People sometimes ask if boredom has been a problem since I retired. The answer is no, thanks in part to “Idaho: the Movie,” a project I’ve been working on most of this year with a company called Wide Eye Productions.

I’d worked with Wide Eye on another project several years ago, and when the people there came up with a new idea, I was lucky enough to be asked to help. They’d been shooting gorgeous HD and beyond-HD video of Idaho for over years and wanted to use it to make a movie. I was asked to be its writer and narrator, which proved to be an education — as well as the most fun I’ve had in some time.

The Wide Eye crew spent a big part of this year shooting additonal video, including interviews with me at my home and on the road. The education part of it, for me at least, was learning how much time and hard work go into making good television. Scenes that take thirty seconds or less in the edited film can take hours or days of traveling, on-site preparation and shooting. The photographers and editors routinely worked 15- and 20-hour days.

It was less time-consuming for me as the writer-narrator, but still a challenge. I’m geared to writing columns and lengthy profiles or feature stories. Writing short, informative segments that coordinated with what viewers would be seeing was a new experience, as was recording voiceovers in the studio. It was a lot of work, but I’d do it over again in a heartbeat — especially after seeing the final version, which shows our state and the work of those talented photographers and editors at their best. Because I didn’t shoot a single frame of it, I can say without bragging that it’s a truly stunning portrait of the place we call home –  a love letter to Idaho

In my career as a journalist, I crisscrossed Idaho repeatedly. So I was surprised (and a bit embarrassed) while working on the film to be introduced  to a couple of places I’d never been. It gave me a new appreciation for a state so big and diverse that you can spend a lifetime in it and  it never stops surprising you.

“Idaho: the Movie” includes interviews with authors Kim Barnes and Clay Morgan, singer-songwriter Pinto Bennett, mountain guide and extreme skier Zack Crist and fly-fishing guide Lonnie Allen (who is also the mayor of Warm River, population three.) Each of them spoke eloquently about the parts of Idaho they call home.

On Sunday at 9 a.m., I’ll join two members of the Wide Eye bunch in viewing parts of the film and discussing it with Dee Sarton on KTVB’s Viewpoint program. “Idaho: the Movie” itself will premiere on Channel 7 at 8 p.m. on Friday Nov. 30. We hope you’ll join us for a new look at an old friend.

Editor’s note: DVDs of “Idaho: the Movie: will be sold at Idaho Mountain Touring; Idaho Albertsons, Costco and Flying J stores, and http://www.idahothemovie.com beginning next week. Signings will be at Idaho Mountain Touring, 13th and Main, Dec. 6 at 5 p.m.; the Boise Costco Store on South Cole Road Dec. 7 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and at the Albertsons Store at Cherry Lane & Ten Mile Dec. 8 from noon to 2 p.m.

A phrase in an email from a friend of Paul and Sydney Revere’s hit like a blow.

“When they tore down the Boise Avenue house … ”

Tore down the Boise Avenue house? The Reveres’ longtime home on Boise Avenue was gone?

It was. They sold it in 2008 and moved to Branson, Mo., where Paul’s band now plays much of the time. The new owners demolished the house and filled in the pool in September. I hadn’t driven by for a while so the news was a surprise, to say the least.

A sad surprise. That wonderful old house and what it represented — reduced to memories.

It’s “a tremendous sense of loss and sadness” Sydney Revere said. “ … Sure we sold the house. But we always thought it would be there to at least drive by.”

To me, 2305 Boise Ave. was one of Boise’s most beautiful homes. Not in a showy way like a lot of upscale houses, but in its own, uniquely private way, it was a Boise treasure.

You could drive right by without knowing it was there. Tall trees and enveloping greenery on a tall, wrought-iron fence hid it from traffic on Boise Avenue. The only way in was through a gate with an entry code. If you weren’t expected and didn’t know the code, forget it.

“It was magical behind those gates,” longtime friend Valerie Crowe said.

The house was a long, white, two-story, with a red tile roof that reminded me of Boise’s Spanish Mission-style depot a few blocks away. Inside were dark wood floors and spacious living areas with floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the outdoors — with good reason. It was the backyard that was the glory of the place.

It really was magical — old trees, a pool with piano-key steps and an almost vertical, vine-covered hillside that climbed from the lawn to the Bench and shut out the world. The pool, classic statues and vivid blooms in potted plants complemented almost-tropical greenery. In that verdant seclusion, it was hard to believe you were in the heart of the state’s largest city. It was like being at a private resort.

“It was our private paradise,” Paul said. “Syd and I designed the pool and the yard and spent every minute we could there. Everyone loved that yard. Billy Bob Thornton couldn’t get over how nice it was.”

Boisean Larry Leasure and his wife Ilene thought it was nice enough that two of their daughters and a niece were married there, “with twinkling lights everywhere put up by Paul himself, and almost everyone ending up in the pool, including one bride!”

The house was built on the original Ridenbaugh estate. William Ridenbaugh was a 19th century irrigation investor for whom the Ridenbaugh Canal and Ridenbaugh Street were named. The Reveres found one of his wife’s button shoes when they dug their pool in 1986. The Ridenbaughs’ turreted mansion caught fire and was later demolished, making way for the home that for nearly 30 years would be the residence of Boise’s most successful pop star.

For newcomers and others who may be unfamiliar with them, Paul Revere and the Raiders had 23 consecutive hit singles in the days when rock was young. They starred in more than 500 episodes of a Dick Clark-produced television show. I can’t think of another Idaho group that has come anywhere close to having that kind of commercial success. Revere was Boise’s one and only rock icon.

I knew him slightly in the 1960s because two friends of mine played in his band. Later I interviewed him for People Magazine, in the days when it did stories about real people instead of celebrity gossip. But it wasn’t until the early ’80s at the Boise Avenue house that I came to know him as more than a musician. He was also one of Idaho’s best storytellers.

My first visit to the house, with then Morrison Center Director Fred Norman and late Statesman sportswriter Jim Poore, was one to remember.

Ostensibly we were there to try to talk Paul and his band into playing a concert at the Morrison Center. What actually happened was that he spent two hours regaling us with show-business stories — Wayne Newton tossing an expensive microphone (nightly) after pretending its cord was too short for him to reach out and shake fans’ hands, one of the Beach Boys throwing a potted plant from a high-rise window because his neurotic brother was afraid of it, etc. Jim and Fred and I were literally choking. None of us had ever laughed harder.

Paul may have saved me some broken bones that day. It was fall and the backyard and original pool were covered with leaves. We were walking across the lawn and laughing so hard at Paul’s stories that we weren’t paying attention to where we were going. If he hadn’t grabbed me at the last second, I’d have laughed my way to the bottom of an empty pool and a trip to the emergency room.

This was in the early 1980s. Paul had recently put the Raiders back together, rehearsing at the Boise Avenue house, to go back on the road after a long hiatus. He’d bought the house in 1979 and was then in the process of an extensive remodeling.

Sydney remembers the original architecture as “midcentury bomb shelter — little windows, small rooms … appliances, sinks and baths were either pink or powder blue. It was a monument to the era it was built. We wanted more of an open concept and a funky, Old World feel.”

The Reveres lived on the remodeled second floor. The west end of the first floor became an apartment for Sydney’s late mother, Rose Buschman.

How do I tell you about Rose? A native New Yorker, she had a New York accent and a New York attitude. I mean that in the best possible way. New Yorkers can be rude and pushy, but Rose was neither of those. New Yorkers also can be classy, funny, disarmingly straightforward, effortlessly likable. Rose was all of those.

The Reveres traveled a lot and liked having friends spend time with Rose while they were gone. The friends were the ones who got the better part of that experience. It was like spending time drinking wine and swapping stories with Lauren Bacall. In fact, Rose reminded me of Lauren Bacall. If they’d met, I’d bet anything they’d have become friends.

Rose’s obituary and picture are still on our refrigerator. A day seldom passes that we don’t think of her.

When I learned that the house had been torn down, I went by to have a look. The gate was locked and I was peering through the fence when a car pulled over and stopped. Its occupants had known the Reveres and Rose, and we spent some time reminiscing. They repeatedly mentioned happy times by the pool, which wasn’t surprising.

“Our favorite memories are of dinners by the pool with family and friends,” Paul said. “That, the weddings in the yard, decorating like crazy for Christmas … there are so many memories there. We spent the biggest part of our lives there.”

Now it’s gone — the house, the pool, everything but the landscaping cleared to make way for a new chapter. The Reveres still have a home in the mountains in Idaho, but nothing else could ever be like their Boise home.

I left a message for the new owners asking why they tore it down, but it wasn’t returned. My understanding is that they want to build a new house on the property. And as someone who spent way too many years remodeling an old house and wishing I’d torn it down and built a new one instead, I can understand that.

But that doesn’t make it any easier for those who loved the place.

When I think of 2305 Boise Ave., I’ll think of laughing at Paul’s stories, cozy evenings in Rose’s apartment and summer afternoons in that matchless backyard, enjoying the unique beauty of such a special place.

I wish the new owners well in their new home. But it’s memories of the old one that I’ll treasure.

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.

The headstone is one of the new ones at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery. It gives the usual information about his rank and years of service in the Navy before adding, poignantly, that he was “Our Papa John.”

How do I tell you about John Leo Ryan, my late father-in-law and one of the most complex and unforgettable men I’ve ever known? He had an Irish temper, a cantankerous tongue and a glare that could cut stone. He also had a Gabby Hayes giggle, a heart of gold and an underlying sweetness that belied his grumpery. A man of contrasts.

We met in his kitchen in Olympia, Wash., where he was installing a refrigerator. His first words to his future son-in-law:  “Here, hold this!”

With that he handed me a length of copper tubing and shoehorned himself into the space between the wall and the refrigerator. Only when the job was finished did he emerge, offer a calloused hand and say, “Hi, you must be Tim. I’m John Ryan.”

It was clear from the start that he was a straight-talking, no-nonsense man of action. When he wasn’t installing refrigerators, he was likely to be building furniture, repairing a balky boat motor, building a cabin, trolling for salmon in the pre-dawn mists of Puget Sound, volunteering at his church, traveling the world as a ballroom-dancing instructor or other of his eclectic pursuits.

He was raised in his mother’s boarding house in Lincoln, where his father was a railroad worker. The youngest of four siblings, he learned early to work hard, eat before the food ran out and speak up when rubbed the wrong way, a talent at which he excelled. His reaction to a slight at the Boise River Festival was vintage Papa John. When a portly woman arrived late and set up her chair in front of some people who had been been waiting for hours, blocking their view of the floats, he politely suggested that she move. She rudely refused, prompting a more pointed response:

“Move, blubber butt!”

She moved.

Part of his penchant for pungent repartee could be attributed to his years in the Navy. No one gets in and out of the Navy without learning the art of colorful conversation. He was the radar officer aboard a destroyer, the U.S.S. Morrison, on the morning of May 4, 1945, when a kamikaze plane crashed into the bridge. Three more followed, sinking the ship and claiming 152 lives. Half a century later, the Navy awarded medals to those who survived. He wore his “kamikaze survivor” cap almost to his dying day.

It’s impossible for me to think of him without recalling his way with a phrase.

On the temperature in the Morrison’s boiler room:  “It was hotter than the hubs of hell down there.”

On catching a lucky break:  “Even an old blind dog gets a bone once in a while.”

On his beloved Washington Huskies, usually following a Washington touchdown: “Best team in the nation! Nobody can touch ’em!?

On the Huskies after a Washington miscue: “Worst team in the nation! They’re a buncha’ chowderheads!”

On his hapless Chicago Cubs:  “The Cubs are like grains of sand tossed on the water. Sooner or later, they sink to the bottom.”

Papa John-isms were uttered with a hundred-watt smile that reflected his Irish humor and a gentle side. When the transmission froze on the car he loaned us for our honeymoon, he drove most of the way to the Washington coast to fix it, cheerfully and without once mentioning that the culprit was my shifting. When we bought our first house, he loaned us most of the down payment. When we bought Maintenance Manor, our second house, he loaded up his tools, drove from Olympia to Boise and spent a week helping us work on it, a kindness that was repeated again and again during our years there. (He told us at the outset that the best thing we could do was knock the house down and have a new one built on the lot. It was the best home-improvement advice we ever got.)

None of us will forget the day that our son, then a toddler, fell out of Papa John’s boat in a storm. We’d never seen anyone move faster. He was over the side in a blink. If not for him, we’d still be grieving parents. He never bragged or even reminisced about it. To him, it was just something that had to be done.

He wasn’t reticent, however, when it came to dispensing advice about what had to be done. At the end of one of his Maintenance Manor visits, he took me aside and advised me to take a firmer hand with our daughters.

“They get away with too much,” he said. “If it keeps up, you’re going to have trouble with them when they get older.”

I took his advice, in moderation. None of us ever really know how successful we are as parents. One of the girls’ teenage years were decidedly rocky, but they both turned out okay. Part of the credit for that has to go to their grandfather.

In his later years, he was hard of hearing. We still laugh about the time our youngest granddaughter, then four, yelled at him through an open window behind his favorite deck chair.

“Hi, Papa John. I’m right behind you.”

“Huh?”

“HI, PAPA JOHN! I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU!”

“Quit yellin’!”

Softly, “Hi, Papa John. I’m right behind you.”

“Huh?”

It was hard to say which was worse, the Alzheimer’s that claimed the mind of the brilliant mathematician and accountant who served as Washington’s deputy treasurer, or the prostate cancer that took his life.

Mercifully, his Alzheimer’s was the slow-progressing variety. At first, the differences were subtle. In the later years, they were devastating. He forgot that he spent a week’s vacation with the family in Mexico almost before the plane home had touched down. A hundred times a day, he asked his wife, Elsa, where the bathroom and bedroom were, whether he had eaten, even how to eat. Resisting the temptation to preserve her own sanity by putting him in a “home,” she took care of him to the end. They don’t give medals for that, but they should.

With the end in sight, they moved to Boise to be with family here when it came. It came slowly, and was heart-breaking to witness. The cancer had spread to other organs and was so painful that even the pressure of a sheet against his skin made him cry out in agony. This from an old salt who had gouged fingers with fish hooks, smacked thumbs with hammers, even fallen through a roof and rarely mentioned  pain.

Powerful drugs helped — for a while. In addition to easing the pain, they gave us precious time with a Papa John we had rarely glimpsed. Gone were the glare and  grumpiness, replaced only by the sweetness that had had made him lovable in spite of them. He sang, danced with his wife, his daughters, his granddaughters.

In the final weeks, not even the most powerful drugs helped. The pain was beyond helping.

“I’d like to go to sleep tonight and not wake up,” he said one memorable afternoon.

Then, quietly breaking our hearts, “Would that be okay?”

We told him it was. No one should have to suffer that much. Defying the doctors’ predictions, he hung on until his daughter Mary could arrive from her home in Washington. When she, too, told him it would be okay, he got his wish.

It was nearly dark and an unusual thunderstorm was brewing when we got home from the hospital that evening – an ominous blue-black, punctuated with flashes of lightning.

“What a strange storm,” Elsa said. “… Maybe it’s John.”

It was dry lightning — wind and thunder, but hardly any rain. A lot of  bark, not much bite.

It was perfect.

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.

DEPOE BAY, Ore. – An unlikely sight greets Boiseans in this picturesque seaside community.

Deep in Oregon Ducks and Beavers country, a blue and orange banner graces an upstairs window of a restaurant overlooking a popular stretch of Oregon’s famous coast.

Two things about this struck me as being about as probable as seeing an Oregon Beavers logo in my front window. One was that, some 400 miles from Idaho, one of the last things I expected to see was a Boise State banner. The other was that it was that, of all the restaurants where it could have happened, it was this one.

Depoe Bay is the sort of place people have in mind when they think of idyllic coastal villages. It’s on one of the prettiest parts of the coast, whales frequent its bay and it has a varied and interesting mix of shops and restaurants. One of them, the Spouting Horn Restaurant, has been a revered haunt of the Woodward clan forever. We’ve been going there since our kids were small. It isn’t much to look at, just a weathered-gray building with lots of windows, a blue and white restaurant sign and a row of newspaper boxes out front. But the food brings us back again and again.

“It’s comfort food,” Phil Taunton said. “Fish and chips, pie … Some restaurants are known for being trendy. We’re known for the consistency of staying the same.”

A lifelong Oregonian, Taunton is an unabashed BSU fan. He’s also the cook at the Spouting Horn, which has stayed more or less the same since the 1930s.

“We’re starting to see our fourth generation of customers,” he said. “We have people come in with their kids and tell us their grandparents used to come here.”

Named for a saltwater blowhole in the heart of Depoe Bay, the Spouting Horn is a family restaurant in the truest sense. Taunton’s grandfather, Pearl Taunton, bought it in 1944. His parents, Betty Taunton and her late husband, Vaughn, owned it after him. Betty is locally famous for her pies. An Oregon newspaper proclaimed her “the perfecter of the peach melba, the master of the marionberry, the wizard of the walnut cream.”

Her son is no slouch in the kitchen, either. It had been several years since we’d been there, and we were worried that it might have changed hands or gone downhill. The first bite confirmed that it hadn’t. A relative drives there from the Seattle area for the prawns. The fish and chips are arguably the best I’ve ever had. And we won’t even talk about Betty’s marionberry pie.

It’s no accident that the restaurant flying the BSU colors is wall-to-wall windows on both the main floor and the upstairs banquet room, which  through the years has functioned both as an inn and Depoe Bay’s Coast Guard headquarters. The building overlooks what signs and tourism brochures proclaim to be “the world’s smallest harbor.”

It’s as picturesque as harbors get. Fishing boats ply a small channel to the sea beneath the restaurant’s windows. One famously navigated it with actor Jack Nicholson at the helm during the 1975 filming of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won him his first Academy Award and still makes lists of the best American movies ever made. Taunton was in fifth grade when it was being filmed and worked as an extra.

“I’m one of the people waiting on the dock when Jack Nicholson brings the boat back,” he said. “I got to take the day off from school, and I got paid $25. I didn’t get to  meet Jack Nicholson, but I did meet Michael Douglas (the film’s producer).”

Framed photographs of Nicholson, Douglas and other actors who were in the movie decorate the restaurant.

In addition to BSU paraphernalia. On game days, Taunton’s BSU banner has a place of honor in a second-floor window above the blue and white Spouting Horn sign. A parking place sports a “Reserved for BSU Fans” sign. A Bronco pennant adorns the pie case.

“I grew up in Oregon and had no interest at all in Boise State football until that great Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma,” he said. “We had some customers who wanted to watch it. I didn’t pay much attention until the third quarter, when it really got interesting. And the ending! That Statue of Liberty play and winning the game by going for two as the clock ran out? I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Taunton, 47, was born just down the coast, in Newport, Ore., and has spent his entire life in Oregon. I asked him how fans of the local teams, the Beavers 60 miles away in Corvallis and the Ducks 100 miles away in Eugene, react to his unlikely allegiance to a team from Idaho.

“They ask if I grew up there or went to school there,” he said. “When I tell them I just like the team and the coach, they give me a hard time. We hear all kinds of names in here. I’ve been called a traitor more times than I remember. When they find out I’m a Boise State fan, the Oregon fans always complain about BSU’s schedule. That’s when I remind them that more often than not Boise State has beaten them.”

Depoe Bay has  become something of a Bronco outpost in Pac-12 country. We saw almost as many BSU T-shirts, caps and sweatshirts there as we did those of the Oregon schools. And BSU fans are quick to show their appreciation for Taunton’s public – you could even say courageous – show of support.

“We had one who came in and asked my wife what was up with the pennant on the pie case,” he said. “When she told him the cook was a Boise State fan, he said he had season tickets and offered up four of them.”

Not just any tickets. Taunton, his wife, Renee, and two of their children will get the V.I.P. treatment in the Stueckle Sky Box for the San Diego State game on Nov. 3.

“Some other people from Boise offered to put us up, so we’ll be staying with them,” he said. “Actually, we’ve had several customers from Boise offer to put us up. We see a lot of BSU fans here.”

He said one of the main reasons he’s a fan is Coach Chris Peterson.

“If Oregon wins something, good for them. But when I see the Oregon kids get in trouble and they’re playing the next weekend, that’s disheartening. There are rules that need to be followed – in football and in life – and our coaches and our programs should have a higher standard. I think Coach Pete could be a model for programs across the country. If you screw up at Boise State, you’re gone.”

While this season’s rocky start has had some fans complaining in Boise, Taunton proudly continues to fly the blue and orange in hostile territory – for more reasons than football:

“It shouldn’t just be about wins and losses. Until the other schools show that they’re serious about life as well as football, I’ll be a Boise State fan.”

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

McCALL — Class reunions normally hold about as much interest for me as lawn-dart tournaments; I can take them or leave them. But the All-Schools Reunion in McCall this month was something else altogether.

  I was there as a member of one of the bands that played for it. We’ve played a lot of reunions through the years, but none like this one. Imagine a class reunion attended by hundreds and potentially thousands of people you knew in high school. Not just your own high school, but every high school in the county. And not just your own class but  every graduating class of the entire decade you graduated.

  That’s what this was. Every Boise, Borah, Capital, St. Teresa’s, Bishop Kelly and Meridian High School class that graduated from 1960 through 1969 was invited. Only a few hundred people attended this time, with this being the first year and all, but in years to come we could be talking some very serious crowds here – with all of the profits  donated to the Idaho Food Bank.

   The person who came up with the idea is Denis Smith, a 1962 Boise High School graduate who now lives in Reno, Nev. His inspiration, sadly, was the recent death of his friend, Doug Haight.

  “Doug was always kind,” Smith said. “He took time to get involved with people’s problems, volunteered for hospice work through his church and offered financial help to many people while always keeping it to himself. He was a friend who stood by you through thick and thin.”

  It was Haight’s dream to hold a reunion for all of the high schools that existed in Ada County when he was in high school. Now, thanks to Smith, it’s happening.

  “When I thought of doing an event in Doug’s memory, the reunion idea struck me,” Smith said. “Doug was a strong supporter of the Food Bank, and that’s why it was picked as the recipient of the funds generated.”

  Smith wrote the Food Bank a check for $500 this year. He’s confident that next year’s will be larger.

  “The next reunion will be all weekend long,” he said. “I’m hoping to expand it to include a golf tournament, a car show and a Sunday jam session. … Ideally the event will grow and become a tradition, one that younger classes will carry on after we’re gone.”

  It would be great if that happened, for a couple of reasons: a) it’s for a good cause, and b) it’s a new and interesting twist on an old idea.

   For an ordinary class reunion, you get a notice months in advance, fill out a form saying you’ll be there and spend a weekend making small talk with classmates you saw at the last reunion. At the All-Schools Reunion, you see people you haven’t seen forever. Not just from your own class, or even your own school; you’re likely to run into people who graduated years before or after you did, from whatever schools they attended, and that you may have known from parts of your life totally unrelated to high school. You go to McCall, pay a $10 admission fee and watch ghosts from the past materialize when you least expect them.

 It happened to me before the band even started to play.

  “Are you Tim?” a tanned, gray haired woman asked as I was setting up my gear.

  “Yes.”

  She introduced herself, giving a name I remembered as that of a cheerleader from my class at Boise High School. Gone was the fresh-faced girl I remembered, replaced by a woman whose beauty was deeper, a beauty born of time and character.

  I, of course, hadn’t changed at all.

  One surprise followed another. There were people there who would never attend a typical class reunion – ever. People who normally wouldn’t dream of going to a class reunion … but they went to this one.

  The band was finishing its second set when two nicely dressed, vaguely familiar-looking  gentlemen approached the stage and introduced themselves.

  “I was Dick Cates and the Chessmen,” one of them said. “He was Paul Revere and the Raiders.”

  The crowd noise was so loud that I had trouble hearing him, so at first it didn’t click. Then something about his face rang a bell.

  “Did you say you were Mike McCarty?”
“No, that’s my brother. I’m Bob McCarty. I played sax with Dick Cates and the Chessmen.”

  So there, two feet away, was one of my teenage heroes. With Paul Revere and the Raiders, Dick Cates and the Chessmen were the best band in the valley when rock and roll was young. Roy Orbison had nothing on Cates, the Chessmen’s lead singer. Anyone who ever heard him sing will tell you that. And Paul Revere and the Raiders were then one of the hottest groups in the Northwest, about to ride a rocket to the national stage.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the Raider half of the twosome. “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Is there something wrong with your eyes?” he asked.

  “Something wrong with my eyes?”

  Granted, there was something decidedly familiar about him. The hair was shorter and grayer, but the face … I definitely knew that face.

  “I’m Charlie,” he finally said.

  “Charlie? You don’t mean  … Charlie Coe?”

  It was Charlie Coe. My old guitar teacher, unseen in nearly half a century. At the top of his game, he was a virtuoso. He could nail virtually every song Chet Atkins ever played. He introduced me to Atkins, jazz greats Howard Roberts and Django Reinhart and other wizards. He had the distinction of being the only person ever to play lead guitar for Paul Revere and the Raiders twice, and his technical prowess was the envy of every guitarist  who knew him.

   We spent the break between sets catching up. He said he hadn’t played guitar in years; golf had replaced it in his life. That was a bit of a disappointment — I was sort of hoping to score another Chet Atkins lesson — but nothing stays the same forever.

  Bob and Charlie were the highlight of the evening for me, but for the rest of the dance and for a long time afterwards people with faces dimly remembered continued to approach the stage and share long forgotten stories. Stories of the people we used to be, half a lifetime ago. Some were sad, some funny, all were compelling in one way or another. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed an evening more.

  Next year’s reunion has already been scheduled. The goal again will be to raise  money for the Food Bank.

 And, with a little luck, you’ll get to party with old friends you never expected to see again.

 Who knows? You might even run into an old flame.

 If you went to any high school in Ada County in the 1960s, you’re invited. Put Sept. 13-14, 2013 on your calendar and stay tuned for details, to be posted on mccall60sreunion.com

   I’ll try to remember to give you a reminder a month or so in advance.

   Think about it. You’d be helping to feed hungry people, and it could be one of the best times  you’ve had since high school.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman’s Life Section. It’s posted on his free blog, www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

It was Bronco Stadium, and it wasn’t.

A friend and I had taken a wrong turn after buying tickets there and ended up in the band room. Emerging from a long, dark hallway into the bright morning light, we were looking at the stadium from just outside the north end zone. In the foreground, workers were building the foundation for the new football complex. Beyond them were the sweep of the field, the new seats in the other end zone and looming above it all the Stueckle Sky Box. From that angle, the stadium looked wider, taller, more imposing than I once could have imagined. It was a jaw-dropping view, one that reflected BSU’s astonishing growth.

I’m not a sportswriter and don’t usually write about sports. But with apologies to the Statesman’s fine sports staff, I’m venturing into their territory for one Sunday, not to do a sports column but to write one from the perspective of a fan who has witnessed the Broncos’ evolution from the stands for over half a century. You could call it a sports history column.

My first exposure to Bronco Stadium was with my sister, then a Boise Junior College student. She was ten years older and took me to games when our parents had saddled her with babysitting. It wasn’t really a stadium in those days, just a grass field with some wooden bleachers. Crowds were measured in hundreds, not thousands. Today, a lot of high schools have better facilities.

The wooden bleachers eventually were torn down to make way for a small version of the current stadium. A grass field with concrete bleachers on either side. Capacity, a little over 14,000.

The first game I attended in it was the following year, the first game the Broncos ever played against the University of Idaho. Boise State College was the newest member of the Big Sky Conference, and the heavily favored Vandals had festooned the stadium with placards reading “Welcome to the Big Time.” The Broncos won, 42-14.

The team’s wide-open style was addictive, and when a friend bought season tickets and offered to sell two to my wife and me, we couldn’t say yes fast enough. For the better part of the next three decades, we rarely missed a home game.

For much of that time, it was strictly small-college football — Idaho College, California State East Bay, Northern Michigan, Southeastern Louisiana … And of course the perennial Big Sky rivals —  the U of I and Idaho State, the Montana universities, Weber State, etc.

Small time, but great memories. Then as now, the Broncos won more than they lost. Big Sky conference championships and Division I-AA playoffs were, if not annual events, not far from it. And no fan who was here then will forget 1980, the year BSU won the 1-AA national championship.

To reach the championship game, they had to get past Grambling State and its legendary coach, Eddie Robinson, in what at the time was arguably the most memorable game ever played there.

Robinson retired in 1997 as the most winning coach in college football history. When his Tigers lined up on the field at Bronco Stadium, they dwarfed the Broncos. But BSU had an unexpected ally that day.

Grambling is in steamy Louisiana. The temperature in Boise at game time was close to being in the single digits, and the stadium was covered with rime ice, formed when fog freezes. The crystals were over an inch long, giving the stadium a surrealistic, Arctic look not seen since.

The shivering, numb-struck Grambling players certainly had never seen anything like it, and thanks in no part to the weather BSU won a squeaker and went on to win the national championship. When the Broncos threw the winning pass with seconds left in the championship game, my wife, temporarily rebounding from pneumonia, leaped from a couch in front of the television and knocked a clock off of a wall.

There were a lot of “if-onlys” in those days.

If only BSU could get a game against Washington State. (WSU regularly  played Idaho, after all; why not BSU?)

If only the Broncos could Play Oregon State.

If only they could play any Division I opponent.

“We just wanted to get in the game with the big boys,” Skip Hall, BSU’s coach from 1987 to 1992, recalled.

Eventually they did, with losses to Pac-10 schools giving true believers a sobering dose of reality. When BSU left the Big Sky Conference and moved up to Division IA in 1996, some fans — this one included — mourned the loss of traditional rivalries and the post-season playoffs. Was this really the way to go? Could the Broncos really play with the big boys?

Obviously, they could. To the surprise of nearly everyone, the small-town Broncos have become contenders on the national stage, winning more than they lose against the big dogs of college football.

“I find the whole thing almost unbelievable,” Hall said. “Although we should never say never, our dream 25 years ago —  the president, the athletic director and me as the head coach — was that we would become a Division I program. But to take it to the heights that it has reached now never crossed my mind as a solid possibility. In my mind, the rise of the Broncos is one of the great stories in college football.”

It used to be that when Boiseans traveling in other parts of the country were asked where they were from, the automatic response was, “Oh, potatoes.” Now, it’s “Oh, the blue turf.” Or, “That’s quite a football team you have out there.” It’s happened to me in Arizona, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, even Mexico, where two burly young men in Kansas jerseys surprised me by saying the fans there were rooting for BSU to join their  Big 12 Conference.

“Everybody at Kansas wanted BSU,” one of them told me. “We still don’t understand why you went right over us to the Big East.”

This summer, we spent a few days in Memphis, where a sports junkie In a restaurant knew almost as much about BSU as we did.

“You’re from Boise?” he asked. “I don’t know what are you guys are putting in the water up there, but whatever it is it’s working.”

“You’re not going to make a potato joke, are you?”

“Forget potatoes,” he said. “I’m talking about Chris Peterson. He pulls rabbits out of the hat every year. I’m from Texas, and if the Broncos ever play the Longhorns I’ll be sweating.”

Will the magic continue? Will the Broncos keep pulling rabbits out of hats?

History says they will. They’ve been doing it for decades. And they aren’t doing it small-time anymore. One look at the ever-growing stadium tells you that.

Forget the Northern Michigans and Southeastern Louisianas and even the Gramblings. Fans who used to wonder if our guys could play with the big boys now find themselves in what once would have been an unthinkable position. Our guys are flirting with being the big boys.

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

You meet three kinds of people on trains — train buffs, crazies and unforgettable characters.

Most people are there for the same reason we’d chosen Amtrak; they love to ride trains.

The number of crazies depends in part on the type of train. On the Elevated Train in Chicago, we met three who talked non-stop from the time they boarded till the time they left. One chose me as his victim, describing the places we were passing in such numbing detail that I considered throwing myself on the tracks. The second talked to anyone who would listen about his imminent crackup. The third talked on his cell phone loudly, and endlessly, about his girlfriend’s thong.

That brings us to the unforgettable characters. The first was Freddie Baglio. Freddie and his family were returning from Memphis to their home in Independence, La. They’d gone to Memphis to see their son, Jason Baglio, perform there. Jason is an Elvis impersonator.

Freddie approached us after quietly watching us play a card game in the observation car.

“So you have to follow suit if you can and the trump changes every hand?” he said by way of introduction.

We invited him to join us. In three hands, he’d mastered the game.

Freddie owns a restaurant, Mufaletta’s Deli in Independence, where he said he worked “17 hours a day. My kids all help. They live in my back yard.”

Literally. They have houses or mobile homes there.

When he isn’t running the restaurant, Freddie works for the nearby Amite Sheriff’s Department.

Or travels as far as Las Vegas to see his son’s Elvis performances.

“If you can get him a gig up there in Boise, I’ll come visit you,” he said. “He’s very good.”

No argument. We checked his site and thought we were seeing the real Elvis.

Freddie deftly shuffled cards — sideways. He did one of the best card tricks we’d ever seen. He reached across the aisle to two little boys, snatched their toys and in seconds had them laughing. When his stop was called and he got up to leave, he gave us two new decks of Amtrak cards and each of the boys five dollars.

With planes, you get body scans, cramped seats, fellow passengers with their noses buried in magazines or digital devices. On trains, you get cards and Freddie.

At the station in Lafayette, La., we met a garrulous gentleman who walked up and spontaneously began to tell us about his life.

“You’re from Boise?” he said.  “I used to live in Payette.”

Payette? What were the odds of that?

He went on to give the intimate details of some hospital tests he’d just had, and went on to say that he’d left Lafayette as a young man but returned to live there after his parents died, that his weight fluctuated between 150 and 210 and that he’d almost died from drinking but “quit when the Lord gave me a second chance.” All without being asked a single question.

In the New Orleans station, a muscular young man with head-to-toe tattoos walked up and, without so much as a hello, asked me if I had any aspirin. It took an annoyingly long time to find some in my suitcase.

“Thanks,” he said. “You’re nicer than most of the people where I came from.”

“Oh? Where’s that?”

“Incarcerated,” he replied. “I’ve spent the last seven years in prison.”

This, incidentally, was the second person we’d met in as many days who was on his way home from the slammer.

In New Iberia, La., it was all the shuttle driver at our motel could do to find the train station.

“I’ve been here 11 years, and you’re the first people who wanted to go there,” he said.

The station, such as it was, was on a one-lane road that quickly became a gravel road. It’s an understatement to say there wasn’t much activity. There was no activity. The small, dilapidated building appeared to be abandoned. It looked less like a station than a place to store picks and shovels. A sign on a locked door reassuringly reported that it wasn’t an Amtrak office and there were no public restrooms. With the train due in an hour, not a soul was in sight.

“I hope you’re in the right place,” our driver said as he sped off, leaving us alone in a neighborhood where the chances of getting a train and getting mugged looked to be about equal. We were trying to look invisible when a truck pulled up and its solitary occupant emerged and headed directly for us.

“I wasn’t going to get out of my truck until I saw you,” he said. “This isn’t a safe place to be alone.”

“Are you here to catch the train?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just like trains.”

His name was Billy Gesser, and he had lived in New Iberia all his life.

“So we’re in the right place? This really is the Amtrak station?”

“Yes. The train is due at 5:42.”

Gesser explained that New Iberia’s onetime train station is now a Louisiana Delta Railroad maintenance shop, which explained why it looked like a place for storing picks and shovels. Amtrak still stops there, but only a few days a week, and there are no services at all.

The train was late, which was okay because it gave us time to talk. Gesser lives near the station and goes train-watching there several days a week. He had model train sets  as a kid and, in his sunset years, still has two of them in his bedroom.

“I take the train to New Orleans whenever I can,” he said proudly. “And I’ve been all the way to Jackson, Miss.”

We were talking trains when a young man approached and asked if he could buy a ticket on the train.

“Yes,” Gesser said. “The conductor sells them.”

“Good! I can’t wait to get  home. I’ve been gone two years?”

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“Incarcerated.”

Dear God, was there anybody in this state who hadn’t been incarcerated?

Distancing ourselves from our new friend, we continued our conversation.  A retired jack of all trades at a car dealership, Gesser said New Iberia was spared the worst of Hurricane Katrina so he put up  some of its victims in his one-bedroom home.

“At one time I had eight of them living there at once,” he said.

I commented that it was a fine thing he did.

“It’s just what you do,” he said. “We were lucky here. New Orleans wasn’t.”

He proudly said that he hadn’t missed a Mardi Gras in 55 years.

“And I have every intention of making it 60,” he said. “I stay with friends and I always take them a ham.”

Running out of things to say, we stood quietly in the steamy Southern heat outside the rundown building that now passes for New Iberia’s Amtrak station. Gesser seemed to be lost in thought.

“This wasn’t always the station, you know,” he said after a long silence. “It was an auxiliary building. The main station was down the tracks. It had a nice waiting room. The trains came every day then. The place where we’re standing was a flower garden. It was a busy place then. Now it’s a neglected, lonely, dangerous place.”

I told him how sad I thought it was that Congress had allowed our rail system to deteriorate so badly.

“*It is sad,” he agreed. “It’s beyond sad.”

***

No Woodward vacation would be complete without a couple of travel mishaps, right?

Our train from Memphis to New Orleans was scheduled to leave at 6:50 a.m. It was roughly a half-hour taxi ride from the hotel to the station, so the desk clerk arranged for a cab to pick us up at six.

No cab.

Ten after six? No cab. Quarter after? No cab.

“Which company did they call?” a new desk clerk asked.

“Yellow Cab.”

“Yellow Cab! They don’t never show up!”

Thus reassured, we called another company. The cab arrived at 6:30. If there was no traffic and the driver floored it, we might make it.

He did. We arrived in the nick of time and climbed aboard as the train began to move.

Moral: If you’re ever in Memphis, call anybody but Yellow Cab. They don’t never show up.

In New Orleans, we weren’t as lucky. Our itinerary said the train for New Iberia left just before noon, so we got up, had a leisurely breakfast and were planning a farewell stroll around the French Quarter when I checked our tickets and stared with disbelieving eyes at the departure time:  9 a.m.

It was then 9:20. (Amtrak had e-mailed a schedule-change weeks earlier, and you-know-who forgot about it.)

“No, it left right on time,” the agent said when I called to ask if by chance the train was late. “The next one isn’t for three days. But if you can make it to the station by 10:30, there’s a bus that will get you as far as Lafayette.”

No two people ever vacated a hotel room faster. We caught the bus to Lafayette and took a very expensive taxi from there to New Iberia. In our haste, I left my favorite, almost-new shoes under the bed at the hotel in New Orleans.

It had been a great trip.

But I still miss my shoes. May the maid’s boyfriend love them as much as I did.

When I finished my last story and hung up my reporters’ notebooks at The Statesman, my co-workers knew exactly what to get for a retirement gift. No rocking chair or golf cart for Woodward. They bought me an Amtrak gift certificate.

I am a man bewitched by trains. Always have been. The romance began with a model train set at age six or seven and never let up. Some of my all-time favorite Statesman assignments, and cherished life memories, have involved trains.

I’d been retired almost a year before my wife and I got around to buying our 15-day Amtrak passes, but the wait was worth it. In fact, we had enough bizarre experiences and met enough fascinating characters riding the rails that I collected material for several  columns, starting with this one, on the Midwest.

Our plan was to fly from Boise to St. Louis, spend three days there, take the train to Chicago for three nights, hop on the overnight train to Memphis for a couple of days and finish the trip in New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou country. We’d fly home from New Orleans – if we came home at all.

Don’t laugh. I’ve met several adventuresome souls over the years who went to New Orleans on vacation and stayed for good. It has that effect on people.

But I’ve strayed from this week’s subject, the Midwest. Friends Bob and Christy Hagar met us at the St. Louis airport with a boggling list of possibilities for things to do there. St. Louis isn’t a world capital like New York or Washington, D.C. It isn’t one of our larger metropolises, like Los Angeles or Chicago. It’s just a medium-sized Midwest City. And that’s what makes it so surprising. There are so many things to do in St. Louis that you have trouble getting your head around them, and just when you think you have, out comes another list of things to do.

At the top of most St. Louis visitors’ list, of course, is the famous Gateway Arch. It’s a stunning sight, rising some 600 feet above the skyline. Not a place for those of us afflicted with fear of heights. While Christy and my bride rode the train to the top, Bob and I remained sensibly on the ground perusing the Lewis and Clark exhibits. You never can have too much history. And I just knew that if I took the train the power would fail, stranding us for hours, possibly days, at the highest point.

It’s a short walk from the Arch to the St. Louis Cardinals’ new stadium, which is made of red brick and looks a little like an old-fashioned ballpark. Out front are bronze statues of legendary Cardinal players — Stan Musial, Dizzy Dean, Bob Gibson and others. We tried to buy stadium-tour tickets, but the girl at at the ticket window said they were sold out. The hussy was wearing three World Series rings – all from this millennium. While there is no truth to the rumor that I removed my Diehard Cubs Fan Club card from my wallet and stomped on it, I wasn’t far from it.

History is literally underfoot in St. Louis. We were strolling down a sidewalk when I glanced down and saw that I had stepped on a plaque informing whoever was interested that on that very spot Joseph Pulitzer had purchased the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the nation’s storied newspapers.

A few blocks away was the courthouse where the famous Dred Scott had his one and only jury trial. More than half of the slaves who sued for freedom won it, but Scott’s was infamously denied by a Supreme Court more interested in cotton revenues than justice, a ruling that helped ignite the Civil War.

When the Hagars, who are not Catholics, suggested that we go out of our way to see St. Louis’s Cathedral Basilica, we wondered why. A church is a church, right?

The second we stepped inside, we stopped wondering. You could put Boise’s St. John’s Cathedral in a corner and not notice it was there. And it’s not the basilica’s size that impresses. Its cavernous spaces are gilded with the largest collection of mosaics in the world. The work, which took lifetimes, rated a 1999 visit from Pope John Paul II. I’m not an overly religious person, but it was impossible to be surrounded by all those religious icons in that vast, glittering space and not feel reverence. If that was where you went to church, it would be hard to be bad

Our next stops — the Hagars run a taut ship — included the Budweiser Brewery, the confluence of two of the nation’s great rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri; a fishing interlude on the Mississippi, a monument (in nearby Alton, Ill.) to the late Robert Wadlow, at 8 foot 11 history’s tallest man; and Forest Park, site of the 1904 World’s Fair.

Shakespeare plays are free in Forest Park. If you sit in the back rows, the operas are free there as well. In fact, St. Louis claims to have more free attractions than any other city: its art museum, zoo, history museum, science center and more are all free of charge. Time and again we reached for our wallets to pay admission fees and were told to put our money away.

A day didn’t pass without learning something new about surprising St. Louis. Some of the highlights:

–  Dr. Pepper, 7-Up and iced tea were invented in St. Louis. So were Martinis, Bloody Marys and Planter’s Punch.

– The nation’s first kindergarten was in St. Louis.

– The world’s first skyscraper, Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building, was built in St. Louis in 1887.

– The bread slicer was invented in St. Louis. And, my personal favorite, peanut butter.

St. Louis has an actual, functioning Amtrak station, right downtown where it should be. It was there that we thanked the Hagars for their matchless hospitality and boarded the train for the short ride to our next city, Chicago. We were ordering lunch at a deli some friends had recommended there when the man who was building the hot-pastrami sandwiches asked where we were from.

“Boise,” we replied.

“I knew you weren’t from around here,” he said. “You’re too nice.”

The sort of remark you’d expect in a tough town like Chicago. Except that, on this trip at least, Chicago failed to live up to its tough-guy reputation. In three days there, we went just about everywhere that one or the other of us hadn’t been and wanted to go — the Art Institute, Navy Pier, the beach, Miracle Mile, Billy Goat’s Tavern, Lincoln Park, Willis (Sears) Tower, the Chicago River architectural tour and more. And everywhere we went, people couldn’t have been friendlier. This, mind you, is coming from a lifelong resident of Boise, a city known for being friendly.

For $5.75, you can ride trains and buses all over Chicago all day and long into the night. Often we were carrying luggage or shopping bags or both, and people unfailingly helped us get them on and off of trains, up stairways, onto escalators. Even the bus drivers were patient and friendly. Young and old alike, people gave us directions to where we wanted to go, urged us to enjoy their city, engaged us in conversation.

When they learned where we were from, not one of them mentioned potatoes or confused us with Iowa. They knew that Idaho was part of the Northwest (not just up the road from Des Moines) and, in more than one instance, complimented us on “that football team that plays on the blue field.”

Chicago and St. Louis couldn’t have been more interesting or welcoming. We were on a roll. No travel mishaps, no Woodward-esque disasters. And the night train to Memphis — the part of the trip we’d looked forward to most — was hours away.

Next: Memphis, Cajun Country, swamps and alligators.

The news that a baseball card collection worth millions was found in an attic in Ohio this week was yet another painful reminder of the loss of my boyhood baseball card collection.

Unlike many lost baseball card collections, it wasn’t foolishly sold before its time to earn money for a bike or hot rod or other treasure of youth. It was thrown in the trash by an unlikely villain — my mother.

My mother was a good woman, a good mother and a better than good housekeeper. Everything in its place, and nothing that wasn’t needed. If it wasn’t being used, out it went. I don’t know this for a fact, but I think that when I left for the Navy my mother had a truck backed up to my room, threw everything I valued into its bed and drove it straight to the dump.

When I returned from the Navy, my clothes were gone. My catcher’s mitt signed by Bob Uecker, then of the Boise Braves, was gone. My baseball card collection was gone. My record collection was gone.

“You weren’t using them and I didn’t think you’d want them anymore,” she sheepishly explained. “They were taking up space, and you know how I hate clutter.”

Clutter. The baseball card collection wasn’t large compared with some, but it was big enough to fill a shoebox and included many of the big names of the 1950s, when I was a kid bewitched by baseball. I had Earl Wynns, Yogi Berras, Bob Fellers … I know for a fact that I had three of my hero, Mickey Mantle. Today, those cards would be worth thousands of dollars each.

The crown jewels of my record collection were the infamous Beatles albums with the butcher block covers. One I’d tried to peel, but the other was in close to pristine condition. There may have been a third; not sure about that. I am painfully sure, however, that, like the baseball cards, those records today are worth thousands.

My mother’s biggest blunder, from a collector’s point of view, was the Fiasco of the Gold Coins. My father had invested in gold coins, which he sealed in Mason jars and buried in the basement crawlspace. He’d been dead several years when my mother hired some men to fix a problem with her lawn sprinkling system one summer. Mucking  around in the crawlspace, they found the jars and showed them to her. She’d all but forgotten them, and as a reward for their honesty gave them each a jar of solid gold collector’s coins, leaving herself with a single jar.

Later, my sister and I checked on the coins’ value. They were then worth $2,200 apiece — making the afternoon’s work the most expensive sprinkler repair in history.

As I slip into my antecdotage, I’ve grown philosophical about such things, or at least come to grudgingly accept them. After all, it’s only money. Some people are destined to fall into it; others aren’t. There’s not much we can do to change that, and a lot of rich people don’t seem to be any happier than the rest of us anyway. Maybe it’s all for the best.

But I sure do wish I had my Mickey Mantles back.

HAMMETT — At a Main Street  bar in downtown Boise this week, Pinto Bennett will perform the songs that made him an Idaho musical icon. Fans eager to hear their favorites might want to take advantage of the opportunity because, as he himself might put it, God knows when or if it will happen again.

The occasion is the annual reunion of the Famous Motel Cowboys, the group Bennett fronted and that shared stages with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other country stars while enjoying fleeting star status itself in England in the 1980s. Band members will be coming from as far away as Nashville to play at Hannah’s Friday through Sunday.

I’m not a huge fan of country music, but to me Bennett is a musical treasure. His best songs, especially the lyrics, are as good as just about anyone’s.

Until 2007 he was a regular on Boise stages, playing, drinking and charming his way into the hearts of admirers. Now, for the most part, he’s a man of solitude.

His home these days is a sheep wagon parked on a horse ranch near Hammett, in Elmore County. The prevailing sounds are the music of birds and the song of the desert wind. A small sign with “God Bless” burned into its weathered wood hangs above a corral gate. Decorative rocks dot the sheep wagon’s porch. On one is a painted message:  “My help comes from God.”

When he built the sheep wagon and pulled it to a lonely patch of desert, many of his fans and friends thought it would be a passing phase:  there was no way the onetime Navy bosun’s mate and hard-living country singer — a man who had partied with celebrities from the Everly Brothers to Bonnie Raitt — would remain a born-again desert solitary.

For five years, he’s been proving them wrong.

“People keep telling me I should do another honky-tonk album,” he said during a recent sheep-wagon interview. “I probably have enough of that material for three or four albums, but what I like to do now is take Bible stories and twist them. It’s still Pinto Bennett, but it’s Christian.”

Beside him on his bunk was his constant companion Daisy, a border collie-mix. A crucifix hung from a nearby wall. Absent from the decor were photos, posters, bumper stickers and other trappings from his years with groups from Tarwater to Trio Pinto.

“A lot of the honky tonk seems redundant to me now. It feels like the same stuff over and over. It just doesn’t move me like it used to.”

What does move him is his faith, which he found late in life but embraces the way he once did groupies and Jack Daniels.

“It’s been an evolution,” he said. “I’ve gone from being a shepherd to a fleet sailor to a road musician to a Christian, and it’s all seemed natural. I don’t see myself ever going back to my old lifestyle. I’ve come home.”

His home on the range recalls his early years as Fred Bennett, Elmore County sheep-camp denizen. His rancher grandfather saw to it that young Fred learned to handle a horse, tend a camp and herd sheep, but  the rock and roll bug bit early. He served a term in the Navy and considered making it a career, but what he really wanted was to be the next Elvis.

Instead, he became Pinto Bennett, playing “hard country music” in Tarwater and other groups. He spent five years in Nashville, where his friends included Chet Atkins, Don Everly, Lyle Lovett and other stars, but remained an outsider with the Nashville establishment. Returning to Idaho, he became a fixture of the Boise music scene, continuing to write and record until a heart attack and a television commercial changed his life.

The commercial, for a Boise church, was the beginning of a conversion. He quit drugs, cut back on alcohol, became a churchgoer. His talents as a songwriter remained undiminished, but the songs changed from country to gospel. The move to the desert, far from bars and boozing buddies, completed the transformation.

Visitors to the sheep wagon assume that a “Back Soon” sign beside a window is to let people know when he’s out, but it’s also the name of his newest gospel CD, now in record stores, and a profession of faith.

“The title means that Jesus will be back soon,” he said. “I really believe that.”

He’s lost count, but in the last five years Bennett has had at least four heart attacks and two strokes.

“My heart sounds like tennis shoes goin’ around in a dryer.”

A 2010 operation in Portland to correct his heart’s rhythm almost killed him, and a stroke two years ago impaired the use of his left arm and hand.

“I can’t hold a pick or get my arm around my big acoustic guitar and strum like I used to,” he said. “I had an epiphany that I’d be playing an electric guitar the same color as my sweaters. (The gray cardigans he wears onstage.) My next stop was Old Boise Guitar.”

As if from his epiphany, a thin-bodied electric with silver metal-flake paint was waiting. Sliding a strap emblazoned with a crucifix over his head, Daisy watching intently from the bed, he finger-picks it as if he’s done it for years.

“I can still play,” he said. “It’s just different than the way I’ve played most of my life.”

Now 65, he spends his days tending horses and irrigating for a local rancher, playing and writing gospel songs and reading from the Bible, a dictionary and Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, the sailor’s bible.

“You can get an education from those three books.”

He still plays an occasional honky-tonk gig, proving to fans and himself that the magic isn’t gone.

“I played on at the Egyptian last winter with Reckless Kelly,” he said. “Four generations of women were coming up to touch me so I guess I haven’t lost it entirely. I was like an ancient Elvis.”

It was a departure from what has become his usual, low-key routine.

“I used to play every night. Now it’s a gig every other month or so, usually at a church. I played one not too long ago at the Prairie Store.”

No one is saying that this week’s Famous Motel Cowboys reunion could be one of his last public performances. But his health is a concern, and to borrow one of his favorite lines, “nobody has a guarantee in their hip pocket that they’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I worry about my time being short,” he said. “I worry about it every day. That’s why I keep looking up. I won’t say I have a feeling of impending doom. But I do have a feeling of impending glory.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman’s Life section and is posted the following Mondays on http://www.woodwardblog.com. Next: The Great Train Ride, Part I.

Dan Popkey did such a good job of reporting on the passing of former Boise Mayor Dick Eardley that I’d all but decided not to write anything. What could be added?

Still … it wouldn’t feel right to let Dick go without a word.

I was The Statesman’s local government reporter when he was a city councilman and later mayor. Dick was a force in city government at a critical time in Boise’s history, when the city was hoping to become an example for other cities of how to handle growth. A former newsman, he had no ties to the development lobby and was an early and strong advocate of a council of governments created to hire professional planners and implement their recommendations.

That didn’t happen. The vested interests were so powerful that they successfully ran their own slate of candidates, disbanded the council and sent the planners packing. No one was more dismayed than Mayor Eardley. He was disappointed and angry and said so. He consistently stood up to those who valued their bank accounts more than public interest. No one admired him more for that than I did.

We didn’t always hit it off. In fact, we repeatedly butted heads. One of my stories back then called a plan that would have limited development to specific boundaries “inherently controversial.” It was. In fact, it was the main reason the planners were driven out of town. Eardley blamed me for the controversy. Speaking to a service club while running for election, he held a rolled-up copy of the paper with my story in it, pointed it at me and identified me to the club’s members as public enemy number one. We didn’t speak for a while after that.

He was the leading proponent of the city’s long effort to build its biggest shopping mall downtown. When a department store chain the city had been courting announced that it wasn’t interested, I quoted the mayor’s remark that the company had “led us down the primrose lane.” It became a butt of cynical jokes, and once again we didn’t speak for a while.

History and Boise Towne Square proved Eardley and the rest of the city’s then leaders dead wrong about the downtown mall. It wasn’t meant to happen, didn’t happen, and Boise today would be a lesser place if it had happened. His successor got credit for what became the downtown success story and went on to become a U.S. senator and Cabinet member. Meanwhile, the mayor who had worked longer and harder for Boise was forced to settle for what had to have been a demeaning role for him, working a desk job for a state department until he could retire.

In his retirement years, we developed an uneasy friendship, or at least a truce. He was polite and helpful whenever I called to interview him about something that had happened in the old days. And he happily volunteered for a number of panel groups at the Statesman, where he impressed everyone with his knowledge, intelligence and humor.

He could be irascible and he could hold a grudge. But he had a good heart, no one ever worked harder for the city of Boise, and there was never a doubt that he had the its best interests at heart.

I’ll say this for Dick Eardley. Unlike many politicians, he didn’t change his tune or his vote based on polls or how the political winds were blowing. He was a straight shooter. For better or worse, you  knew exactly what he thought and where you stood with him. I’ll miss him.

Any American who has vacationed in Mexico has either verbally stiff-armed an army of pitchmen or succumbed to the horror of a timeshare presentation.

Tourists in Mexico are repeatedly badgered to attend timeshare presentations. As bait, the pitchmen offer jungle tours, booze cruises, even cash. And every tour, cruise and peso of it is earned the hard way — by surviving a hard sell from hell.

My wife and I survived one years ago and emerged looking as if we’d spent a day of torture in a Mexican prison, which in a sense we had. We vowed that never, under pain of death, would we be suckered into another one.

That, however, was before we met the irresistibly charming and cunningly sneaky Javier on a recent vacation. Javier wasn’t at the beach or other of the usual huckster hangouts so our guard was down. We met him in an American-style, big-box supermarket, a nice little man we initially thought was the store interpreter.

When we asked a clerk about a product that was advertised but not on the shelves, he produced a walkie-talkie and called Javier — who was wearing what we thought was a store uniform. He was friendly, helpful and spoke excellent English. If we couldn’t find a product or a label confused us, there was Javier. Need an ATM? Directions? Help in translating? Javier was delighted to oblige.

As we were leaving the store, my wife happened to spot some zipline brochures on a counter near the exit.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to go on one of these?” she innocently asked.

Lurking just within earshot, Javier was on her like a cockroach on an empenada.

“You want to go on a zipline tour? I can set one up for you. It goes 7,000 meters from one mountaintop to another. Beautiful! You will love it!”

“I don’t like heights, Javier. Do you have anything that stays closer to the ground?”

“Yes, a party cruise. You will love it!”

Javier was not the store translator. He worked for a posh resort, which had an arrangement with the store to let its hawkers work the crowd. This has become common in Mexico; it was just our first exposure to it. A bit sneaky, if you ask me, but apparently legal.

“I don’t know, Javier,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten. “How much does it cost?”

“Normally $225,” he replied, “but for you — today only — a special price of only $40. And I’ll throw in some beautiful T-shirts. What size do you wear?”

“What’s the catch, Javier?”

“No catch at all. All you have to do is attend a 90-minute presentation at a beautiful resort only five minutes from here. It’s not a timeshare — it’s a private residence resort. And the people are very nice. It’s not a hard sell; no pressure at all.”

The difference between a time share and a private-residence resort, of course, is the same as the difference between cow dung and horse poop. We should have seen it coming. I was starting to sweat and could feel my blood pressure rising dangerously. But just when I was about to sprint for the safety of the nearest cantina, my bride, ever the optimist, blurted the fatal words:

“Oh, come on. Let’s go. It’ll be fun.”

Going for the throat, Javier arranged to meet us the following morning in the village where we were staying and drive us to the Jaws of Hell Resort. That isn’t its real name; I made it up. But hell is what I was dreading, an expectation that did not go unfulfilled.

The next morning, Javier was waiting at the village square to take us for a ride, literally and figuratively. After winding over a jungle road, he delivered us to the palatial doors of a resort that appeared to have been designed for Mayan royalty. It was heart-stoppingly beautiful, sinfully opulent. You half expected to see Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian fox-trotting in the lobby.

Our “guides” were Pepe and Lupe. They began the inquisition pleasantly enough, treating us to a sumptuous breakfast of everything from made-to-order omelets to sushi. Then we were whisked away in golf carts to a Fantasy Island setting of palms and coconuts, lakes, tropical birds, crocodiles, interconnected swimming pools and a waterpark-style river bobbing with overstuffed Americans on floaties. It was groomed and manicured to the point of being almost too pretty, as if it wasn’t quite real. If you have a seven-figure bank account and “The Stepford Wives” is your favorite movie, you’d think you’d found paradise.

After dazzling us with Lincoln-Memorial sized Mayan statues and suites where everything but the toilet handles was made of marble, Pepe and Lupe escorted us to a conference room filled with other victims, sharpened their calculators and got down to business — meaning us. As resort members, they said, we could enjoy a two-bedroom unit with room for friends and family members for up to six weeks a year for a mere $800-a-week maintenance fee. A one-bedroom or a studio could be had for somewhat less. If we didn’t want to use our weeks, we could sell them and make money. And as anyone knows who owns a timeshare, that’s about as easy as selling used underwear.

It took a while for Lupe to get to the bottom line, a.k.a. the membership fee. Pepe for the most part remained silent. I think he was a trainee, or maybe he just didn’t have the stomach for what was coming. To fatten us up for the kill, Lupe produced a gleaming iPad and showed us pictures of other five-star resorts we could enjoy by doing a simple exchange with victims in, say, Italy, Fiji or Dogwater, N.D.

The membership fee, when she finally got around to it, was only $61,000. In the unlikely event that we didn’t have that much up front, we could pay in monthly installments of roughly a third more than our house payment. Putting it another way, we’d be paying $61,000 for the privilege of paying $800 a week to stay in a marble palace with a view of a golf course we would never use. Airfare, meals, taxes and gratuities not included. If that sounds reasonable to you, I have a great deal for you on foxtrot lessons with Donald Trump.

As politely as possible, we told Lupe and Pepe it wasn’t in our budget. Along with a new Ferrari, a Gulfstream G650 and spa dates with Paris Hilton.

No problem, she said. A more modest plan could be had for $40,000 and change. Still too much? Plans C, D and E were available for less money up front, offered a variety of accommodations and features and came with a barrage of financial options that would have confused an accountant. As the bombardment continued, I realized that what what happening was nothing other than the time-honored Mexican tradition of bartering. It was exactly what happens on the streets and beaches of Mexico, except that instead of necklaces and T-shirts the stakes are colossally higher. By the time we said no for the fifth or sixth time, I was sweating like a nun at Hooters on amateur night. I’d have paid a thousand bucks just to get the hell out of there.

At last, when we said no to even the cheapest plan, Lupe reluctantly introduced us to her manager — who trotted out still more plans. When even he gave up, she icily drove us to the resort’s “travel agency” to collect our free gifts and a cab ride home.

But we were far from home free. After stonewalling some of the best timeshare sales people in the business, we were now in the clutches of the travel agency people.

I won’t bore you with the details except to say that the final pitch — by then our “90-minute presentation” had taken the whole day — seemed almost reasonable.

“It actually sounds like a good deal,” said my wife, who is smarter than I am about such things. “I think we should do it.”

And so … we did. No timeshare or private-residence membership, no ownership of anything. Just a travel club that, if we live long enough and go to enough places, should be worth almost what it cost to join.

The important thing is that it got us out of there, clutching party-cruise tickets and the world’s most expensive cheap T-shirts. By then I was so battered from sales pitches that I felt like an iguana squashed on the highway.

We were glad we’d opted for the no-pressure presentation Javier had promised back at the supermarket. The hard sell would have killed us.

Tim Woodward’s column is posted here on alternating Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Have you ever said something so preposterous you hoped nobody would notice?

Something like Alex LaBeau’s statement this week that Idaho could eliminate $129 million a year in tax revenue and no one would notice?

LaBeau is president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, which includes many of the state’s biggest businesses and wants to do away with Idaho’s  personal property tax on business.

“You could feather it (the $129 million) out over five years and nobody would notice,” he said.

No one will notice that $129 million is missing?

Right.

No one likes the personal property tax, which requires businesses to inventory and pay taxes annually on equipment and other non-real property. It’s an administrative nightmare. But to say that no one would miss the money it generates is like saying you wouldn’t notice a cut in your salary.

The local governments that count on the tax for up to a quarter of their budgets wouldn’t notice it had disappeared? The people who benefit from programs that could be cut wouldn’t notice? The homeowners whose taxes could increase to make up the difference  wouldn’t notice?

In economic boom times, growing tax revenues would lessen the impact. But as most of us have noticed, times have been a bit hard of late. The last thing homeowners struggling to hang on to their homes and livelihoods need is a tax shift that helps big business at the expense of the little guy.

You have to wonder how LaBeau thought he could get away with such an outlandish statement.

On the other hand, it’s summer. People are taking vacations, enjoying the outdoors. The Olympics are about to start; the presidential race is dominating the headlines. People aren’t paying as much attention to state-government news as they normally do.

Maybe he thought we wouldn’t notice.

Hi. Remember me?

I’m that guy who used to write columns for The Statesman. I wrote hundreds of them, on subjects from vacation and home-remodeling disasters to colorful Idaho characters to the fiascos of Idaho politicians.

It’s been a year since I retired and found that life without deadlines was sweet. Friends said I’d acquired the “post Statesman glow,” a term inspired by former co-workers who left the pressures of daily journalism and had years fall away as if by magic. My step had a new spring. People said I looked younger.

So why am I back? Good question. But first let me answer the question people have been asking  since I logged off for the last time, hung up my reporters’ notebooks and entered a brave new world without deadlines.

The question: “how’s retirement?” And its corollary, “What are you doing with yourself now that you’re a loafer?”

The answer to the first question is just fine, thanks. Retirement is the ultimate liberation. Every day is Saturday. In fact, you resent Saturdays because working people are crowding the places you’ve gotten used to having to yourself.

Sleeping in is nice. Dreaming about people working while you’re sleeping in is nice. Loafing is nice. I’m highly in favor of loafing — up to a point.

There are days that are just plain made for loafing, and we owe it to ourselves to enjoy every good-for-nothing second of them. The truth, however, is that there haven’t been many of those days. The calendar for my first month of “liberation” had precisely two days without commitments: retirement parties, anniversaries, speeches, appointments, meetings, visiting relatives … It was almost enough to make me long for the peace and quiet of work.

Work, for that matter, wasn’t entirely over. The Statesman was publishing “Destination Idaho,” the latest collection of my columns, and for a book of previously published material it required a surprising amount of work. Going through 40 years of material to find the best not used in previous books was the equivalent of mining “War and Peace” for titillating nuggets. That, along with headline writing, proofreading and other chores, consumed a big part of last summer and fall.

Two other projects are in the works. The USS Boise people have asked me to take a ride on their submarine and write the copy for a video about it. And I’m working with some friends, Tom Hadzor and Jennfer Isenhart,  on a video about this magical place we call Idaho. A labor of love. Tentatively titled “Idaho: the Movie,” it should be out by Christmas. (Thanks to Tom and Jennifer, incidentally, for the column photo used above.)

Two things you absolutely have to do when you retire. It’s standard procedure, it’s expected, practically mandatory. You have to volunteer, and you have to travel.

I volunteer a couple of times a month at a shelter. There’s nothing remotely glamorous about it. You sweep and mop. You make gallons of coffee and wash a staggering amount  of dishes. You hand out food, bandages, aspirin, cold medications, plastic bags, toiletries … It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. Working there has put faces on the homeless, the majority of whom are courteous and grateful for even the smallest kindness. Some are hard working people victimized by the economy, as any of us could have been.

Readers of my early columns on travel disasters will be happy to know that my bride and I are doing our best to meet the travel obligations of retirement. We took an 1,800-mile drive through the Southwest, spent most of February in a village in Mexico and took a long-delayed train trip through America’s heartland. More on those adventures in future columns.

That brings us back to the first question: Why am I back?

The answer probably isn’t what you think. It wasn’t that I was desperate for the money or missed the actual writing process. After making my living as a writer for 40 years, it was good to give those mental muscles a rest. And not having deadlines or the endless need  for new subjects — feeding-the-beast in newsroom-speak — felt better than good.

Loafing, however, is best taken in moderation. Too much of it can be lethal. And somewhat to my surprise, I missed some things once taken for granted. One was having a voice – the ability to comment on events when they’re actually happening. The last Idaho legislative session, for example. A humor columnist’s dream.

I missed the feeling of accomplishment that comes from writing a good column. Not that all of mine were good; God knows I had my share of lemons. As the late, great San Francisco columnist Charles McCabe put it, writing a newspaper column is “like hitting for a baseball team. If you get the good wood on the ball one time in three, you’re doing well.” And when you do get the good wood on the ball, nothing feels as good in quite the same way.

Something I missed a lot was  the immediate connection with readers. Though many told me they enjoyed the Best of Tim re-reruns, they were quick to add that they missed getting new columns.

So, just when you thought you were rid of me, I’m partially back. Partially in that I’m still retired, not a Statesman employee and will write columns at a stately retirement pace of one every other week.

At that rate, I’m going be playing catch-up for a while. There are things I can’t not write about that have happened in the last year. People I loved have died, I had my first experience with surgery and you’ll be pleased to know that retirement has done nothing to lessen my propensity for travel mishaps.

So, starting today, I’m back in the Life section every other Sunday. If you miss a column there, you can find it on my blog, http://www.woodwardblog.com. Columns will be posted there every other Monday. Extra blog posts will be added when truly important or unexpected events warrant immediate attention. The Cubs going to the World Series, for example, or Chuck Winder joining Planned Parenthood.

Wherever you read me, thanks. It’s great to be back.

Next: Trapped in Timeshare Hell in Mexico. Appearing June 24 in The Statesman, posted here June 25.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Statesman’s Life section every other Sunday and on his blog, http://www.woodwardblog.com, the following Mondays. 

Idaho lost a brilliant mind and a colorful iconoclast with the passing Wednesday of Perry Swisher — journalist, public servant, firebrand.

The reports of Swisher’s passing covered the facts of his long and varied career as a state legislator, gubernatorial candidate, public utilities commissioner and journalist. But unless I missed, them they didn’t  include several of my favorite Swisher episodes, which say a a lot about him as man.

One was his appearance at a Little Feat concert at the Boise Hawks ballpark. The music was loud enough at Swisher’s home not far from there that it kept him awake. His “solution”: to show up at the concert in his pajamas and bathrobe, wielding an ax. It made news for weeks.

As  PUC commissioner, he almost singlehandedly increased the telephone company’s request to raise its pay-phone charge from a dime to, as I recall, 15 cents. Swisher said it would be inconvenient for customers to fish around for  dimes and nickels and suggested raising the charge to a quarter. The ensuing increase was wildly unpopular. The Statesman captured the prevailing mood by publishing a cartoon of Swisher in a phone booth with a caption reading, “Why not make it 50 cents and call all your friends?” He called the paper in high spirits, said he thought the cartoon was hilarous and asked for the original drawing. He wanted to frame it.

But my favorite Swisher anecdote was his reaction to a letter to the editor of  a very good weekly newspaper he published in Pocatello. He thought so little of the letter that he called its author.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m canceling your subscription,” he said. “I don’t want anybody as stupid as you reading my newspaper.”

I can’t tell you how many journalists have wished they could do that.

They don’t make journalists — or characters — like Perry Swisher anymore.

WELCOME:  You’ve found the blog for Tim Woodward’s retirement-is-overrated  columns. They appear in The Idaho Statesman’s Life section every other Sunday and  are posted here the following Mondays.

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SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE:  To subscribe to http://www.woodwardblog.com, click on the tab to the right and follow the directions. It’s easy, takes seconds and it’s free. If you miss a column in The Statesman, you can catch it here. Columns are archived on the blog  so you can find old favorites or those you missed regardless of when  they first appeared — in addition to getting the extras.

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Thanks, and welcome.