which way the city would grow and buying real estate in the right places. In addition to working at The Statesman then, I was a correspondent for People Magazine, which in its early days wasn’t limited to Hollywood fluff. One of my assignments was a “where are they now” story about Revere. The response from his fans encouraged him to start yet another Raiders band, and the Paul Revere of the oldies Circuit was born.
When he turned 50, I interviewed him by radio phone (no cells then) aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
“You wouldn’t believe how much they’re paying me to play a show a night and spend the rest of my time having fun,” he said.
He sounded relaxed, happy. Who wouldn’t be? This was the Paul Revere who would spend the rest of his career playing aboard luxury liners, at casinos, state fairs, private parties for zillionaires … Good work if you can get it.
It was during this time that I came to know Paul Revere the storyteller. Time and again, I marveled as he mesmerized listeners with show-business yarns: The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson tossing a potted plant through a window of a high-rise hotel because it frightened his unstable brother Brian. A teen idol losing his platinum-plated Rolls Royce. Wayne Newton throwing a $500 microphone because the cord appeared too short (it wasn’t) for him to reach down and shake fans’ hands. He could tell stories like that all night, leaving all who heard them gasping with laughter.
The last Paul Revere I came to know was my friend. My wife and I spent some of the most enjoyable times of our lives at his and his wife Sydney’s beautiful home on Boise Avenue. We came to love her late mother almost as much as they did. When my mother died, Paul and Sydney were the only people outside the immediate family to attend her graveside service. And they surprised me again by showing up unexpectedly at my retirement party.
He played music almost to the end, even when he had to be carried on and offstage. When I asked him last summer if there was anything he still wanted to accomplish, he said he wanted to play until he was 99.
And he wanted to write his life story. He’d been talking to me for years about helping him with it. It would have been a great read because his life was spiced with so many great anecdotes. Did you know, for example, that as the teenage owner of a drive-in restaurant he was the one who came up with the names “Papa Burger,” “Mama Burger” and “Baby Burger,” now used by A&W drive-ins all over the world?
We actually got a start on the book, but his life was just too busy to do it the way it needed to be done.
It was on his mind almost to the end:
“We need to do it soon,” he said the last time we talked, in August. “This thing (the cancer) is gonna’ get me, and I need to do it before I don’t have any memory left.”
Until it actually happened, I couldn’t quite believe that he was dying. He was always such a force – larger than life, bigger than cancer.
Now that he’s gone the book won’t happen, which is a shame. It would take a book – a big one – to do justice to his stories, his wit, his amazing life and extraordinary personality.
With that I’ll wrap it up. I need to have a drink and cry for my friend.

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

 

SAVANNAH, Geo. – I’ve wanted to see Savannah for most of my life, and it took almost that long to get there
It was worth it, too,
My interest in Savannah began with an offhand comment by a Southern belle named Beth Herndon. Beth was married to a fellow sailor where I was briefly stationed in Charleston, S.C. When I mentioned that Charleston impressed me as a beautiful city, she quickly changed the subject:
“If you think Charleston is beautiful, you should go to Savannah. It’s the most beautiful city in the South!”
I’ve wanted to see it ever since, but didn’t get a chance to do it properly until last month on a trip to Atlanta. Atlanta has a lot going for it, but you expect that in a big city. By contrast, Savannah is a small but exquisite jewel. It’s about half the size of Boise and attracts more than 12 million visitors a year – 12 million.
There are reasons for that. One is that Beth was right – it’s ridiculously beautiful. A shopkeeper we met likened it to a little New Orleans – live oaks dripping Spanish moss, lush gardens, 22 parklike public squares, impressive architecture, imposing monuments and fountains … you can’t take pictures fast enough.
One reason Savannah has so many beautiful and historic buildings (a few dating to colonial times) is that it wasn’t burned during the Civil War. Why Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman spared it during his fiery March to the Sea depends on which version of the story you choose to believe. The official one is that the city sent a delegation to tell Sherman the city would surrender and offer no resistance if he didn’t burn it down. Others are that he couldn’t bring himself to burn such an attractive city and that his best friend lived there.
“What Yankee told you that?” a tour guide huffed when I mentioned it. “It wasn’t his best friend. He had a girlfriend who lived here. All the generals had girlfriends here.”
Savannah’s sidewalks, incidentally, were built extra wide to accommodate its Southern ladies’ billowing gowns.
History is almost palpable there:
* Savannah has the largest restored historic district in the U.S., the first motorized fire department in the U.S. and the nation’s first public art museum.
* It was the country’s first planned city, laid out around its famous squares.
* The Girl Scouts of America were founded there.
* Parts of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” were set in the Pirates’ House, built in the mid-1700s and still a popular Savannah restaurant today.
* Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in Savannah.
Civil War history is, of course, ubiquitous. Dates on some of the headstones in a downtown cemetery were altered to make it appear as if the deceased had lived for centuries. The culprits: members of Sherman’s army, who camped there.
Robert E. Lee was a frequent guest at a mansion now open to tours. Its original owner was Andrew Low, a cotton baron. His daughter-in-law, Juliette Gordon Low, founded the Girl Scouts in its parlor and died in an upstairs bedroom. (Nothing if not dedicated, she was buried in her uniform.) Lee slept in a bedroom across the hall. His prayer book is still on the nightstand.
Not for the first time – the first was on seeing Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained pillow in Washington D.C. – I was struck by how accessible our history is. I was standing inches from Robert E. Lee’s prayer book, the book he agonized over while deciding the grim fates of countless human beings. I wanted to touch it, but our guide – an imposing representative of the “Colonial Dames,” undoubtedly would have rapped my knuckles.
Impressive as it is, Savannah’s history is but part of its story – and its charm. More than 800 movies have been made there. It’s most closely associated with “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” But the iconic “feather scene” in “Forrest Gump?” And the scenes where Forrest sat on a park bench and told his story? They were shot in Savannah. The bench is in a museum now.
The fifth best ice cream shop in the world, according to the Toronto Sun, is in Savannah. (The Sun’s top four, respectively, are in Los Angeles, Madrid, New York and Torino, Italy.) Rankings like these, obviously, are subjective. But it occurred to me while contemplating the meaning of life over a double scoop that there would be a lot worse ways to go than death by Leopold’s rum raisin.
Not to be overlooked among Savannah’s attractions are its people, and their deserved reputation for Southern hospitality. From tour guides to taxi drivers, we didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t over-the-top friendly and helpful. They’re proud of their city and love to tell you about it. They talk a lot, laugh a lot. They seem to have found lasting joy simply by living in what a friend once called the most beautiful city in the South.
Without her, I probably never would have gone there. Thanks, Beth.

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.

 

The newlyweds watched the first half of the game through a chain-link fence. They couldn’t afford the price of admission.
The year was 1971, the game the first ever between the University of Idaho and then Boise State College. Fans were admitted free for the second half, and the newlyweds watched from the bleachers as BSC defeated the Vandals 42-14. He’d been to games at Bronco Stadium before and knew what to expect. She hadn’t. A newcomer from Washington state, she was hooked for life that day by the Broncos’ high-voltage offense.
The newlyweds, as you’ve probably guessed, were the Woodwards. We’ve been to a lot of games since then, but never to a big-time game in a distant city and have always wondered what it would be like.
This year’s season kickoff against Ole Miss in Atlanta on Aug. 28 represented the perfect opportunity to find out. We had some airline rewards freebies, some friends were going, and Atlanta isn’t far from Savannah – a city I’d wanted to see virtually all my life.
Like others who watch BSU’s away games on television, we had a vague idea of what to expect. We’d seen the cheering, the celebrations. But what would it be like to be there and be part of that?
The first surprise came on the plane, when a flight attendant led a Boise State cheer. Twice.
The next surprise was the number of Bronco fans in Atlanta. Not as many as for a game in, say, Seattle or Las Vegas – Atlanta is almost four times as far away. But spontaneous cheers broke out on the streets, and BSU colors seemed to pop up everywhere – the airport, our hotel, in restaurants, at the Civil War Museum, the Margaret Mitchell House …
Bear with me for a brief digression of travel trivia totally unrelated to football: Mitchell only wrote “Gone With the Wind” because someone told her she wasn’t smart enough to write a book. She wrote it in a tiny apartment she called “the dump,” hid the manuscript pages and denied she was writing it. And she wanted Basil Rathbone (best known as Sherlock Holmes) to play Rhett Butler instead of Clark Gable!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Back to football.
The train ride to the stadium was, well, different. Fans in Rebel red outnumbered those in blue and orange by something like ten to one. It was weird to be engulfed by the opponents’ colors at a BSU game. Weird, and a little intimidating.
That changed, however, at the Chick-fil-A pre-game show. There were a lot of Bronco fans there. One was Linda Clark, superintendent of the West Ada School District. Clark figures she’s attended roughly 80 away games – two a year for 40 years.
“It’s a nice way to start the season,” she said, “and it’s always fun to go to a big game like this one. That and I wanted to be here for the start of a new era, with a preponderance of the new coaches having BSU ties. In case you can’t tell, I bleed blue.”
Unseen, at least by us, were the blue-haired Elvises, shirtless guys painted blue and orange and some of the other local-color staples of home games. That was okay, though. I was looking for staples of away games, and couldn’t have found a better one than Chuck Hallett.
Hallett was wearing orange pants, an orange BSU cap, a white and orange BSU shirt, orange and blue necklaces and was carrying an orange bag filled with pre-game memorabilia. A Capital High and BSU graduate, he’s lived in Olympia, Wash. for years but attends all of BSU’s home games and many of its away games.
“I live in a neighborhood where there are 300 Husky fans and two BSU fans, and BSU is better represented,” he said.
Hallett and his wife, Mary (blue shirt, orange blanket, blue and orange jewelry), have a BSU tent, balloons, banners, golf cart and other Bronco gear at their home in Olympia. They have autographed footballs, helmets, pool floats, a Kellen Moore display. A Husky fan had to pose for a picture wearing BSU colors after losing a bet to them. They take pictures of Husky fans’ pets lying on their BSU dog bed.
“We love the town of Boise, the team, the colors, everything,” Chuck said.
“And we really love going to the games,” Mary added. “We both have things we do on our own, but this is something we can do together that we both love.”
A bonus for BSU fans who made the trip to Atlanta was its newly opened College Football Hall of Fame. The Broncos were the first team to visit.
Some trivia totally related to football: The worst drubbing ever at a college game was Georgia Tech over Cumberland College, 222-0. (Mercy rules apparently were for sissies then.) Five rather than 10 yards used to be required for a first down, and a touchdown used to be four points.
BSU is well represented at the hall of fame – interactive displays, photos of a Bronco tailgate party and former coach Chris Petersen, film of the Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma … Nearly a thousand BSU fans passed through the doors the first week.
We’ve come a long way from the days when they could watch games through a chain-link fence.
Note: This is the first of two columns from Tim’s trip to Georgia. Next: Savannah.

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.

If you’re going to lose something, there are a lot worse places than Seattle to do it.
I don’t know what it is about Seattle, but something about it brings out the worst in the Woodwards when it comes to losing things.
Not that we don’t lose things elsewhere. We lose things in our house, our cars, our yard – all sorts of places – on an almost daily basis. I can lose a cell phone or a pair of reading glasses in my sleep.
But there’s just something about Seattle. And, happily, people who live there seem to be as good at finding and returning things as we are at losing them. Seattle hereby gets my vote for Best City in America to Lose Stuff.
The most recent incident involved what can legitimately be called a heroic effort by Alaska Airlines employees to retrieve a computer my wife left on one of their planes. More on that later. First, some background:
The first incident happened several years ago at a hotel a few blocks from Seattle’s airport. I’d checked out and was walking to the airport to catch my flight home when I discovered that the wallet that should have been in my pocket wasn’t.
Panic! All my money and the ID I needed to board the plane were in that wallet. Without it, I’d be stuck. Visions of sleeping on sidewalks danced in my head.
The only hope was to search for the wallet and hope it turned up in time to catch the plane. I retraced every step. I went back to the hotel, turned my room upside down. Then I started looking in trash cans and dumpsters, hoping someone had taken the money and thrown the wallet away. That’s when a nice young man approached and asked if I’d lost something.
“The dumpster diving tipped you off?”
“Is this it?” he asked, holding out my wallet.
He’d found it on the sidewalk outside the hotel. I offered him the money inside as a reward, but he wouldn’t accept it. He wouldn’t even let me kiss his feet.
The second incident didn’t happen in Seattle proper, but close enough. My wife and I were driving from Boise to her folks’ house near Hoodsport, Wash., and stopped in Olympia to buy groceries. When we got to Hoodsport, an hour’s drive away, she realized her purse was missing.
Panic on steroids! Not only did the purse contain her ID, credit cards, makeup, photographs, cell phone, glasses, camera, pens, pencils, checkbook and a side of beef, it contained over $500 cash. Our money for the trip, and way more than she normally carries.
We drove back to the shopping center in Olympia, knowing it was hopeless. Who would turn in a purse with that much money?
We never knew, because the woman who found it in a shopping cart in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s didn’t leave her name. She just quietly turned it in – with every dollar still inside – and left. In the off chance you happen to read this, mystery woman, thank you for rescuing our vacation.
That brings us to the heroic Alaska Airlines employees. It was nearly midnight when our plane landed at Sea-Tac. We made it to the first restroom on the concourse when my wife realized she’d left her laptop in the overhead.
“You wait here with our luggage,” she said. “I’ll go back to and get it.”
She was gone a long time. Her expression when she returned left little doubt that the news wasn’t good.
“The plane is gone,” she said.
“What do you mean the plane is gone? You were back at the gate in ten minutes. They couldn’t have turned a flight around that fast.”
“They didn’t. They towed the plane to a hangar for maintenance.”
The airport was all but deserted at that hour, but we got lucky and found a solitary Alaska boarding agent finishing up at his post.
“Let me make some calls,” he said.
He did. Quite a few calls, actually.
“They’re going to search the plane. I’m giving them your cell number so they can call you when they know something. It shouldn’t take long.”
We sat and waited. And waited. And waited … The helpful agent got off duty and left. We waited some more. At last, a call.
“We have your laptop,” a voice said. “Where are you?”
We’d been expecting a call rather than an actual person, so we didn’t think it mattered that we’d left our gate. To our surprise, an Alaska supervisor had been waiting there for nearly an hour, repeatedly trying to call us.
It seems that a maintenance worker had transposed two of the digits when he gave my wife’s cell phone number to the supervisor. The supervisor, nothing if not resourceful, found our reservation on the lost laptop. The reservation included the correct cell phone number.
“It’s a good thing your computer isn’t password-protected,” he said. “We never would have found you.”
By this time half a dozen smiling Alaska employees who helped in the search had gathered to watch the handoff. You can’t ask for more from an airline than that.
And if you’re traveling and lose something really important, try to do it in Seattle.

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.

GUSTAVUS, Alaska – A note in a pottery shop in Gustavus, Alaska says a lot about the kind of town it is.
“Fill out receipt for what you want. Attach cash or check to receipt and drop in box.”
Alaska-themed pottery lines shelves on three walls of the shop, which is less a building than a glorified lean-to. There is no fourth wall. No clerk, no wall, no locks. They aren’t necessary.
A metalsmith’s shop up the road also operates on the honor system. Beautiful copper kitchenware, some of it expensive, is displayed for customers to admire and, if they choose, to purchase by leaving the money. No security needed. The shop runs on trust.
My wife and I spent a week in Gustavus this summer at the home of a longtime friend of hers, a native of Alaska who has spent most of her life there. Gustavus, population 400, is five miles from Glacier Bay National Park and a world away from the lower 48. Everybody knows everybody – literally. All 400 of them, no exceptions, wave when they pass each other in their vehicles. They stop and talk on the streets, help one another in times of need, trust one another in ways outsiders find both quaint and enviable.
Note on the post office bulletin board: “Yellow and blue stepladder stolen. Need it back as soon as possible.”
Next to it was a high school graduation announcement.
“Why would someone put a high school graduation announcement on a post office wall?” I asked.
“Because everybody in town knows her,” Aimee, my wife’s friend, replied, looking at me as if I had three heads. “They’d want to know she’s graduating.”
A stack of pamphlets on a nearby counter provided details of Gustavus’s centennial celebration. The whole town was invited to participate in activities from log rolling and gold panning to watermelon seed spitting and an “Alaska Extreme Chainsaw Toss.”
For those who needed it, transportation was available.
On a hay wagon.
Notably absent from the festivities was anything resembling law enforcement. The biggest threat in Gustavus isn’t human malfeasance. It’s moose.
“They raid people’s gardens and occasionally attack people,” Aimee said. “A pack of dogs killed a mama moose’s baby a while back. She went after every dog in town.”
We were warned to run to the nearest large tree and hide behind it in the event a moose attacked, not an uncommon occurrence there. But when several days had passed without a sighting of the moose that were said to be just about everywhere, we were disappointed at not seeing any. Then my wife’s cell phone rang.
“If you want to see a moose, get over here right now,” a neighbor we’d met the day before said. “It’s eating my only sunflower.”
Gustavus used to have a safety officer, but things didn’t work out.
“He quit after getting between a feuding husband with a shotgun and a wife with a pistol,” Aimee’s friend Vince told us. “He was unarmed and decided to seek less exciting employment elsewhere.”
Many of those who drive and wave on Gustavus’s roads don’t have driver’s licenses. Some have Alaska license plates on their vehicles, but others have plates from wherever they came from, or no plates at all.
“Why should we have them?” Vince asked. “There’s no law here.”
He was serious. The closest cops are state troopers in Juneau, 50 miles away by boat or plane. (There are no roads.) In the event of a crime serious enough to warrant the troopers’ attention, they’re likely to call the Park Service, which dispatches a ranger. The last really serious crime anyone we met could remember was a shooting a dozen years ago.
“There was a fight, and the loser shot the winner,” Aimee said. “There were no witnesses so he wasn’t charged.”
The first time we left her house, we reminded her to lock her doors.
“Why?” she asked. “Nothing ever happens here.”
“But our laptop is in plain sight on the table by your kitchen door.”
“And I’ve got money sitting in plain sight on my stairs. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
And it was. The only time people lock their doors in Gustavus is when they leave for days or weeks at a time. They leave their cars unlocked with the keys in the ignitions. The most common crime is gas siphoning. Between their cars, trucks, boats, heavy equipment and other vehicles, Alaskans use a lot of fuel. And gas, like most everything else in Alaska, is pricey.
Gas: $5 a gallon. A three-pound can of coffee: $16. A pint of ice cream: $7.50. A salmon dinner for four, with a bottle of wine that would cost $13 in a Boise Winco: $312.
Prices are high because of the isolation. Everything has to be shipped or flown in. But other expenses we take for granted in the lower 48 don’t exist in Gustavus. There are no property taxes, no income or state sales taxes. And Alaskans receive annual checks, between $900 and $1,500 in recent years, for their share of the state’s oil wealth.
The slogan on Alaskans’ license plates (those who have them) is “The Last Frontier.” In some ways, it’s accurate.
“I was selling Girl Scout cookies the day we became a state,” Aimee told us. “Everyone was excited, but now we have all these federal regulations. Alaskans don’t like to be told what they can do. People come here to get away from that. We didn’t realize that statehood was the beginning of the end of our way of life.”

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.

 

GUSTAVUS, Alaska – I always thought that if there was a state I’d never see, it would be Alaska.
Alaska, after all, is sort of a larger version of Idaho – mountains, forests, rivers, the kinds of things we have right here at home. Alaska is Idaho on a grander scale. Why go there to see the same things we have here only bigger?
And it’s so far away. You have to fly or drive across a sprawling immensity of backwoods Canada to get there, and let’s face it – if back woods aren’t your thing, there’s not much to do along the way. It’s not like driving from here to, say, Florida, where you can stop in Las Vegas to see a show or New Orleans for gumbo and beignets. On the road to Alaska, there are lengthy stretches where you’re more likely to see a moose than a restaurant or even a taco stand.
However … my wife has a friend who lives in Alaska and has repeatedly invited us to come visit. Every summer we talk about heading north to Alaska and instead fly south to blue skies and white beaches. The thought of lying awake shivering in a place where it never gets dark, rains buckets and high temperatures seldom exceed 60 degrees invariably sent us in the opposite direction.
Until this summer. After years of procrastinating, we accepted my wife’s friend’s invitation – and realized how wrong our preconceptions about Alaska had been.
We flew from Seattle to Juneau and from there to the little town of Gustavus, where we stayed for the next week. The flight to Gustavus was so short that the flight attendants didn’t unfasten their safety belts. I thought the least they could do was roll some beverage cans down the aisle, but no one seemed to mind the absence of drinks and pretzels. Everyone was mesmerized by the scenery – snowcapped peaks, forested slopes, sparkling bay.
And it wasn’t even raining.
At the Gustavus airport, which is roughly the size of a convenience store, ours was the only Alaska Airlines (or any other airline) flight of the day. Our captain was carrying a kid’s lunchbox, which seemed odd until he opened it and started passing out candy to the airport employees – all half dozen of them. The ticket agent seemed flummoxed when we told her our friend was late picking us up and didn’t recognize our friend’s name. Gustavus, apparently, was the sort of place where everybody knows everybody. It appeared from the outset that we were in for a new and different experience.
And we were. Quirky Gustavus could have been the inspiration for the defunct TV series “Northern Exposure.” The town, population 500, merits a column all by itself. (Look for it two weeks from today.) But the thing people come there to see, five miles up the road from Gustavus, is Glacier Bay National Park.
If you’ve never been to Glacier Bay National Park, put it on your bucket list. I thought I knew how beautiful Alaska would be. I had no idea.
To say that Idaho is similar to Alaska is like saying that Shafer Butte is similar to the Himalayas. We spent two days on the bay, one on a friend’s commercial fishing boat and the other on a park service tour boat, and came home both times with our jaws sore from dropping. Spectacular isn’t a big enough word.
I love Idaho – its mountains, lakes and rivers, even its deserts. I was born in Idaho; it’s home. But you could drop the Sawtooths and White Clouds into the mountains around Glacier Bay and hardly notice they were there. You pass one glittering peak after another, mile after mile after mile of them, hour after hour of them, all dropping thousands of feet from snowy summits to a shimmering sea.
And then, the glaciers. We’d never seen a glacier before and didn’t know what to expect. One was a mile wide, 250 feet high and 21 miles long. I’d always imagined glaciers as smooth rivers of ice. This one, white from snow that fell 150 years ago and streaked with blue ice and gray sediment, looked like a gigantic ice carving. With its skewed peaks and jutting ridges, it looked as if a deranged giant had tried to carve images of the mountains around it.
The sounds it made when it calved, dropping locomotive-sized chunks of ice into the bay, was all but indescribable. The native people, who had a way with names, called the upper bay “the land of white thunder.” Boats and ships can’t get too close to the glaciers. The waves created by the enormous chunks of ice falling from them were powerful enough to rock a nearby ship. A cruise ship with some 2,000 passengers aboard.
Wildlife? In the time it takes to watch a football game, we saw three bald eagles, four grizzly bears, seven mountain goats and scores, possibly hundreds, of sea lions, porpoises and puffins.
What we didn’t see were people. On our first day on the bay, in the fishing boat, it was after lunchtime before we saw another boat. It was just the four of us, surrounded by that vast, icy wilderness. Logic notwithstanding, it was easy to feel like we were seeing something no one had ever seen before, that this was the way the world looked when it was new.
True, Alaska and Idaho are similar. Both have mountains, forests, sparkling waterways, spectacular scenery.
Beautiful states – similar, but worlds apart.

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

When former Gov. Cecil Andrus said he was troubled about having to miss John Evans’s memorial service, I knew exactly how he felt.
The July 11 service gave those who knew and admired Evans, who succeeded Andrus as governor, a chance to acknowledge him for a life well lived. Andrus was unable to attend because he was recovering from surgery. I couldn’t be there because I had to be in eastern Idaho that day. And though I didn’t know Evans nearly as well as Andrus did, I did know and like him well enough that it bothered me not to be able to pay my respects.
Evans wasn’t exactly a household word in parts of Idaho when President Jimmy Carter made Andrus his Interior Secretary, vaulting then Lt. Gov. Evans from the serenity of small-town eastern Idaho to the fishbowl of the governor’s office. Many of those he was about to govern didn’t know much about him, so The Statesman sent me to his hometown of Malad City to do a profile of him. It was a daunting assignment for a young reporter, but one remembered fondly.
The three days I spent in Malad City, population 2,000, was like traveling back in time. Or maybe to Mayberry. Everybody knew everybody. People smiled and spoke in passing. Farmers tipped their hats to women on the streets. It was picturesque, old-fashioned.
There was a restaurant just outside town – I think it was called the Deep Creek Cafe – that served some of the best down-home food in Idaho. The year was 1976, but the prices were straight out of the 1950s. You half expected to look up and see Aunt Bee baking an apple pie in the kitchen.
This was the sort of place where our governor-to-be was born and had spent most of his life. He grew up there, impressed the people there enough that they elected him to the State Senate at age 27, and made him the mayor of Malad City for six years. He went on to become Idaho’s Senate Minority leader, lieutenant governor and, defying the odds in Republican Idaho, a Democratic governor who served for a decade. A small-town success story.
Evans was the first Mormon to be elected governor in Idaho. It would have been surprising, given his roots, if he’d been anything else. Then as now, Malad City was one of the most predominantly Mormon towns in the state. I’ve forgotten the percentage of its residents who claimed membership in the church, but it was over 90 percent.

So it came as something of a surprise to find several bars in town. I popped into each of them, purely for journalistic purposes, and they all were doing a nice business.
The patrons did not include the future governor, however. I don’t know whether he was a model Mormon, but you wouldn’t have caught John Evans staggering out of a bar with a six-pack of Moose Drool under his arm. He was unquestionably a model citizen.
He proved to be a good governor as well. He helped guide the state through a nasty recession, supporting both budget restrictions and increased taxes to maintain essential services. He negotiated a landmark water-rights agreement, championed important environmental legislation and consistently vetoed right-to-work laws he saw as negatively affecting incomes. The laws were later passed, and our wages remain among the lowest in the nation.
Evans remained a force in public life after leaving the governor’s office. While president of D.L. Evans Bank, he supported numerous local, state and national organizations. And, reflecting both his rural roots and his stewardship of the environment, he used his influence to help defeat a proposal for a mega-hog farm his rural neighbors and others saw as an environmental nightmare.
Despite his achievements, he was never stuffy or self important. I interviewed him a number of times during his years as governor, and not once did he come across as anything but a nice, down-to-earth gentleman – an impression irrevocably confirmed in an unlikely setting – a chili cookoff in McCall.
He and I were judges. We sat beside each other at the judges’ table, and my son, then a toddler, sat on my lap from time to time while my wife socialized. You always hope that your kids will be well behaved and not do anything to embarrass you – particularly when you’re sitting six inches from the governor.
It had to happen, of course. The Woodward luck. We were doing just fine until the kid in my lap spilled a bowl of steaming hot chili in the governor’s lap. He was wearing a beautiful suit, which I stammeringly offered to have cleaned.
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied, laughing. “This makes me feel right at home.”
That was John Evans, who came out of Mayberry to rise to the state’s highest office and serve with distinction. A good governor and, more important, a good man. Idaho was lucky to have had him.

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.

 

When our oldest granddaughter, Hailey, told my wife and me she was pregnant, my reaction was mixed. Mixed as in shock, concern, and horror.
Shock because the news itself was shocking. We tend to delude ourselves into thinking that grown children and grandchildren are just that – children. We remember the innocent young things they were a blink or two ago and have difficulty accepting that they’ve become part of the grownup world, with all of its consequences.
Concern because she was so young, only 20, and plans for her education would be put on hold. College is tough enough for anyone, let alone a single mom with the round-the-clock demands of a new baby.
Horror because of our impending and premature (to me, at least) status as great grandparents.
A great grandfather? Me? No way. Great grandfathers are old men, doddering relics with, as my mother used to say, one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. My great grandfathers died decades before I was born. I don’t even know their names.
Besides, I wasn’t ready to be a great grandfather. I’m still young. Okay, maybe not young, but nowhere near ancient enough to be a great grandfather. I don’t even drool yet.
For our daughter Jennifer, who would soon become a grandmother, the transition was even more jarring. She’s 37 and can pass for younger. It was a stretch for her to wrap her head around the prospect of becoming a grandmother.
Once the shock wore off, however, it was replaced by something quite different.
Hope.
Jennifer was even younger, still in high school, when she told us she was pregnant. It’s news no parent wants to hear. What we didn’t realize, or remotely suspect, was that it would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to her. Overnight she went from being a rebellious teenager to being a responsible adult. She finished high school and went on to have a 4.0 average in nursing school and become a charge nurse at a regional medical center.
Now, Hailey appears to be on the same path. She made her share of mistakes as a teenager. Today’s kids face perils my generation couldn’t have imagined. She’s still paying for some of those mistakes. But what a difference pregnancy made. And no, I’m not recommending it as a cure-all for young girls who who get in trouble (once a euphemism for becoming pregnant). But in her case, as in her mother’s, it appears to have turned a life around.
She stopped smoking, which, as anyone who has done it will tell you, is no small feat. She stopped seeing the former friends who were partially responsible for her troubled past. She began choosing more nutritious foods, read books on parenting, dedicated herself to becoming a good mom.
Then, the miracle. On Feb. 4, Grayson Timothy became the newest of the family.
I’ve had some honors, but my granddaughter’s choosing my name to be part of her son’s touched me more deeply than any of them. She wanted me to be in the delivery room when he was born and asked me to cut the umbilical cord. My hands were shaking. And not all of the tears in the room that afternoon were the new mother’s.
Grayson is five months old now, and a joy to all. To say that he’s a happy baby is like saying Rembrandt was a pretty good artist. The kid never stops smiling. He’s so easy going that at first I worried that he didn’t know how to cry. He’s since dispelled that fantasy. But about the only time he’s out of sorts is when he’s tired or hungry, and who isn’t? Give him a nap or a bottle and he’s back to reducing us all to baby-talking buffoons with his thousand-watt smile.
No one is more captivated than his mother. The kid who made the bad choices now makes all the right ones. She’s enrolled at BSU for the fall semester. She works hard at her job and is devoted to being the best mother she can possibly be.
Grayson’s diaper is wet? She has it changed faster than I change my glasses.
Grayson is hungry? No worries. Mom will handle it.
Grayson has a medical problem? She researches it and by the time he gets to his appointment knows almost as much about it as the doctor does.
When she’s with him, which is every second she can be, the two of them are in their own world. She’s constantly bouncing him, hugging him, telling him how crazy she is about him. When you say something to her, she may or may not hear you. All her attention is focused on him. The two of them communicate in a way only mothers and babies can.
I’ve decided that maybe it’s not so bad being a great grandfather. I’ve managed to resist the temptation to buy a cane and grow a long white beard, and I have a new buddy who never fails to cheer me up. Even at my grumpiest, I can’t resist that smile.
Horror? What was I thinking?

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.