In music, mistakes or near mistakes sometimes have a way of ending happily. Synapses fire and a forgotten lyric is remembered a nanosecond before it has to be sung. The mind goes blank, but muscle memory takes over and something unexpected and wonderful happens.

On rare occasions in the musical world, even the most frustrating blunders produce gratifying results. So it was with me and the botched Steely Dan interview.

For those who missed last month’s column on that embarrassing episode, Steely Dan is one of my two all-time favorite groups. They played at the Idaho Botanical Garden in August, and I’d gotten myself included in a July  media teleconference that kicked off their tour. To say that I was looking forward to interviewing my heroes is an understatement.

If you did read last month’s column, you know about The Mistake. We were told at the beginning of the teleconference to press *1 to be entered in a queue for asking questions. I pressed 1* – and never did get to ask my questions. As my late mother might have put it, I felt like “two cents waiting for change.”

I was half hoping that Steely Dan’s press people would take pity on me and set up an interview with them when they came to town. That didn’t happen, but some other good things did.

They started, as good things sometimes do, with a bad thing. On the first or second song of the show, the inevitable contingent of fans who think that people would rather watch them dance than see the act they paid to see stood up and blocked the view of the stage. Incensed, my wife asked them to sit down. Miraculously, they did.

For one song. Then a woman old enough to know better not only got up and started dancing but gesturing for others to join her. That was all it took. What began with one dancing dolt ended with hundreds of people standing and dancing in front of the stage for the rest of the night.

You can only look  at the backs of knees for so long. If your chairs have been reduced to obsolescence and you’ve become part of a gyrating throng, you might as well be close to the front of the gyrating throng, where you can see something.

From there, you could get an idea of what it’s like to be onstage with a group of that caliber. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who began and jointly are Steely Dan, surround themselves with ten of the best studio musicians and backup singers on the planet. For someone like me, who has played in local bands most of my life, an evening in close proximity to that kind of  talent was akin to finding Shangri-la.

And we’d get even closer. The walk back to the car after the show took us past a white limousine stuck in gridlock. I was walking with my daughter who had had her Steely Dan license plates turned into a purse (the one pictured with last month’s column). We assumed some fans had rented the limo for a night of partying until a window rolled down and there, close enough to touch, was Donald Fagen – the co-writer, keyboard player and voice of Steely Dan.

“If ever there was a time to get your purse signed, this is it,” I said after regaining the power of speech.

“No,” she replied. “I don’t want to bug him.”

To understand this, you need to know that for us Fagen has almost mythical status. The man is an alien. His intellect is not of this earth. I was proud of her for not invading his privacy.

The story doesn’t end there. The next morning, we were loading the car for a trip when we noticed an unfamiliar cell phone on its roof. My wife, who is better than me with phones I consider to be the digital equivalent of Chinese water torture, checked its directory and called a number. No one answered, but seconds later someone called back.

“You just called me at my home on my cell phone,” a relieved-sounding voice said. “Thank you! My life is on that phone. Tell me where you live and I’ll come and get it.”

He lived in Ontario, Ore. It happened that the route for our trip took us by there, so we met him at a freeway restaurant.

“What did you think of Steely Dan last night?” he asked after thanking us profusely for his phone.

I told him I thought they were one of the best bands in the world.

“What do you mean ‘one of the best?’ They’re the best!”

I liked this guy. He may be even more absent-minded than I am when it comes to hanging onto his stuff, but his musical taste is above reproach.

I saved the best part of the story for last. The next day, an e-mail arrived from Julia Rundberg, the botanical garden’s executive director. It said she had “something I might like.” The purse-daughter all but melted down waiting for us to get home from our trip and find out what it was.

What it was was an autographed Steely Dan poster for her. And a framed, autographed copy of the botched-interview column for me. It’s on a wall in my home office now. If the house ever catches fire, it’s one of the first things I’ll grab.

Thanks, Donald and Walter, for doing that. It beats the hell out of asking you a couple of questions on the phone.

And thanks to Julia and all the folks at the botanical garden for making it  happen. And for all the great talent you’ve brought to the garden in the last few years.

A friend who saw Steely Dan in Portland said the garden show was better,  because the crowd was so into it. Becker and Fagen seemed energized by that, talking  to the audience more than I’d ever seen them do in other cities.

Maybe they’ll come back one day. If so, I have some questions waiting for them.

***

If you like humor with your music, you might want to put Oct. 4 on your calendar. Antsy McClain and the Trailer Park Troubadours will play a benefit concert for the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline (1 800 273-TALK) that night at the Egyptian Theater.

At his previous Boise shows, fans alternated between enjoying McClain’s  and his band’s musical prowess and laughing until they cried. I laughed so hard I hurt myself.

The show will raise money to extend the hotline’s hours to 24/7 and will honor veterans, a high-risk group for suicide. Tickets, $25, are available at the Egyptian and the Record Exchange. Information:  http://www.egyptiantheatre.net.

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 live along the river or in the Foothills – and chances are even if you don’t – you know we’ve been invaded.

They’re everywhere. In our parks, on our streets, in our yards.

No, I’m not talking about politicians (though yet another campaign invasion is also beginning). These invaders are four-footed rather than two-tongued. Our valley has been invaded by mule deer.

Strictly speaking, invasion is the wrong word. The deer, after all, were here first. Its just that there are more of them now.

A lot more. The Statesman ran a photo recently of some mule deer, swimming right alongside humans rafting the river. I’ve been floating the river for decades and have never come within 50 yards of a deer. Now they swim up and ask you for a beer.

I’ve always thought deer were supposed to be wild animals. These days you can’t even frighten them away.

When I opened the front door to pick up my newspaper on a recent morning, a mule deer eyed me casually from my yard. She was busy with her breakfast – my favorite rose bush. I’ve babied that rose bush for years. I love its deep red petals, which were rapidly going the way of Anthony Weiner’s mayoral aspirations.

Because nothing original came to mind, I resorted to the time-honored method people use when they want a pest to go away, especially when it’s bigger than they are.

“Shoo!”

I might as well have sung her a lullaby.

“Shoo. Go on. Git!”

She didn’t stop eating, didn’t even look up.

“Shoo! Beat it!” I said, raising my voice and waving my arms. By this time I couldn’t have been more than 30 feet from her.

She looked up and placidly gazed in my direction. I could almost hear her thinking:  “What’s up with these crazy humans around here? And by the way, what are you doing in my yard?”

We’ve lived in our neighborhood for 25 years and have never seen as many deer as we have this summer. Including two fawns, I counted seven of them crossing the street in front of a neighbor’s house the other day. One   appeared to be carrying something brushy in her mouth as she crossed his lawn, a possible indication that he’d invited them to a potluck.

If this keeps up, it’s only a matter of time before they’re using our grills and lounging in our deck chairs.

The Idaho Fish and Game Department office on Walnut Street has gotten as many as five calls a day this summer from motorists concerned about hitting deer.

“The reason we’re seeing so many of them in town is the drought,” Toby Boudreau told me. “There’s less water higher in the hills so they come down to the lower elevations where they can live.”

Boudreau is a man who knows his deer. He’s the department’s statewide deer and elk coordinator. As long as the drought persists, he sees the urban deer population increasing.

“A mule-deer herd can grow 28 percent a year, so the population can double in three years,” he said. “Every doe has fawns. And some have twins.”

In other words, the real hordes may be yet to come.

You know that spare room you’ve been thinking of renting to make a little extra money …

One of the reasons people enjoy living in Boise, Boudreau said, is the proximity to wildlife. We love seeing bald eagles along the river, Bambis in our parks, squirrels harvesting our tomatoes, crows plundering our grapevines …

“We’ve created a perfect habitat for them,” Boudreau said. “All these beautifully maintained lawns and gardens and ornamental shrubs are very palatable to deer. They love them. Intentionally or not, we’ve created habitats right here in town that are very conducive to growing mule deer.”

In Helena, Mont., he said, so many deer are living in town that the city is attempting to return them to their natural haunts.

“We’re not quite to that point yet,” he added.

Because more and more of us have them as neighbors, it’s important to remember that deer are still wild animals. They only look tame.

“They’ve become habituated to humans. They’re not tame, but they’re tolerant of us. In the wild, you can’t walk up to a deer. In Ann Morrison Park, you can. They’re not necessarily a danger to people, but you need to give them their space. If they’re cornered, they’ll defend themselves.”

The biggest danger comes, as is usually the case, when people interfere with nature. A soft-hearted animal lover sees what appears to be a lost fawn, pitifully looking for the cold-hearted mother that abandoned it in a city park, and takes the poor, helpless creature home for a hot meal and a bedtime story.

“The mothers hide their young while they go feed,” Boudreau said. “Then they come back to nurse the young. The fawns have been told by the mother to stay there, but people think they’re abandoned so they take them home and feed them. Then, when they become aggressive, they don’t want them anymore.

“… There was one instance where a deer raised by humans gored two people. A woman was down and bleeding, and when someone tried to help the deer gored him.”

In 2011, a deer partially raised by humans attacked a cyclist in Sun Valley. In southeast Idaho, one chased a farmer on a tractor.

Moral: admire the Bambis all you want – from a distance. When it comes to taking care of them, mother knows best.

Especially when it comes to food.

“People food is terrible for them,” Boudreau said. “It can kill them. Their stomachs aren’t designed for it. They’re designed to digest woody plants.”

Including roses. Clumsy humans, at least this one, manage to prick ourselves just pruning roses. Deer can nibble the tender petals we love without so much as touching a thorn.

“They have very dexterous mouths,” Boudreau said. “They can eat the petals and leave everything else. After the roses have stopped blooming, they can eat the rose hips that are left behind. They can pick the leaves off of alfalfa and leave the stems.”

Tired of having your prize flowers used as snacks? Malodorous sprays (Deer-Off is a good one) will keep the deer at bay but have to be reapplied if rained on or sprinkled. (You might want to increase the applications during campaign season.) And the staff at any good garden store or nursery can tell you which plants and bulbs not to buy because they’re deer delicacies. I can tell you from bitter experience that tulips top the menu.

Other than that, it’s live and let live. You can’t get away from them – they’re along the river and in the hills for pretty much the length of the valley – and they aren’t necessarily just passing through.

“Some are year-round residents,” Boudreau said. “The climate in the valley is a lot better than it is in places like Council or McCall or Lowman, where the snow gets so deep. The valley and the habitat we’ve created in it is perfect for them. It’s a great place to be a deer.”

Maybe we should be grateful.

At least they’re not skunks.

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

Wanted: Personal assistant for newspaper columnist. Duties include  compensating for failing memory and chronic absent-mindedness. Salary negotiable.

The columnist mentioned above would be me.

My memory, never great, is getting worse. How much worse became all too clear recently – on a day impossible for even me to forget.

No, as a matter of fact, it’s not strictly an aging thing. I’ve always been forgetful. And notoriously absent-minded. I once spent the better part of an hour looking for my shoes and found them in the refrigerator. I was 16 then.

There’s no denying that it’s getting worse, though, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you’ve finished reading the saga of the lost keys and wallet.

And they weren’t even my keys.

It began, as days are apt to do at my house, with a call from a female in distress. Usually it’s the teenage-granddaughter-in-tears syndrome, but this time it was our younger daughter calling in behalf of her youngest, who is six. A mixup had left her without a parent for a special event at her day care. My wife was going to cover for our daughter, who had to work, but a communications breakdown had left both thinking the other would be there.

“They have little tables set up for each kid and their moms,” she said, her voice breaking. “I have this image of poor Chloe sitting at her table all alone while all other kids’ moms are there.”

A heart-rending image if ever there was one.

My wife, meanwhile, was volunteering at a homeless shelter, oblivious to  the unfolding tragedy. The good news was that I volunteer at the same shelter, so the solution was obvious. I would relieve her while she went to the day care.

It would have worked, too.

Except for the key fiasco.

I was washing dishes when another volunteer asked if anyone had seen the shelter keys.

Silence.

Moments later, “This is serious, guys. The keys aren’t anywhere. Are you absolutely sure you didn’t put them somewhere?”

More silence. This led to a visit to the kitchen from the office manager, whose normally placid demeanor had evaporated.

“We can’t have lost those keys!” she said. “They’re the keys to everything we have!  Could any of you have used them for something and forgotten to put them away?”

Still more silence. She might as well have been talking to a room full of statues.

We’re not talking an ordinary set of keys like those you keep in your purse or pocket. This was an industrial-sized ring of keys – keys to the front door, back door, office, clothing room, laundry room, gate, storage areas, you name it.  No one wanted to think about what could happen if all those keys had fallen into the wrong hands.

“There was some guy here a little while ago that none of us had ever seen before” one of the volunteers said by way of reassurance. “He said he’d just gotten out of prison.”

“Could your wife have taken the keys when she left to go to the day care center?” the office manager asked me.

I told her it was doubtful, a premise validated when my wife returned an hour later with no knowledge of the missing keys.

“Are you sure you didn’t do something with them?” my wife asked me, her eyes narrowing. “You know how forgetful you are.”

“Me? No way! I’ve been in the kitchen the whole time. Haven’t had to open anything but a bottle of bleach. Didn’t use the keys, haven’t needed the keys, haven’t seen the keys.”

Wishing them luck, I left for home with a clear conscience.

So you can imagine my reaction when I got there, reached into my pocket for the house keys and found …

The missing shelter keys. They were in my pocket the whole time! I hadn’t used them or needed them; I’d just casually picked them up, stuffed them in my pocket and walked away with them – all without having the slightest memory of it.

Embarrassed? Absolutely. But, embarrassed or not, the only thing to do was drive back to the shelter and return them as quickly as possible.

The office manager was surprised to see me there.

“I thought you went home,” she said.

“I did. Have you changed the locks yet?”

“No. We’re going to have one of the guys sleep here tonight in case somebody uses them to try to get in and take something. Why? … Did you find them?”

“They were in my pocket.”

“What?! You had them all along? How could you have done that?”

I told her about finding my shoes in the refrigerator at 16, hoping she’d  understand and sympathize.

She looked at me like I had three heads.

“It’s inherited,” I lied. “Well, I have to go now. My lawn needs mowing.”

The lawn part, at least, was the truth. Red-faced and humiliated, I drove to the gas station to buy lawnmower gas, reached for my wallet and …

No wallet. It wasn’t in the glove compartment, wasn’t under the seats, wasn’t stuck between the seats … It was in my pocket when I returned the keys, so it must have fallen out then. There may be worse places to lose your wallet than a homeless shelter, but none came immediately to mind.

Even an old blind dog gets a bone once in a while – I didn’t get a speeding ticket driving back to the shelter.

The wallet, however, wasn’t there.

“We’ll be sure to let you know if someone turns it in,” the office manager said.

“Right. And I’ll let you know when the Cubs win the World Series.”

Losing a wallet with your debit card, credit cards, health insurance card, driver’s license and other things you can’t live without makes you a little crazy. You panic. You go a little crazy. You look in places you know it couldn’t possibly be. I looked in the trunk of the car, checked my pockets a dozen times, went home and turned the house upside down – even though I was certain the wallet had been in my pocket when I left home.

For old time’s sake, I looked in the refrigerator.

Then I called and canceled the cards.

A few hours later, the phone rang.

“Is this Tim Woodward?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know me, but I found your wallet in the middle of Ninth Street by the Cottonwood Grill.”

The Cottonwood Grill? That was blocks from the shelter.

There were only two possible explanations. A) someone had found the wallet at the shelter and walked all that way to toss it into heavy traffic on Ninth Street or B) you-know-who had absent-mindedly lain it on the roof of the car and driven away.

Wonder which it could have been.

The fact that I’ve driven away with everything from groceries to library books on the roof of my car is immaterial.

The next day, the woman who found the wallet met me and returned it. Everything that was in it when it was lost was still in it. Offered a reward, she declined.

“It was the right thing to do,” she said. “I was on my bike when I saw it lying in the street. I was in a hurry because I wanted to ride to Bogus Basin, but I thought about how I’d feel if it was my wallet and said to myself, ‘Jodi, you can take a few minutes to help someone.'”

Thank you, Jodi Cuccia. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just say the word.

On second thought, don’t say the word.

Make it something I can’t forget.

Write me a note.

Send me an e-mail.

A telegram …

A registered letter …

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.

My original plan for today’s column was to interview Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan, one of my two all-time favorite musical groups. They’ll be playing at the Idaho Botanical Garden a week from tonight, so an interview with them would have been timely.

The plan hinged, of course, on actually getting the interview – which is hardly a cinch. They don’t give a lot of them and aren’t known for suffering media fools gladly. These are smart guys who make very smart music. I agonized over trying to come up with questions they hadn’t been asked before and would find at least moderately interesting. They were, after all, two of my most enduring musical heroes.

For readers unfamiliar with them, Becker and Fagen collectively are Steely Dan. They’ve used and continue to use some of the world’s best studio musicians on their recordings and tours, but they’re the constants – the ones who started the group, write the songs, call the shots. They’ve had a string of polished hits and albums and are known as two of the most exacting perfectionists in the business. It would be a long shot for someone from a relatively small paper in a sparsely populated state like Idaho to get to interview them, but it was worth a try.

Besides, I had a secret weapon. One of my daughters has a personalized “Steely Dan” license plate that she had made into a purse. (Nobody can say I didn’t raise my kids right.) I made sure to tell their media person about this when requesting the interview. It was just the sort of thing that might appeal to the offbeat, Steely Dan sense of humor.

This would be more than just an interview. It would be a chance to reverse a spectacularly dismal record at connecting with my musical heroes.

The Beatles, for example – the other of my two all-time favorite groups.

Granted, Steely Dan and the Beatles couldn’t be much different. But their music bewitched me in different ways at different times in my life, and I’ve remained a fan of both ever since. With any luck at all, my request to interview Fagen and Becker would be more successful than my attempts to interview Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.

Starr and his All-Starr Band came to Boise in 1999. I was writing a weekly column then called “Lunch with Tim.” Each week I took a different person to lunch and wrote about wherever the conversation led. My quest to take Ringo to lunch began two months before he was due to arrive. I called his press agent every other week. As late as the week of the show, the lunch was a go.

The day before the show, the press agent called to say that Starr had changed his mind – no reason given. He didn’t need a reason. He was a Beatle. And in fairness to him, and others cursed with the incessant demands of fame, he has to get awfully tired of reporters in towns from Boise to Bangkok wanting a piece of him. Especially when some members of the media – unlike courteous, respectful me – are so obnoxious about it.

The McCartney Heartbreak, as I’ve come to think of it, was even more of a letdown. I started by calling Geoff Baker, then McCartney’s publicist, when the tour was in New Orleans to request an interview in Tacoma, the closest where McCartney would be performing. For the next month, I called weekly to jog Baker’s memory. The night before the concert, I called him from my hotel room in Tacoma.

“Still looks good,” he said. “We’re on for tomorrow afternoon before the show. Call again late tomorrow morning.”

I did.

“Sorry,” Baker said. “He’s canceled all interviews for the rest of the tour.”

Maybe it was for the best. If I’d actually come face to face with a legend like Paul McCartney, I’d have been so nervous the power of speech might have left me. The humiliation, however, would have lasted a lifetime.

This brings us, by means of a smooth and natural transition, back to Steely Dan. With them I started by contacting the botanical garden, where  Director Julia Rundberg put me in touch with publicist Erik Stein. Stein in turn e-mailed to say that “Walter and Donald do not do in-person interviews at tour dates. Generally, the only time they do an interview together is a media teleconference prior to the tour kickoff. We’ll keep you advised of that as it develops.”

Of course they would. They’d keep “Rolling Stone” advised. They’d keep “The New York Times” advised. But an obscure columnist from Dogwater, Idaho? Right.

That was in April. To my surprise, after months without a word, an e-mail arrived in July from another publicist, Eve Samuels. Eve was writing to say that the teleconference had been scheduled. Was I still interested?

Interested? Are the Cubs interested in winning a pennant? Is Boeing interested in fireproof batteries? Is Edward Snowden interested in a visa?

Eve’s next e-mail contained instructions on where and when to call to participate in the teleconference. At the appointed time, I dialed the number. A recorded voice said to punch in a two-digit code to be queued in with the other reporters. Then a real person came on the line and apologized for what she hoped would be a short delay.

“The boys are rehearsing,” she explained. “But they should be here any minute.”

The boys? Clearly she was a person of stature. Two of best musician-songwriters on the planet, and she gets to call them “the boys?” I’d been debating between “eminences” and “excellencies.”

After a short wait, “the boys” came on the line. It was almost surrealistic: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker live on my telephone!

The first question was from a reporter in New Jersey, who did not fare well. He made the mistake of being flippant and after a brief but withering response from the eminences was reduced to apologizing.

The teleconference lasted a little over an hour and was peppered with the droll repartee for which Becker and Fagen are known. Told that the next question would be from an Oregonian reporter, Fagen asked whether Oregon had a state song and if not, “would they like to have a state song and how much would they pay for it?” Becker’s suggestion for a title: “Please don’t eat the pomegranates.”

Asked by a youthful-sounding reporter if there were any young musicians they enjoyed listening to, Becker replied, “Charlie Parker. He was only 35 when he died.”

In 1955.

Asked why they never finished recording some of the songs they’d written, Fagen replied that “every time we get together we just go fishing,” adding that the first “fish” he ever caught was a box turtle, the second a lamprey.

Most of the reporters asking the questions were from magazines or fairly large newspapers. So it was encouraging when a reporter from a small paper in Indiana got a shot.

The bad news: It was the last question.

No! This couldn’t be happening! I’d started weeks in advance. I’d called the right number at the right time, I was queued up …

And I’d fumbled on the one-inch line.

It was Starr and McCartney all over again.

I didn’t know whether to scream, sulk or throw something. So I did all three. Then I e-mailed Eve.

She responded immediately.

“Did you punch in the *1 code?” she asked. “That’s the only way you were put in the queue to ask a question. … Everyone who was in the queue got to ask a question.”

No, as a matter of fact, I hadn’t punched in the *1 code. Every reporter in the Steely Dan universe had punched in the *1 code – except for one,   boneheaded Idahoan, who had punched in 1*. My only chance to interview my heroes, shot to hell by transposed digits.

It was hard to sleep that night. I lay there for a long time, gritting my teeth and thinking of fiendish ways to abuse my telephone.

The next day, when the daughter with the Steely Dan purse related the  sorry turn of events on her Facebook page, one of her friends responded by writing, “Now he knows how Bill Buckner felt when he let that ball dribble through his legs and cost the Red Sox the World Series.”

That was how it felt.

That was it, exactly.

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 http://www.woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

When he was 12 years old. Fred Norman raised the bar for baseball scholars in his hometown of Johnstown, Penn. He was the only person in the city of 65,000 to predict with 100 percent accuracy the starting lineups of both leagues for the All-Star Game that was played in St. Louis that year. His prize was two free tickets to the game.

“It set the expectation for the rest of his life,” his brother, George Norman, said. “The entire community expected him to be a genius. People would ask him what a player’s average was, how many home runs he’d hit, how many times he’d struck out – and he would always know. He was a genius.”

Few who knew Fred Norman, who died July 2 at 78, would argue that point. And though his knowledge of sports history was encyclopedic, his genius was far from being confined to sports. He was one of those people who seem to know just about everything.

Who played left tackle for the Oakland Raiders in the 1968 Super Bowl? Ask Fred.

Who played Judith Fellowes in John Huston’s “Night of the Iguana?” Ask Fred.

Where did Mikhail Baryshnikov first study ballet? Fred would know.

In Boise, his home for many years, he was best known as the first director of the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts. He and Velma Morrison planned the center together and led the effort to get it built. With Morrison, he was the Morrison Center, handling the myriad details of operating it, personally directing some of its most memorable plays and charming one world-class entertainer after another into performing there. He kept their numbers in a book his brother described as being “a foot long and half a foot thick.” It contained contact information for celebrities from NBA stars to presidents.

When actor Hal Holbrook gave his Mark Twain performance at the Morrison Center and I wrote a review of it, Norman called to tell me he knew Holbrook well and was sending him a copy.

I was skeptical, but a few weeks later a letter arrived in a Morrison Center envelope. Inside was a scrawled note from Norman, and a long, personal letter from Holbrook, commenting on the review.

A few years later, actor Robert Redford visited Boise for the premiere of “Jeremiah Johnson.” Norman was involved behind the scenes, something that happened a lot, and the week after the premiere he called to say he was sending a copy of a biography I’d written of author Vardis Fisher (who wrote a book on which the movie was based) to his friend Bob.

“Bob?” I asked him. “Bob who?

“Robert Redford.”

Right.

I’d all but forgotten about it when the mail brought an envelope with a return address in Sundance, Utah. Inside was a note from Redford’s assistant, who said that his boss’s friend Fred Norman had sent him a copy of the book and “Bob” wanted to thank me for it.

“Fred and Robert Redford played baseball trivia together,” George Norman said. “He said Redford was very good at it. But Fred was better.”

When he wasn’t schmoozing with stars or coaching actors, chances are you’d find the Morrison Center’s director on the blue turf, coaching BSU quarterbacks. He’d played quarterback in high school in Pennsylvania and was recruited by the University of Oregon, turning down a scholarship there to attend Boise Junior College with a friend who failed the entrance exam at Oregon. Norman played quarterback for BJC, married a local girl and in 1959 landed a job teaching theater and coaching football at Arizona State University.

A decade later, he was back in Boise with two sons and a troubled marriage.

“He and our mom were divorced a long time ago, but they remained friends for life,” his son Lance said. “They always said they got along better after they were divorced.”

“They were two different people,” George Norman added. “She wanted him to be a farmer like her father had been, and he wanted to do performing arts.”

Performing arts received most of his time and talent for the rest of his life. He and Morrison became friends shortly after his return to Boise, and he quickly became a Boise institution.

“Boise is a richer place for him and all of his gifts,” Director Michael Hoffman said. “This is a place full of gifted people, and he gave us the gift of believing in ourselves.

“… He was my mentor. When I didn’t believe in myself, he would always believe in me. And he was tireless. He never slept. he just drank coffee and inspired people.”

Norman’s longtime friend and former BSU Alumni Director Dyke Nally added that he “wasn’t just the Morrison Center director. He was director of anything that the university, the students, faculty, public and friends needed him for. He was BSU’s community-relations specialist and the greatest friend raiser and fund raiser the university ever had.”

His work for the university and the community won enough awards and honors to fill a trunk. What went unreported was what he quietly did for individuals.

“The biggest quality about Fred was that he was always giving to others,” his brother said. “When a gentleman from Canada somehow connected with him after failing to get an article published, Fred sent it to Ronald Reagan. It’s in the Reagan Archives now. … Two ladies he’d helped with problems they were having cried for 15 minutes when I told them he had passed.”

In the early ’90s, Norman offered to help me through a mid-life career crisis by trying to get me a job at BSU. The reason nothing came of it was that he didn’t try very hard – for an excellent reason. He knew what I was yet to learn, that I’d never find another job that would be as rewarding as the one I already had.

In at least one way, he was a man of mystery – vanishing for extended periods and, when they’d all but given him up for dead, surprising friends with a call or a letter.

“I wouldn’t hear from him for months and then I’d suddenly get a letter,” Hoffman said. “He’d track me down in England or somewhere. How he did it I never knew. He was like God.”

Sometime in the 1990s or possibly a few years later – sources’ memories vary “- he disappeared for good.

“He was tired of working so hard in Boise,” George Norman said. “He wanted to go to a place where he could relax, someplace where nobody knew him and he could clear his mind.”

Rumors circulated that he was in Toronto, Canada; Apache Junction, Ariz., St. George, Utah … Only a few close friends knew that he’d ended up in Mesquite, Nev., a retirement community of 15,000 on the Arizona border.

Last winter, after a long time without a word, he called me from there. A column I’d written had piqued his interest, and he wanted to talk about it. Later, he sent a letter quoting, among others, poet Maya Angelou:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

No one who knew him will forget how Fred made us feel:  in a word –  better. He was so alive, so intense, so infectiously enthusiastic that it was impossible to spend time with him without feeling better about life.

A memorial service is tentatively planned for Sept. 23 at the Morrison Center.

But there needs be something permanent. A sculpture on the center steps perhaps, near the one of Gib Hochstrasser. One gave us a lifetime of music, the other the gift of arts and entertainment. It’s the least we can do for all he did for us.

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

I took advantage of a rare opportunity last weekend by dragging my grandkids to the Treasure Valley Train Show. Kids today grow up with only a vague idea of what trains are, let alone experiencing the romance of railroading, and I wanted to give them a shot at it.

It was a rare opportunity because the show, at the Boise Hotel and Conference Center, was the first here in seven years. The good news, according to railroad buff Phil Ulmen, is that it and other shows are proving popular enough that there’s talk of making it an annual event.

For the uninitiated, which includes most people under the age of, say, 50, a train show is an out-sized display of model railroads – miniature trains chugging through miniature recreations of everyday life – towns, farms, hills and valleys, roads, bridges, airports …

There was a time when an event like that would have been swarming with kids, mainly boys of elementary-school age. Now its mainly old guys – and a few old gals – playing with toy trains.

That’s not meant to disparage them. They work hard at what they do, putting on impressive shows throughout the West and charging very modest entry fees for them. Their group, the Rocky Mountain Hi-Railers, is based in Boise. They do the shows to share their enjoyment of model railroading and to teach others, especially children, about trains. (Interested in learning more? Go to http://www.rockymountainhirailers.com and click on “contact.”)

The Hi-Railers are helping to preserve memories of a bygone era – when America ran on rails and trains did much of what cars and airplanes do today.

How much have the times changed since then? When John Eichmann, the group’s coordinator, showed a young boy a speeding train spitting out a mail bag and snatching another from a hook beside a track, the response was “what’s mail?”

That’s exactly the sort of thing that made me want my grandkids to see the show. I didn’t want them to be wholly ignorant of the transportation system that helped build America – let alone the concept of mail – and I wanted them to experience a tiny fraction of the fascination kids used to have with trains.

Ulmen spent years working on a model railroad with his father. He attributes that to father-son camaraderie (the Hi-Railers also welcome mother-daughter teams) and to “humans’ natural fascination with big machines.”

When Eichmann was a boy, he could set his watch by the whistle of the train that passed through Boise every night at 10 o’clock. He remembers trains wending their way through downtown, a locomotive roundhouse (turnaround) at 16th and River streets, a furniture store with a wall built in the shape of a curve to conform to the curve of the tracks.

When I was that age, none of the neighborhood boys dreamed of getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. We all wanted parts for our train sets. We’d spend hours perusing catalogs for cars, switches, lights, scenic accessories, transformers and, best of all, locomotives.

There were two camps – steam and diesel locomotives. My choice was steam. There was something about those big, black engines thundering over the tracks, lights flashing, smoke pouring from their stacks, that was just short of mesmerizing.

One boy in our neighborhood was lucky enough to have both steam and diesel trains. His dad was rumored to make $1,000 a month – big money in Boise in those days – so they could afford it. The trains were set up on a huge table in their basement. The best time to watch them was at night with the lights off. You could see the headlights casting eerie beams in the dark, the glow of the illuminated dial on the transformer, the signal lights switching from red to green and back again in the rich kid’s basement. The rest of us hated him.

The most elaborate setup in town was that of a professional model railroader we knew only as the Lionel Man. That was because he sold, among others, Lionel brand trains. (Guitarist Neil Young is a Lionel consultant.) The Lionel Man had staggering displays of them in his home, which seemed to be mostly devoted to trains. We spent hours “oohing” and “aahing” as we compiled our wish lists there.

My own train set was far more modest. It easily fit on a ping pong table in my folks’ basement. They didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a big deal when they offered to buy me a set of switches and it wasn’t even my birthday.

Actually, it was a bribe. The catch was that I’d have to find a new home for Champ, a puppy I’d adopted and to which I was severely allergic. It was a case of giving up the puppy and having train switches or keeping the puppy  and having asthma. Seduced by the switches, I succumbed.

I missed Champ a lot. But the train switches were almost as much fun, and I didn’t have to get shots to play with them.

The Hi-Railers’ $10,000 display has 45 switches. Its name is “Lookout Junction.”

“Four trains can come to it simultaneously,” Eichmann explained. “We were always yelling ‘look out!’ so that’s what we decided to name it. We had eight crashes there yesterday.”

Crashes are fine for thrills, but the display has far more than the potential for mayhem – from an airport with a radio-controlled helicopter to old-fashioned towns with stores, banks, churches … My personal favorite: a recreation of the house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” with a “Bates Motel” sign advertising “showers available.”

“There’s a saying among model railroaders,” Eichmann said. “Growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional.”

Kids, he added, “are one of the main reasons we do this. There’s nothing like seeing a little kid who’s just tall enough that his eyes reach the table, and he’s smiling and his eyes are popping out. That’s the payoff.”

I was curious about how my high-tech grandkids would react to the Hi-Railers’ lovingly assembled, $10,000 setup. It didn’t take long to find out.

The oldest took a quick look and retired to a corner to text her friends. A typical teenager.

The middle kid, the only boy, stuck around longer and politely asked questions. Hopeful signs.

The youngest, who is six, seemed interested for almost an hour. A chip off the old block, perhaps?

No such luck. When I asked her afterwards what she thought of the show, she said she liked pushing the button that made the whistle blow.

“That’s all?”

“Well, I liked the train with the smoke. The rest of it was kind of boring.”

I should have known. Kids today will probably never be bewitched by trains. But perhaps in decades to come, they’ll find similar pleasure in resurrecting and entertaining themselves with the long-antiquated digital devices that are so much a part of life today.

Watching the Hi-Railers at play, it was hard not to hope so. The youngest member of their group is 59, the oldest in his 70s. The most striking thing about them was how happy they all looked. They smiled almost non-stop. For a few hours during the show they work so hard to put on, the aches and pains and worries of age fell away. They didn’t even look like old men. They looked like happy boys, who just happened to have gray hair.

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

The dizzying progress of technology has produced a society with two kinds of people – a minority of what I like to call the technologically resistant, and everybody else.

I refer to the first group as technologically resistant because it sounds so much better than stupid.

It happens that I am a member in good standing of the technologically resistant group – and I I resent the implication that we’re dim. We’re smart enough in other ways; we’re just not wired for technology. What comes intuitively to geeks and kids comes to us with great effort, if at all.

The scary thing is that we’re becoming social outcasts.

This is not an exaggeration. Not long ago, for example, one of my daughters and two of my granddaughters were bonding around our kitchen table. By bonding I mean that they were communing with their devices. The result was silence, punctuated by an occasional comment about a text, a tweet or a chirp that the misfit of the group, me, didn’t remotely understand. My attempts at conversation failed utterly. If I tried to break the silence with a comment about the news, sports or even the weather, they glared at me as if I had fossils coming out of my ears.

My wife, who is more technologically adaptable than I am, has taken to her Smartphone the way a legislator takes to free dinners. It was all I could do to get a word out of her during a recent trip through scenic Nevada.

“Looks like a thunderstorm up ahead.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Nothing but desert. This road doesn’t have a single turn in it for as far as you can see.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Look, a carrier pigeon!”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

My wife, daughters and granddaughters text and twitter on their phones, shop online with them, ask their phones’ personal assistants the meaning of life. Their favorite response: “The evidence to date suggests chocolate.”

Who says computers don’t have a sense of humor?

The women and girls in my life use their phones to get directions, news and weather updates, restaurant recommendations, you name it.

It’s all I can do to answer their phones.

Answering a phone used to be so easy. You picked it up and said hello. To answer my wife’s phone, I have to slide an arrow, click an icon, enter a code, click another icon …

Then I see how far I can throw it.

For Christmas, she got me a Kindle. This would be two, no, three Christmases ago. It took forever just to learn how to turn it on.

I was sort of getting into the iPod one of my kids got me last year for Father’s Day until it viciously turned on me.

One of the songs on my iPod is by a group called Marconi Union. It’s not actually a song; it’s music (sort of) that puts you to sleep. Time Magazine hailed it was one of the 50 great inventions of the year – music instead of a pill for insomniacs. The trouble is that Marconi Union’s eight minutes of almost hypnotically calming sounds on my iPod are followed immediately by B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone.” So one second you’re drifting peacefully off to sleep and the next you’re jolted awake by blues guitar riffs. The thrill is gone, and so is the sleep. There must be a way to stop that from happening, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how.

Don’t even get me started on digital television. Last winter we switched to a new satellite provider. One look at the new remote and I was instantly suspicious. It has over 40 buttons. Circular, rectangular and oval-shaped buttons. Black, gray, red, green, yellow, blue and orange buttons. Buttons with arrows, buttons with icons, buttons with functions I don’t have the slightest understanding of and am afraid to touch. For all I know, one of them is an ejection seat.

The remote, of course, is one of many remotes – one for the television, one for the Blu Ray player, one for the now hopelessly antiquated DVD player, one for audio … (The audio remote is roughly the size of a playing card and is forever getting lost in the couch cushions or mysteriously transported to, say, the laundry room. Sometimes it just dematerializes.)

It goes without saying that I’m forever pushing the wrong remote buttons – with predictably infuriating results. Just when I think I have the remote (s) mastered, I push the wrong one and instead of my favorite show get one of those nauseating commercials for Phillips laxatives, or, worse, the next installment of the Kardashians.

The upstairs TV? Forget it. I can’t even turn it on. The installer explained the process, but it didn’t help. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t want to push multiple buttons on the TV and the remote, slide a button, push more buttons and go hunting for a second or third remote just to watch a movie. I just want to turn it on and watch.

It used to be easy. Now, for the technologically resistant, it can be almost prohibitively complicated.

Last winter, I vowed to reform. Instead of remaining a dinosaur in the digital world, I decided to embrace technology. I took some computer classes. I learned to turn on my Kindle and actually read a book on it. I even bought a SmartPhone.

Not long after that, a funny thing happened at our house. We’ve been lucky in recent years to live in a neighborhood free of barking dogs that keep people awake nights, but suddenly our luck appeared to run out.

“Did you hear that?” I asked my wife.

“Yes, it sounds like a big dog.”

“A really big dog.”

Most of the neighborhood dogs are small. This sounded like Doberman or maybe a Great Dane. It barked at all hours. I walked around the neighborhood looking for it, peeked over fences and was about to start asking neighbors about it when I realized the embarrassing truth.

The “barking dog” was the ringtone on my new SmartPhone.

It was lucky that I hadn’t already gone up and down the block asking questions about a dog that was actually a phone. It would have confirmed the younger neighbors’ worst fears about the Woodstock generation.

It’s not easy being a low-tech guy in a high-tech world. Sometimes I miss the days when phones stayed put, televisions had big, round dials and books didn’t need tech-support.

Life seemed so much simpler then. All we had to worry about were the Russians.

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

One of my daughters recently gave me a tip on a great new restaurant in one of the old Statesman buildings. We miscommunicated on which building it was, but that was okay. The memories waiting for me there were worth the confusion.

“Do you mean the white marble building at Sixth and Bannock? I asked her.

“Yeah … I think that’s the one.”

That was the building where I cut my teeth as a rookie reporter. It was converted to offices after The Statesman sold it in 1972. The prospect of dining in my onetime haunts was intriguing enough that a few days after my daughter recommended it I made a point of going there for lunch.

It was clear without even getting out of the car, though, that my daughter  had been mistaken about the Bannock Street location. There was no sign of the  restaurant she’d recommended, which turned out to be in an even older Statesman building at Sixth and Main. But as long as I was in the neighborhood …

Expecting to be confronted by a receptionist, secretary or security guard, I stepped inside.

No one. Not a soul anywhere.

Offices occupied what had been the newspaper’s bustling lobby. Where a gaggle of busy advertising and circulation workers once served customers, closed doors blocked access to quiet spaces. A sign on the door to what once was the inner sanctum of legendary publishers Jim Brown and Margaret Ailshie identified it as the current quarters of the Idaho Department of Lands. The department also had taken over the onetime pressroom, where pedestrians on the Sixth Street sidewalk used to be able to peer through windows and watch the paper being printed.

I stopped, listened. Not a sound.

Then, “Hey Woodward. Get on and we’ll ride up together.”

It was the jumbo-sized ghost of Jim Poore beckoning from the elevator, as he’d done the morning I reported for work for the very first time. Then the paper’s star sportswriter, he armed me with tips for nervous rookies as we rode upstairs to the newsroom. By the time we got there, I felt as if I’d known him for years. We were friends for the rest of his life.

The elevator door opened on a hallway with an entrance to offices. A young man, presumably a receptionist, sat at a desk beneath a sign with the name of a law firm. No one else was in sight.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“No, thanks. I’m about 40 years late.”

What a difference. The elevator in those days opened on a scene of modified chaos – clattering teletypes, bells ringing when a big story came in on the wire, reporters, editors and copy boys scurrying everywhere in the daily rush to meet the deadlines.

The managing editor’s office was a sharp left from the elevator. I could almost see brooding Dick Hronek, poring over budget papers on the cluttered desk behind his closed door. Our first meeting was where I made my first rookie mistake. He’d paused after offering me a job as a bureau reporter and telling me what it paid. The old timers later told me that the pause was my chance to protest the low salary. If I had, they said, I’d have gotten another ten bucks a week.

The man was a fine journalist, but he wasn’t a people person. He could squeeze a budget until it bled. Only with reluctance did he comply with a newsroom custom of ordering food for those who had to work late on election nights. When a type setter wandered into the newsroom one election night and helped himself to a sandwich, the penurious editor ran – not walked – after him, snatched the partially eaten sandwich out of his hand and shouted, “You can’t have that! That’s a newsroom sandwich!”

I could almost see Hronek at his desk, sharpening his budget pencils.

A few yards away was John Corlett, long known throughout the state as the “dean of Idaho political reporters.”  Always dapper in a suit and tie, he covered every national political convention for decades until Mr. Brown, as he was universally called, broke his streak for reasons now lost in time. Corlett was not happy about it.

A few weeks later, Brown suggested that they take a stroll together. This was in the days when all of Boise’s car dealerships were downtown.

“Which one do you like best?” Brown asked as they admired the new models in a showroom window.

“That one there,” Corlett replied.

“It’s yours. I know you were upset that I didn’t let you go to the convention, and this is my way of making it up to you.”

So, just like that, John had the new car of his dreams. In some ways, the good old days were.

It’s a safe bet that few if any of the lawyers who work in what then was The Statesman’s newsroom have ever heard of Brown, Corlett, Poore and other onetime pillars of the newspaper’s past. If I closed my eyes, I could see their faces:

Walter Johnson, the epitome of the old-time newspaper editor – rumpled shirt, bow tie, green eyeshade. Universally liked, he was wise and kind,   the perfect mentor for a green kid who had a lot to learn about being a reporter before getting a shot at writing a column.

Betty Penson, the closest thing the newsroom had to an aristocrat. She was the editor of the “women’s section.” Her byline: a drawing of a bee, a pen and the sun: B. Penson. Known (but not to her face) as the Queen Bee, she was not a woman to be crossed.

Bob Lorimer, the columnist’s columnist. His “Boiseana” column was easily one of the best-read things in the paper. I still remember the way one of his columns began:

“I woke up this morning to the sound of snow falling.

“Oh, yes you can.” From there he went on to explain, as only he could, what falling snow sounds like.

The old newsroom wasn’t much to look at – cramped and chaotic, a patina of age and grime on just about everything, a clutter of desks arranged in a way that would only make sense in a newsroom. Every desk had a typewriter, a mountain of books and papers, a gluepot and a box of soft lead pencils. When you finished a story, you glued the pages together end to end to form a continuous sheet anywhere from one to eight or ten feet long and carried it to your editor, who marked the pages, skewered them onto a desktop spike and shouted “copy,” whereupon a copy boy would obligingly materialize and rush them to the copy desk.

The copy desk was a circular affair with a cast of editors who were nothing if not colorful. One night two of them got into a rousing fistfight. When it ended, they got into a second fight over which could fire the other for breaking the company’s ban on striking editors. (Apparently you could strike all the reporters you wanted.)

The old place may have been old and run down, but it was also bustling, vibrant, teeming with noise and life. Seeing it again reminded me of how lucky I was to have worked in what was, if not the golden age, certainly a golden age of journalism. Walking the old building’s stairs and hallways a career later, the thing that struck me most was the almost total absence of sound. There had to be people working behind all those closed doors, but they were unseen, unheard. Compared with the controlled chaos I remembered, it was eerie.

It was good to see some of my departed colleagues and spend time in the old haunts again.

But the silence was unnerving. I think I’d have liked it better if it had been a busy restaurant.

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

The night of Sept. 30, 1961 was, literally and figuratively, one of the darkest of Art Jackson’s life. The 36-year-old Marine captain’s job that gloomy night was to escort a man suspected of being a Cuban spy off of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay. But a momentary delay – the lock on a gate wouldn’t open – began a series of events that haunts the Boise Medal of Honor recipient to this day.

Jackson is Idaho’s under-the-radar Medal of Honor recipient. Others – Kuna’s Bernie Fisher, the recently deceased Ed Freeman of Boise, even the late Vernon Baker of far-off St. Maries – all have received more local media attention. Jackson has seldom spoken publicly about his military career and never about its Guantanamo chapter.

A company commander at Guantanamo on that September night, he discovered a Cuban bus driver named Ruben Lopez in a restricted part of the base for which Lopez had not been granted access. Naval intelligence had identified Lopez as a spy for Fidel Castro’s new Communist regime, but he’d been allowed to keep his bus-driving job on the base. When Jackson found him in the restricted area, an ammunition dump, he decided to remove him from the base and summoned another officer to assist.

The two escorted Lopez to a back gate, but were unable to open its lock. Jackson sent the other officer for tools, but managed to pry open the lock while he was gone. No sooner had he done so than Lopez lunged at him and tried to take his sidearm.

Lopez chose the wrong man to attack. If he thought he was quick enough to disarm the larger, seemingly slower-moving American, he was mistaken. Left alone with a suspected spy, Jackson had taken the precaution of having his pistol cocked and ready in its holster. He drew and fired in self defense.

Lopez died instantly. And Jackson was about to make a decision that would change his life, putting him at odds with the highest levels of President John F. Kennedy’s administration.

“I hoped no one would find out,” he said. “The world found out.”

In line for a promotion to major at the time, a celebrated career all but assured, Jackson was arrested. The World War II hero was placed under guard and flown to Washington,D.C., where Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, acting on orders from Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, forced him to leave the Marine Corps. From a rising star with the nation’s highest award for bravery in his service record, he went to a job as a mail carrier in California. He was honorably discharged, but his status as one of the most admired men in the military passed like a Cuban breeze.

The young man who found himself at the center of a potential international incident in Cold War Cuba could have been a poster child for the All American Boy in Depression-era Ohio. A native of Cleveland, Jackson grew up in Canton, Ohio, where he was a Boy Scout and the bugler in his troop. He was five merit badges shy of making Eagle Scout when his watchmaker father took a job in Seattle. The Jacksons had hardly settled there when another job offer took them to Portland, where Art attended high-school, lettering in baseball, football and track.

“My mother cried after I graduated and left the country,” he said.

He left for a job with a construction company in Alaska, then 17 years from statehood.

“I was a common laborer. They were building a Naval Air Station and extending the runways at Sitka. I’d hear the roar of the planes and watch those Marine Corsair pilots and think, ‘Holy moly, that’s what I want to do – fly a plane off a carrier.'”

He failed the eye examination for pilots, but the Marine Corps was happy to accept him for infantry training. His first encounter with the enemy was in Cape Gloucester, New Britain, where he received his first citation for bravery. The commendation from the commanding general of the First  Marine Division recognized him for pulling a wounded private to safety “in the midst of tremendous fire from enemy pillboxes and with utter disregard for his own personal safety.”

As bad as the war was in New Britain, it was but a warmup for Peleliu, an obscure Pacific Island and the scene of some of most vicious fighting of  World War II. The two-month battle resulted in the highest U.S. casualty rate of any in the Pacific War. The National Museum of the Marine Corps called it “the bitterest battle of the war for the Marines.”

On Peleliu on Sept. 18, 1944, Pfc. Jackson saved his platoon from being pinned down and possibly wiped out by Japanese gunfire. A book on the battle of Peleliu described him as “nothing less than a one-man Marine Corps.” His Medal of Honor citation credits him with proceeding ahead of American lines, defying heavy enemy barrages and singlehandedly wiping out 12 Japanese pillboxes, contributing “essentially to the complete annihilation of the enemy in the southern sector of the island.” He was 19 years old.

He said at the time that he didn’t consider himself a hero. Asked seven decades later how he felt about killing 50 enemy soldiers, he paused for a long time.

“When I think about what they did to our guys …”

It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence. Brutality against U.S. soldiers in the Pacific – torture, mutilations, beheadings – are well documented.

Jackson was wounded on Peleliu and again in the Battle of Okinawa. He returned to the U.S. with two Purple Hearts and was honored at the White House, where President Harry Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor. He was congratulated by Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandegrift, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, celebrated with aviation legend and fellow Medal of Honor recipient Jimmy Doolittle, rode with celebrity columnist Walter Winchell in a New York City ticker-tape parade.

Given his choice of assignments, he chose China.

“The commandant  looked at me like I was crazy,” he said. “He thought after all that time and all that fighting, I’d want to go home. But I’d heard so many stories about China and China Marines that I wanted to go there and see it for myself.”

He did. Jackson served in the Marine Corp for four years after the war and in 1949 joined the army, which offered him a chance to earn a regular commission as an officer. (The battlefield commission he’d received in the Marine Corps was only effective in reserve units.) He spent a decade in the army, serving in the U.S., Korea and Japan, and in 1959 rejoined the Marine Corps.

Why?

“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” he said.

It was a decision he would second-guess after the fateful night in 1961, at the Cuban prison that confounds presidents to this day.

“He told me he could see how I shot Lopez,” Jackson said of his dressing-down by then Commandant of the Marine Corps David Shoup. “It was self defense. He said my mistake was trying to cover it up.”

But the decision wasn’t that simple. Given the circumstances, it was one  any soldier might have made. Jackson didn’t explain it publicly, remaining silent and refusing requests for media interviews.

“I’ve never talked about what happened,” he said. “I was ashamed of what I did.”

To understand what happened, put yourself in his place. You’re alone in the middle of the night with a suspected enemy spy, whom you shot to keep him from taking your weapon and possibly killing you. It’s five months after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba – and its ally the Soviet Union – were at the boiling point. A Cuban national killed by an American hero would have been made to order for anti-American propaganda. Jackson would have been on front pages worldwide.

In retrospect, the right call might have been to report the shooting, claim self defense and wait for the storm to blow over. Jackson never explained until now, at age 88, why he chose to hide the body and, with help from four other officers and several enlisted men, bury it on the base:

“My understanding of the treaty between Cuba and the U.S. was that any military person involved in a situation like that, Cuban or American, would be tried in a Cuban court,” he said. “It was pretty obvious what the outcome would have been in Castro’s Cuba at the time. I probably would have ended up at the Isle of Pines.”

The Isle of Pines was the site of a Cuban prison. A 1969 letter to the president of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights described it as “a forsaken place of terror and barbarism,” where 7,000 prisoners lived in  quarters built for half that many. It was the setting, the letter said, for “the most cruel, brutal and inhuman plan of forced labor known in the history of the Americas … we all were beaten mercilessly.”

Jackson’s choice, as he saw it, was to report the killing and risk torture and possibly death on the Isle of Pines, or hide the body and hope it was never found. Word leaked, however, and he and three officers involved in the coverup were forced out of the Marine Corps. A fourth was allowed to finish the two years he had remaining. The enlisted men were reassigned. All were told never to talk about what happened.

Jackson requested a court martial to try to clear his name, but the request was denied.

The story – minus his input – did make front pages. Columnist Jack Anderson accused the Defense Department of hushing up “one of the most explosive incidents of the long Cuban crisis …”

Not long after that, Jackson declined an invitation to a White House ceremony honoring Medal of Honor recipients, saying that his presence there might embarrass the president. Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger responded that the president respected his decision, adding that Jackson “would always be welcome at the White House.”

The hero of Peleliu worked for a year as a mail carrier in San Jose, Calif., returned to the army as an enlisted man, then worked for the Veterans Administration in San Francisco before transferring to Boise in 1973. He’s now retired and lives in East Boise, where he’s known as a good neighbor, a good American and a modest recipient of the nation’s highest award for valor.

“His character is impeccable,” longtime neighbor Jean Patrick said. “He’s a wonderful man of honor and integrity and a great patriot. He flies the U.S. flag and the Marine Corps flag every day. It bothers him if someone flies a dirty or tattered flag. He tells them to take it down and replace it.”

More than half a century after the night that changed his life, I asked Jackson if, given another chance, he’d have done anything differently at Guantanamo.

“Yes,” he said. “I never should have let myself be left alone with a man like Lopez.”

Does he wish he’d reported the shooting?

“No. It would have gone to a Cuban court. I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

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

Two of the most subjective things in life are art and Mexican food. One person’s favorite Mexican dish is another’s dog food, and one person’s revered work of art is another’s candidate for visual affront of the century.

That Boiseans hold divergent views on public art was seldom clearer than in the responses to my column last month on proposed artwork for City Hall Plaza. The column was critical of what I considered to be failures of the past, namely “the steaming crack” at the Grove Hotel, the wings on the airport parking garage and the metal rectangles in Julia Davis Park.

In a perverse way, the reaction was flattering. Never – well, almost never – had responses to one of my columns occupied the entire Letters to the Editor section of the editorial page. The intensity of the response surprised me because I naively thought I was on solid ground. I thought everybody hated the steaming crack, but even it has its admirers.

In my defense, one letter writer agreed with me. And a local  artist called to thank me for writing what he’d thought for years but had never said publicly.

So much for the positive responses. A letter to my e-mail address criticized not only the art column, but much of what I’d been writing for 40 years. It didn’t actually say so, but the implication was that I’d be better suited to alphabetizing the classified ads.

One person dismissed a sculpture I like and had praised as “schlocky mall art.” Another wanted to know why I’d focused on relatively few public art pieces instead of taking a more extensive look. It was never my intent to visit and critique every piece of public art in town, but the letter writer had a point. As I was about to find out, I had a lot to learn about Boise’s public art.

Enter Karen Bubb, the city’s public arts manager. Her e-mail noted that all three of the works I’d singled out for “negativity and sarcasm” were commissioned prior to the city’s establishing a full-time art department with a professional staff and commissioning over 100 pieces of public art.

One hundred? I didn’t think there were that many in the whole state.

So, when Bubb offered to take me on a guided tour, I accepted. It was the least I could do, considering my newly acquired reputation as Public Art Enemy No. 1.

Our tour began at City Hall, where Bubb showed me the plaque designating it (and dozens of other buildings) as geothermally heated, an entryway mural with tiles by youthful artists, a “penny post card” mural and two pillars from the storied Natatorium. I’d walked past them dozens of times without noticing them.

From there we walked to the Basque Block. I’ve long admired the large Basque mural there, but had hurried by the block’s smaller works of art without giving them their due – Basque crests, an Oak of Guernica memorial, flag sculptures, names embedded in the sidewalk of the Basque families who emigrated here … In a way, the entire block is a work of art. Even the street was redesigned to better present the Basque heritage.

At the Grove, we peered through “binoculars” containing historical  photographs, admired the great blue heron sculptures and smiled at the symphony of percussive sounds released by our walking past the “Homage to Pedestrians” auditory artwork.

Here and there, Bubb pointed out the artwork gracing traffic boxes – 57 completed to date, another 41 still to come. We pass them all the time without stopping. Their artists deserve better.

It’s amazing what we just don’t notice. I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped to look at the photographs and read the texts on the Grove Street Illuminated piece at Ninth and Grove, but always in the daytime. I’d walked right over the “Boise Canal” lights in the sidewalk (the canal still flows underground there), utterly oblivious to them.

The same goes for the bricks you walk across in the courtyard of the Plaza 21 building on Ninth between Main and Idaho. They form the tail of a fish, Bubb said, complete with scales. You have to see it from the right perspective and take time to appreciate it, as you do with Kerry Moosman’s ephemera on the back of the Idanha Hotel.

“River of Trees,” embedded in the sidewalk outside the Ninth and Idaho Center, honors Boise’s river and street trees. It was done by the same artists who put the fish in the floors of Sea-Tac Airport.

The new Jesus Urquides memorial at Second and Main is mix of art and history. Uquides was a Mexican-American pioneer who built a “Spanish village” there in the late 1800s. The memorial’s focal point is a bronze camera with his image, pointed at the former site of the village. Texts tell his story; a model shows what the village looked like.

We didn’t have time to see all of the artwork Bubb wanted to show me, but I solemnly promised to see as much of it as possible on my own. My first stop was Anna Webb’s colorful new mosaic at Ninth and River. I was briefly Anna’s next-door neighbor in The Statesman’s newsroom and never knew what a talented artist she is.

Next I visited the Boise Watershed campus on Joplin Road, a veritable repository of public art – sculptures, stained glass, art inspired by reservoir rings – all reflecting the role of water and the importance of conservation in our lives. Even the drinking fountains are works of art.

A few miles away, public art graces the Foothills Learning Center. Its lobby walls are painted to represent the Boise Front. Sculptures represent air, fire, earth and water. “Air” is a gigantic dandelion with a top that turns in the wind, dispersing “seeds.” “Fire” is a mosaic of a tree damaged by fire, but healing. “Earth” and “water” are yet to come.

There isn’t space to include all of Boise’s public art pieces. There are just too many. And more are coming within the next year. They include new artwork for City Hall Plaza and other Downtown locations, the BSU campus, Marianne Williams Park, South Boise, the Boise Airport, the Foothills Learning Center, Julia Davis Park, Zoo Boise …

The thing that struck me most about all this is just how much public art and how many talented artists we have in Boise. I still don’t like the “steaming crack.” But I do like a lot of our public art, now that I’ve taken the time to actually see it.

“A lot of it we’ve done in recent years hasn’t been big projects,” Bubb said. “It’s been smaller and more personal. It tells our stories. And we’ve been so busy doing it that we haven’t done a good enough job of telling people about it. Maybe that’s where you can help us.”

The best way I can do that is to tell you to slow down. There’s more art to see in this city than you think. But you don’t appreciate it – or even see a lot  of it – from a moving car. Park the car and walk. Take your time. See what you’re looking at.

If you follow those simple instructions, I guarantee you’ll learn something and have fun doing it.

You’ll also be less likely to get a letter from some know-it-all saying that you should be put to work alphabetizing the classified ads.

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

Brightening the walls of my home office are photographs from some of my Destination Idaho stories, a drawing by Statesman artist Patrick Davis – and a watercolor painting of an old cafe.

Why the cafe?

Easy. It’s Manley’s.

Everyone who remembers Manley’s remembers it fondly. It was a local treasure. And soon the site of the little cafe with the big reputation will become Boise’s newest park.

Terry Day Park, on Federal Way just east of Protest, will open June 5. Initially it will be a grassy area with a pond, a walking path, trees and a small parking area. Future additions will include a playground, restrooms, tennis courts and a larger parking lot off of Overland Road.

The late Terry Day was a longtime Boisean known for volunteer work. gardening and love of tennis. She and her husband, Pat, lived in the house next door to Manley’s, where Pat, 88, still lives today. The Day family donated land and money for the eight-acre park, and Day also has donated his home to be used as a community center there after his death.

“It will be a great thing for the city,” park development coordinator Kelly Burrows said. “We’ll have a new neighborhood park in a part of town that really needs one. A new park on the Bench has been a priority, and the Manley’s connection is a nice bonus.”

For those who missed it, Manley’s was more than a cafe. To look at it, you wouldn’t have guessed that. For that matter, you probably would have driven by without stopping. It was just a little white building, old and borderline shabby, with faded paint a patina of grease.

But the food!

Or rather, the enormity of the food. Not that it wasn’t good, because it was, but the portions were legendary.  If you wanted fancy food, you went somewhere else. If you wanted plain but tasty food – and lots of it – you went to Manley’s.

Its founder and longtime proprietor was W. Manley Morrow, an old-time chef and avid carnivore who prided himself on selecting the best meats, cured and aged to perfection. He opened the cafe in the early 1950s as Manley’s Rose Garden. In those days, it actually had a rose garden. One of my earliest memories is of dining there with my parents, enjoying the world’s best hamburgers at picnic tables surrounded by beautiful roses.

Good as they were, though, it wasn’t burgers that made Manley’s famous. Its tours de force were prime rib and pie a’la mode, served in eye- and stomach-popping portions.

Pat Day, who knew Morrow well, said he was “raised on a farm, and when he started the restaurant there were a lot of farmers in and around Boise. I think that was the basis of those huge portions. Farmers worked hard and ate big meals. He cooked that way for them and because that’s the way he was raised.”

Manley’s prime-rib dinners draped over the edges of the platters on which they were served – and they were big platters. For a couple of extra bucks, you could order prime rib for two – a larger portion (as if it was necessary) with an extra plate. Even a single portion was more than enough for two people. You ate until you couldn’t eat any more, and took the rest home for dinner the next night.

The pie was homemade, scrumptious. And, like everything else at Manley’s, the size of the servings never failed to elicit “oohs” and “aahs.” Imagine a quarter of a pie topped with half a quart of ice cream and you’ll have the right mental image – old-fashioned pies with rounded crusts and fat with fillings, the kind your great grandmother used to make.

Locals loved to take out-of-town visitors to Manley’s and watch their eyes bulge. Rumor had it that Jascha Heifetz, the violin virtuoso, agreed to return to Boise for a second performance just to eat at Manley’s again.

When Calvin Trillin, then the New Yorker’s food reviewer, came to town to research one of his U.S. Journal stories and was using the archives at The Statesman, we took him to Manley’s for lunch. His eyes widened as he took in the broken screen door, worn linoleum and greasy everything. Then he smiled and confided that he wasn’t a native New Yorker, let alone a food snob. He was a Kansas City native who loved honest, unpretentious food.

“Every town I go to, they take me to the restaurant in the glass ball on the top floor of the tallest building in town,” he said. “The prices are outrageous, and the food is awful. This place is great!”

To the dismay of its many fans, Manley’s closed in 1997. Morrow’s wife, Marge, ran the cafe after he died. Then their son ran it briefly and sold it to two of its waitresses, who ran it into the ground. The cafe that had brought so much enjoyment to so many was demolished not long afterwards.

Soon after that, the mail brought me a unique gift – the watercolor painting of Manley’s. It was long enough ago that I’ve forgotten the artist’s name, but I’ll always be grateful to him. He did the painting during the restaurant’s last days, after it had closed but before it was knocked down – a measure of its impact. How many doomed cafes have artists painting them?

Day still has the wooden Manley’s sign that greeted its customers.

“We hope to incorporate it into the design of the park,” Burrows said.

A great idea. It would be even better if the design included a plaque or a sign telling the Manley’s story. Too often our beloved institutions fade from the scene and are forgotten. Manley’s deserves to be remembered.

“An interpretive sign would be a good thing,” Burrows said. “Manley’s hasn’t been available to the public for a long time, but that way people could come to the park and experience it in a new way.”

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

Public art for the plaza at Boise City Hall, according to a recent Statesman headline, is “back on track.”

We can only hope.

When it comes to such projects, Boise has a history of being so far off  track that the result can be as much public outrage as public art.

Northwest Passage, for example. Remember that? Originally titled “Point of Origin,” it consisted of three sterile-looking rectangles in the same plaza the city is attempting to beautify with yet another piece of public artwork. Reaction was so negative – a  Statesman story at the time characterized it as “near apoplexy” – that it was moved to Julia Davis Park, where it remains today.

Northwest Passage was touted as evoking our history. Somehow those mystifying metal rectangles were supposed to inspire visions of Lewis and Clark, Capt. Bonneville or, for all the average person knew from looking at them, Chief Seattle.

The most historic thing about them may have been the sales pitch the artist used in talking the city into buying them. The only visions they inspired for me were of geometry class.

One of the most controversial examples of public art in Boise, of course, is that which confronts passersby at the corner of Capitol Boulevard and Front Street. This is one of the most, if not the most, prominent intersections in the city. It deserves something inviting. Something tasteful. Something beautiful.

So what do we have – assaulting us daily from the front of the Grove Hotel?

The steaming crack.

When it was unveiled, to considerable fanfare, I thought it looked like a geothermal weed – a vinelike monstrosity on an electric-blue background oozing steam. Its only saving grace was that the steam partially obscured the ghastliness of it. Now the paint is chipped and faded and even the placating steam is gone.

The crack was billed as a vertical river honoring water, “the lifesource of Boise,” but let’s be honest. Have you ever once walked or driven by it and observed, “My, what a lovely likeness of our lifesource!”

Of course you haven’t. It doesn’t look at all like a lifesource. It looks like what it is – a rundown, ill-conceived, formerly steaming crack.

An architectural firm is reassessing the crack in the hope that it can be renovated.

Here’s an idea. Forget renovating it. Take it out and start over. Fill in the crack and replace it with something that will require less maintenance and actually be attractive. What law says public art has to be ugly, weird, or both.

Speaking of weird, what about those ridiculous wings on the parking garage at the airport? They looks like mosquitoes trying to lift an anvil.

This is not to say that Boise doesn’t have good public art pieces. We’re fortunate to have a number of them:

Ann LaRose’s charming “Keepsies” sculpture, for example – the one of children playing marbles near the fountain on the Grove. And, though not art per se, the fountain itself. If there’s a better example of interactive public art in Boise, I haven’t seen it.

Amy Westover’s “Grove Street Illuminated,” the aluminum circles inscribed with historical photos and texts at Ninth and Grove. Not only is it interesting visually, you can learn a fair amount of local history from it. (Wouldn’t it be nice if the developer of nearby Bodo had included a fitting memorial to that area’s rich history? If you’re listening, Mark Rivers, it’s not too late.)

The new replica of Gutzon Borglum’s seated Lincoln in Julia Davis Park  inspires respect for one of our greatest presidents without being even slightly off-putting. I seldom pass it without stopping or at least slowing down. On successive visits, I’ve seen grownups reverently contemplating Lincoln’s legacy and laughing children snuggled up to the former president as if he were a beloved grandfather. You can’t ask much more of a sculpture than that.

A panel has selected three finalists from more than 50 artists or art groups that have applied to do the new piece for City Hall Plaza. You can see what they’ve come up with beginning May 11, at City Hall or on the city’s website, and will have two weeks to tell the city what you think.

That’s important. If, like me, you’ve bellyached about some of the lemons chosen in the past, this is your chance to influence a choice.

The panel that selected the finalists will name the winner, who will then have to win the approval of the city’s Visual Arts Committee, Arts and History Commission, the Capital City Development Corp. and ultimately the city council.

If that many people like it, maybe it will be something the rest of us can live with – or at least not question the mental health of those who voted for it.

The city, according to a recent Statesman story, “is looking for a piece that is modern and looks toward the future but also is welcoming, exciting and comfortable for people who come to City Hall.”

Fine. But would it be too much to hope for something really basic – that it be pleasing to the eye?

Each time the subject of beautifying Boise is in the news, I think of a remark by a local architect, who told me years ago that when it came to aesthetic considerations it was common to cut corners or settle for second-rate – or worse – because “it’s only Boise.” If it was New York or Chicago or Seattle, he said, architects, developers and even artists would do things  differently.

Boise has grown up a good deal since then. It’s bigger, more vibrant, more interesting. Our art should reflect that.

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

Most families have at least one eccentric, someone whose habits, appearance or lifestyle depart from the conventional. In my family it was my sister, Joanie.

She wasn’t eccentric in a bad way. In many ways, she was a remarkable person. She went halves with me on my first guitar. When my parents couldn’t afford it, she paid to have my teeth straightened. Though her own vision was fine, she learned to read braille to teach it to the blind. She prepared meals for the homeless. Most of her charitable works she kept to herself. When she died, most of the family knew nothing about them.

At her funeral, the thing that struck me most was how normal all of her friends looked – stylish, contemporary women living in the here and now. Joanie lived, to the extent she could, in a world of her own making.

If you happened to see her at one of her hangouts — Albertsons at 16th and State, Arnie’s Beauty Salon or the Elks Rehabilitation Hospital, where she worked almost until her dying day at age 75, you’d have remembered her. Her hair was a ’60s bouffant lacquered into submission with copious amounts of hair spray. Her makeup in her later years: vintage Sophia Loren. Her unfailing attire: black, low-heeled slip-ons; black, polyester slacks and a billowing, brightly colored print blouse.

Her habits didn’t die hard; they didn’t die at all. She drove her cars until they expired of old age, literally. When one ended its requisite decades of service with a repair bill exceeding the value of the car itself, she mourned. Then she bought a newer car and proceeded to drive it till its wheels fell off. She drove for nearly 60 years, and in all that time I remember her having four cars. If one hadn’t been totaled, it would have been three.

Long after color television sets had become the norm, she defiantly stayed with a black and white. The telephone in her kitchen was a bakelite Bell with a dial, dating to at least the 1950s and possibly to Alexander Graham Bell himself.

“Why should I get a new phone?” she would huff. “This one works perfectly fine!”

She could huff with the best of them and was particularly hair-triggered with our mother. They regularly got into arguments over such profound matters as whether the trim paint on our old house was pink or salmon. The spats would escalate until, in a terminal huff, Joanie would deliver one of her trademark  epithets – “Oh, my aching foot!” or “Gadfrey Agnes!” – grab her cavernous black purse and storm out of the house.

The flip side was that she could be infectiously cheerful. She loved to retell stories about funny things that occurred years ago, laughing as much as when they actually happened. It made everyone else laugh along with her, no matter  how many times we’d already heard the story. It was those times, I think, when I loved her best.

She was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She had a nursing degree but worked at a clerical job beneath her training or encyclopedic knowledge for the simple reason that she didn’t want to make a change, even if it meant moving up.

Change of any kind she abhorred, resisted, railed against. She took the same route to work every day, went shopping on the same day at the same store every week, lived in the same house with the same furniture for half a century. Her clothing and hairstyle didn’t change from the time she was a teenager. She had a standing hair appointment at the same time on the same day at the same place every week. While the rest of the family traveled, she stayed home. Including the family vacations of our youth, I can think of four times when she left Idaho, and rarely the city limits of Boise.

Her five-room home was the one she and her husband purchased as newlyweds and where they were living when both of their sons were born. It was painted gray, a color that didn’t change throughout her tenure there. If his tenure had been longer, there might have been changes. They divorced when the boys were small.

He remarried; she didn’t. She raised their sons alone, remaining on good terms with both of them for life. If you know a single parent or are one, you know what a feat that is. She’d have done anything for her boys. Family and her faith were everything to her. She was an unreconstructed, old-school Catholic who believed that the church had taken a wrong turn at the Vatican II Council, which  decreed that mass would be said in the vernacular, and that the true faith was that kept alive by a handful of itinerant priests who said it in Latin and otherwise clung to the old ways. Years passed without a visit from one of these increasingly aged and idiosyncratic men, but she continued to pray her rosary and read from her dog-eared prayerbook almost to her dying day. At its heart, Vatican II was her old nemesis:  change.

Our extended family had a tradition of getting together for Sunday dinners. The hosts  rotated weekly, from Joanie to our parents to my wife and me. One of the many things my sister did well was cook. Her baked-ham dinners and pineapple upside down cakes were universal crowd pleasers. She had an unsettling predilection, however, for trying new recipes gleaned from women’s magazines. Most had at least an even chance of backfiring. And over time, the strain of the  mandatory Sunday dinners took its toll. They consumed a big part of the weekend that could have been devoted to other things and were resented by those who had to cancel other plans, mainly me. In time I would come to regret that.

The get-togethers ended abruptly with a family rift that never entirely healed, the cause of which is best left unsaid. All families have things they don’t talk about; that’s ours. It’s enough to say that for the last  nine years of her life, we rarely saw my sister. We invited her repeatedly for Christmas and Thanksgiving, but the response invariably was silence. The chasm was too great for her to cross.

She was ten years older than me and as much a second mother as a sister when we were growing up. She was my only sibling, and it was important to win her approval.

The night before her older son was born, she came to hear my band play for a prom at Boise High School. We used to joke that it was climbing the gym bleachers that brought Kevin into the world. That night was the first and one of the few times she ever heard us play, and I wanted desperately for her to say we’d done well. The truth, however, was that to her we most likely were unbearable. She was Lawrence Welk and Rodgers & Hammerstein; we were the Beatles and Buffalo Springfield. She never said we were bad, but she almost never said we were good. Though I didn’t expect her to like our music, the withheld praise stung a little. It was she, after all, who had started me down that road with a pawnshop guitar.

Did I mention that she was actually my half-sister? My parents didn’t, either, until I was 16. Mom dropped the bomb casually on her way out the door to work one morning.

“Did you know that your father and I were both married before?” she asked, which was a little like asking whether I knew the house had been struck by a tsunami.

“Well, we were,” she continued. “That man who brings a Christmas present for Joanie every year is her father. Any questions?”

Only a hundred or so, none of which was ever asked. My folks only discussed their past lives on rare occasions when they thought circumstances demanded it, and then briefly and in tones that said “don’t ask.” They’d both been dead for years before I learned some of their  secrets.

Different fathers went a long way toward explaining why Joanie and I were so different. Physically, we looked nothing alike. And our tastes and temperaments were entirely different.

I liked John Lennon; she liked the Lennon Sisters.

She was a homebody; I was and still am smitten by the desire to see the world. She often asked when I returned from a trip to some distant place what it was like. She was interested in the world, just not in seeing it.

While she kept her home looking almost exactly the same for half a century, seldom changing or replacing anything unless it broke or wore out, I was continually buying different houses, moving, remodeling, changing. And with every change made during what I came to think of as the lost years, I wondered what she would think of it.

She was the last member of the family I grew up with, and losing the last relative you shared your childhood with is a game changer. In a flash, you appreciate more than ever how mortal you are, how little time you truly have left. You also realize that no matter what you do, none of the people who once meant everything are left to impress.

Do we ever fully outgrow our childhoods? I’m a father of three and grandfather of four. I’ve traveled the world, written books, retired from a job I loved, made a bit of a name for myself. I’m a big boy now. And I’m still, and always will be, looking for approval from my big sister.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman’s Life section. For readers who don’t take the Statesman,  it is posted on this free blog, http://www.woodwardblog.com, the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

No one who knew him will forget the late Grady Myers. He was an imposing figure: six-foot-four with merry blue eyes, strawberry blond hair and a Yosemite Sam mustache. He was, among other things, a combat veteran, a gifted artist and a collector of preposterous vehicles, from British Morgans to an ancient, hulking Imperial. Now he’s a posthumously published author.

Those who knew him couldn’t be happier about that. It was as a storyteller that many of us knew him best.

Grady and I became friends during his years at The Statesman, where he worked as the editorial department’s graphic designer and cartoonist. He should have been syndicated. His cartoons could make John Boehner laugh. He was one of those people who could effortlessly tell a tale, complete with sound effects, in a way that had everyone within hearing distance pounding their desks with laughter.

One of my favorite Grady stories was about his fleeting experience as a Borah High School football player. He went to Borah when its team was the best in the state and one of the best in the Northwest. His size made him an obvious candidate for it, but he hated practicing and wanted to quit. Told by everyone from his father to the coach that no one quit the mighty Lions, he thanked them for the advice, quit anyway and retired to a pleasant perch on a hillside, drinking beer, watching his former teammates run laps and making bets on who would throw up first.

He was a founding member of the Fenwick Club, patterned after an “exclusive” club begun by a New York tycoon who admitted homeless people but rejected applications from the rich and famous. A faded Fenwick Club shirt, graced by Grady’s artwork, remains one of my treasured possessions.

When the mood struck him, he would spin yarns about his time as an army private during the Vietnam War. Most gave the impression that the war was one comic incident or absurd foulup after another. He didn’t sugar-coat it – he told us about being shot and sent home with a Purple Heart – but he preferred to focus on the war’s antic qualities. Listening to him was like watching a M*A*S*H episode. I sometimes wondered what his war was actually like, the one with fear and suffering and the ever-present threat of death. Now, thanks to his book, I know.

Julie Titone, his ex-wife, helped him write and recently published his Vietnam memoir – “Boo Coo Dinky Dow: My Short, Crazy Vietnam War.” (Bocoo Dinky Dow means, in a word, nuts.) She said she hears “repeatedly from people that it’s the only book about Vietnam they have been able to read without dread, or to read at all. Grady’s bursts of humor, powers of description and engaging drawings pull them through.”

His perspective on the war was unconventional:

“The next five days brought me in contact with soldiers whose duties were at opposite ends of the mundane-to-murderous spectrum: an ice-cream machine repairman and members of the Iron Butterfly squad.  (The repairman) told us he hated to see us go out and fight and maybe get killed. He wouldn’t, he said, trade places with us for anything in the world. I just savored my vanilla cone and speculated that I, for one, would rather get my licks in behind a rifle than an ice cream maker.”

I don’t know how many Vietnam books I’ve read, each dispensing liberal doses of horror. At no point did any of them include the perspective of an ice-cream machine repairman. Only Grady would have thought of that.

He soon had second thoughts, however, about getting his licks in behind a rifle or, in his case, a machine gun. Gentle Grady’s response to his first order to kill someone was, to me at least,  the book’s most touching passage. His unit was entering a village where the first person they saw was an old man carrying a bundle of sticks. The big guy carrying the machine gun was told to shoot him.

“I flinched. We’d all heard stories about the papa-sans and the toddlers who hid explosives in their packages and playthings.”

Told again to shoot “the pathetic figure” in his gun sight, he refused.

Inquiries later revealed that the old man most definitely was not an enemy agent hiding explosives. He also was blind.

The day came, of course, when my friend the gentle giant had little choice. His squad had encountered some North Vietnamese soldiers who may have been involved in a massacre of children and a priest.

“I fired a long burst,” he wrote. “My eyes squinted, following my sight line to three squirming figures falling awkwardly into the churning brush.

“‘My God,’ I thought. ‘I’ve actually killed those people.'”

The gentle giant’s reaction?

“After Grady told me that part of the story,” Titone said, “he never discussed it again. I never pressed him on it. His attitude in the original telling was, ‘This is what the army trained me to do, and it was a kill-or-be-killed situation for me and the men behind me.”

In any case, he didn’t have time to think about it. Moments later, he was hit.

“It felt as if someone had welded a 10-penny nail to a sledgehammer and slammed it into my left shoulder.”

He was in a no-man’s-land, his fellow soldiers on one side, the enemy on the other. If he moved or yelled for help, he’d be shot again. To the Americans’ shouted inquiries of whether he was alive and whether he could move, he remained silent. But he also was afraid that he could bleed to death. Desperate, he eventually called out, and was shot two more times.

A medic who should have gotten a medal for it risked his life to give him first aid, and six more soldiers risked theirs to pull him to safety. A helicopter ride, a succession of hospitals and a trip home followed. Grady spent the rest of his life working as an artist. His health deteriorated and, sadly, he spent his last years in a wheelchair and then a nursing home. He died in 2011, at 61.

No one will ever know how much of a role Vietnam played in his demise. His war injuries caused pain, lack of sensation and difficulty walking for the rest of his life. He suffered from cluster headaches that literally laid him low. When we worked together, the current site of the Bureau of Reclamation building across Irving Street from The Statesman was an abandoned farm. When the headaches were bad enough, he’d go there, lie down in the grass and weep from the pain.

Titone doesn’t think he had “classic PTSD.” But she adds that he was reluctant to seek help for depression because he didn’t want to be thought of as a crazy Vietnam vet and that “it seems pretty clear that he self-medicated with alcohol, which led to an avalanche of health problems, including obesity and diabetes.”

This was the man who could, and did, make all who knew him laugh until they cried.

Parts of his book came close to bringing me to tears. Reading his stories as only he could tell them made me miss my friend more than ever. There were times when I could almost hear his voice.

Mostly, his book made me realize for the first time how much he suffered. The next time you see a veteran, of Vietnam or any other war, be sure to say thanks. We owe them more than we know.

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

In a normal year, February is my least favorite month – colds and flu, lousy weather, you’re sick of winter and it’s too early for spring.

This, however, has not been a normal year.

Or at least not a normal January.

The month began with abnormal precipitation. The first to notice was our granddaughter Chloe.

“Papa, there’s a big wet spot on the rug by the downstairs bathroom.”

Thinking it was her way of confessing to a spill, I blotted up the water with an old towel.

No problem.

It did seem like an awful lot of water, though.

About an hour later, our older daughter said I might want to take a look in the bathroom. She said this with the sort of expression Titanic passengers had when saying, “Captain, you might want to check below decks.”

A corner of the bathroom ceiling and the top of a wall were starting to buckle, and the wet spot by the bathroom door was spreading to the bedroom. Casa Woodward had sprung a leak.

Leaks are cunning. They almost always happen at the worst possible times in the worst possible places – like an upstairs toilet five minutes after you leave on vacation. That way they have time to destroy the house while you’re happily sunning yourself on a beach.

Luckily, I know a good plumber. There was a time when, as a younger man remodeling a North End house of horrors,  I tried to fix plumbing leaks myself. Now I know better. I call Harold.  He said he’d be over in the morning, and to shut off the water immediately.

Luckily, the shutoff valve at our house is conveniently located. All you have to do is wriggle the length of the house on your belly in a claustrophobic crawlspace teeming with deadly spiders. Though I’ve never actually seen one there, I know they’re lurking. Spiders are sneaky that way, like leaks.

Crawlspaces are not noted for cleanliness. I emerged bearing a striking resemblance to my grandfather Tom, a coal miner.

Harold’s face in the doorway the next morning was more than welcome. The source of the leak, however, proved to be something of a mystery. Nothing is ever easy at our house.

The suspects included the never-to-be-trusted upstairs-bathroom toilet. Sure enough, its shutoff valve was bad. Harold had a new one installed in less time than it would have taken me to find the tools. But he wasn’t satisfied. He isn’t one of the best plumbers around for nothing. For the next hour or so, he prowled the house like Sherlock Holmes on steroids. He tapped here, poked there, measured distances as carefully as a referee on third and inches.

“I don’t think that valve was the problem,” he concluded. “I think the problem could be in the wall behind it.”

This, obviously, was not what we wanted to hear. A plumbing problem inside a wall is like your only set of keys being locked in your car. Something has to get broken.

“I hate to bust into walls,” Harold said, “but we’re going to have to do it. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Another night without water. The leak, meanwhile, had accelerated its assault on the bedroom, where the carpet was doing a passable imitation of a bog. The bathroom wall and ceiling were bulging like a Chuck-A-Rama waistline.

In the morning, Harold began poking holes. The first was in a wall under a bathroom sink.

“That’s what I figured,” he said. “It’s wet back there.”

The next hole was in the bathroom ceiling.

Bingo.

“I feel the leak,” he announced. “It’s a pinpoint-sized hole in the pipe.”

More ceiling came down, exposing the culprit. For a pinpoint-sized hole, it was spraying a surprising amount of water. To me it looked more like a geyser.

“When they built the house, they crimped the pipe where it shouldn’t have been crimped,” Harold said.

A mistake that was certain to put a crimp in the family budget.

Harold had the leak fixed in no time. Fixing the hole in the ceiling and drying out the bedroom carpet, however, took over a week. Despite blotting and vacuuming up a shocking amount of water, the carpet remained terminally moist. Worse, it was beginning to smell like a mildewed dog.

By the time the carpet was replaced and the sheetrock damage was repaired, the leak that had begun innocuously with a small wet spot had devoured two weeks and a goodly portion of the winter travel budget. The silver lining was that we needed to replace the carpet anyway, and we could stop lying awake nights worrying about the plumbing.

For three days – specifically until the morning I got out of bed, headed for the bathroom and stepped onto wet carpet in almost exactly the place where the trouble had started before.

Could I be still be in bed, dreaming? Was this a recurring nightmare?

It wasn’t. This time the leak was coming from the furnace room, where the hot water heater was launching a lively new flood.

Following Harold’s instructions over the phone, I shut off the water to the hot water heater and used a hose to drain the tank. The floor dried up immediately.

“Okay, you need a new hot water heater,” he said. “I’ll be over with one the day after tomorrow.”

Having no hot water is only marginally better than having no water at all. Nothing feels quite like a cold shower on a morning when the temperature is near zero.

Harold was as good as his word. Back as promised, this time with an assistant, he had the old water heater out and the new one in in a couple of hours. The rest of the winter travel budget was gone, but we had hot showers again.  Life was good.

Until the morning of the wakeup call from hell.

“Sorry to wake you, but we don’t have any water.”

“No hot water?”

“No. No water at all.”

It was two below that morning. To the ceiling leak and mutinous water heater, we now could add frozen pipes.

Following Harold’s advice over the phone, we turned up the heat in the house to sweltering, blew warm air into the crawlspace, opened up the bathtub faucets. Still no water.

This time the water wasn’t just gone for a couple of hours or overnight. It was gone for almost three days …  No showers, no laundry, no washing dishes. You can’t even wash your hands properly. After one flush, the toilets are out of commission. It’s like camping without the fun.

Relatives let us use their showers and brought us jugs of water. We melted snow to fill the toilet tanks, wore a path from our house to the restrooms in a nearby park.

Then, a sliver of hope. The evening news reported that water meters had frozen all over the valley. The house and crawlspace were hotter than the hubs of hell and the water still wasn’t running – it had to be the water meter.

A water company crew reported promptly the next morning, Sure enough, the meter was frozen as tightly as John Boehner’s Obama face. Half an hour later, water was flowing from the kitchen faucet again.

“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” my wife said.

It was. When we count our blessings, we should include clean, running water that stays where it belongs and helps us through every waking hour of every day. At our house, we’ve come to  appreciate it every time we turn on a faucet.

Best of all, the Siberian January is over.

February never looked so good.

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

The trucks came early on a Monday morning. The temperature was near zero; the only people in the park were the men driving the trucks and an occasional runner on the icy Greenbelt bike path.

Tree-service trucks aren’t what you expect to see in a city park on a morning when pipes and water meters have frozen and slick roads have traffic all but gridlocked. What were trucks and heavy equipment doing in Municipal Park at 8 a.m. on one of the coldest days of our Siberian January?

For the first few minutes, I  hoped it was routine maintenance – a  weakened limb or an isolated case of disease. The equipment, however, said otherwise. Too big, too much of it. They were going to take down one of the trees that were a big part of why we moved to this part of town nearly a quarter-century ago.

By 8:30, big limbs were falling. From our kitchen, we could hear them crashing. At the rate they were coming down, the tree would be a memory by lunchtime. I got on the phone.

The woman who took my call at the city’s forestry department said the tree had been dropping branches. Worse, two more of the park’s big Norway maples were going to go. They’d all been dropping branches, she said, and the city was concerned that a branch could fall on someone.

Well, yes. In 2010, a man was killed by a falling branch in New York City’s Central Park. Another man was badly injured by a falling branch in Central Park and sued the city for neglect. We live in litigious times. Earlier generations reasoned that if a branch fell and killed you, it was an act of God, rotten luck, your time. They called an undertaker and moved on. Today, we call a lawyer.

I called The Statesman. If the forestry people got a call from a reporter, it might remind them of a more civically engaged era when people chained themselves to trees they loved rather than let them be cut down. They might worry about publicity. They might call off the guys with the chainsaws, at least temporarily.

Was I overreacting? No one else seemed particularly concerned. We were talking three trees in a park filled with them, in a city with thousands of them – a city named for trees. Maybe in the digital, instant-gratification age, trees don’t mean as much to people as they once did. As a reader comment on The Statesman website later put it, “Time marches on. Trees get old. Plant new ones.”

Right. Then wait the rest of your life for them to be as majestic and beautiful as the ones they replace.

Besides, these were my trees. Not really, of course, but after 24 years of living beside them, of seeing them from my window or yard virtually every day, I’d come to have a proprietary feeling about them, irrational as it may have been.

My kids and grandkids played in their shade. We’ve cooked breakfast and eaten picnic lunches under their spreading canopies. I’ve attended weddings there, church services, a memorial for a colleague who died too young. I’ve spent countless hours in my back yard, admiring the massive towers of green that reached for the summer sky. If you listened closely, you could hear the trees – an almost inaudible whisper of air rustling the leaves.

By noon, two trees had been felled and a third all but stripped of its limbs. As the workers were leaving for lunch, I walked over and took some photos. I called some neighbors. Maybe calls from concerned citizens would make the city issue an eleventh-hour reprieve.

It didn’t.

By mid-afternoon, having seen no sign of a Statesman reporter or photographer, I called two of the local news stations. One tree, after all, was still standing. Maybe there was yet some faint hope.

“Thanks for letting us know,” the people at the news stations said, using almost exactly the same words. “We’ll pass it on.”

I knew from long experience what that meant. I’d used the same line myself. Translation: don’t hold your breath waiting for us to get there.

The Statesman did publish a story two days later: City forester Brian Jorgenson was quoted as saying that a falling branch had narrowly missed a woman and her child last summer. He also said Norway maples are doing poorly valleywide.

“We don’t know if they’re diseased or not,” Jorgenson told me. “For some reason they seem to be having problems when they reach a certain age. We need to team up with some pathology experts and see if we can find the cause. If it’s something we can do something about, we would if it’s fiscally feasible.”

Great. But it would have been nice if that had happened before resorting to the ultimate solution – chainsaws. Maybe the result would have been the same regardless. Maybe the trees were beyond hope. But if there was any hope at all, my guess is that the taxpayers who use and love the park would have thought it was worth the cost of finding that out.

It also would be nice, when the city plans to cut down old trees in its oldest parks, to give the public some notice and a chance to comment.

“We do that for trees in public right of ways, but not in parks,” Jorgenson said. “If it’s not an emergency, like a dead tree that poses an obvious danger, I wouldn’t be opposed to doing that.”

By evening, all three trees were down. We watched from the kitchen window as the last one fell. When the trunk hit the ground, it shook the house.

In a single day, trees that had taken half a century or more to grow were memories. Workers returned the following day to remove the remaining timber, leaving stumps and circles of sawdust in the snow.

Losing the big Norway maples, Jorgenson predicted, “will definitely change the appearance of the park.”

It already has. A part of the park loved for its shade and the towering columns of leaves that blocked out the sky is a sunny place now. New trees will grow there, but it won’t look the same in most of our lifetimes. And looking out the window will never be as pleasant.

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

Until now I’ve avoided the debate over arming teachers in classrooms for some excellent reasons.

One is that few things are more inflammatory in idaho than the gun-control debate. My last foray into that quagmire ended with a fellow panelist taking a swing at me on public television. And he was the pro gun-control panelist, the alleged pacifist.

Another reason is that my experience with guns is pretty much limited to blasting away in my teenage years at jackrabbits, game birds and, on one memorable occasion, my neighbor’s hunting dog. In my defense, the dog was hidden by brush and looked exactly like a pheasant.

I do have considerable experience with teachers, however, including being married to one. And it occurs to me that one aspect of the debate over arming teachers has been overlooked.

What if the teacher is a nut job? We rightly worry about armed intruders in our schools, but what’s to prevent an armed teacher from going over the edge?

In saying this, I mean no disrespect to the majority of teachers who are stable, competent individuals. If all teachers were like Mr. Borque, for example, the argument to arm teachers would make a lot more sense.

Mr. Borque was the American Government  teacher and football coach at our school. He was built like a linebacker and looked like a Marine sharpshooter, which for all we knew he may once have been. One look at an armed Mr. Borque would have sent a would-be shooter fleeing in terror. And in the event of a shootout, there isn’t the slightest doubt who would have prevailed. If Mr. Borque had been at the Dallas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, 1963, JFK would be retired and living happily on his book royalties now.

Mr. Borque, however, was an exception. The majority of my teachers, from first grade through college, were, shall we say, ill-suited for armed combat. And a few were absolute loonies.

Before rebelling against a decade of parochial education and switching with two friends to public high school, I attended schools staffed almost entirely by nuns. Some were gifted teachers and kind, gentle souls. This was in the days, however, when their less than kindly colleagues inflicted discipline that today would be illegal. Sister Brutus, for example. (That’s not her real name; if I used her real name, she’d track me down and beat the living daylights out of me.)

Sister Brutus had what she quaintly referred to as a “boo-boo stick.” Made of heavy plywood, it had a face with tears painted on the business end. If you screwed up in class – and it didn’t take much – she put a check after your name on the chalkboard. Each check represented a lively whack with the boo-hoo stick after school. The more checks, the more whacks.

One boy in our class amassed an astonishing number of checks almost every day. It wasn’t that he was such a horrible kid; I think he just rubbed her the wrong way. Every night after school, he was whacked, and whacked and whacked some more. He rarely cried, probably due to the calluses.

God knows what would have happened if Sister Brutus had been armed with a .38 instead of a boo-hoo stick. She might have winged the poor kid for good measure.

Sister Screwloose seemed outwardly normal, even fun-loving, until the day she found out that one of the boys in our class had invited one of the girls over for Sunday dinner with his family. We were then in sixth grade, and to her way of thinking this was the equivalent of one of the boys inviting a girl over for a spirited orgy.

Instead of the usual classroom routine, she devoted the entire day to making fun of the youthful “offenders.” We were encouraged to draw cartoons of them and write things about them on the chalkboard. Everyone seemed to know it was wrong but her. The next day, at the request of their parents, the principal, the pastor and quite possibly the pope, she apologized profusely. The apology was heartfelt, heartbreaking. We were sorry for her. But we were sorrier for those two kids.

The following year, another breakdown. Two of the class troublemakers drove our seventh-grade teacher berserk. She was escorted from the school babbling. We never saw her again. I hate to think what might have happened if either of those women had had revolvers instead of rosaries hanging from their belts.

The same went for Mr. Jitters, one of my teachers at Boise High School. The man was terminally nervous. One of the class clowns exploited his agitation by playing one of those tasteless jokes that only high school boys found funny. He slipped the textbook out of the projector Mr. Jitters was using to highlight passages on a movie screen and replaced it with a Playboy centerfold. When the resulting snickers caused him to turn around and see what his pointer was pointing at, he turned a deep shade of red and wordlessly left the room. A substitute teacher replaced him for the rest of the week.

Years later, I happened to run into Mr. Jitters. He said he was never comfortable teaching and had left the profession for another line of work. I didn’t ask him whether he’d have felt more comfortable if he’d been packing heat. Given his shaky condition, a scary thought.

My English teacher at Boise High School taught us the finer points of usage and passed on her love of literature to those who were susceptible. She was a good teacher, but she was old and frail. It was all she could do to climb the stairs to her classroom. Somehow I can’t see her strapping on a Glock before setting off to work in her Rambler every morning. Or fending off a burly student bent on stealing her piece.

One of my foreign language teachers at the University of Idaho was as excitable as he was inspiring. It was nothing for him to climb on top of his desk, wave his arms and jump up and down. If he’d been wearing a gun, he could have shot himself in the foot.

Another of my college teachers could have posed for a Norman Rockwell painting of a kindly college professor – tweed jacket, bow tie, twinkling blue eyes. He was wise and gentle, universally loved. He could have been armed with every weapon imaginable, and I  don’t think he could have hurt anyone.

Strict gun control laws like those adopted in some countries will probably never happen here. But it’s hard to believe that our best minds can’t come up with a better response to Newtown than strapping guns on the mixed bag of individuals who teach our children. If good is to come of the tragedy, it will be that it leads to a civil discourse and finding a middle ground that reduces the likelihood of future tragedies.

That will be mainly up to the members of Congress – who aren’t known for harmonious relations. Let’s hope they don’t vote to arm themselves.

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

With due respect for Time magazine and Barack Obama, my Person of the Year for 2012 is Dorothy Peachock.

Who is Dorothy Peachock?

Good question. She is, among other things, the only Dorothy Peachock in the United States. More importantly, to me at least, she and her husband, Phil Peachock, are the owners of a music store in Kent, Ohio. Or at least they were until recently.

Spin-More Records closed last spring, when a franchise sandwich shop offered to pay more rent for the space. Familiar story: a beloved local institution is forced out for a cookie-cutter franchise. At least one customer, according to a local news report, wept at the news.

The silver lining, for me and no doubt for other record shoppers, is that Spin-More is selling some of its massive inventory, assembled over 30 years, online. And one of those records – the only one for sale in the U.S., incidentally – was a record I’ve wanted forever.

The package, stamped with Dorothy’s name and address, arrived just in time for Christmas. Opening the carefully packed box, I momentarily succumbed to doubts. Could it really be the right record? Decades had passed since I’d even seen it. Maybe I’d remembered the title incorrectly. Or the artist.

I hadn’t. One look at the jacket and the doubts were gone. It was the right record, all right _ “Christmas Joy,” by George Melachrino and his orchestra, recorded in 1958 “in living stereo.” The Christmas album of my childhood, the best Christmas album ever.

My sister, who was a decade older than me, bought it at the old C.C. Anderson’s store, later Macy’s, in downtown Boise. It immediately became a family favorite. I used to spend hours just looking at the jacket photo, a nighttime shot of a postcard-perfect mountain cabin all but buried in powder snow, gigantic icicles on its eaves illuminated by its golden-glowing windows. It was probably taken in Vermont or Colorado, but I was an impressionable kid who dreamed of skiing in the Swiss Alps and was enamored of all things Swiss. Anyplace that picturesque had to be in Switzerland.

It was the music, though, that made the record special.

“Listen to ‘Jingle Bells’,” my sister said. “It sounds like sled dogs whining on a cold winter night.”

It wasn’t sled dogs; it was bassoons. But she was right. With a little imagination, they did sound like sled dogs. “Jingle Bells” has never been one of my favorite carols. But I like that “Jingle Bells” a lot.

The thing that made “Christmas Joy” different from most Christmas records was that much of it wasn’t Christmas melodies at all. A carol might begin with a familiar tune, then transition to an original phrase or lush orchestral passage that had no earthly business in a Christmas carol, except to make it unpredictable and beautiful. The album kept and held your interest with unconventional instrumentation, chord changes and twists of melodies where you least expected them. More than half a century has passed since it was recorded, and I’ve yet to hear another Christmas album like it.

Looking back, I think some of the happiest times in my life were spent listening to that old record. It wasn’t just the music – though that was a big part of its appeal – it was the times of which it was  part. Think Jean Shepherd’s “A Christmas Story.” BB guns or model trains in carefully wrapped packages under the tree, old-fashioned Christmas lights glowing in a darkened room, extra fuses in the kitchen cupboard.

Every December, my grandmother Susie would come and stay for a week or more. Like the Christmas album, she was a family favorite. She’d outlived three husbands, three of her four children and had three homes burn, yet somehow remained the most jovial person we knew. Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without her.

Her arrival invariably launched a baking frenzy. She and my mother and sister spent entire days in the kitchen, making pies, fudge, Christmas cookies, old-fashioned fruitcake … Being a boy and too young to be of much use anyway, I’d hunker down in the corner by the heat register and enjoy the results. Homemade Christmas treats, a Hardy Boys mystery, “Christmas Joy” on the stereo — it didn’t get much better than that.

My sister loved that old record so much that she kept it for more than 30 years. (She also liked it so much that even the most delicately worded suggestion that it would make a fine Christmas gift for her little brother was brusquely rejected.) Eventually it disappeared, as records will, its whereabouts becoming a mystery.

By then I’d made a cassette tape of it, but the tape faithfully reproduced every skip and scratch. Then the tape deck broke. I considered getting a new one, but this is the digital age. Ask about tape decks at an electronics store and the clerks will look at you like you had three heads.

Annual  attempts to find the album online failed. Only this year did I learn why. For some reason (perhaps because it was what was scrawled on the cassette tape box), I thought the album had been recorded by Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra. Hugo was indeed an orchestra conductor of that era and had recorded several Christmas albums, but not “Christmas Joy,” which was why my searches came up empty. Only this month, when it occurred to me to search without using Hugo’s name, did I get lucky and find Dorothy.

The record she carefully boxed and shipped from Ohio was in remarkably good shape for as old as it is, but it still had some pops and scratches. Don Cunningham, an audio-wizard friend,  removed them on a CD he burned for me, making the long-dead George Melachrino and his orchestra sound good as new. The CD played non-stop on Christmas Eve while the kids and grandkids opened their gifts. Now it’s a favorite with a new generation.

It’s funny how things from your childhood occasionally come back to you, making them more dear than ever. I can’t say that old record is the best Christmas present I ever got. In the sense that I bought it myself, it wasn’t a present at all. And the best Christmas present I ever got, or ever will get, was a guitar I’d ordered and been making payments on for over a year. My parents secretly paid the balance and had it waiting on Christmas morning. No gift before or since has been as beautiful.

“Christmas Joy” wasn’t in the same league as that, or maybe even a Red Ryder BB Gun.

But it was close.

Thanks, Dorothy.

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

I’m writing this well ahead of Friday’s end of the world, in the absolute certainty that it will be published two days later.

It’s a safe bet that prayers at Thanksgiving tables Thursday included expressions of heartfelt gratitude for the end of the most expensive and one of the most negative political campaigns in U.S. history.

“Thank you, Lord, for our family, our home and our health. And for delivering us from the slurs, lies, shameless attacks and generally despicable tactics of those who would be our leaders.”

If you were lucky enough to be in Idaho for the duration of the campaign, you may be wondering what would cause me to make such an observation. In Idaho, the campaign was for the most part downright civil. That’s because the Idaho “races,” such as they were, didn’t matter. Everyone knew the state would vote solidly Republican, so neither party spent much time or money here. The only issue that inspired anything close to heated campaigning was repeal of the Luna Laws, and even that was low-key compared with was happening in many states.

I know because I happened to spend time in another western state during the campaign’s final two weeks. You think Idahoans were happy when the political ads ended? Where I was, they were kissing the ground and serving boilermakers at church socials.

The following isn’t a verbatim record of the congressional campaign ads that assailed the voters there, but it’s close. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty and am guilty myself of some exaggerating – but not by much:

“Candidate Smith voted to cut your Social Security benefits and your Medicare benefits. This conniving shyster would like nothing better than to have  you, your family and your middle-class friends forced into the streets with nothing while he and his cronies continue to get rich.”

One of the more emotional commercials featured a woman claiming that Smith “voted to send women like me home from the hospital the same day we had our breasts removed.” Another said  he would eliminate the department of education, slash millions in school budgets, pollute drinking water and “redefine rape, victimizing women all over again.”

Anyone would have to be better, right?

But wait. Pro-Smith commercials argued that his opponent, Candidate Jones, was forced  out of his job, leaving his employers millions in debt. They also claimed that Jones wanted to raise taxes and “lacked integrity.” A vote for Jones was a vote to put scheming, traitorous liberals in Congress.

Two prominent politicians who had once endorsed Jones did an about-face, accusing him of having “the most shameful political ad of all,” which under the circumstances was saying quite a lot.

Often, opposing ads aired back to back, offering vastly different perspectives of the same candidate:

“Candidate Johnson’s opponent would end Medicare and Social Security, but the saintly Johnson is fighting the good fight for us. Her fight is our fight. She supports our military and our oppressed middle class. She just wants to help people. If not for her tragic death, Mother Teresa would have happily managed Johnson’s campaign.”

Seconds later, “A vote for Johnson is a vote for socialism. This liberal wench has accused hard-working, stay-at-home mothers of sponging off their husbands. And we have it on good authority that one of her biggest campaign donors is Vladimir Putin!”

“Candidate Brown is fighting for you. She puts the middle class first.”

“Candidate Brown’s campaign is full of lies!”

Creative use of photos reached new lows. One commercial would have a candidate with a perfect suit, perfect hair and a thousand-watt smile; the next would be of the same candidate with rumpled clothes, a smirk fit for a wanted poster and hair that looked like he’d been up all night with Hurricane Sandy. One ad would picture a candidate smiling beneficently at the Pearly Gates; the next had him spraying napalm on the hubs of hell.

Commercial after commercial portrayed candidates as selfless patriots who wanted only to help their fellow man and make America a better place – and as lying scoundrels who wanted to get rich and send the country to hell in a chauffeur-driven limousine. The same candidates!

And we wonder why voters get confused.

A tactic used repeatedly was to attack a candidate by saying he or she “supports Obama, was hand-picked by Obama or was an ‘Obama Rubber Stamp’.” As if this were the equivalent of saying a candidate was hand-picked by Charles Manson or a rubber stamp for Attila the Hun.

One of my favorite commercials pictured a group of cowboys seated around a “Blazing

Saddles” campfire, referring to the target of their ire as a lobbyist who, if elected, would be “happier than a pig in mud.”

The commercials were virtually non- stop. You were actually relieved when some insipid pitch for dry-mouth or ED medicines broke the stream of vitriol.

Idaho politics are hardly perfect, and occasionally laughable. We’ve had Idaho politicians brandishing six-guns on the floor of Congress, cleaning cowboy boots in a bidet at a luxury hotel, a congressman regularly claiming congressional immunity for speeding tickets, a state legislator crashing a stolen SUV while driving under the influence, and of course Dr. Winder’s helpful hints for women confused about whether they were raped.

But even the most clueless Idaho politicians still tend to conduct their campaigns with a degree of decorum. As I learned this month with dismay bordering on nausea, what passes for political discourse in some states makes Idaho political campaigns seem almost courtly.

The really scary part was that in many cases the negative campaigning was successful. Is that what we’ve to – candidates with limited scruples and big TV budgets getting the keys to the kingdom?

Idaho, with its small population and predictable voting patterns, is virtually ignored in national elections. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe the states where politicians make voters almost physically ill with their harangues could learn something from Idaho. Civility doesn’t have to be obsolete, even in politics.

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