Any downtown worthy of the name should have colorful characters.
The old Downtown Boise had its share: Leo “Scoop” Leeburn, who roamed the streets with a humongous Speed Graphic camera, chronicling decades of growth and change. Al Berro, legendary owner of the Bouquet bar and a professional boxer. Luke Davis, who ran the shoeshine stand in the Owyhee Hotel and was never without a good yarn …
I used to lament what struck me as an absence of notable characters in the new downtown Boise. But that was before I met Ken Virden, voluble denizen of the Alia Coffee House, 908 W. Main.
For most of his tenure there, Virden’s table could be identified by a sign that read, “Here’s Trouble. Bad to the Bone.” The sign was made of paper and didn’t hold up, so Sri Galindo, Alia’s co-owner, made a new, improved version: “Trouble is now accepting hugs and kisses from tomatas.”
Galindo made the sign, but the wording was Virden’s idea. (A “tomata,” for those too young to have heard the expression, is a mispronunciation of “tomato” and in, his generation’s slang, an attractive woman.)
“The sign works,” Galindo said. “We see women go by all the time and give him a hug or a kiss. Other male customers are always asking how they can get a sign.”
“Trouble,” incidentally, just celebrated his 91st birthday.
He got the nickname from a waitress.
“She told me I just looked like trouble,” he said. “The name stuck.”
Its accuracy is debatable. Galindo calls him “one of our absolute favorite customers. Everyone knows him, and he greets everyone when they come in. He’s a fixture here, and we love it.”
Virden has been an almost daily Alia customer for about two years. He’ll talk to anyone who sits at his table, telling stories and giving direct, sometimes surprising answers to questions.
“What made you start coming to this particular coffee shop?” I asked him.
“I make lousy coffee.”
Over good coffee, he answered questions about his life. He was born in Decatur, Ill., and grew up in an orphanage:
“My dad died of TB when I was 11 months old. That left my mom with three boys. I lived with my grandparents until I was three and then went to the orphanage.
“It wasn’t my mother’s fault. It was the Depression. She made $1.50 a day cooking and washing dishes in a restaurant. I saw her maybe a dozen times while I was living at the orphanage. She was a good woman. It was just hard times.”
What was it like living in an orphanage?
“The first couple that had it was nice. The next guy was mean. He threw my brother down the stairs and tried to drown me in the bathtub. I told him I was going to join the army and he’d better not be there when I got back or I’d kick his butt. He took my advice and was gone when I got back.”
A month after his 18th birthday, seven months after Pearl Harbor, Virden joined the Army Air Corps.
“I volunteered for the paratroopers and they made a tail gunner outa’ me.”
A tail gunner? That had to be one of the scariest jobs in the history of jobs. You sat in a cramped, plexiglass ball in the tail of a bomber, with thousands of feet of nothing under you and enemy pilots shooting at you.
“The plexiglass wouldn’t have stopped a fly if it was mad. When they started shooting at you, your life expectancy was eight seconds.”
“Were you scared?
“Yes, but you couldn’t think about that. If you did, you wouldn’t survive.”
He survived 26 missions.
“You could go home after 25 but I told them I’d do one more. They said ‘now we know you’re crazy.'”
That kind of selflessness was typical of the Greatest Generation. Their war united the country in a way that hasn’t happened since.
“And we haven’t won a war since,” he agreed. “And we’ve been in some we shouldn’t have. We’re not the mother of the world. I hate war.”
He doesn’t have much use for politicians, either:
“Politicians are like diapers. They’re full of it and they need to be changed all the time.”
Virden spent 40 years in the military, some of them at Mountain Home Air Force Base. A widower and father of four, he worked at two funeral chapels and retired at age 87 as a resident coordinator, “dorm mother” as he calls it, at Yellowstone Park. At 91 he’s razor-sharp – he’s teaching a dyslexic man how to read – and physically fit. He walks everywhere he needs to go.
His advice to young customers who venture to Trouble’s table:
“Get your head on straight. Don’t do drugs and don’t get tattooed because you’re going to regret it. Treat everybody right and don’t think you’re better than anybody else. Live every day like it’s your last. For me, it might be. And I don’t care.”

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

Talk about memories!
A recent Statesman story about Decoration Day brought a virtual tsunami of them.
The last time before that that the term “Decoration Day” appeared in a news story, I probably hadn’t started shaving yet.
Boise’s Columbian Club, the East End Neighborhood Association and Boise Parks and Recreation put it back in the headlines by observing the once popular May 30 holiday at Pioneer Cemetery. For those who missed the news story and aren’t familiar with it, Decoration Day was the predecessor to Memorial Day, the day reserved for taking flowers to cemeteries to “decorate” the graves of loved ones.
When I was small, my folks would no more have missed the annual observance than they’d have skipped Christmas. It was a big deal. We’d load the car with flowers from my mother’s garden, a picnic basket and a cooler filled with soft drinks and make the annual pilgrimage to Star, where my mother’s aunt and her family lived.
That would be my great Aunt Amy, her husband Adolph and their son Weldon. Their farmhouse, old even then, was between Star and Middleton on what has long since ceased to be farmland. Aunt Amy would enlist me to help her catch chickens in the barnyard for making what to this day is the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. After lunch, we’d drive to the Star Cemetery to decorate the graves of relatives I never knew and even now think of as historical figures rather than actual people.
The same could be said of most of the people buried in Pioneer Cemetery, the city’s oldest in continuous use. The only ones that I actually knew were three-term governor Bob Smylie and Merle Wells, the state’s late, great historian emeritus. When you asked Dr. Wells about a figure from Idaho’s distant past, the answer could take half an hour or more and leave you with the impression that Wells knew him or her personally. It was Idaho’s loss that, when he died in 2000, the technology didn’t exist to download his brain.
But the other folks buried there were, to me as to most Idahoans, little more than names in history books, relics from the past. They were, that is, until I took one of the Decoration Day tours with the Columbian Club’s Janice Stevenor Dale.
Most of the cemetery’s residents were, as its name attests, pioneers. Many of the dates on headstones there are from the Nineteenth Century. So it was a bit of surprise to encounter Karl William Seyb – July 27, 1994 to April 9, 2011. His grave was decorated with petunias, roses, two baseballs and a batter’s helmet.
“He was on the Boise High School baseball team,” Stevenor Dale said. “He was killed in a car accident.”
Seyb, 16, was a standout hockey player and student as well. A gifted young man gone too soon.
One of the cemetery’s sadder burials was that of Corilla Robbins, who owned the city’s first residential telephone, rode in the first airplane to land in Boise and the first automobile to come to Idaho and was a force in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. The grave of her second husband, Orlando Robbins, is adorned with one of the cemetery’s most opulent markers.
“He erected this monument to himself and left nothing for her,” Stevenor Dale said. “She was buried in a grave that wasn’t even marked. All we know is that it’s somewhere near his.”
A lot of important people are buried in Pioneer Cemetery, including 11 mayors and four governors, but few had more impressive resumes than former mayor James Pinney. He’s credited with, among other things, the city’s first sidewalks and sewer system, Morris Hill Cemetery, the Boise Independent School District, the Natatorium and a beautiful old theater, the Pinney, that was torn down in the 1970s to put up a parking lot that remains to this day.
“He also predicted that automobiles would become a big thing and invested heavily in our streets,” Stevenor Dale said.
Some of the gravesites convey the grief felt at a loved one’s passing more than a century after the fact. Elizabeth Goad’s, for example. When she died, in 1903, her survivors commissioned the following inscription for her headstone:
A light from our household is gone.
A voice we loved is stilled.
A place is vacant in our hearts
That never can be filled.
I could go on about the folks buried in the old cemetery, but their stories would fill far more than a column. They’d fill a book, with stories left over. The important thing is that, thanks to the Columbian Club and others, they – and Decoration Day – have gotten some long overdue attention.
“A lot of people today don’t even know what Decoration Day is,” Stevenor Dale said. “We thought that this event would call attention to it – and to all the pioneers we drive by every day and don’t even think about.”

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.

For Lance Stephensen, every day is Memorial Day. He works nearly full time as the volunteer director of Honor Flight of Idaho, the group that flies World War II veterans to the nation’s capital to visit their memorial.
The story of how that came to happen began in Vietnam, and on Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Stephensen’s father was a fighter pilot stationed at the base. Lance Stephensen will never forget the day – he was 10 then – when he and his sister were called out of class at the base school.
“When we got home, a staff car pulled up in front of the house. They told Mom that Dad was an MIA. We didn’t even know what that meant then.”
Their father, Col. Mark L. Stephensen, had been shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in North Vietnam. His remains weren’t found and identified until 1988. He was an MIA for 21 years.
Stephensen did what he could to learn his father’s fate. He wrote letters to congressmen. He watched every North Vietnamese propaganda film he could in hopes of catching a glimpse of his dad. He served as director of the Boise Valley POW/MIA Corp. and as state coordinator of the National League of POW/MIA Families.
He was speaking about his POW/MIA work at Nampa’s Warhawk Air Museum when he learned that a group of Idaho WWII veterans had been rejected for an Honor Flight from Spokane because they weren’t from Washington.
“The hub was in Spokane, and they wanted to give priority to veterans from Washington,” he said. “It broke my heart that these Idaho guys who had applied and were looking forward to it couldn’t go. So I asked what it would take to get a hub in Idaho.”
What it took, essentially, was Stephensen. He felt so bad for the Idaho vets that he contacted the Honor Flight Network headquarters in Springfield, Ohio, did the legwork and started a hub in Boise.
“I thought I had about 30 vets I needed to take care of,” he said. “In less than two weeks, I was 130 applications behind.”
Twenty-eight veterans and 20 guardians boarded the first Honor Flight from Boise in 2012. A second flight followed last year.
“Many of them had never been to D.C. before. One said he thought everybody had forgotten them. It was heartbreaking.”
The average age of the veterans on the Idaho Honor Flights: 92. Five were in the first wave of the D-Day invasion. Former Marine Don Brown of Boise was on Mount Suribachi when the iconic photo was taken of Marines raising the flag there, one of the most reproduced photos of all time.
“The flight was a wonderful experience,” Brown said. “I’d never been back east before. People clapped and shook our hands when we showed up. It was very gratifying.”
“A lot of these guys would never get to see our memorial otherwise,” WWII army veteran Roger Guernsey said. “And Honor Flight is such a fabulous program. It covers everything. I took $100 in spending money and spent $5 of it.”
“One of the guys told me the trip was the best thing he’d ever done,” Stephensen said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute – you got married and had kids and everything.’ And he said, ‘No, this is the most honorable thing I’ve ever done.'”
Everywhere they went, the veterans got the heroes’ welcome they so deeply deserve.
“Water cannons hose down the plane at every stop, an honor usually reserved for retiring pilots,” Stephensen said. “The joke was that we had the cleanest plane in Southwest’s fleet.
“The pilots and flight attendants shake their hands and thank them for what they did during the war. When the flight attendants announce that they’re honored to have members of the greatest generation aboard, everyone applauds. People in airports shake their hands and thank them for their service. It humbles them, and they’re already humble.
At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, four of the veterans were selected to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony during the changing of the guard.
“Sixty military people in uniform were there for the ceremony, “Stephensen said. “They all shook their hands and hugged them. I couldn’t stop crying.”
His only regret, he says, “is that we can’t do five flights a year. I’d like to start doing two a year, in May and September.”
The trip costs $1,000 for each veteran and guardian. Southwest donated $1.3 million in flights for Honor Flight groups nationally, but those run out this year. Stephensen initially paid many of the costs himself, but now the group relies on donations.
In time the program will transition to Korea and Vietnam veterans.
But for WWII vets, time is growing short. Half of the 14,000 who were living in Idaho in 2011 have died since then. At that rate, it won’t be long before the soldiers and sailors who saved the world from tyranny will be gone. The time to thank them for their service is now.
To donate or to apply for a flight, click on http://www.honorflightidaho.com.

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.

If you’re human, you’ve formed attachments to material objects.
Cars, for example. Cars are at or near the top of the list of things we cherish. People name cars, bestow human qualities on them. My late sister was loathe to part with every car she ever owned, driving the wheels off of them and mourning them when they died. But certain other objects of our affection sneak up on us. They captivate us without our knowing it.
The old clock in my living room, for example. It’s a wall clock with a pendulum and chimes. Not a valuable antique that has to be wound, but one of more recent vintage, powered by a battery. I bought it at, of all places, The Idaho Statesman’s break room.
It was made by a then Statesman employee named Red Wilder. Red worked in the back shop, the now dated term for the part of the building where type was set. In his spare time, he built clocks and sold them to people he knew, often fellow employees. I’ve forgotten how much mine cost, but $125 comes to mind. It was a bargain considering the amount of work he put into it. But for a young reporter in those days, it was still a fair amount of money – and an indication of my regard for Red’s craftsmanship.
I’d forgotten how long we’d had the clock until last month, when I re-read the inscription on a brass plaque beneath the dial – “Handcrafted by DeVaughn ‘Red’ Wilder, 1982.” I read the inscription while gloomily taking the clock down from its spot on the living room wall. After 32 years of keeping perfect time, its time appeared to have run out.
Its battery has to be replaced annually. I put a new one in this spring, but a week later the clock stopped running. Only the second hand continued to move. Thinking the new battery might have been defective, I replaced it – to no avail. The battery hadn’t died. The clock had.
Only then did I realize how much that old clock meant to us. It kept us on time for work, school, appointments, social engagements, graduations, weddings and the other large and small events that make up our lives. It never gained or lost a minute. When other clocks failed, it kept right on ticking.
For 32 years.
How many things are that reliable in an age of disposable everything? When our refrigerator stopped working a few years ago and had to be replaced, the salesman encouraged us to buy an extended warranty.
“The average lifespan of a new refrigerator,” he explained, “is about four years.”
“Excuse me? It sounded like you said four years.”
“Sad but true,” he replied. “They don’t make them like they used to.”
The ice maker on the new refrigerator, incidentally, gave out in a little over a year. The repairman said he couldn’t repair or replace just the ice maker. He had to replace the whole door.
We were glad we bought the extended warranty.
This spring, I had to replace the lawnmower that had run faithfully for some 20 summers. On the last mowing of last summer, it exploded. Literally, as in flying shrapnel. I spent hours online perusing lawnmower reviews. One after another complained of parts breaking right out of the box. I was leaning toward a brand that sounded reasonably dependable until the guy who aerated our yard said he bought one and the wheels broke the first time he used it.
Red’s clock, on the other hand, never missed a beat. Thirty-two years not only of running perfectly, but of adding traditional beauty to two living rooms. It was a fixture in our lives when our son was born in 1982, and when our great grandson was born this year.
Only when it stopped working did I realize how much I loved that old clock, and how much I’d miss it.
The thing to do, obviously, was to call Red and ask if he could fix it. But I hadn’t seen him in years and didn’t know if he was still around, or, for that matter, still living. A Google search yielded a picture of him in uniform on the deck of a submarine at Pearl Harbor, but no phone number.
A former co-worker, however, had his number and was happy to give it to me. It was good to connect with Red again after so long. He no longer works on clocks, but he recommended a shop that did.
That was a surprise. I thought clock repairmen had gone the way of buggy makers and, sure enough, the shop had closed. But Google (how did we survive without it?) supplied the names of others that hadn’t. I took it to a shop on Vista Avenue, which was like stepping back in time. Clocks everywhere. On the hour, the place erupts with everything from chimes to chirping cuckoos.
“We can replace the movement,” the man behind the counter said. “One like the one that’s in it is $150. If you don’t need it to chime, I can get one for $40. It should be ready in three weeks.”
The old clock’s absence left a disproportionately large hole in our living room. It took the possibility of losing it to make me realize that it belongs in the same category as some of my favorite cars, guitars and other possessions I’ve loved, lost and would give anything to have back. Whatever it costs and however long it takes to fix it, it’s worth it.

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

If you’ve ever had a rival who competed so fiercely with that she won your admiration, and ultimately your friendship, you know how I felt about Pauli Crooke.
There was a time when I detested her and had no doubt that she detested me. But when she died last month, at 85, the news brought a sense of loss. State Sen. Cherie Buckner-Webb, a friend of hers, called to let me know about it.
“We were talking about a lot of things a week or so before she died, and she mentioned you,” Buckner-Webb said. “She referred to you as ‘that kid who gave her a run for her money.'”
Coming from Pauli, there could have been no higher compliment. We were reporters on the city beat at a pivotal time in Boise’s history. I was a rookie at The Statesman; she was a veteran at Channel 2 when Channel 2 was without a close second as the dominant local news station.
It was an exciting time to be a local-government reporter in Boise. The city was busy tearing itself down in the name of urban renewal. One downtown building after another was being demolished to make way for a shopping mall. The city had joined the county and its other cities in hiring a staff of professional planners in an effort to avoid mistakes other places had made as they’d grown. And the population was about to explode.
We traded jabs like pugilists. One day I’d beat Pauli on a story about the leveling of yet another department store – there used to be five downtown – and the next day she’d beat me on a decision to raze a historic hotel. I’d beat her on a plan for a new bus system and she’d beat me on a plan for improving traffic flow. We were friendly to each other’s faces, but fought like pit bulls to develop sources and get the news in print or on the air first.
Being first trumped almost everything – so much so that her boss, who later became mayor, once remarked during a city council meeting that Channel 2 wasn’t interested in a story – no matter how important – if it had already been in The Statesman.
Important as they were, I had almost zero enthusiasm for covering the city’s annual budget meetings. They were long, complicated, excruciatingly tedious. Never good with numbers and possessing limited patience for boring meetings, I skipped most of them to work on more interesting stories. But I did make it to the final meeting at which that year’s budget was adopted – and for which Pauli was inexplicably absent. She’d dutifully attended every other budget meeting, but missed the one that counted. I wrote my story and gloated when it wasn’t on Channel 2 the night before.
“It was the only time,” she later admitted, “that I cried about being beaten on a story.”
Tears didn’t stop her, however, from promptly beating me on a story I’d been working on for weeks. The day before it was published, my primary source called her out of the blue and dropped it in her lap. Unlike my rival, I did not cry. But I did get a stern talking-to from the boss for throwing my AP Style Book across the newsroom.
We saw each other less after she was promoted to the news director’s job at Channel 2 – CBS’s first female news director in the U.S. – and I moved from the local government beat to editorial writing and then column writing. (When CBS flew her to New York to give a speech, she learned at the last minute that she’d be following Walter Cronkite.) And we lost contact entirely when she moved to New York in 1978. To my surprise, I missed her.
An activist at heart, she helped found the Boise chapter of the NAACP, led the effort to establish the Idaho Human Rights Commission and won a truckload of professional and public-service awards.
Late in life, she moved back to Boise and the onetime nemeses had a rivalry-free and thoroughly enjoyable reunion. Only then did I realize what an honor it was to have gone head to head with this accomplished, fiercely competitive woman. She embodied what it meant to be a good reporter and public-spirited citizen. If there were more Pauli Crookes, democracy would be better for it.

***
March brought another passing, this one of a very different sort. Lew Johnson, a player in Boise’s early rock scene, died at 68 in Phoenix.
He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. Though we were never close friends – we played in rival groups – he never failed to make me laugh. He drove an old behemoth of a Nash that was absolutely silent. When you least expected it, he’d glide up behind your car, bump it and have everyone in both cars in hysterics.
Lew played in the mid ’60s in a very good band called the Quirks. His death is the latest of many local musical passings: Dick Cates, John Arant, Tim Bosworth, Eddie Heuman, Drake Levin, Vance Shirley, John Hynes, Leo Lawrence, Dennis Mulliken, Charlie Bieker, Cliff Green, Steve Johnson … trailblazers who started rock and roll in Boise and kept it going.
All gone. Maybe someone should start an Idaho Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – before the history is gone, too.

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

Editor’s note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the second of two columns from the trip.

Tourists have two options for getting around in Mexico – taxis and buses. Either can fall in the category of extreme adventure.

A third option, of course, is renting a car. One taxi ride convinced us that this might not be the smartest thing we could do. Imagine a NASCAR race on narrow, cobblestone streets and you’ll have a fair idea. We cringed in the back seat while our driver broke as many speed limits as possible, swerved sickeningly over crowded  sidewalks and played  chicken with other drivers. With people like him on the road, driving a rental would be like doing the running of the bulls backwards.

That leaves buses. Mexican city buses are cheap, frequent and get you where you need to go. That said, it should be noted that the only resemblance to American city buses is that both are large vehicles that carry people.

Mexican buses do not have functioning shock absorbers. They’re either built without them as an economy measure, or have long since worn them out on prodigiously potholed streets. Upholstery is considered a frill; the seats are hard plastic. The back of the bus becomes airborne when careening over the largest potholes, making for excruciating landings on the rock-hard seats. My back hasn’t been the same since.

The buses do have one feature, however, that American buses do not – entertainment. Musicians climb aboard and serenade the passengers by playing for tips. Some are pretty good, but one wasn’t even a bad musician. His “instrument” was a boom box, played at eardrum-shattering volume. Passengers grimaced and held their ears.

No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t get a lot of tips.

Many Mexican buses are equipped with shrines – crucifixes, holy cards, dangling rosaries … My guess is that the drivers see them as insurance for the hereafter, and considering the way they drive, they need it.

One driver had a dashboard button with a drawing of the Virgin Mary. He pushed on two occasions (possibly activating a prayer for a miracle). The first was when he accelerated just as an old man with a cane stepped into the street in front of us. The old man jumped back, narrowly avoiding becoming road kill. The second was when an 18-wheeler pulled onto the road in the oncoming lane. Our driver pushed the button and headed straight for him – playing chicken!

They missed each other by millimeters. It was enough to make us wish we’d taken a taxi.

***

Mexico is a wonderful place to take a vacation. It’s beautiful, friendly, inexpensive. But it has one seriously annoying drawback.

Vendors. They’re everywhere, and relentless. Yes, they have to make a living. But there has to be a better way of doing it than driving potential   customers to the point of justifiable homicide.

This is typical: We were tired and thirsty after a long, hot walk and had settled gratefully into chairs at a restaurant on the beach when the assault began. One vendor after another stormed the table, each with a “unique” product – sarongs, wood carvings, hats, T-shirts, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, dolls, puppets, blankets, fish mobiles, sunglasses, paintings, puppets, plastic skulls, parasailing Spidermen … It’s endless.

And every one of them came to our table. If one more vendor had pushed a carved wooden sword under my nose, I might have used it on him.

When the vendors finish picking your bones, the musicians take over – guitarists, mandolin players, bongo bands … My favorite was a vocal group singing – in Spanish – “Oh, when them cotton balls get rotten …”

When an accordion player headed our way, we paid the bill and fled. We’d had all the entertainment we could stand.

***

If your name and face are in a newspaper regularly, you get used to people you don’t know walking up and introducing themselves. It happens all the time.

In your home state.

But in another country?

I was dozing in a lounge chair by a sparkling pool, dreaming of   Margaritas, when a voice suddenly said, “Excuse me. Are you Tim Woodward?”

Dear God, did I forget to pay the tab yesterday?

I hadn’t. The stranger introduced himself as Tim Haskell. He and his wife, Bonnie, were staying at the same place we were.

The Haskells live in Boise and knew me from my column. Bonnie Haskell worked with my sister. She and Tim live a few blocks from my house.

What were the odds of that? We’re practically neighbors, meeting for the first time – 2,100 miles from home.

***

If there’s a black hole in the galaxy, it’s Gate 12 at the Puerto Vallarta airport.

To get to Gate 12, you pass through food courts, a security check, multiple duty-free areas, acres of shops and a corner of Guatemala. When we arrived at Gate 12 – out of breath and sweating like pigs – absolutely nothing was posted about Phoenix, our destination.

A forlorn looking sign provided one word of information:  Kansas.

Not Kansas City, not Wichita, not Topeka, just someplace in Kansas.

“Are you going to Denver?” a man in an official looking uniform asked me.

“No, Phoenix. Why does the sign say Kansas instead of Phoenix?”

“They probably changed your gate. Check the monitor.”

Good idea, only the monitor was broken. It conveniently provided information only for flights that had left hours earlier. The airport announcer, meanwhile, cheerily reported that Flight 571 – our flight – was ready for boarding at Gate 12. (Obviously it wasn’t, Gate 12 having been commandeered by Kansas.)

“Are you going to Phoenix?” I asked a weary looking American there.

“I hope so,” he said. “I sure don’t want to go to Kansas. Have you ever been to Leavenworth?”

The man in the uniform, meanwhile, continued to thread his way through the crowd shouting “Denver! Denver anyone?”  It was like a scene from the Tower of Babel.

When I returned from a restroom/sanity break,  my wife and other panicked-looking passengers were running, lemming-like, in the opposite direction.

“Hurry!” she said. “They moved us to Gate 15! It’s downstairs.”

“Is this Phoenix?” we asked at Gate 15.

“No, Houston.”

“Houston?! What happened to Phoenix?

“It’s at Gate 20.”

It actually was, too. As we climbed aboard, the clueless announcer continued to chirp that Flight 571 to Phoenix was boarding at Gate 12.

We were mercifully taxiing for takeoff when the plane stopped.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have some passengers who didn’t make it on board. We’re going to go pick them up.”

They were waiting for us at … Gate 12.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in the Idaho Statesman every other Sunday and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Subscribe to http://www.woodwardblog.com for free if you don’t have access to Tim’s column in The Statesman. A column will be e-mailed to you every other Monday, at no charge. Contact Tim at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

(Editor’s Note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the first of two columns from the trip.)

SAYULITA, Mexico – “You’re going to Mexico? Do you really think that’s safe?”

You get that a lot when you’re planning a trip to Mexico. People wonder about everything from the drinking water to cartel violence. “El Chapo,” the country’s most notorious cartel leader, was arrested the week before we left so the news was awash with reports of cartel violence.

“Maybe you could cancel and still get your money back,” a well-meaning friend said. “The drug dealers do horrible things to tourists down there.”

In Sayulita, the reality couldn’t have been more different. We’d been there before and were impressed by just how safe it was. It’s a small town on the Pacific coast – peaceful, old-fashioned, almost quaint. Except for more tourists this trip – it’s been discovered now – little seemed to have changed.

A Canadian who spends a month there every winter laughed when I asked him if there was cartel violence in Sayulita.

“The cartels are the reason it’s so peaceful here,” he said. “They have two rules. Don’t hurt the local businesses, and don’t hurt the tourists.”

I had serious doubts about that. If you believe even half of what’s been reported about them, the cartels are guilty of outright butchery. The thought of El Chapo or anyone like him being a peacekeeper struck me as ridiculous.

So I asked Rollie about it.

That would be Rollie Dick, a Sayulita institution. When he retired as a school principal in northern California, Dick moved to Mexico to chase his dream of running a restaurant. He knew nothing about the restaurant business, but his hard work and charm have made Rollie’s one of the town’s most popular hangouts. The food is great, the prices reasonable and laughter is always on the menu.

When a customer while we were having breakfast there made the mistake of asking whether the restaurant’s water was purified, its fun-loving owner shouted – loud enough to be heard half a block away – “a glass of the bad water on table six, please!”

When I asked him about the Canadian’s absurd notion of the cartels as peacekeepers, Rollie’s response surprised me:

“I think there might be some truth to that. A lot of people here think they sense the presence of the cartel. I’ve never seen evidence of it, but I think it’s possible. Bad things rarely happen here.”

Whatever the reasons, Sayulita is an oasis of tranquility. When you arrive at the nearest airport, in Puerto Vallarta, you’re mobbed by vendors offering everything from crafts to taxi rides. When you arrive in Sayulita, an hour’s bus ride away, you’re mobbed by no one. No vendors, no timeshare peddlers, no pressure. As you schlep your luggage through town, stopping for a cold Pacifico or Corona en route, people smile at you. Real smiles. They seem genuinely happy to have you there.

Electric streetlights are a relatively recent phenomenon. Visitors are told to bring a flashlights to negotiate the streets after dark, good advice as most of the streets are dirt or cobblestone and the sidewalks have bone-jarring drop-offs where you least expect them. I’m told that a few years after the lights went in on Main Street, they were temporarily voted out. Too much modernity.

Life is simple there. We slept with the doors open to the deck and the night air. No need to pack an alarm clock. Roosters wake you up at sunrise.

Our morning entertainment was drinking coffee on the deck and watching vendors hawking their wares – from bottled water, fruit and shrimp to propane gas – on the road below. One of the neighbors still rides a horse to work.

We were waiting for a bus one day when a little boy – he couldn’t have been more than four – grabbed one of our suitcases and rolled it to a different spot. It was his way of telling us that the bus didn’t stop where we’d been waiting. He didn’t hold out his hand or ask for a tip. He just wanted to help.

Another day, when my wife left her camera sitting on our table after lunch, our waiter chased us down and returned it to her. The same thing happened another time when we forgot some change.

Mexico isn’t safe? No argument – depending on where you are. Border towns are best avoided, and it’s smart to check the State Department warnings when planning your trip.

But in a place like Sayulita, you’re safer than you’d be in a lot of U.S. cities. My favorite story about it is that of some Boiseans who went there for Christmas. When it was time for the local kids to break open a Christmas piñata, they deferred to the Boiseans – saying their kids should go first because they were guests.

The cartels didn’t have anything to do with that. They were just good kids. Good kids growing up in a place that, for whatever the reasons, is as safe and idyllic as where I was lucky enough to grow up – a then little town called Boise.

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.

Every so often you witness something that makes you realize how much the world has changed. A recent incident in a Boise restaurant was such an occasion.

I was having lunch there when three teenage girls and one of their mothers slid into the adjacent booth. The girls began to commune with their smartphones while waiting for their order to be delivered.

“Look at this!” one would say, holding the phone so her friends could see it.

They watched in silence, occasionally punctuated by a grunt or a giggle.

“Check this out!”

Another phone extended, another silence. Eventually all three girls more or less dematerialized into their phones. The mother ate her lunch in silence, feeling, as my mother used to say, like two cents waiting for change.

I related to the mother. When we were those kids’ age, we actually talked when we went out with our friends.

This is not to say that kids today don’t talk to each other. They do, as anyone who has been to the mall or a high school event lately will attest. But they seem to spend as much or more time communicating with or through their devices than with each other. We’re a device-oriented society. By that I mean that devices have become a dominant force, if not the dominant force, in daily life. And increasingly, those of us who aren’t device-oriented are the social equivalent of, well, two cents waiting for change.

How omnipresent are our devices? Last month, I attended a junior high school band concert at which almost none of the parents were actually watching the performance. They were watching their smartphones film the performance.

A young woman I know was texting on her smartphone during labor recently, thumbing messages between contractions.

A frequent visitor to our home is on her smartphone from the time she arrives at our house for a visit until the time she leaves. She’s on the phone when she walks in the door, on the phone when we’re trying to have a conversation or watch a movie, on the phone when she walks out the door. Occasionally she’s talking to someone on the phone, but more often she’s texting, tweeting, Googling or Facebooking. She considers this normal behavior. My wife and I consider it rude.

But then, we’re dinosaurs. What Baby Boomers consider rude or obsessive phone behavior is perfectly acceptable among members of the X Generation and all but obligatory among Millennials.

The demise of the actual dinosaurs – we haven’t quite matched that  distinction yet – may be the ultimate cautionary tale. Adapt or die. And God knows we’re trying to adapt. But, as anyone who didn’t grow up with digital toys and smartthumbs will tell you, it’s not easy.

My wife has had her smartphone, a different brand than mine, for well over a year and I still have trouble answering it. In the age of Pre-Digital Innocence, answering a phone was easy. You picked it up, said hello, and that was that. With my wife’s phone, you have to press an icon, slide another icon, enter a code, show it your birth certificate and submit to a retinal scan. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but not by much.

Facebook is a continuing mystery to me. Nothing on my page has been posted by its originator – me – in months. My daughters and granddaughters post things on it, my friends post things on it, for all I know Lady Gaga is posting things on it.

I was taking some pictures on my smartphone last week when suddenly, with no prompting whatsoever, the images changed from color to black and white. Happily, a seasoned, tech-savvy authority was standing two feet away. My 16-year-old granddaughter.

Voice recognition and auto correct make me crazy. A few paragraphs earlier in this column, the word “behavior” was auto-corrected to “beaver.”

When I’m correcting mistakes in texts or e-mails on my smartphone, its cursor goes everywhere but where I want it to, then opens a window that doesn’t but might as well say “nice try, stupid.”

The solutions to these problems no doubt are simple enough that I could  end the frustration with some study and practice, but the truth is that I just don’t care enough. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between everyone else and dinosaurs like yours truly. And besides, I found an eminently satisfying solution of my own recently. I threw the phone across the street.

The curmudgeon in me is tempted to grump that the devices that permeate our lives will spell the demise of human interaction. But that’s too easy and  pessimistic, to say nothing of wrong. Curmudgeons undoubtedly said the same thing when telegraphs were invented. Technology isn’t stifling conversation; it’s  changing it. Instead of having to write letters, make long-distance calls or run to the library for information, all the girls I encountered  at that restaurant have to do is click. The world is at their thumb tips.

But I still say there’s nothing like a good, non-digital conversation.

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.

“Henry, this check is made out to the county. Shouldn’t it be made out to me?”

“Henry, can I get two bus passes?”

“Henry, the coffee machine is leaking.”

Henry Krewer sits in the worn chair in the cramped office where he spends his days, dealing with seemingly endless questions and complaints. He has done this for a decade now. He is 80 years old. He looks tired.

“I am tired,” he said. “It’s time for me to be cutting back.”

This month, Krewer will step down as mission coordinator of the Corpus Christi Homeless Shelter, 525 Americana Boulevard. Considering all he does there, the title is modest. Krewer co-founded the day shelter in 2003 and has overseen almost every facet of its operation since then, from finances and administration to personally easing the burdens of homelessness. Need a ride, a meal, emergency money? Someone to fix a problem, be an advocate, break up a fight? See Henry.

He estimates that 100 people a day have used the shelter’s services since it opened in December, 2003. Krewer and his wife, Kathy, have been there almost every day of that time. She keeps the books, makes runs to the Idaho Food Bank and helps out in myriad other ways. If not for the Krewers, countless people would have gone hungry and not had a safe place to get in out of the cold. They don’t just talk about helping their fellow man. They do it  – six days a week, without pay.

I met them in 2002. A homeless man had drowned in the Boise River, and Henry Krewer wanted to talk to me for a story about what was and wasn’t being done for the city’s homeless population. He and Kathy were serving meals  at Community House then, and working to build what would become Corpus Christi House. His next stop after our interview was for a sleeping bag to give to a homeless man sleeping outside while dying of cancer.

It made an impression. When I retired from The Statesman three years ago, I joined the many volunteers who help keep Corpus Christi running. My contribution is small – a couple of mornings a month – but it’s been enough to learn how much the shelter means to those who need it.

I’ve seen people shivering after a winter night on the streets, grateful beyond words for a warm bagel and hot coffee. I’ve seen the gratitude on the faces of those desperate for a ride to a job interview or a doctor’s appointment as they joined one of the Krewers in their 8-year-old Toyota Prius. Time and again, I’ve seen Henry Krewer respond to an urgent request by reaching for his wallet and handing over his own money.

His response to those who say the homeless are loafers who live off of handouts:  “You can say that about any group of people, and you’d be right some of the time.”

He himself grew up poor in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. He became a Franciscan brother and says that “everything I am I owe to them. But I was limited to teaching, and I wanted to work with poor people.”

He moved to Canada and worked at a school where he met his future bride, then found a job “helping poor native people stand on their own two feet and get an education. I was very content there. But then Canada tightened up on immigration so we came back to the states.”

In 1976, the Krewers moved to Boise, where Henry became a chemistry and physics teacher at Bishop Kelly High School. (He has degrees in biology and endocrinology.) He was known as a tough teacher, which he defines as “having high expectations.” He worked as a soup-kitchen volunteer in his free time and in 1996 retired from teaching to devote the rest of his life to helping the poor.

“It makes me be real,” he said, his Brooklyn accent still palpable. “Saying you’re a Christian and living it are two different things.”

“… I’ve formed many friendships among the homeless. There are things we can do here for them and things we can’t. … We give them a home base, a place where it’s easy to be good.”

There are, he says, two kinds of homelessness. One is temporary – people who lose jobs and homes and need help before getting back on their feet. “Those people come and go here, and that’s a good thing. I just got a call from one who used to be here and is in Kansas now. He just got his contractor’s license and wanted to hire somebody from Corpus.”

Others are chronically homeless. Corpus Christi works with various agencies to help give them housing and continued support. Citing Utah,  which now saves several thousand dollars a year per homeless person by providing them with housing rather than operating shelters, he hopes for a time when Boise no longer needs shelters.

Until then, he’ll continue to volunteer at Corpus Christi “six days a week, but for a shorter time each day.” Marc Schlegel, a Mennonite pastor, will take over his post as mission coordinator. (The shelter is non denominational.)

“He gets it,” Krewer said. “He knows, as I do, that there’s a great satisfaction in doing this. It’s the difference between just going to church and living your faith.”

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.

Every other week, a group of people who seldom see each other anywhere else meet in one another’s homes to discuss what they’ve been reading. Some of them have being doing this for 40 years.

The newest member of the group, Jack Harty, joined in 1997.

“We still call him the new guy,” 31-year-member Vince Hannity said.

Collectively, the group’s 17 members are one of two Boise chapters of the Great Books Club. Begun in 1974, it is the city’s longest-running book club with mostly original members. The term “book club” is somewhat misleading, however, because they only read one novel a year, during the summer months. The rest of the year they read texts, often obscure essays or poems. The most recent  was Jane Addams’s “Devil Baby at Hull House,” written in 1916. Hardly an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

The stereotypical image of book clubs is of friends gathering over tea and cookies to discuss popular novels. Classics occasionally are on the menu, but the fare more typically runs to best sellers. The Great Books Club is different. A few of the books its members have read through the years:  “King Lear,” “Moby Dick,” “Ivanhoe,” “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” “War and Peace” …

Texts have covered the spectrum from the Declaration of Independence to Bhagavad-Gita. Authors span the centuries from Plato to Hemingway.

When the group discussed “The Sun Also Rises” in 2007, they met at Hemingway’s onetime home in Ketchum.

The latest get-together was in Boisean Bob Bushnell’s home. Fifteen club members – seven men and eight women – turned out on a snowy night to sip wine and discuss devil babies around a candlelit table of hors d’oeuvres that went largely untouched during a lively, two-hour exchange of ideas.

Their only universal interest is reading. When one member mentioned that he was an attorney, another (between them they have over 40 years in the group) exclaimed, “Jack is a lawyer? I learn something every time I go to Great Books.”

The Great Books Foundation began in Chicago in 1947 to encourage reading and discussion of important books. Participants use a method called “shared inquiry,” in which a discussion leader poses questions meant to encourage diverse points of view, explore possible meanings and make collective discoveries.

“We’re limited to talking about what we’ve read and how we feel about it,” Hannity said. “There’s no research, no outside experts, no right or wrong answers.”

A recipe for a spirited exchange of ideas. Some excerpts from the discussion at Bushnell’s home:

“The devil baby is a metaphor for questions in our lives about why evil things happen to innocent people.”

“We can take comfort in the devil baby as a punishment, in knowing that there’s retribution.”

“I don’t think it’s a punishment.”

“You don’t think having a devil baby born in your house is a punishment?”

“I think the devil baby is a form of salvation.”

“I think the author is setting it up as the antithesis of the Christ Child.”

The discussion was animated, but not heated – affirming Hannity’s statement that there are no right or wrong answers. It reminded me of an upper-division college literature class.

Despite the intellectual tone (Nietzsche’s work was repeatedly cited), club member Diane Plastino Graves stressed that “we aren’t elitist or different from other people. We all have normal, everyday lives like everybody else.”

Several admit to having an everyday weakness for popular mystery novels.

The reason the group asked me to sit in on their normally private meetings was a hope that publicity would inspire younger readers to start their own clubs. For information on starting a Great Books Club, contact Bushnell at 336-0758 or click on greatbooks.org.

For a less rigorous regimen, there are other options. The Boise Public Library has hundreds of books specifically designated for book clubs. Its Hillcrest and Collister branches have active clubs of their own, as do The Cabin and the Rediscovered Books and Barnes and Noble stores. Clubs occasionally advertise on Facebook, Craigslist and the library’s community events bulletin board.

The rewards of belonging to a book club?

“I can’t recall a meeting where I haven’t learned something,” Great Books member Jack McMahon said. “Even a short story like ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County,’ which is something like five pages. We talked about it for two hours and came up with insights I never dreamed of.”

“It’s enriched my life because I read things that I wouldn’t read otherwise,” Kay Hardy added. “It’s also an exercise in the democratic process, people coming together and expressing different opinions.”

For Bushnell, the payoff is personal. He says the club has taught him more about himself – about “how I think and feel and act.” It has “enriched my life by revealing origins and aspects of who I am and who we are.”

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

Those who grump about downtown Boise – traffic, difficulty parking, shops that have closed – either weren’t here or have forgotten what it was like a  generation ago. A video circulating on the Internet of downtown in 1988 shows how far we’ve come.

It also shows the rare opportunity Boise had to build a new downtown at a time when the old one had pretty much been reduced to memories.

The video was shot at a turning point in the city’s history. A newly elected city administration had abandoned the decades-long urban renewal effort to build a downtown regional shopping mall. The voters had had their fill of watching historic buildings demolished to build what at one point resembled nothing so much as a giant quonset hut.

Check out the video (Google Boise downtown summer 1988) and you’ll see early indications of what was then downtown’s new direction. The First Interstate building, now the Wells Fargo building, was almost finished. The “Keepsies” sculpture was newly installed on what would become the Grove. Apart from that, downtown was a mess.

The footage evokes images of cities wracked by wars or terrorist bombings. (A Chicago newspaper story called Boise “the city that tried to tear itself down.) I’d forgotten how bad it was – rubble, ruins, barricades, detour signs, orange traffic barrels – streets that looked like bomb craters.

Those of us who were here then didn’t fully appreciate it because we were so used to them, but even some of the buildings spared by urban renewal were monumentally ugly. The former Bank of Idaho building at Capitol Boulevard and Idaho, for example. It’s mercifully had a facelift or two since then, but in 1988 it was a red-brick monstrosity that Harper’s magazine likened to “a stack of giant toaster ovens.” We were the butt of a lot of jokes in those days.

The Grove seen in the video is a parking lot/construction zone, with the Grove Hotel yet to be be started and the Boise Centre on the Grove a hole in the ground. Downtown’s bus transfer point was a wooden boardwalk with a glass enclosure that looked like a strong wind would blow it away and … a Porta Potty.

Urban renewal had leveled much of the old downtown –  which in its own way was quite a lively place. With Sear’s, just west of downtown proper, it had six department stores – one more than Towne Square Mall. It had four movie theaters, hotels, a grocery store, drug stores, specialty shops and wonderful restaurants. Some – Vic’s Cafe, the Royal, Murray’s, Louie’s Golden Dragon, the Empire Room – are wistfully remembered to this day.

Then, the wrecking ball. One building after another fell during the 1970s and ’80s. The loss of the Pinney Theater still rankles. It was beautiful in a way only grand, old theaters can be. Think Egyptian Theatre without the Egyptians. (Speaking of which, the Egyptian came within a hieroglyphic of being torn down.) The site of the Pinney, razed with such urgency, remains a parking lot some 40 years later.

Our new downtown has some great attractions of its own. But newcomers who shop, dine and play there have little or no idea of the frustration and heartache it took for it to happen.

As The Statesman’s local government reporter for several years, I attended weekly meetings of the redevelopment agency, a.k.a. exercises in desperation. Each week the agency’s brain trust met to approve expenses, plan the demolition and – above all – woo department stores. The mall dream was wholly dependent on luring department stores to the quonset hut. No department stores, no mall.

Two memories stand out from that time. One is that of the agency’s executive director’s suicide. He was the most nervous man I’ve ever known. I often wondered whether he was naturally that way or the pressures of chasing an impossible dream made him that way. Either way, he was found on his patio with a shotgun and a hole in his chest.

The other memory is of a former mayor who, upon learning that yet another department store had spurned the city’s dream, accused it of “leading us down the primrose lane.” The hard truth was that the stores didn’t want to come downtown, and who could blame them? Suburban malls were the wave of the future, and downtown Boise looked like a war zone.

But you have to wonder about the opportunities that might have been missed in 1988. What would have happened if even one of the stores had taken a chance? Perhaps others, if they’d had a vision of what Boise is now, would have followed. Imagine what downtown would be like with the addition of some really nice department stores. An already vibrant downtown would be even better.

That, of course, is another impossible dream. We can’t go back and wouldn’t want to. As the trip back in time shows, we’ve come an awfully long way.

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.

Picture your childhood hero. It could have been an athlete, a singer or mu sician, a movie star – someone you admired from afar and never had the slightest hope of meeting.

Now imagine that a lifetime later you got to have lunch with that person. Then you’ll know how I felt having lunch with Bobby King.

Most of us have multiple heroes when we’re growing up. Kids’ tastes are nothing if not eclectic. King was a hometown hero, a shortstop for the Boise Braves in an era when boys were bewitched by baseball. I went to Braves games, even sold concessions in the stands, but the thought of actually meeting the great Bobby King would have terrified me. He was an idol, and therefore unapproachable.

I mentioned King in a recent column about that baseball-crazy era, and to my surprise the responses included an e-mail from him suggesting that we have lunch.

Unapproachable? He turned out to be one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

King played for the Boise Pilots, Yankees and Braves for much of the 1950s, when baseball was without a close second as the national pastime. A lot of players came and went during his years on the teams, including several who advanced to the big leagues. The best known was Bob Uecker, who went on to play for the Milwaukee Braves and become a Major League announcer, humorist and actor.

Uecker signed my catcher’s mitt – one of the treasures my mother threw away when I left for the Navy – but it was King who was my favorite player. Mine and that of about every other kid in town. He never made it to the big leagues, but there was just something about him. Over soup and sandwiches – he goes by Bob instead of Bobby now – I asked him what he thought it was.

“Well, I kept coming back,” he said, laughing. “Most other players would be there a year or two and move on, but I was there for most of a decade. That and I hustled like mad. I was a little guy – 5 feet 8, and I weighed 150 pounds. I think people liked that, the fact that I had that limitation but was back every year working against the odds.”

He did more than beat the odds. In one of his years with the Boise Yankees, he missed having the Pioneer League’s highest batting average by three-thousandths of a point. He was a good fielder and clutch hitter. Whether we were in the stands or listening to an away game on the radio, we knew we could count on Bobby King when the chips were down.

Our hero joined the Marine Corps just in time for the Korean War to end. With no battles to fight, he was assigned to a Marine Corp baseball team and played against, among others, the great Willy Mays.

In an exhibition game between the Boise Braves and the Pittsburgh Pirates, he played against the equally great Roberto Clemente.

“There was a play where Clemente fielded the ball on the first baseline and made a throw to third like a bazooka. I’ve never seen anyone else make a throw like that. And he was such a wonderful philanthropist and human being.”

Players like Clemente inspired King. But it was Uecker who made him laugh.

“We were staying at the Bannock Hotel in Pocatello on a road trip when the Bannock was the best hotel in town,” he said. “Someone had thrown a bunch of dirty, stinky clothes in the bathtub. No one wanted to wash them so Uke set them on fire. There were fire trucks everywhere.

“… He had false teeth. When we’d go to his house in Boise, he’d offer to get up and get someone a beer. The refrigerator was in a little space under the stairway, and he’d hit the wall there to make it sound like he’d banged his head. When we’d go to check, he’d be lying on the floor with his teeth out. We fell for it every time, and it was always funny.”

King and Uecker became lifelong friends.

“He told me he was treated better in Boise than he was anywhere else in baseball. We loved this place. … And there’s nothing like minor league ball. There was such a camaraderie in it. Why did I stay so long? It’s a disease. It’s just such a great game. You become immersed in it.”

He’s still immersed in it. King saved enough money with his $175-a-month  baseball salary to get a teaching degree from Idaho State University. He taught at South Junior High while playing summers and, to my surprise, spent two years as principal of Boise High School a few years after I graduated there. He has Ph.D in leadership and human behavior from San Diego State University and for 25 years has been a scout for the Houston Astros. He lives half of the year in San Diego and half in Garden Valley.

So all this time that I’ve been wondering what happened to my childhood hero, he’s been just a short drive away – and is every bit the role model I hoped he’d be. Knowing that was worth waiting a lifetime.

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

When you only write a column every other week, it’s hard to jump on breaking news in a timely fashion. But I knew the late Bethine Church for most of my life and couldn’t let her go without writing something.

My introduction to Church, who died Dec. 21, came long before she and her late husband were household words in Idaho politics. A very young Frank Church was running for the Idaho Legislature – a job that, given his liberal views, would have had him on all fours gnawing at the earth before his first session ended. Idaho voters spared him that, giving him time to prepare for bigger things.

I remember that campaign more than most, for an excellent reason. Her name was Bea Hally, and her youngest son was my best friend. Tim Hally and I were five years old and less interested in Frank Church than in Sheriff Spud. But his mother somehow made it seem important, even glamorous,  for us to help her deliver campaign pamphlets around the neighborhood.

The guy whose picture was on the pamphlets seemed fairly glamorous himself. Idaho politicians in those days tended to have names like Clarence or Orville and bear an unsettling resemblance to Elmer Fudd. This guy was young, handsome and had a wife who could charm a scorpion.

One day Mrs. Church stopped by to talk campaign logistics with Mrs. Hally. She also took time to chat with the two small boys on the porch, disarming us with her friendliness and thousand-watt smile. Kids are hard to win over, but she did it effortlessly.

Frank Church lost his Idaho legislative race that year, but at 30 went on to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, making him the fifth youngest person ever to serve there. He was smart and eloquent, but as much as anything else it was Bethine’s personality, political acumen and attention to detail that got him elected.

It was interesting to watch them work a crowd. As people came forward to greet them, Bethine would casually say, “Frank, you remember Dorcas and Doris Diffeldonger; they have that beautiful farm where we had the fundraiser out by Dogwater last year.”

“Of course!” the senator would reply, never letting on that he was   clueless. The running joke was that he never remembered a name, and she never forgot one.

Their introduction to my wife, however, was one even he remembered. I was a rookie Statesman reporter; my wife was a new Idaho resident. Campaign ads were still fresh in mind when we bumped into the Churches at the Idaho Press Club’s New Year’s Eve Party.

“I know you!” my bashful wife said, buttonholing the senator. “You’re Bud Davis!”

She had committed what could have been an unforgivable blunder, confusing an unsuccessful congressional contender with the state’s senior senator. But Bethine came to the rescue, smoothing away the gaffe by saying “Yes, there is a resemblance, but this is Sen. Church. I’m Bethine Church. And you are …?”

She never forgot us again, annually including us on her famously long Christmas card list. She sent out hundreds of cards every year.

When her husband concluded his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, I was part of a team that interviewed him in The Statesman publisher’s office. To everyone’s horror, I reached to shake his hand and spilled a cup of scalding coffee into his shoe.

He couldn’t have been more gracious, laughing and telling me not to worry about it (while frantically hopping about trying to remove his shoe.) Bethine laughed every time she told that story.

No one enjoyed a good laugh more. My favorite photo of her is one taken with Jackie Kennedy at a Washington reception. In every other photo I’ve ever seen of her, the then first lady looked composed – almost regal – but in this one she and Bethine were laughing so hard they looked as if they  might explode.

“What was she laughing at?” I asked Bethine.

“I’d just told her a dirty joke about Richard Nixon,” she replied, laughing all over again.

That’s the Bethine Church I’ll remember. Not as a teller of dirty jokes, of course; she was too classy to make a habit of doing that – but as an important, involved person (fighting for the White Clouds right up to the end) who never lost the common touch or her love of Idaho and Idahoans.

She rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful, but retained a genuine sweetness. If something I wrote tickled her, she made a point of calling or writing to say so. She showed up at signings, bought my books, sent congratulations on my retirement. She treated everyone from power brokers to paupers with kindness and sincere interest in their lives.

She was our Elder Stateswoman, and one of the best friends Idaho ever had. There’ll never be anyone else quite like Bethine Church.

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.

Three days to go. We’re in the home stretch of the holiday shopping season, and if you’re feeling more stress than Christmas spirit you aren’t alone.

It starts earlier every year. Stores decorate in October; Black Friday has all but eclipsed Thanksgiving. It’s recreation for shopaholics, good for stores, good for the economy.

But as you rush to get the last gifts under the tree, consider this: Do you remember the gifts you bought last year? Do you remember the gifts you received last year?

I don’t. Except for a new sweater found in a drawer after being forgotten for a year, I couldn’t tell you a single thing I got last Christmas. Or bought for others. The gifts buried in the knee-deep sea of wrapping paper at our house undoubtedly included clothing, gift certificates and maybe a CD or two, but I honestly don’t remember.

There have been exactly two gifts that I remember and will never forget. One was a guitar. I was a teenager and had been saving for it for over a year. It seemed odd that it had taken over a year to arrive since I’d ordered it, but on Christmas morning the mystery was solved.

It had actually arrived months earlier, but my parents had sworn the dealer to secrecy. They’d made up the $150  difference between what I’d saved and the purchase price – a lot of money for them in those days – and on Christmas morning it was waiting. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and the best gift I’d ever received, or would receive.

The other gift remembered for life was one my wife and I gave to her entire family. Our principal possessions then included one small child and an old, North End house that devoured money faster than a bloodhound can down a plate of bacon. We were, in other words, pretty close to being broke.

Financially, Christmas couldn’t have come at a worse time. We were in the process of replacing the plumbing, the wiring, the furnace and other antiquities. To say that we didn’t have a lot of money for gifts would have been an understatement. We might have had $100 total to spend on what was then a fairly large family – parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins … Short of gift certificates to McDonald’s, it was obvious we couldn’t buy something for everybody.

So … we decided to make our gifts. Specifically, Christmas memory boxes. I did a fair amount of woodworking in those days, so we went to a lumber store and bought boards to make the sides, laminate for the backs and cedar strips to make compartments inside the boxes. I routed grooves near the front edges to hold panes of glass, which we had cut to size at a glass shop.

That sounds simple, and for a master woodworker it would have been. My skills fell somewhat short of the master level, however, and by the time we’d gotten the idea time had grown short. The number of boxes needed meant that I was working in my father-in-law’s basement workshop well into Christmas Eve.

My wife was equally busy making the contents of the compartments. Each compartment represented a branch of the family, each item in the compartments a person. My wife’s mother, then a secretary with the Washington State Patrol, was represented by a law enforcement insignia, her husband the deep-sea fishing buff by a fishing pole. Her cousin, then in her last year of college, by a cap and gown. Her uncle, who worked for Boeing, by an airplane. Her grandmother by miniature knitting needles … and so on.

Our compartment contained a miniature newspaper for yours truly, a  Joker playing card for my wife the family wit, a doll for our toddler daughter – and a baby bottle.

When the boxes were opened, the baby bottle had everyone stumped.  Until my wife’s aunt guessed the obvious – it was a way of announcing that we were expecting another child.

You could say it was corny, and in a way it was. But all of the relatives who got the memory boxes still reminisce about them and have them displayed in their homes some 30 years later.

Why did those gifts, which cost a few dollars each, make such an impression? Because there was something of us – and of the whole family – in them. We didn’t need to spend spend a lot of money or go on a shopping spree. Our gifts were simple, but they came from the heart. It seemed to be enough.

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

Tim spent part of October and November in the Southwest. This is the second and last column from the trip.

PHOENIX – Phoenix is a great place in some ways, but I’ve spent so much time visiting relatives there that I’ve driven as far as Santa Fe and Tombstone looking for things to do – never knowing that one of the most interesting things was just a few miles away.

A musical friend was aghast to learn that in repeated trips to Phoenix my wife and I had never visited the Musical Instrument Museum.

“You’ve got to go,” he said. “You could spend a week there.”

In our defense, the museum is only three years old. But in that short time it’s established an international reputation as the best of its kind on the planet. That may be because it’s the only one of its kind on the planet.

I had no idea what to expect, but I definitely didn’t expect to see a guitar Eric Clapton played on classic Cream recordings that I spent hours struggling to learn as a kid. Or two of Carlos Santana’s guitars, or the Steinway piano John Lennon used to write “Imagine.” They alone would have been worth the price of admission.

But to say that MIM is a collection of instruments owned by famous people is like saying the Louvre is a collection of tapestries.There are some 15,000 instruments (roughly 6,000 are on display at any given time), from seed pods and gongs to high-tech wizardry. (A mechanical jazz “orchestra” plays instruments from saxophones to xylophones with no human musicians at all.)

The collection includes instruments from almost every country in the world. It has displays on how they’re made, a gallery where visitors can play them. It’s 200,000 square feet, cost $250 million and is the only museum in the world devoted entirely to the world’s musical instruments. They cover the spectrum from the classical to the bizarre – a Zambian thumb piano, a cello as tall as a grizzly bear, a guitar made from a Castrol oil can.

Five galleries allow visitors to see the instruments and hear the music from developed continents like Europe and the Americas to places so small and obscure you aren’t likely to have heard of them and would have trouble finding them on a map. Cape Verde, for example, a remote archipelago with so little going for it that a majority of its countrymen now live other places. Those who stayed play music, though, and they and their instruments are duly represented at MIM.

Most of the tours are self-guided. When you pay the admission fee ($18, with discounts for teens and children), a guide hands you a wireless receiver and headphones. As you approach each video display, you hear its audio accompaniment on your headphones. There’s no remote, no buttons to push, absolutely nothing in the way of digital frustration. Nirvana for technophobes.

The receiver, according to MIM President Carrie Heinonen, “automatically tunes to more than 300 sites around the museum, providing a soundtrack to the video offerings that bring to life the cultural traditions represented in song and dance. MIM is truly the most remarkable museum you’ll ever hear.”

As they pass from gallery to gallery, visitors hear the music of the world – from didgeridoos to Irish pub music to symphony orchestras. Videos show people playing music, singing it, dancing to it. Videos of Third World dancers made our jaws drop. Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire had nothing on these guys.

If you get weary walking from exhibit to exhibit (and you will), you can take in a special exhibit on “Women Who Rock,” featuring artists from Billie Holiday to Taylor Swift. Or make a reservation for a live performance in a world-class concert hall.

You don’t have to be a musician or a music buff to enjoy this museum. There’s something for everyone. The costumes alone are worth a visit, and who can’t enjoy the primal pleasure of banging a gong? Singer Tony Bennett was quoted as saying that everyone should visit MIM, which he called his “favorite museum in the world.”

I left there with a better appreciation of the role music plays in our lives. It’s existed longer than recorded history and is with us from birth to the grave. It transcends language and cultural barriers. It moves us in ways nothing else can. It’s “the language of the soul,” as visitors are reminded in multiple languages on everything from gallery walls to T-shirts.

Heinonen, who has worked in museums for more than 20 years, says that “until I came to MIM, I’d never actually heard someone say they’d been transformed by a visit to a museum. I hear it here on a regular basis, and I’ve experienced it myself.”

One visitor likened the experience to “walking into the soul of mankind.”

A long, exhausting walk. And worth every weary, aching muscle.

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

Note: Tim spent part of October and this month in the Southwest. This is the first of two columns from the trip.

BENSON, Ariz. –  Most visitors to the Southwest are drawn by its warm climate, cultural diversity, sporting events  … caves don’t top a lot of lists. Who wants to crawl around in a cave when you can be enjoying the desert sunshine?

  That’s what I thought, at least, until a friend told me she’d been to Kartchner Caverns three times.

  “They’re one of the most beautiful thing’s I’ve ever seen!” she said. “It’s a living cave! You’ve got to go there.”

  We took her advice – and learned just impressive caves can be.

  From outside, Kartchner Caverns don’t look like much – just a couple of nondescript hills on the cactus-dotted slopes that comprise the landscape of southeastern  Arizona. That’s all anyone thought they were until Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen came along. Cave junkies, they were exploring a sinkhole on a November day in 1974 when they hit the spelunkers’ jackpot.

  Twisting through a crack, they found two small rooms and a crawlspace ending at a saucer-sized hole. With a small sledgehammer, they enlarged it enough to wriggle through – and found themselves in a different world:  glistening stalactites and stalagmites, stone spires, spaces so vast their lights got lost in them. It was like a set from “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” There were no footprints or any other signs that humans had ever been there.

  They were the perfect men to make such a discovery. And James and Lois Kartchner, who owned the land above, proved to be the ideal stewards. They could have put up a sign and charged admission, resulting in graffiti and destruction of mineral formations millennia in the making:

  “Get out the hatchet, Billy. Let’s take a stalactite home to Uncle Horace.”

  That didn’t happen, because from the beginning preservation was the top priority. The caves were kept so secret that not even legislators who approved their purchase for a state park knew what they were approving until the final vote. It took 14 years for that to happen, another 11 to install walkways, lighting and other amenities – with virtually no vandalism or the sort of missteps made at other parks.

 Consultants from Carlsbad Caverns, for example, warned against repeating their mistakes of installing elevators or a parking lot above the caves, which upsets the delicate forces that created them. The result is that Kartchner Caverns are still pristine, still living (the dripping water that created them continues to do so), still awe-inspiring.

  A tram takes guests from the visitors’ center to the entrance. From there you walk through four doors that keep out the desert air and maintain an average humidity of 99 percent. You pass through blowers and misters to remove contaminants from your clothes. The environment  is so fragile that you can’t touch anything. If you do, you tell the guide, the spot is marked and the oil from your skin is later removed.

  The caverns are smaller than Carlsbad’s, but more colorful. Minerals absorbed by water percolating through the soil above create hues from white to grays, browns, gold, rust, blues, greens … But colors don’t begin to describe the unearthly shapes or their impact.

  “Soda straws,” for example – long, thin stalactites that take 750 years to grow an inch. One is nearly 21 feet tall. You don’t want to be the one to trip and break it.

  “Food” seems to be everywhere: “Fried-egg” formations – white around the edges with yellow “yolks” in the center. “Cave bacon” looks like giant slabs of its namesake. There are popcorn formations, turnip formations, carrot formations … We passed giant “icicles,” “curtains” resembling lush draperies, columns, totems, “moon milk” … it seemed endless.

  At the end of one of the two tours that are offered, the guide turned off the lights. Gradually, other lights illuminated the other-worldly features of the aptly named “throne room.” I won’t even try to describe it. But the feeling it evoked in the awed silence was something like reverence.

  When we think about the beauty of the natural world, we think of mountains and forests, lakes and rivers, seashores … We don’t stop to think about the world beneath our feet – as different from the one above as it could be, and in its own way just as spectacular.

  Now I know why my friend went three times.

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

You don’t appreciate it until you’ve traded places with them, but there’s a lot to be said for mooching off of your parents.

My wife’s parents built a cabin on Hood Canal, a finger of Puget Sound, when we were college students. Every summer we’d visit them and mooch – riding in their boat, eating their seafood and generally enjoying life.

That changed when my wife’s father died and her mother moved to Boise. Weary of maintaining the cabin, she turned it over to us.

Inheriting a house on the Sound may sound like a wonderful thing, and in many ways it is. But, as we soon learned, there’s a big difference between being guests and being owners – maintenance, repairs, etc. We’d have to paint, weed, buy a lawnmower …

This required repeated visits last summer. From Boise, it’s a 600-mile drive. Road-weary and wanting only a good night’s sleep, we parked the car on our first night as the new caretakers and got out the list of things that had to be done.

“Sheesh, look at that deck!” I said, crestfallen.

In anticipation of our new role, I’d spent an uncertain but large number of hours the previous summer scraping and painting the deck. Salt air does terrible things to painted decks. Even in the fading light, the peeling paint was obvious.

“Maintenance Manor revisited,” I grumped, a reference to the fixer-upper of our newlywed days. “Let’s go inside. Where’s the key?”

“One of the neighbors hid it for us. Do we have a flashlight?”

We didn’t. But the key, cleverly hidden in a large envelope propped against the front door, wasn’t too difficult to find.

“I’ll turn the power on,” my wife said, studying her list. “You go turn on the water.”

It took a while to find and open the main water valve. My wife, meanwhile, was switching things on in the house. The hot water heater under the kitchen sink, for example. I didn’t even know there was one. The kitchen is so far from the main water heater that it took forever to get hot water there, so my wife’s mother had a smaller one installed under the sink. This led to …

Mishap number one. While I was fumbling with the water valve, the electricity my wife had switched on was coursing through the empty water heater, reducing its element to a smoldering husk.

That, at least, was the diagnosis of the man who answered the phone at the number printed on the water heater.

“Are you sure it’s the element?” my wife asked him. “Isn’t there a reset button somewhere? Maybe we could try that.”

“Can you see a reset button on the top or sides?”

We couldn’t.

“Then it’s probably in the back.”

You have to wonder about people who design appliances. Anyone smart enough do that should know that the water heater would have to be removed to push a reset button on the back – a process involving multiple pipes, wires, hoses, flashlights, wrenches and vigorous cursing.

“Let’s have Clarence do it,” I suggested.

Clarence is – or was – the neighborhood handyman. Unfortunately for us, he had recently retired from the handyman business – probably when he saw us coming.

The water-heater company man said that replacing the element was a simple procedure, and that new elements could be purchased at any big-box store.

“There’s probably one right around the corner,” he chirped.

This ignored two salient facts: Replacing an element might be a simple procedure for an electrician, but he was dealing with the Woodwards. I once knocked out the power to three houses trying to hang a kitchen light. And we were more or less in the middle of nowhere. The nearest big-box store might have been just around the corner, but the corner was 30 miles away.

And the water heater was just the beginning. Somehow, turning on the power and frying it had led to …

Mishap number two – frying the kitchen lights.

Lurking beneath the lights’ decorative ceiling panels were eight fluorescent tubes. One of the eight flickered dimly.

“It might be the tubes, or it might be the ballast,” a helpful neighbor said.

Both of which could be purchased at the nearest store, conveniently located the aforementioned 30 miles away.

If you’ve ever removed the decorative panels on fluorescent lights, you know that they’re as fragile as a congressional compromise – cracking or shattering if bumped, twisted or verbally abused. Having had previous experience with this, I put them in a safe place behind a couch – where my wife launched …

Mishap number three – breaking the panels while reaching for her cell phone.

She needed it to call her aunt, who, told of our introduction to vacation-home ownership, offered a cruel but accurate assessment:

“I thought you were going there to fix the place, not demolish it.”

At this point we opted to make do with what we had. There were enough other lights that we could get by without the broken ones. We also could get by without hot water in the kitchen (a good thing because the kitchen faucet leaked like a downspout). There was no telling what would happen if we tried to fix the water heater, but electrocution seemed highly possible.

“Maybe we need to get away for a while. Let’s go buy a lawnmower before we burn the place down.”

We had to buy a lawnmower because we were being charged roughly $2 a minute to have someone mow the lawn. Call him Bob. Old guys who mow people’s lawns are invariably named Bob. It wasn’t that Bob’s price was unreasonable; he had to drive from God-knew-where and had to include his travel cost. We could save enough to pay for a mower in a summer or two of cutting the grass ourselves.

With help from an online search at the “neighborhood library,” conveniently located ten miles away, we chose a mower. Then we drove another 20 miles and bought it. Altogether, it took half a day.

“Look!” my wife said as we proudly pulled into our driveway with our new mower.

“What? I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the grass!”

While we were gone, Bob had mowed the lawn. At $2 a minute.

The rest of our stay was uneventful. We did yard work, painted and managed not to break anything. When we got back to Boise, we sent checks for the property taxes.

With the summer drawing to a close, we went back and did more maintenance. By then a neighbor had fixed the lights and leaky faucet ($160), but the main water valve had sprung a leak ($85).

In the spring, we’ll go back to scrape and paint the deck again, do more yard work,  scrape moss off of the roof and other pleasantries.

If we’re lucky, we might have an hour or two to spend at the beach.

I think I liked it better the old way.

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

It was fitting that the old card surfaced just in time for the World Series.

I was looking through a little-used file, and there it was – a Baseball Hall of Fame postcard mailed to me from Cooperstown, N.Y., in 2001. I was writing a column called “Lunch With Tim” in those days. Each week I took someone to lunch and wrote about the resulting conversation. The person who sent the card was Kay Doty of Kuna.

“Would you like to hear about my recent trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame over lunch?” she wrote. “It was a lifetime dream come true!”

Three things struck me in re-reading the Doty lunch column in The Statesman’s archives. One was that the great Lou Gehrig tousled her hair at the first Big League game she attended at age 6. She said she felt like she’d “been anointed by God.” The others were the “reverence” she felt at the Hall of Fame and her comment that baseball, unlike football or basketball, is “a gentle game” and was the one constant in her life.

A lot has changed since then. Football has become more popular, baseball less. Is football now the national pastime? A majority of fans would say so.

Will baseball be all but irrelevant in another generation or two? I tried to find Doty to ask her what she thought about that, but the phone number she’d written on the postcard belongs to someone else now and online searches for her came up empty.

But I have a pretty good idea what she’d have said. We were from different generations, but she and I both grew up when baseball was without a close second among sports. The country all but stopped during World Series games. Kids watched at school on TV (games were always in the daytime then), with the blessing of their teachers. Class was one thing; the World Series was, well, the World Series.

How many people will watch today’s World Series game, and how many will watch regular-season NFL games instead? If you’re a diehard baseball fan, you probably don’t want to know.

That said, there’s no denying that baseball still has a lot going for it. Doty was right that, comparatively speaking, it’s a gentle game. There’s something to be said for a sport in which season-ending injuries aren’t weekly occurrences. Baseball is slower, but more cerebral. Its venues, generally speaking, are prettier. There are reasons why they’re called parks. Baseball follows the natural cycle, beginning with the first hint of spring and ending with the first chill of winter. And there’s an almost mystical  quality about it that is comforting, even restorative.

Last summer at an outdoor concert, a friend walked up and for no apparent reason handed me a baseball. My first thought was that it had been signed by one of his heroes and he wanted me to see the autograph, but that wasn’t the case. Then I thought he wanted me to keep it, but a few minutes later he came back and asked for it. I was mystified until he explained:

“The healing power of baseball.”

Of course. For those of us who love the game, there’s something about holding a baseball – the way it fits and feels in your hand – that simply makes you feel better. I don’t think the same can be said of a football or a basketball.

When I was young, most boys’ and some girls’ lives revolved around baseball in the summertime. There were only two things that my father and I regularly did for fun together – fishing and baseball. We played catch, went to Boise Braves games together, listened to Braves games on the radio of his ’55 Buick over drive-in burgers and root beer.

The Braves played at a beautiful little ballpark not far from where I live now. My hero was a standout player named Bobby King. Along with their major league idols, he was the hero of every kid in the neighborhood. Some of us attended Braves games for free by working in the stands, hawking peanuts and popcorn and soda pop. (Grownup vendors got the more lucrative hamburgers and hot dogs.)

The most famous player to wear a Boise Braves uniform was Bob Uecker, who went on to play for the Milwaukee Braves and is best known today as the whisky-swilling announcer in the “Major League” movies. He signed a catcher’s mitt for me. I still wince over its eventual loss.

Kids in our North End neighborhood gravitated, like lemmings, to the playground at Lowell School on summer days. Not a playground with swings and slides, but a sprawling expanse of lawn big enough to accommodate multiple games. Nothing else was like spending a summer day there playing baseball – the crack of the bat, the satisfying sting of a ball hitting a well-oiled glove, the incomparable feeling of connecting with a good pitch – said to be the most difficult thing to do in all of sports.

Years ago, I wrote a column about that. A few weeks later, a letter arrived with a Cleveland postmark, thanking me for describing what baseball meant to all of us as kids. Its author was Bob Feller, one of the greatest pitchers ever. He was passing through town and happened to see the column. I saved his letter for years, but, like the mitt Uecker signed, it’s  disappeared. I still wince over that, too.

Now football has surpassed baseball in popularity, which in today’s society isn’t surprising. It’s faster, more violent, more continuously exciting. A lifelong baseball fan, even I spend more time watching college football than big league baseball these days.

But that doesn’t mean that what went before wasn’t great. No other sport can rival baseball’s history, its traditions, the hold it once had on the nation. Football may be our national pastime now. But those who missed the golden age of baseball missed a beautiful thing.

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 woodwardolumn@hotmail.com.

“You’ll save at least an hour if you go over White Pass,” a relative said in the voice of a spider to a fly. “We know because we’ve done it. At least an hour. Guaranteed!”

The conversation took place over dinner in Pendleton, Ore., where we’d driven that afternoon en route to the family cabin in western Washington. We’d made the drive countless times through Portland, but our well-traveled relative assured us that his shortcut over White Pass would have us there the next day in time to catch and cook lunch.

“It’s a good road and an easy drive,” he said. “A lot prettier than going through Portland, and compared to the pass we just came over (the Blue Mountains between Pendleton and LaGrande), it’s nothing.”

A fringe benefit was that the route would take us through Prosser, Wash., the hometown of former BSU football star Kellen Moore.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to see where Kellen lived?” my wife said in the tone wives use to entice husbands into doing things against their better judgment. “I’ll bet they have pictures of him all over town.”

They did. Prosser is clearly proud of its hometown hero. We spent half an hour or so in Prosser, then continued on to the pass.

Soon the road narrowed. Then it began to rise alarmingly.

“This sure doesn’t look like ‘nothing’ to me,” I said, fingers tightening on the wheel. “It looks higher than the pass we came over yesterday.”

And we were just getting started. The road continued to climb.

And climb.

And climb …

My acrophobia (fear of heights) is familiar to regular readers of this column. You’d think a person born and raised in Idaho would take mountain roads in stride, but there’s nothing rational about phobias. White Pass probably doesn’t bother most of the people who drive it, but for acrophobiacs it’s White Knuckle Pass. It’s the home and onetime training ground of Olympic skiing champions Phil and Steve Mahre, so we’re talking serious mountains here. Its neighbors include Mt. Rainier.

We passed lakes and waterfalls.

We passed rockslides.

We passed the tree line.

I think we caught a fleeting glimpse of a mountain goat.

Or maybe it was a yeti.

“You want me to drive?” my wife asked with a decided lack of enthusiasm. (She dislikes mountain roads almost as much as I do.)

I thanked her just the same, sure that if we tried to pull over to trade places we’d lose control and the car would hurtle over a thousand-foot drop off.

It was at about this time that the driver behind me started to honk.

“What’s wrong with that guy?”

“I think he thinks you’re going too slow,” she replied.

“Too slow? We were going 15 mph!”

The guy behind us, incidentally, was the relative who had suggested the shortcut. He was at the helm of his motorhome, which is roughly the size of Greyhound bus. And though I can’t be certain, I think he was smirking.

At last … the summit. People who aren’t bothered by heights think reaching a summit would be a relief for those who are because you’re no longer climbing  – the worst is behind. That’s true, up to a point. It’s also true that the summit is the point at which all true acrophobiacs remember that they forgot to have the brakes checked and know beyond doubt that they’ll fail at any second and send the car and everyone in over a dizzying and fatal precipice.

To my immense relief, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in part because our descent was blocked by roadwork. Lots of roadwork. For an uncertain but large number of miles, we alternated between waiting for oncoming traffic on what had become a one-lane goat path and creeping along in a line of vehicles traveling at five to 10 mph (if you ask me, an eminently sensible speed for mountain passes).

The relatives in the motor home had a different destination than we did and turned off of the goat path onto a normal highway before we did. So we never did get a chance to say goodbye and thank them for their time-saving tip. We had to content ourselves with a wave (my wife vetoed my suggestion for a volley of buckshot) and continued on to the cabin, arriving late in the afternoon.

Without the shortcut, we’d have gotten there three hours earlier.

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

This started out to be a story about a neighborhood reunion.

But it became something more.

The neighborhood reunion was last weekend. It was the first get-together in 16 years for the “South of the Tracks Kids.” The neighborhood where they grew up, in the 1940s and ’50s, was bordered by Ninth, 16th, the Boise River and Grand Avenue. It was the only neighborhood in Boise with any significant ethnic diversity, about half black and half white, and one of the poorest.

“We were poor, but we didn’t know it,” said Lois (Petrie) Kerr, one of about 50 who attended the reunion. “All of us kids had a home to go to, clothes to wear and enough to eat. Every house had a hedge, fences, flowers and a garden. People worked hard and were well respected, and we all stuck up for each other.”

“There was no such thing as segregation,” Jack Wheeler added. “If somebody needed help, we all helped them. It didn’t matter if you were black or white. We were family.”

Wheeler remembers swimming the river to ride horses on an island in what is now Ann Morrison Park. Neighbors wistfully recalled the long-gone Pearl Grocery and Grand Avenue Market, the Riverside Softball Park, an open-air dance hall (now the Mardi Gras) and the imposing locomotive roundhouse on 16th Street.

“You had to hang your laundry out early in the morning because a train came by every morning at 11,” Kerr recalled. “If you didn’t bring the laundry in by then, you got cinders from the locomotive all over your clean clothes.”

How much has the old neighborhood changed? Kerr’s family lived near the corner of 12th and River Streets – on an acre and a half where her parents raised hybrid irises. The neighborhood was almost entirely residential, no commercial or office buildings like those there today at all. There were six houses on one side of S. 12th Street, nine on the other. Lots of vacant land, lots of places for kids to play.

Kerr and Wheeler were kids when they fell in love. She was 16; he was 17. She still remembers the day when he asked her to marry him and put an engagement ring on her finger: Christmas Eve, 1959.

“I was crazy about him,” she said. “We were crazy about each other.”

But the marriage wasn’t to be. Her father not only didn’t approve of it; he absolutely wouldn’t allow it. Fathers did things like that more in those days.

“He said we were too young and that Jack was going to leave in the Navy and meet a thousand girls,” she said. “We were heartbroken. I was so mad at my father that I went to Virginia for a year and stayed with my brother. He was in the Navy there and had an apartment.”

Disappointed as they were, the young lovers respected her father’s wishes. Wheeler joined the Navy and served as a radioman and crypto repairman aboard an aircraft carrier. Then he returned to Boise, met and married another woman and spent most of his working years at a tire store and an automotive shop. His wife died two years ago. They were married 43 years.

“But I never forgot Lois,” he said. “For all those 43 years that I was married, I held onto my picture of her.”

Kerr stayed with her brother in Virginia long enough for her anger to cool  and returned to Boise as well.

“You know how it is,” she said. “You meet someone else and end up married.”

She was married twice, had three children, lived in several states. Her second husband died in 2006.

But she never completely got over Wheeler

Her father apparently didn’t, either.

“He told me I had to go to Boise to find Jack and apologize for him for what he did,” she said. “He died 30 days later.”

On May 16 – the 19th anniversary of her father’s death – she came back to Boise and found Jack. And after all those years, the spark still hadn’t died.

“He walked up, put his arms around me and kissed me,” she said. “It went right down to my toenails.”

Then her onetime fiancé did something she wasn’t expecting. He told her he’d loved her all his life, and proposed for the second time.

As you’ve probably guessed, she said yes.

And so, at ages 70 and 71 respectively, high school sweethearts Lois Petrie and Jack Wheeler finally were married. I think it’s fair to say that the wedding, a week ago yesterday, was the highlight of the South of the Tracks Kids reunion. Relatives came from as far away as Hawaii. The ceremony was held in the parking lot of the Humphreys Diabetes Center, which not coincidentally is the site of Wheeler’s boyhood home. He lived at what was then 520 S.12th Street; she lived across the street at 525 S. 12th.

At the reunion picnic last Sunday, he couldn’t stop smiling.

“It took me 54 years to catch up with her,” he said as he posed for a  picture between his new bride and her sister, Pennie Smith. “I got the girl of my dreams and I gained a sister. I’ve always wanted a sister. I couldn’t ask for more.”

Maybe it’s true that it’s never too late. Married over half a century after they wanted to be, the former South of the Tracks Kids have found happiness made sweeter by the long wait for it.

“I couldn’t ask for more,” Wheeler said.

His bride summed it up well:

“We’re recycled teenagers.”

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