A framed copy of Murphy’s Law hangs in my garage, a memento from 13 years of remodeling the Woodwards’ former home, Maintenance Manor. Everything that could go wrong at Maintenance Manor did.

  Murphy’s Law came to mind more than once during a recent trip to Las Vegas with my wife and a friend for a Boise State University game. Thankfully, no major disasters happened; just one minor but annoying mishap after another. So many that it almost became comical.

  It started at the airport, where our friend, Lynn, realized she’d forgotten to bring her phone. She called her daughter on my wife’s phone to ask her to bring it to her, but her daughter didn’t recognize the number and didn’t answer. She did respond to a text, though, and brought the phone in the nick of time. So all was well.

  Or so we thought.

  When we checked in for our flight, the TSA pre-check numbers, which would have saved us waiting in long lines, were missing from our boarding passes. My wife had included them when she booked the tickets, but Expedia for some reason didn’t include them on its end. The ticket agent was not inclined to be helpful. She looked at us as if we’d forgotten to wear clothes.

  Happily, a friendly agent at a neighboring desk came to the rescue. He Googled “lost TSA numbers,” asked us our names and birthdates and up came our numbers. All was well again.

  Right. 

  On her way through the pre-check line, Lynn got beeped. She hadn’t done anything wrong and concluded that it was just a random beep. (I suspected the devil, but refrained from saying so.) An agent took her phone and disappeared with it. A few minutes later, he returned it and cleared her to pass.

  “What was he doing, checking for messages from Putin?” I asked.

  The agent didn’t think that was funny at all.

  It was a full flight so they took our bags and said they’d be waiting for us in Las Vegas.

  It was hard for me not to be a bit skeptical about that. In my 20s, en route to Navy boot camp in San Diego, United Airlines sent my seabag to Chicago. For four days, I was the only one of thousands of sailors marching around in beige pants and a black trench coat. The drill instructors had a field day with that.

  Our seats were in the very back row of the full flight. Walking from the front of a full airplane to the back is a little like walking the length of a football field through quicksand. I may have stepped on everybody’s toes but the pilots’.

  When we landed, a flight attendant announced that our suitcases would be at Carousel 14 in Terminal One. Getting there took a while. The Las Vegas airport is huge, the seventh busiest in the U.S. We had to take a train to get to the terminal and then walk the equivalent of from Boise to Meridian to get to baggage claim.

  OK, I made that up. It wasn’t that far, but you get the idea. It was a long walk. When at last we arrived at Carousel 14, no one was there but us. This wasn’t surprising as it had taken forever to slog from the back row of the plane to the exit. The passengers in the front row may have been downtown playing the slots by the time we made it to the carousel

  An agent at our airline’s help desk explained that Carousel 14 was broken and that our bags were actually at Carousel 12.

  Barely! By the time we got there, they were being loaded onto a cart bound for unclaimed baggage. Unclaimed baggage, for all we knew, may have been in another building miles away. If we hadn’t arrived in the nick of time, we might still be looking for them.

  Accustomed to a short wait or no wait at Boise’s airport, we were stunned by the number of people waiting for taxis. The line stretched roughly to Tucson. 

  Arriving at last at our hotel, we were surprised to learn that there was a $100 deposit for each room, and that the $75 price of the rooms on Thursday night ballooned to $215 on Friday night, the night of the game. Welcome to Las Vegas, Bronco fans.

  Unpacking brought yet another surprise. Despite being in a tightly closed jar inside a Baggie, the distilled water for my CPAP machine had leaked all over my suitcase. Not to be outdone, my wife’s gooey purple cough medicine had leaked all over her purse. 

  “What else can go wrong?” I asked no one in particular.

  It didn’t take long to find out. The safe in Lynn’s room didn’t work. The guy who was sent to fix couldn’t get some screws to line up so he had to install a whole new safe.

  By the time we go our suitcases, waited in line for a taxi and spent time in gridlock watching the fare on the meter go up like a hot air balloon, it had taken three hours to get from the airport to our hotel. It was so late that our nice dinner in Las Vegas turned out to be bread, Walmart salami and fruit, served on a chair. (Our room didn’t have a table.)

  The trip wasn’t all bad, though. We saw a lot of Las Vegas. (Did you know that its famous “Strip”is the brightest place on Earth when seen from space, but some 1,000 people live under the city in tunnels?) We didn’t lose any money gambling and the right team won the game.

  So … Viva, Las Vegas. Murphy’s Law and all.

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

  Longtime readers of this column may recall that I live in a haunted house.

  Not haunted as in spectral apparitions and things that go bump in the night; our house is haunted by a poltergeist.

  A poltergeist with a sense of humor. He, or she, likes to hide things and snicker at us while we grow increasingly frustrated looking for them.

  Recently the specialized screwdriver for our Ring Doorbell disappeared. I dropped it after changing the doorbell’s battery. It bounced off of my shoe, and into oblivion.

 “Order a new one,” my wife said. “Then you’ll find the old one.”

  Sure enough. The day the new one arrived, the old one magically appeared – in plain sight in the middle of a bedroom floor.

  One of the more memorable disappearances was that of my smart phone.

  Granted, I’m not great at keeping track of it, often setting it down and forgetting where it is. Annoying, but temporarily so as it’s usually found with a minimum of searching.

  This time was different – a maximum of searching. Days of searching! We looked everywhere. You know how it is when you can’t find something and look in increasingly unlikely places? We  looked in all the usual places – in the car, in drawers, under beds and couch cushions, then progressed to searching in locations so unlikely as to be ridiculous – the stereo cabinet, the laundry hamper, the freezer … It was as if the earth had swallowed it.

  In due time it turned up in a bedroom. Not under the bed or a dresser, but once again right in the middle of the floor. I almost stepped on it. 

  We’d searched every inch of that room repeatedly, with no sign of it.

  There was only one possible explanation. It had to have been the poltergeist. 

  After a period of relative tranquility – no incidents in months – the vanishings began again last summer with the disappearance of our season tickets to Boise State football games.

  The tickets had arrived in the mail. My wife brought them in from the mailbox and handed them to me. I immediately put them in the file where we’ve always kept them.

  When we went to get them out … gone. Neither of us had taken them out of the file, nor had anyone else in the family. I looked through the file several times, took everything out of it. There was no doubt that they were gone. Completely, thoroughly, utterly gone.

  We looked everywhere. All through the desk drawer that contained the file. All through all of the desk drawers. All through the office containing the desk. All through the house, the wastebaskets, the trash, the recycling bin. Knowing that it was pointless to the point of being absurd, I looked in the garage, the back yard, the refrigerator … 

  Why, you may ask, would any sane person look in the refrigerator for  football tickets? A sensible question, with a not-so-sensible answer. I once found my shoes in the refrigerator.

   Absentmindedness? No doubt. 

   Or maybe I’m not an entirely sane person.

   Despite days of intensive searching, marked by increasingly colorful language, the football tickets never were found. Thankfully, the folks at the BSU ticket office were sympathetic and issued us new tickets.

  This was far from being the first time that frantic searching had  failed to produce missing items. The case of the missing car keys comes to mind.

  I’d set the keys on the dining table while doing some paperwork. The paperwork might have taken all of ten minutes. When I went to pick up the keys, they were gone. We did everything but turn the house upside down and shake it looking for them.

 This happened soon after we’d moved into our current home – and those keys are still missing more than 30 years later!

  This brings us, by means of a smooth and logical transition, to dandelion diggers.

  Most people whose homes have yards have a dandelion digger. A dandelion digger that they use every summer. My parents had the same dandelion digger for decades. I have to buy a new one every summer.

  This is not because the dandelion diggers are faulty or wear out; it’s because they vanish.

  A dandelion digger is not a small thing. It’s not like keys, a cell phone or some other relatively small thing that gets lost and is hard to find because of its diminutive size. Most dandelion diggers are a good 14 inches long, with colorful handles and shiny silver blades. Easy to spot when left lying around the yard.

  Except at our house. By my count, four dandelion diggers have disappeared from the premises in about as many years. You’d think I’d see them when mowing the lawn, pruning the bushes or doing other yard work, but no. It’s as if they dematerialize.

  As you undoubtedly are aware, Halloween is this week. To prepare for it, I climbed to the attic to get down the spooky decorations that have been stored there for years.

  You know what I’m about to tell you, don’t you?

  Right. The Halloween decorations were missing.

  Halfheartedly, all but certain that it will suffer the same fate, I went online and ordered a spooky looking witch.

  Halloween, of course, is the day for celebrating all things ghostly, and perhaps that includes poltergeists. My guess it that, with Halloween over, ours will be feeling generous and return our Halloween decorations.

  Just in time for Christmas. As mentioned earlier, he or she has a sense of humor.

  Happy Halloween, everyone.

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

  Imagine you live in a place where brutality is an everyday fact of life.

  A place were people are regularly kidnapped.

  A place where gang rape is a common occurrence.

  A place where people are beaten, slashed with machetes, murdered.

  The place is Haiti.

  Haiti is a country that can’t seem to get a break. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world, a place where more than six of every ten people live in poverty. Haiti is  plagued with earthquakes, floods, epidemics; food, fuel and water shortages, gang violence …

  Not a place where most people would choose to live.

  Most, but not all. Father Rick Frechette has lived in Haiti for 37 years. He could have been the pastor of a well-off parish in his native Connecticut, but chose Haiti instead.

  Prior to that, he and another Catholic priest had started an orphanage in Honduras. It was doing so well that he was asked if he’d be interested in starting one somewhere else.

  “I said I would and was asked if there was a place I’d suggest,” he said. “I’d visited Haiti and saw how impoverished it was, and that was what I suggested.”

  What began modestly with an orphanage in 1987 is now a campus that includes, among other things,  multiple schools, a clinic and school for vulnerable and displaced children, three rehabilitation centers for children and adults with neurological disabilities, a solar energy farm and two hospitals. Saint Damien Pediatric Hospital is the only hospital in Haiti that treats children with cancer and the country’s only hospital where heart surgery is performed.

  Father Rick, as he is widely known, is one of the health professionals who work in the hospital. He didn’t think he could do enough for people in Haiti just as a priest, so he went to medical school and became a doctor.

  Last month, he was in Boise to speak at a fundraiser for Saint  Alphonsus Regional Medical Center’s Project Haiti, now in its 30th year of supporting his work. I asked him whether he thought he had done more for people in Haiti as a doctor or a priest. 

  “I don’t think they can be separated,” he said. “They’re both part of a multilayered approach to the priesthood. It can’t be otherwise.”

  A warning: If you’re squeamish, you might want to skip over the next  three paragraphs. I debated whether to include them but opted to do so to provide an idea of just how grim things are in parts of Haiti. Should those of us who live in peaceful, comfortable surroundings turn away from horrors others must face regularly?

  A recent photo shows Father Rick wearing his priest’s vestments while blessing the muddy body of a victim of the violence outside of a gang leader’s compound. He said it’s common to find decaying bodies in the streets.

   “If they stay on the streets they deteriorate and children see them so we call the police and pay a stipend for the police to remove them,” he said. “It happens easily once a month. … Bodies do stay in the streets in some places. They’re eaten by dogs or pigs or burned.”

  The United Nations reported that a gang attack on Oct. 3 killed “at least 70 people, including women and babies.” 

  Does being a priest who has spent decades helping Haitians provide any protection from the gangs?

   “Because our schools are in a lot of areas, we have a long history of  dialogue with the people there, including the gang leaders,” he said. “You can’t avoid them, and they know you’re doing benevolent work. I don’t think they especially care about that, but they do care about what advantages you’re bringing to the area, like food distribution. Their family could get some food. They see that there is mutual gain.”

  During a previous visit to Boise, he said it wouldn’t surprise him if one day he became a victim of the violence. I asked him during his recent visit whether he still felt that way.

  “I said that in the sense that there are no guarantees. Even if you’re more or less known, there are always new combatants. And even if you’re known, the gangs are more drugged up. Safety is not a guarantee.”

  Risks to life and limb aside, just trying to function normally in contemporary Haiti can be challenging. 

  “There are closed roads to the north and south so the economy and agriculture are affected. If you don’t have some savvy in knowing how to get around, its difficult. The gangs have control. … Staff often can’t get to work, and patients can’t get to the hospital.”

  Supplies also can’t get there, and violence and kidnappings have caused  roughly a fourth of the hospital’s trained staff to flee to the U.S.

  I asked him how he kept going amid so much adversity. He could be forgiven for wanting to throw up his hands and flee himself.

  “One way is not to let too much get in. And the rightness of what you’re doing along with the fraternity, the solidarity, with which you’re working becomes a strong impetus to continue. … For believers, added to that is faith. Those are the marching orders of the gospel. That brings a lot of depth and strength.”

  He had an appointment and our interview time was running short, so  I asked him whether there was anything important he’d like to add.

  “Yes. It’s important to know that 13 million people in Haiti are victims of maybe 5,000 people who have big guns. It would be wrong to blame Haitians for the situation in Haiti. The movements that caused this (the violence) involved international mafias in drugs and guns. Where does a barefoot 18-year-old who is lucky to eat every three days get a weapon worth $1,500?”

  How can those of us who have multiple pairs of shoes and never miss a meal help?

  Project Haiti supports the hospitals, orphanage, schools and other charitable enterprises begun by Father Rick by helping pay for capital improvements, food, medical supplies and more. 

  To donate, go to https://donate.saintalphonsus.org/ProjectHaiti-Donate. Or mail a check to:  Saint Alphonsus Project Haiti, Attn: Jill Aldape, 1055 N. Curtis Rd., Boise, ID 83706.

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

  Early in my journalistic career, before RVs were as omnipresent as they are now, I met a couple whose home on wheels was a stunner.

  It was sleek and beautiful and had all the comforts of home. Curious about it, I struck up a conversation with them and was surprised to learn that it was their full-time home. They’d sold their traditional home to buy it and had been on the road ever since.

  Truth be told, I was a bit jealous. There’s something about the freedom of being able to go wherever you want without actually leaving home that appeals in varying degrees to many of us. 

  Fast forward a few decades – to a very different sort of motor home.

  Regular readers may recall a column about my granddaughter and her husband converting an old Air Force bus into a motor home. It’s become a thing to do that. Most of the buses being converted are former school buses; thus their nickname:  schoolies.

  Kelsie and Christian have been on the road in their schoolie for nearly a year and a half now. They’ve been to 25 states, the farthest east being Ohio. They’ve seen a lot of sights, had some great times, met a lot of interesting people.

  The adventure hasn’t been without challenges, though. The schoolie broke down once and took a week to fix. To pay expenses – the schoolie gets about 8 mpg – they’ve had to work a variety of jobs. Kelsie has a teaching degree and has taught online. They’ve worked a beet harvest and as campground hosts. Christian has done electrical and plumbing work, cut trees, operated heavy equipment ….

 As you might expect, it isn’t always easy to find a place to park a vehicle as big as a school bus.

  “When we’ve been somewhere for just one or two nights we’ve had to stay in some sketchy places, like truck stops or Walmart parking lots,” Kelsie said. “All Walmarts used to be RV friendly, but now some are saying no overnight parking.”

  In Arizona,  a long-term BLM parking fee that used to cost $180 for six months now costs $800.

   “Another negative,” Christian added, “is that you’re rarely in familiar routine. When you go shopping, you don’t know the store. You don’t know whether it will be open, whether you can park there and whether they’ll have what you need.”

  Their favorite city so far is Austin, Tex. Their least favorite: Memphis.

  “There was trash everywhere, and it felt dangerous,” Kelsie  said. 

  That surprised me. My wife and I had a good impression of Memphis being clean, safe and friendly when we were there. But that was a long time ago.

  They say the trip has changed them.

  Kelsie says their time in the schoolie has taught them “a lot of life lessons. I feel like I understand different types of people better. I don’t necessarily agree with them on everything, but now when I don’t agree I have a better understanding of why they’re the way they are and why they believe what they do.”

  “You realize your problems are just you,” Christian said. “It’s not where you are.”

  They may live in a conventional home again one day, but for now they’re happy with life in the schoolie and plan to keep it for trips even if they do buy a house. 

  “The best thing about it is the freedom,” Kelsie said. “You take your house with you wherever you want to go. If you’re somewhere you don’t like or working somewhere you don’t like, you just get up and go.”

  As good as that may sound, I’m a bit too settled for it now.

  But I’m still jealous.

                                                ***

  Two readers emailed about my recent column on my wife’s being hacked. They thought it embarrassed her for me to write about her for falling for a phone scam. One went so far as to say that I deserved a good beating for writing it.

  For the record, she read the column before it was published and was okay with it. Her reasoning was that it was worth a bit of embarrassment if it helped others avoid what happened to her – a scam evolving into a seemingly endless nightmare. 

  Several readers wrote to say that pretty much the same thing happened to them. All, like my wife, are smart, savvy  people who didn’t think that was possible. 

  Several readers suggested not answering the phone if the number of the caller isn’t recognized (now the practice at our house). One said she only provides personal information if she’s the one making the call.

  Greg Feeler wrote to recommend www.identifytheft.gov and a government publication, “Taking Charge: What to do if Your Identity is Stolen.” Find the PDF version at: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/taking-charge-what-do-if-your-identity-stolen. 

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

  We all think we’re too smart to get fooled by a telephone hacker, right?

  It’s one of those things that happen to other people. People who aren’t as smart as we are. People who aren’t as savvy or well informed. People who are naive or overly trusting.

  Until it happens to us.

  It happened to my wife, who is one of the smartest people I know. That she’d fall victim to a hacker on the telephone was so out of character as to be almost unbelievable. That it did happen shows just how slick these guys are at preying on people.

  It seemed to start innocently. The caller said he was with our satellite TV provider and that the company needed to install some new fiber optics equipment because ours was outdated. The installer would be out the following week. The caller said to be sure to check his ID to make sure he was legitimate. The installation was free; the only charge would be a $10 co-pay. Then he asked for a credit card number for the ten bucks.

  A friend who was visiting and overheard the conversation on the phone speaker thought it sounded fishy.

  “Ask him why you can’t just pay the installer with your credit card when he gets here,” she said.

  The hacker was quick with an answer:  the installer wouldn’t have a machine to process credit cards, and the company didn’t accept cash or checks.

  A couple of hours later, someone claiming to represent our credit card company’s fraud department called and asked whether she’d given her card’s number to someone that morning.

  “Yes. Why are you asking?”

  “It’s a scam,” the caller said. “They’re using your credit card and have gotten into your bank account. You need to give us some information so we can stop them before they clean you out.”

  Her reaction: instant panic.

  But still wary. 

  “How do I know you’re really my credit card company?” she asked.

  The caller said she could check by calling him back.

  “But instead of using my head and calling the number on the back of the credit card, I called the number on the caller ID. They answered by saying they were the company’s fraud department. Then they said they needed my passwords, user ID and Social Security number so they could stop the hackers. I know now how stupid it was, but by then I was panicking and I  fell for it hook, line and sinker.”

  Worried, as anyone would be, that the hackers were about to empty her bank account, she told the “fraud department” that she was going to call her bank. And was told not to do that.

  “They said that if I did, the hacker would have access to that number and could do more damage. By this time I’d also given them all my credit card numbers and told them about what the balance was in my bank account.”

  As mentioned above, this was utterly unlike her. It was all but  unbelievable that she’d given out that much information.

 “My brain just stopped working,” she said. “If he’d said the sun rose in the West I probably would have believed him. … They’re so good at it! They study people’s possible responses so they have a quick comeback for anything you say to them.” 

  The fallout from that one phone call:

  The hackers withdrew $2,800 from our bank account, spent $1,300 with an online-retailer, charged $1,300 on one credit card and $500 on another. This all happened within minutes.

  Damage control took much longer. My wife estimates that she spent about 12 hours a day for two weeks on it.

  She canceled all her credit cards. 

  She closed the bank account we’d had for decades and had to change the direct-deposit and autopay information used by Social Security and other income sources. She changed passwords, contacted utilities, her doctors, the credit bureaus, had an alert put on her Social Security number …

  We also had to get rid of the landline telephone we’d had forever and get new cell phone numbers, because the hacker had forwarded our calls to himself! And of course we had to tell all the friends and others who used our old numbers that they wouldn’t work any more.

  Weeks have passed since the hacking, and I still miss the landline phone we’d had ever since the house was built. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to make a call where that dependable old phone graced the kitchen before remembering once again that it’s gone.

  Of course it goes without saying that we had to tell all the friends and others who used our old numbers that they wouldn’t work any more.

  It takes a while to realize just how many places those numbers were used. One example: I now have scores of utterly useless business cards.

  We were lucky in one way. The damage control worked. My wife’s immediate and diligent response to the scam got all our money back.

  Countless other victims haven’t been as fortunate.

  Luckily, there are ways to protect ourselves. Two of the Federal Trade Commission’s tips:

  Don’t give your personal information to anyone who calls out of the blue. Legitimate organizations will never do that.

  Don’t trust Caller ID. It can be faked. It may say that it’s your bank, a government agency or a company you’ve done business with, but it could end up being your worst nightmare instead.

  My wife’s advice:

  “Don’t answer the phone. If it’s not a number I recognize, I don’t even pick up. If it’s legitimate, they can leave a voicemail.”

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

  “Why don’t you ever write any vacation disaster stories any more?”

  A question I still hear time to time from readers. When our kids were young, my wife and I seemed to experience every vacation mishap possible, many of which found their way into my columns. Readers loved them because they made their own vacations sound good by comparison. 

  We inadvertently pitched our tent on a red ant hill, blew up a camp stove.

  We had a flat tire during a blizzard on a mountain pass. While I was trying to change the tire, the jack slipped on the icy road, pinning both the jack and the tire under the car. If a friendly trucker hadn’t stopped to help, we might still be there. 

  Our generator went out on our way home from a vacation. With no generator for the headlights, we spent the night shivering at a rest stop in a VW bus, listening to sick kids cough and sneeze all night.

  During one particularly memorable vacation, I caught the chicken pox. You absolutely don’t want to get a childhood disease as an adult. It was as sick as I’ve ever been.

  As time passed and the kids grew up, however, our vacations came to resemble actual vacations more than adventures in purgatory. The catch was that they didn’t supply any column material. Nobody wants to read about someone’s routine vacation.

  Happily, my granddaughter Hailey has stepped up to fill the void.

  Her destination was the family cabin in neighboring Washington state. She’d be traveling with her significant other, Alex, four younger folks aged ten to 24, and Alex’s dog, Sasha. With that many people and a German Shepherd to squeeze in, they opted to rent a van.

  It’s a ten-hour drive to the cabin. They wanted to get an early start, but overslept. By the time they got to the airport, it was after 8 a.m. Alex waited in the car while Hailey went to get the van. At the rental counter, a surprise was waiting.

  “I’ve rented cars before and always used my debit card, but it was always when I was flying somewhere,” she said. “This time I found that if the rental isn’t connected to a flight, you have to use a credit card.”

  She’d ordered a new credit card, but it hadn’t arrived yet so she went back out to the car to get Alex’s. A good plan, except that Alex didn’t have his wallet with him.

  “He figured he’d just be dropping me off to get the van so he wouldn’t need it.”

  The “early start” was beginning to seem like a fairy tale. By the time Alex got his credit card and they came home to load the van, it was mid-morning and getting hot. Worse, the van had electric doors that wouldn’t allow them to use their car-top luggage carrier.

  “Everybody was hot and sweating and miserable,” Hailey said. “And because the carrier wouldn’t work we had to cram everything into the back of the van. We’d just finished when Alex came out of the house, opened the hatch and everything went flying out.”

  When everything was re-packed, there wasn’t room for Sasha, the aforementioned German Shepherd. It took a long time to rearrange things so that she could be marginally comfortable. By the time they got to Ontario, where they should have been by roughly 9 a.m., it was noon. 

  “We were all cranky, tired, angry and upset that we wouldn’t have an nice evening hang together. Then Ryan (her brother) suddenly said ‘Not to alarm you, but there’s a lot of ants back here.’”

  A veritable swarm of ants.

  “Hundreds and hundreds of them! They’d been living inside a half full bag of dog food that we thought would be about right for the vacation. They were everywhere. The kids were freaking out. We had to spend 45 minutes on ant patrol.”

  This should have been enough mishaps for any trip.

  It wasn’t. When they stopped for gas in central Oregon, another was waiting. 

  “We opened the doors and it was insanely windy. The wind blew chip bags, napkins, trash and other things all over the gas station parking lot. A whirlwind of debris! Alex tried to feed Sasha, and the wind was blowing the food away.”

  They’d been looking forward to enjoying some scenery, but it was wildfire season. The “scenery” consisted of smoking, smoldering hills.

  Here we will draw the curtain of mercy over these misadventures, except to say that they arrived at their destination  roughly four hours later than planned.

  “We’d been looking forward to still having some daylight and a nice evening together, but it wasn’t to be.”

  It had had all the makings, she said, of “a true Woodward vacation.” 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. 

Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

    At one time or another, a little-used room at Boise High School has served as a textbook room, a storage room, a temporary gym and a shooting range – with the bullet holes to prove it.

   This week it will open with a new role – as a museum.

   The Boise High School History Museum, according to Sandie Waters, will be the city’s first. A Boise High alumnus, Waters began working on the project in 2020. Fellow alums Molly Ackley Brown and Doug Lee joined her a couple of years later. Together, they’ve logged 1,700 volunteer hours, turning the dusty old room into a museum that would be the envy of any high school.

  Full disclosure:  I’m a Boise High School graduate. But I’d be writing this, and in exactly the same way, if I’d graduated from Borah, Capital, BK or any other high school. The opening of the state’s first high school museum is news.

  The museum is in part a response to the name of the school’s mascot being changed from the Braves to the Brave. Braves was thought by some to derogatory to Native Americans (though not all of Idaho’s high schools with Native American-themed names changed theirs).

  “It’s a bridge from the past to the present, to preserve the history after the mascot change,” Ackley Brown said. “That way all the Braves memorabilia wasn’t just put aside.”

  And what a stash of memorabilia it is! One of the state’s oldest schools, Boise High was established more than a century ago. With so many years to accumulate, the volume of odds and ends the volunteers had to sort was overwhelming. Nothing had been filed or organized. Things were dumped hither and thither with little or no thought to anything but getting them out of the way.

  “It took a year just to sort the archives,” Ackley Brown said. “There were hundreds of trophies, and the file cabinets full of photos and memorabilia weren’t organized. Everything ended up being sorted by decade since there were so many items.”

  Waters, Ackley Brown and Lee weren’t working alone. Other volunteers included Kathleen Reading Haws, Roma Hawes, Vicki Hawkins Kuebler, Tamie Shaffer O’Hara, Jeannie Rice Peterson, Larry Thomason And Dean Worbois.

  Two grants from the Idaho Education Association, one for $1,000 and another for $10,000, helped fund the work. The $1,000 grant was used to transform a section of the school’s old gym floor into a Braves conference table. The other was spent on carpentry work, framing, cabinets, materials … 

  The museum’s collection includes a complete set of yearbooks, from 1901 to the present. Never having seen a high school picture of my mother, I looked for her and found a mystery instead. There wasn’t a single photo of her, either as a senior in the year she’d have graduated or as an underclassman the previous two years.

  Did she even attend Boise High? The only other possibility would have been St. Teresa’s Academy, the predecessor to Bishop Kelly High School, but the odds of finding a St. Teresa’s yearbook for her graduation year are all but non-existent. Not even the state archives had one. 

  The odds of finding arcane Boise High memorabilia at its new museum, though, are excellent.

  An auditorium chair with a hat rack, for example. It dates to the 1890s, when the school was a red brick building that preceded the current one. (And presumably when students and visitors wore hats other than beanies to the school.)

  One of the displays features famous alumni – World War II flying ace Duane Beeson (for whom the terminal building at Boise’s airport is named), U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the late U.S. Sen. Frank Church among others. A photo shows an impossibly young Church with a fake mustache and a swastika on his sleeve, being hanged in effigy as Adolph Hitler.

  The collection includes photos, awards, books, articles, uniforms, and other oddments too numerous to mention. If you attended Boise High, it’s well worth a visit for a trip down memory lane. The museum will have its official opening Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free; donations are accepted.

  When she first started working on the project, Waters “didn’t think we’d have enough things to fill the space.” 

  Now it’s not only filled, but as attractively arranged and displayed as if it had been done by professionals. 

  Maybe one day other high schools in the area will catch up with museums of their own.

  That could take a while. Boise’s second high School, Borah High, didn’t open until 1958. Boise High, founded in 1881, had a heck of a head start. 

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

 It’s a shame that Timmy and Bill weren’t here to see it.

  That would be the late Tim Hally and Bill Molitor. Childhood friends who grew up in my old North Boise neighborhood and died too young. 

  We had two summer pastimes. If we weren’t playing baseball, we were swimming in Lowell Pool.

  Lowell and the South Junior High Pool, as you know if you’ve followed the news stories, needed expensive updates. They were  closed for several years while the city tried to decide whether to spend the money to upgrade them. And, as you also know if you’ve followed the stories, the city has made its decision. South Pool will be replaced. Lowell Pool will be renovated and brought up to code.

  Timmy and Bill would be delighted to know that, as I am. We loved Lowell Pool. It was our summer home away from home.

  It was four blocks from the old neighborhood. We were there the day it opened for the first time, waiting impatiently along with scores of other kids. No one who was there that day will forget seeing it for the first time.

  It was a Blintz Pool, one of over 100 above-ground pools designed by an engineer named Wesley Blintz and now one of very few still in existence. You accessed the pool via changing rooms – men’s on one side, women’s on the other – and climbed stairways to the pool itself – a glittering circle of water so brilliantly blue that it almost hurt to look at it.

  It’s an understatement to say that its annual opening in late May, usually on or near Memorial Day weekend, was eagerly anticipated. No one was admitted until opening day – at least not officially. There was a way, however, to discover prior to opening day whether the pool had been filled with water yet. 

  The lowest limb of a tree, easily climbed, afforded an unobstructed view of the entire pool. Bill and I made the climb daily. One unforgettable night, having learned from our perch on the limb that the pool had in fact been filled, we managed to scale a wall and sneak in for a swim. Being there by ourselves, just the two of us under the stars on a moonlit night in a silent pool normally teeming with boisterous swimmers, was magical.

  Until we actually got in the water – which was the approximate temperature of snowmelt! Our illicit dip lasted less than a minute.

  Never having learned to swim, my mother and older (ten years) sister decided to take lessons there in the evenings, when the pool was only open to grownups. They quit after coming home the first night with goosebumps and blue fingernails.

  Once the water had warmed up to a bearable temperature, Timmy and Bill and I spent virtually every summer afternoon there. With that much practice, we became good swimmers. Our mothers weren’t convinced of that, however, and decreed that we take formal lessons at the YMCA. They relented, somewhat sheepishly, when the instructor promoted us from tadpoles to flying fish on the first day.

  The deep end of the pool had two diving boards, a low- and a high-dive. It was a badge of honor to have worked up the courage to use the high dive. It took me several tries, but it was worth it. I walked home six inches off the ground that day. 

  An accident on the way home one afternoon triggered a fainting spell. We were happily pedaling along when, for a reason now forgotten, I stopped suddenly and jumped off of my bicycle. The handlebars swung around and hit me in the forehead. By the time my pals had walked me home, blood was streaming all the way down to my feet. Mom answered the doorbell and collapsed.

  Most of the pool’s lifeguards were young women in their teens or early twenties. Silly young boys (meaning us) doggedly flirted with them, as if they’d be remotely interested in six- or seven-year-olds. To us, they were goddesses. To them, we were obnoxious pests.

  One of them lived in our neighborhood. All of the neighborhood boys were enamored of her. I don’t remember ever speaking to her in those days, for fear of becoming tongue-tied. If in the unlikely event that she had spoken to me, I probably wouldn’t have been able to utter a single syllable, the power of speech having temporarily left me.

  Fast forward several decades. My folks, who were still alive and living in the old neighborhood at the time, told me that although she’d moved elsewhere the house where she lived during her lifeguard phase was still in her family and she was spending the summer there. This presented an opportunity to say hello and prove that I’d grown up, had children of my own and was no longer the diminutive nuisance she remembered.

  She was very nice, inviting me in after I introduced myself as a former pool denizen. We talked for several minutes, during which she was pleasant but seemed a tad suspicious, as if she half expected me to pull a peashooter out of my pocket or attempt a cannonball onto her couch.

  Indelible memories were made at that old pool. And now, thanks to the city investing in its renovation, more will be made. North Boise children again will have a first-rate public pool to beat the heat on summer days and star in their own stories.

  That’s wonderful news. Cyber-age kids need more than digital memories. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday and posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

  If he’d lived long enough. U.S. Sen Frank Church would be celebrating his 100th birthday Thursday.

  It’s hard to think of him as being that old. At the time of his death, from pancreatic cancer in 1984, he was 59 and looked younger. He was something of a shooting star, burning brightly for a relatively short time but accomplishing more than many of us do with more years.

  For readers unfamiliar with him, Church was a Boise native who served in the U.S. Senate for 24 years. He was, among other things, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, an early and influential critic of the Vietnam War and author of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. He was instrumental in creating the River of No Return Wilderness Area, later named in his honor. To many, it’s now known simply as “the Frank.”

  I barely remember a time when I wasn’t aware of him. Beatrice Hally, a childhood friend’s mother, worked on his first campaign for the Senate in 1956. The Hallys’ home was filled with Frank Church yard signs, pennants, brochures, campaign buttons …The youthful appearance of the person pictured on them was striking. He looked more like someone running for student body president than the U.S. Senate.

  Church grew up in Boise and attended Boise High School. He attended Stanford University and served in the army during World War II. Due in part to the efforts of Bea Halley and other volunteers, he became a U.S.  senator at 32, the fifth youngest person ever to do so.

  In my early years as a reporter, a hush of the type inspired by celebrities fell over the newsroom whenever he came to be interviewed by the editorial board. Governors and celebrities notwithstanding, he was easily the state’s most famous person.

  It never seemed to go to his head, though. When my wife, then new to Idaho, bumped into him at an Idaho Press Club New Year’s Eve Party one year, she mistook him for a freshman candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat.

  “I know you!” she said, excited to meet someone she’d seen in campaign commercials. “You’re Bud Davis!”

  Some senior senators would have been huffy about being mistaken for a political newcomer. Not Church. He laughed, shook her hand and graciously introduced himself and his wife, Bethine. They couldn’t have been nicer about it.

  It was amusing to watch the Churches at a campaign event. His other attributes notwithstanding, the senator was terrible at remembering constituents’ names. Bethine, on the other hand,  rarely forgot a name. 

 “Frank, you remember Bob and Mary Jones,” Bethine would say.

  “Of course!” Frank would reply. “Wonderful to see you both again.”

  In 1976, Church ran for president. I was part of the throng of journalists lining the main street of Idaho City on the raw March  day when he announced his candidacy. He was and remains only the second Idahoan ever to run for the presidency as a major party candidate. The first was Sen. William Edgar Borah in 1936.

  Because of commitments to his intelligence committee, Church announced his candidacy late in the race, after future president Jimmy Carter had already defeated several opponents. Church  referred to it as his “late, late strategy,” traveled in a plane nicknamed The Turtle, wore ties with images of turtles.

  The newcomer stunned Carter by winning four state primaries, but withdrew from the race when it became apparent that Carter would win the nomination. I was a member of the editorial board at the newspaper where I worked at the time and participated in his post-campaign interview.

  “Tim, you remember the senator,” the newspaper’s publisher said by way of introduction.

  “Of course!” I said, and, reaching to shake his hand, spilled a   cup of scalding hot coffee he was holding. It ended up in one of his shoes, resulting in the state’s most famous person hopping around on one foot while frantically trying to take off his shoe.

  Not an auspicious beginning to an interview. As he’d been during the awkward moment at the New Year’s Eve party, though, Church couldn’t have been nicer about it.

  He beat the odds repeatedly by being elected as a Democrat in a conservative Republican state, but feared that his support of the 1978 Panama Canal Treaty would cost him his job. He was right. After 24 years in the Senate, he was defeated in the 1980 election.

  I interviewed him for the last time in 1984, at the Churches’ East Boise home. By then he was dying of cancer, but he answered my questions patiently and articulately. Gracious to the end.

  One of the beside visitors at his Maryland home during his final days was Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy. A witness said it was the only time he had seen a Kennedy cry. 

  Church’s words engraved on his headstone at Morris Hill Cemetery never fail to inspire:

  “I never knew a man who felt self important in the morning after spending the night in the open on an Idaho mountainside under a star-studded summer sky. Save some time in your lives for the outdoors, where you can be a witness to the wonder of God.”

  Thanks for your eloquence and your years of distinguished service, senator. And Happy Birthday. 

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

  An online story attributed to a local radio station this spring could have been a model for click bait. Its headline: “25 stores that are no longer at Boise Towne Square Mall.”

  The story listed the 25 stores, which include Sears, Kinney Shoes, Radio Shack and other household names as well as some lesser known establishments – Justice, Gymboree, Cosset …

  The scope of the story was limited to Towne Square, but it isn’t the only place that’s lost stores through the years. Many downtown Boise stores suffered a similar fate.

  The old Sears Store on West State Street, for instance. It was a go-to place for everything from suits to power tools. When my wife and I were remodeling Maintenance Manor, a North Boise fixer-upper, I was practically on a first-name basis with the clerks in the tool department, buying everything from wrenches to a power saws there. 

  Fixer-upper doesn’t begin to describe Maintenance Manor’s appalling condition before we started working on it. My handyman father-in-law advised us to knock it down and have a new house built on the lot, wise counsel we completely ignored in favor of spending 13 years turning it into a livable  home. Sears supplied most of the tools to do it.

  My most vivid memory of the old Sears store, however, is of a hapless couple who had gone there to buy paint. As they negotiated a turn coming out of the parking garage a bit too fast, their Volkswagen flipped over. Multiple cans of paint opened, drenching the car and its occupants with Sears Best baby blue. They looked like drowned Smurfs. 

  That would never happen at the Towne Square Sears, of course. It doesn’t have a parking garage. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever left its parking lot wearing paint. 

  Virtually all of the city’s department stores were in or near downtown in those days – Sears, Falk’s, the Cash Bazaar, the Mode, Ltd., JCPenney and C.C. Anderson’s, which later became the Bon Marche.

  Falk’s – the name eventually was lengthened to Falk’s ID – was the setting for a harebrained prank played by a young boy yet to learn the difference between a funny practical joke and a foolish one. The young boy was yours truly. 

  I’d have been four or five then.  The Falk’s store’s elevator shaft had grates that you could peer through and see the elevator below. The elevator’s ceiling had an opening directly above the operator. It seems almost quaint now, but at the time you didn’t push buttons to go to  your destination floor. An operator did it for you. 

  Looking down the darkened shaft to the brightly lit opening above the operator, I succumbed to abject foolhardiness, got a mouthful of water from a nearby drinking fountain and spat it down the shaft. It took about two seconds for the moist and hopping mad operator to leave her post and find my mother.

  Mom was furious. Its was the angriest she ever was with me. It wasn’t just that her son had done something wrong, but that it had deeply embarrassed her. Our shopping trip ended immediately. She  marched me outside to her Nash Rambler and drove straight home. My punishments included a spanking and being grounded until I was 27.

  The Cash Bazaar was more of a low-cost department store. It was where my teenage rock group bought the sport coats that we wore onstage. They were made of vaguely foamy material in a blazing,  red-orange color that made fire-engine red seem soothing. They were hideous. We loved them.

  C.C. Anderson’s was the favorite store of every kid in town. This was  largely due to C.C. himself. Mr. Anderson roamed the store in his elegant, three-piece suits, its pockets filled with candy for the store’s youthful customers.

  Anderson’s was home to the Empire Room, a mezzanine-level restaurant that served some of the best burgers and flavored Cokes in town. A shopping trip with Mom to Anderson’s was an event never to be missed. Luckily, the store had escalators. No tempting elevators shafts with nearby drinking fountains.

  The Mode, Ltd., was the most upscale downtown store. It was the only store in town with a “tea room.” Women congregated there to drink tea, snack and exchange pleasantries. I don’t recall ever seeing men there. They wouldn’t have been excluded, but they wouldn’t have been especially comfortable, either. It was by and large a women’s domain.

  The rest of the store wasn’t. My father took me there during my teenage years to buy me a winter coat. He wanted it to be a good quality coat, and the Mode was known for high quality merchandise.I still have that coat all these years later. A gray Pendleton with a black, furry collar. A bit fancy for everyday winter wear, but perfect for occasions when you need to dress up.

  Now the department stores are concentrated at Towne Square. Longtime Boiseans will recall that city leaders tried for years to get the mall built downtown. When the dust settled, with Towne Square in the suburbs and a redeveloped downtown, a former mayor was asked what he thought of what downtown had become. He said it wasn’t what he’d envisioned, but it was okay.

  Okay and then some. It’s a great downtown. But a really great department store would make it even better.

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

New York.

  Just saying the words evokes iconic images:  skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway plays  … It’s our biggest city, one of the most diverse and beautiful and one of the top U.S. tourist destinations:  number four, according to AAA, after Orlando, Anaheim and Las Vegas.

  My wife and I have been to most of Western Europe, a couple of countries in Eastern Europe, Mexico, Canada and most of the U.S., but we’d never been to New York.

  Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I’d been there a total of one day, while in the Navy. It was winter, bitterly cold, windy. My only memories of it are of going to the top of the Empire State Building, searching in vain for a deli that served great New York pastrami sandwiches, and being painfully cold.

  Last month, we saw New York in a different light. Our oldest daughter had planned to visit her best friend, who lives in Connecticut now, and casually asked if we’d like to go along. Not having been on a trip in ages, we said yes in a heartbeat.

 Her friend Stephanie and her husband, Jason, live an hour’s train ride from the city. We stayed with them all but one of the the six nights of our visit and spent three days and one night in New York.

  The temperature was roughly 60 degrees warmer than my previous visit so it was possible to see and enjoy the sights without worrying about hypothermia or frostbite. To a significant extent, the sights consisted of buildings. Scores of them, skyscrapers everywhere, some so tall their upper stories were lost in the clouds.

  The tallest building at the time of my Navy visit was the Empire State Building. Now it’s not even close; it’s the seventh tallest. The tallest, One World Trade Center, is some 500 feet taller. We had to be careful not to bump into people on the sidewalks while gawking up at the skyscrapers.

  Impressive as the tall buildings are, the one that impressed us most was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We spent most of one of our three days in New York on a city tour. Our guide said that in its early days, the the Irish were at the absolute bottom of the city’s social structure. They responded by building the cathedral, and what a job they did!

  The largest Gothic cathedral in the U.S., St. Patrick’s covers an entire city block and is absolutely stunning, inside and out. The only thing in my experience that compares is Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which it resembles.

  The cathedral is a bit over a mile from the Dakota, where John Lennon lived and was infamously murdered. (Other celebrities who lived there through the years included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland and Leonard Bernstein.)

   A one-mile walk from the Dakota takes you to Central Park, the most visited city park in the U.S., one of the most beautiful, and home to Strawberry Fields, the John Lennon memorial. Visiting that is a meaningful experience for any Beatles fan, this one included.

  Jason and Stephanie, our exemplary hosts, took us to a concert at a club called The Village Vanguard, the oldest continuously operated jazz club in the world. The featured act that evening was a guitarist named Kurt Rosenwinkel.

  Jason is a jazz musician and graduate of one of the best music conservatories in the country. He’s primarily a saxophonist, but also plays guitar; he owns some 30 of them. I’ve been playing guitar most of my life. And neither of us recognized a single one of the many chords Rosenwinkel played that night. My guess is that he invented a lot of them. After the show, I looked him up. He’s considered one of the greatest guitarists ever to have played the instrument.

  We emerged from the club to an entirely different kind of sound. Honking your horn is illegal in New York City, but you’d never know it. New Yorkers honk constantly. It’s annoying at first, but you get so used to it that eventually you don’t even notice. It’s just background noise. 

  New York, according to Google, is “one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, with dozens of enclaves and neighborhoods, and hundreds of different cultures, cuisines and languages.”

  Which would explain why almost everyone we spoke with there had an accent. Not a New York accent, but accents from all those languages. Our daughter asked a man for directions, listening intently  while he spoke and gestured for several minutes.

  “What did he say?” I asked her.

  “I have no idea.”

  So many accents, so many people.

  “You will never be alone here,” our tour guide said. “There will always be somebody around you.”

  True. And it can be a bit overwhelming.The sidewalks are human rivers, hundreds upon hundreds of people – people moving in front of you, behind you, beside you. People If you lived there, you’d get used to it. I didn’t, and in time it started to bother me. I vowed that upon returning home I’d drive to the desert east of town with a book and a lawn chair, take a dirt road to nowhere and enjoy a quiet read without another soul within miles.

  Our daughter was crazy about New York.

  “Wasn’t it great, Dad?” she said. “Didn’t you love it?”

  “It was great. I liked it. But can’t honestly say I loved it.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “So many people. You can hardly take a step without walking into someone. That got to me after a while.”

  I told her about my desert-drive idea.

  She mulled that over for a bit before responding.

  “I guess you’re just a true Idahoan, Dad.”

  No argument.

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

  You never know when or where you might encounter people you haven’t seen in years. It can happen anytime, sometimes in unexpected places. 

  A cemetery, for example.

  A few days before Memorial Day, I made my annual pilgrimage to Morris Hill Cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of my parents. It was a nice afternoon, but the cemetery was all but deserted. A good time to take a stroll and check out the neighborhood.

  The first stop was at the grave of Terry Blake Reilly. Terry was an Idaho state senator and the founder of Terry Reilly Health Services. He was killed in a plane crash while campaigning for lieutenant governor, a life lost far too soon. He was only 39. 

  I knew Terry from grade school. He was a year behind me, but it was one of those small schools where everybody knew everybody. He was tall for his age, and fearless. One day on my way home from school, three bullies had me backed up against a fence in an alley when Terry happened by and sent them packing. It probably saved  me from a beating. I will always be grateful to him for that.

  The inscription on his grave:  “I’d Rather be Fishing.”

  Thanking him once again for saving my bacon, I bid him farewell and went to see what other figures from the past might be in the area.

  A few steps from Terry’s grave led to the final resting place of Harold and Ellyn Gates. They were the parents of more people I’d known in grade school. One was in my class. Kevin Gates was the tallest boy in the class, and one of the nicest. My father once suggested that I could do worse than to use him as a role model.

  It would be great to know what became of him. A Google search yielded enough people named Kevin Gates to start a football team. One, in Meridian, seemed to fit except for the names of his relatives.  None of the names of his brothers or sister appeared in the search. If you read this, Kevin, I’d love to hear from you.

  Next on my walking tour were Don and Narcy Anchustegui. It’s impossible for me to be certain, but it’s a pretty good bet that they were the parents of John Anchustegui, who lived in the neighborhood where I grew up and was one of just two people in my life with whom I’ve had a fistfight. 

  No idea after so many years what started it, but what ended it is vividly remembered. It was John’s fist coming to a hard landing on my nose. We’re talking serious pain here. Stars and planets.

  The other fight happened years later, in high school. Armed with liquid courage, I picked a fight with a boy who was known for being exceptionally good at them. He also was bigger and stronger. Same result:  stars and planets, copious bleeding. And a lesson learned. No fights since then. We won’t get into how many years that’s been.

  Not far away were Ed Groff and Audrey Arregui. Audrey was my sister’s best friend when they were young. Though they hadn’t seen each other in some time, she came to my sister’s funeral. A nice lady.

  Encouraged by finding so many people from the past in such a short distance, I ventured farther and came to the memorial for Sen. Frank Church and his wife, Bethine.

  The Woodwards were snake-bit when it came to interacting with Sen. Church. Arriving at the Idaho Press Club’s New Year’s Eve party not long after we got married my wife and I ran squarely into the Churches.

  “I know you!” my wife said. “You’re Bud Davis.” 

  New to the state, she had confused a congressional candidate with the state’s senior senator. Church couldn’t have been nicer about it.

  Five years later, Church unsuccessfully ran for president. I was an editorial writer then and part of a group that interviewed him in the aftermath of his campaign.

  “Tim, you know the senator,” the newspaper’s publisher said by way of introduction.

  “Of course!” I said, reaching to shake the famous hand.

  And spilling the senator’s cup of scalding hot coffee in the process!

  Some of it ended up in his shoe. He hopped around on one foot, grimacing while trying to take the shoe off. It’s fair to say I was mortified. But, once again, he couldn’t have been nicer.

  Walking farther still, I reached the singular headstone for Paul Revere.

  For newcomers unfamiliar with him, Revere was the leader of Paul Revere and the Raiders, the most successful rock group ever to have come from Idaho. I was fortunate to have known him fairly well. He was a force of nature.

  Paul’s headstone is unique. It features an engraving of a three-cornered hat like those the Raiders wore as part of their Revolutionary War costumes, and an inscription:

  “He came. He rocked. He left.”

  Seeing the graves of all these people, once so full of life but now gone, made me realize with a start that I now have more friends and relatives who are dead than living. A sobering thought.

  They were good people. I miss them.

  That said, I’m in no hurry to join them. My headstone can wait a while.

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

 Nothing brings back childhood memories like revisiting old haunts.

  The people who live in the North Boise home where I grew up contacted me recently to say that after 20 years there, they were putting it on the market. Would I be interested in visiting it again before the open house?

  The woman who sent the email took me on a tour of every room. None was without memories.

  Even the entryway. No one in the family ever forgot the night my mother answered the door and watched, horrified, as two of the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells threw a beachball-sized snowball into the house.

  The living room was the scene of countless memorable events. Seeing the fireplace again brought back the times my father had fruitlessly tried to start a fire there. Instead of the cozy fires he’d envisioned for Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve, the result was a room filled with smoke and spirited cursing. As happened with so many minor emergencies, it was Howard who came to the rescue.

  Howard Snyder lived just across the street. A troubleshooter for the power company, he was without a close second as the neighborhood handyman. He could be counted on to fix anything from a broken soap box derby racer to a malfunctioning lawnmower, invariably finishing the job with one of his trademark phrases:  “That’ll stop that foolishness.”

  Howard would make his way through the smoke to the fireplace, work some magic with the chimney damper and in no time the smoke had cleared. My “tour guide” said the chimney flue hadn’t been built correctly so the smoke wasn’t Dad’s fault. He’d have been happy to know that.

  The living room was where I spent countless hours curled up next to the heat register reading Hardy Boys or Tom Swift mystery stories. It was the scene of idyllic childhood Christmases. And the room where my mother sat me down, at age 16, to tell me that she and my father had both previously been married and my sister was actually my half sister. There’s a memory you don’t forget.

  The room that had changed most was the kitchen. The old china closet had been replaced with a newer one, the appliances were in different locations and the “bar” was gone.

  The “bar,” as my mother called it, was a chest-high partition that separated the rest of the kitchen from what she referred to as “the breakfast nook.” The bar had a small shelf for the toaster, which ignited another memory.

  My great grandmother Susie occasionally came to visit from her home in Notus, sometimes staying for a week or more. She had long hair that normally was in a bun. On the morning of the toaster incident however, it was bun-less and reached almost to her waist. She was leaning against the bar, and, unknown to her some of her hair had fallen into the toaster – along with bread that was being toasted. The result was a highly successful blaze.

  Grandma Susie was a jolly old soul. When the fire was extinguished, she sat down and laughed.

  “I’ve lived a long time (she was pushing 90) and have had lots of things happen to me,” she said,  but I never thought I’d catch my hair on fire.”

  Then she laughed some more.

  The largest room in the basement of my onetime home is now a family room. When we lived there, it was a “recreation room.” Recreation rooms, “rec rooms” for short, were popular in those days.

  Its centerpiece was a ping pong table, initially used for ping pong but later for my model railroad. Every boy in the neighborhood had one of those. The two most popular brands were Lionel and American Flyer.

  I was a Lionel kid. Its trains were bigger and heavier. Standing mesmerized in the darkened recreation room, one hand on the transformer controls, the only lights those of the locomotive headlight and the red and green signal lights along the track, is one of my favorite childhood memories.

  All kids do stupid things. Arguably my stupidest was nearly burning one of the neighbor’s garages down. Its owner, a Dr. Paulson, kept a table saw in the garage. Under it was an enormous pile of sawdust. In what can only be described as a temporary lack of sanity, I tossed a lighted match on it.

  The result was instantaneous, and terrifying. In less time than it took a horrified Dr. Paulson to come running with a garden hose, flames were licking the garage walls.

  Luckily, he was able to extinguish them before any real damage was done. His next act was to head to the Woodward residence to tell my father what his birdbrained son had just done. Unable to catch me to administer a spanking, Dad chased me around his Buick in the garage, occasionally delivering a kick in the seat of the pants. To my surprise, one of my chalk drawings still remains on one of the garage walls. 

  One of the rooms in the basement of the old house has been converted to an office. It used be the furnace room. 

  In my teens, I slept in the room next to it, Early one morning, the furnace malfunctioned. I awoke to the sounds of clanking and cursing, followed by my father emerging from the furnace room with a bucket of flaming coal clinkers on the end of a shovel. His contorted face was framed in smoke and illuminated by a fiery red glow. It was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

  Most of the memories about the old house, of course, aren’t fiery. They’re almost uniformly positive. It was a wonderful place, and a wonderful time, to grow up.

  To its most recent owners, thanks for the tour.

  And the memories. 

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

  Can people who have died communicate with us?

  Good question. One no one has definitively answered. Lots of stories out there, but definitive?

  Still, sometimes you have to wonder.

  My last column was about a woman who died not long after writing her life story. Tish Lewis was an Owyhee County icon and champion horse groom. (A groom, for readers unfamiliar with the term, is a person skilled in caring for horses.) Lewis traveled the world to  competitions, which she often won. She was also an expert sheep dog trainer and a much loved figure in Owyhee County.

  A reader who knew her emailed me early in March to say that Lewis  had written her autobiography and suggested that it might be a good subject for my column. I was delighted. I’d interviewed both Tish and her late husband, Gene Lewis, and thought highly of both of them. Not having heard from or about her in years, I was pleased to learn that she was still around and was looking forward to reading her book.

  I procrastinated for almost a month, however, when it came to setting up an interview with her about it. Finally, on the morning of April 6, I stopped procrastinating. It suddenly seemed important to reach her. I called, but no answer.

  Again, no answers that afternoon or evening.

  The following day, I tried several more times. No result.

  The same thing happened the next day.

  The day after that, The Press published her death notice. She’d died on April 6 – the day it suddenly seemed crucial for me to reach her.

  Was she trying to tell me she’d passed away and that sooner-rather- than-later was the time to write about her book?

  Probably not. Still, the thought occurred to me. Was the book so important to her that even in death she wanted someone to publicize it?

   Again, probably not. But who knows? It’s not uncommon for people to hear, or think they hear, from those who have passed on.

  It happened to my mother-in-law. She was away on a trip when her mother died. They were close, and she felt terrible that she wasn’t with her at the end. It bothered her for weeks.

  Then she had a dream about her mother. In the dream, her mother spoke to her.

  “Are you happy where you are?” my mother-in-law asked her.

  “Oh, yes, Elsa. I’m very happy here.”

  She stopped feeling terrible after that. Regardless of whether her mother actually came to her while she was sleeping or it was just a dream, it gave her closure.

  A friend of mine had something inexplicable happen to him at his brother-in-law’s funeral. A furniture builder, my friend was working at the time of his brother-in-law’s death on a cabinet that required an unusual type of screws for its hinges. You couldn’t just run to the hardware store and buy them. They had to be special-ordered, and he was one screw short of having enough to finish the cabinet. 

  When the funeral service was over, relatives gathered in a chapel at the funeral home. While there, my friend noticed something shiny on the purple carpet. It turned out to be two screws – exactly like the special ones he needed.

  “There were no cabinets in that room that were missing any screws,” he said. “People said maybe it was just a coincidence, but I’ll always be convinced that he (the brother-in-law) did it. He loved to play jokes and make people laugh.”

  A last practical joke?

  Last story:  During my elementary school and junior high school years, the smartest student in our class was a girl named Jackie. Jackie wasn’t just a straight-A student; she seemed wise and dignified beyond her years. Everyone admired and respected her. She could have been anything – a surgeon, a psychiatrist, a scientist – but at the time of her death was working to help the homeless in Seattle.

  One night I had a dream about her. It remains the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. Jackie’s home had a back-yard pool, where some of the members of our class spent many happy hours. In the dream, we were all there again. It was so real, as if it were actually happening! I could hear the water splashing, smell the chlorine, see the printed designs on the swimsuits. 

  A few days later, I went to see a friend who had gone to the same schools I had.

  “Did you hear about Jackie?” she asked as she answered her door.

  “No. What about her?”

  “She died.”

  I wrote a remembrance column about Jackie and in response received a call from her father. He said she died the night I had the dream about her.

   My favorite interpretation was that of a classmate.

  “Maybe it was her way of saying goodbye,” he said.

  Was it?

  No way of knowing.

  But it would be nice to think so.

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

 The building was dark, silent, empty. Paper cups and other debris littered the floor. It was as if the once busy transit hub had been forgotten, destined to spend the rest of its days as a relic of a gone era.

  The old Greyhound bus station at 1212 W. Bannock Street in downtown Boise was replaced some time ago by a new one closer to the Interstate. It didn’t seem all that long ago, though, that it was crowded and bustling. I happened by there one morning in February and, memory-smitten, stopped to peer through the windows.  

  So many memories. Two stood out, though. The first had to do with a memorable incident from my teens.

  I was a member of a rock group, and we were playing in a downtown ballroom one night when my then girlfriend asked if she could use my car.

  “My little sister has to be home by 11,” she said. “Can I borrow your car to give her a ride?”

  I gave her the keys and, without giving it another thought, went back to playing music. About half an hour later, a uniformed police officer approached the stage and beckoned to me. Not just any police officer, but Vern Bisterfeldt, a larger than life cop who patrolled our dances and went on to become a city councilman and county commissioner. 

  “Your girlfriend and her sister were in an accident in your car,” he said. “They’re at the bus station.”

  “The bus station? What are they doing there?”

  “That’s where the accident happened. Some guy broadsided them.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure. You’ll have to go over there to find out.”

  When we finished our last song, one of the band members gave me a ride to the station. My car, a Volkswagen Bug, was lying on the sidewalk in front of the station, upside down.

   The officer on the scene said the car that hit it was being driven by a man who was going way too fast. A witness claimed that upon impact my car had flown over the telephone wires before landing on the sidewalk.

  My girlfriend and her sister were thrown clear through the windshield, which had popped out. Miraculously, neither was seriously injured. The little sister needed a few stitches, but other than that they were both okay.

  I’m a firm believer in wearing seatbelts, but if they’d been wearing theirs that night the crash would have been a whole lot worse. The steering wheel had broken in half and gone through the driver’s seat. If the girls hadn’t been thrown clear, the driver almost certainly would have been killed. And her little sister probably would have needed a lot more than a few stitches. They were incredibly lucky.

  The car wasn’t. It was a total loss.

  The other bus-station memory that stands out was of taking the bus to North Idaho to join friends who wanted to start a band while attending the University of Idaho. I’d just gotten out of the Navy and hadn’t bought a car yet so the bus was the only way to get there.

  It left early in the morning so everything had to be ready to go the night before. My suitcase was packed and sitting beside my bed. My guitar was propped up against the suitcase.

  For a reason that remains a mystery, I got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning.

  Ever wonder where the expression “getting up on the wrong side of the bed” originated?

  Ancient Rome, actually. A superstitious lot, Romans believed that getting up on the wrong, or left, side of the bed would bring bad luck. That morning may have been the only time in my life that I got up on the left side of the bed. And sure enough, bad luck followed.

  It was still dark when I got up, walked smack into the guitar and fell down on top of it. In addition to some spirited cursing, the silence was broken by a sickening crack. The guitar was in a fabric gig bag rather than a hardshell case, and its neck snapped off.

  It was a gloomy lad whose folks drove him to the bus station that morning, sans guitar, for the long trip to Moscow (six hours by car, longer by bus).

  These and other memories crowded together as I peered through the windows of the old bus station, recalling what a vital place it used to be and thinking what a shame it was that it wasn’t being used.

  Fast forward a few weeks. Driving by on a recent evening, I noticed people inside, stopped and went to investigate. Workers were busy sweeping and otherwise cleaning up. Seeing me outside, a young man opened the door and let me in.

  He was Aidan Brezonick, founder of the Idaho Film Society. He said it had taken over the building and is using it as work spaces during the day and showing films in the evenings.

  “There’s one playing right now that you’re welcome to watch if you’re interested,” he said, gesturing toward a curtain with a sign identifying it as the entrance to the society’s theater. 

  The film was “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which I’d already seen so I thanked him just the same and left, feeling chipper. It was great knowing that the old building had become an active part of the community again.

  To learn more about the society and films showing at what is aptly named the Omnibus Theater, click on idahofilm.org.

                                                     ***

  My last column, about an online publication’s story on “the coolest buildings in every state,” asked readers for their thoughts on what the coolest buildings are in Idaho.

  The online publication, The Discoverer, gave the Statehouse as Idaho’s. I begged to differ and named some I thought deserving of the title – the Hoff Building, Teater’s Knoll, some depots and churches, etc. To those, readers added the following:

   Brian Bazenni suggested Boise’s Idanha Hotel and Nampa’s Smallwood House.

  Jack Hourcade is partial to the administration building at the old Idaho Pententiary, “made with sandstone mined just a few hundred yards away.”

  The most unusual building suggested:  Miner’s Hat Realty, in Kellogg. The roof of the building actually looks like a miner’s hat, complete with a headlamp. Thanks to Glenn McGeoch for that one.

  Ray Guindon likes the Sun Valley Lodge and the Coeur d’Alene Resort, Joanna Marshall the circular Boise Little Theater. 

  To all who sent suggestions, thanks.

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

 My late father was a building junkie. He was keenly interested in any new building of note that was going up in his adopted home of Boise, occasionally taking me with him to construction sites to watch the work being done.

  Some of his passion for building-watching rubbed off on me. I’ve been known to stop and ask questions of workers at construction sites and can’t drive the Connector into downtown Boise without multiple glances at the Arthur, the new high-rise being built at 12th and Idaho streets.

  So when an email from The Discoverer, an online travel publication, included a story about “the coolest buildings in every state,” I was eager to read every word, 

  Many of the states have buildings that in one way or another are decidedly cool:

  Colorado’s, for example. The Cadet Chapel at the Air Force Academy is so unusual and striking that it’s said to draw visitors from all over the world. It has 17 spires reminiscent of fighter jets and a frame made of 100 tetrahedrons. Tetrahedrons, for those who have no idea what they are (I didn’t), are triangular pyramids.

  Nevada is home to one of the most unusual buildings in the U.S. – the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. Patients seeing it for the first time could be forgiven for thinking their brains were misfiring. The building looks as if it’s imploding.

  Alaska’s coolest building is weirdly whimsical. Known as the Dr. Seuss House, it started out to be a two-story cabin, but the owners kept adding one story after another. Now it has 17 and looks like something out of, well, a Dr. Seuss book. Cool and then some.

  And Idaho’s coolest building, according to The Discoverer, is …

  The Statehouse?

  Granted, the Statehouse is imposing and historic. And it ranks fairly high architecturally among the state capitol buildings. That said, however, it’s but one of many that use the generic capitol style. 

  Impressive? Absolutely. 

  Cool? Not so much.

  So what buildings does Idaho have that could be considered cool? There have to be some, right?

  Well, yes. A few do come to mind.

  Teater’s Knoll, for example. One of only two Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in Idaho, it was built as a studio for late artist Archie Teater. Perched on a hillside near Hagerman, it’s made largely of Oakley Stone. The Idaho Architecture Project calls it “a premier example of organic architecture at its best, where the fundamental integration with nature blurs the meeting of building and nature.”

  One of the members of a group I have coffee with on Saturday mornings cast his vote for Teater’s Knoll. Another suggested the Cataldo Mission, in North Idaho.

  Built in the1850s by Catholic missionaries and members of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, the baroque style church is the state’s oldest building and the oldest surviving mission church in the Northwest. Interesting fact:  the wood of its interior got its color not from paint, but from huckleberries.

  Several Boise buildings are at least moderately cool:

  The Hoff Building, at Eighth and Bannock, was Idaho’s first “skyscraper,” though at just 12 stories plus a penthouse it may or may not have warranted the appellation. Originally the Hotel Boise, the art-deco style building now houses offices and, notably, a lovely   ballroom. 

  The Boise Depot, overlooking Capitol Boulevard, is both beautiful and historic. With its Spanish style architecture, red tile roof and illuminated, 96-foot bell tower, it’s one of the city’s most recognizable and distinctive structures. Harry Truman made a speech there from the back of his presidential train, the Ferdinand Magellan, during one of his 1948 “whistle-stop tours.”

  Nampa, Caldwell and several other Idaho cities also have interesting depots. 

  Wouldn’t it be nice if passenger trains actually stopped there?

  Not everyone will agree with this, but the JUMP building, on the Grove Plaza, arguably could be considered cool. Some people love it; some hate it. And who knows? Maybe the ability to inspire conflicting opinions is part of what makes a building cool.

  Churches come to mind. From Idaho’s larger cities such as Boise and Pocatello to towns as small as Paris and Silver City, the state has a plethora of distinctive places of worship.

  But I’m almost certainly overlooking some of our cool buildings.

  Can you think of any?

  If so, please email them to me at the address below. If there are enough suggestions, they’ll appear in a future column.

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

  If there’s one movie Idahoans can relate to through personal experience more than any other, it would have to be Clint Eastwood’s “Bronco Billy.”

  The movie was filmed in 1979 at more than 20 locations in Southwest Idaho – Lake Lowell, the Nampa and Boise train depots, the Meridian Speedway and Fort Boise Park to name a few. Hundreds of Idahoans watched it being filmed, were hired as extras for crowd scenes and in some cases had speaking parts.

  My wife and I and our then small daughters were among them. More on that later.

  For those who weren’t here then or never saw the movie, “Bronco Billy” told the story of a stuntman-star of a rundown traveling circus. Eastwood played the title role and directed the movie. He was quoted as saying that “if as a director I ever wanted to say something, you’ll find it in ‘Bronco Billy.’”

  Caldwell resident Sandy Kershner wrote a book about the making of “Bronco Billy.” “On the Trail of Bronco Billy” has gone through three editions, the third of which was published in 2016.

  It all started with a headstone. Kershner was doing some volunteer cleanup work in a cemetery when she came across a handmade headstone bearing the name “Art Yensen.” Yensen, who lived in Parma, was the Santa Claus at Nampa’s Karcher Mall for 22 Christmases.

  “I decided that he would be a good person for me to research,” she said. “I found out that he was an extra in “Paint Your Wagon” and “Bronco Billy” and that “Bronco Billy” had been filmed in a lot of places around here.

  “When I learned that, I got sidetracked and went crazy on it. So many people were so enthusiastic about the movie because they’d been in it and told me about Clint Eastwood and the filming. That’s what made me want to do the book.”

   Kershner is working on a new and expanded version of the book, titled “On the Trail of Bronco Billy II.”

  But she can’t finish it. She’s 77, is losing her vision and is looking for someone to take over the project.

  “My parents had the same problem, but not as bad as my sister and me,” she said. “We’re identical twins and are both losing our eyesight.

  “I’m looking for one or more people to finish the new book. It will be bigger with a lot more stories. It wouldn’t have to be a writer or an editor, just someone who loves the project and wanted to finish it. Someone like me. I’m not a real writer.”

   I was surprised to learn that the woman who has devoted so much time to doing books about “Bronco Billy” wasn’t there for the filming (her husband was in the Air Force and they were living in Japan at the time) when so many Idahoans watched it, were extras or had bit parts. 

  The Woodwards were in an indoor crowd scene, and at one point in the movie I can be seen running after one of my then small daughters in a carnival scene filmed at the Meridian Speedway.

  One of my newspaper assignments while the movie was being filmed was to spend a day shadowing Candy Loving, Playboy Magazine’s “25th Anniversary Playmate.” We were at a party that evening at what’s now the Riverside Hotel when Eastwood dropped in, surveyed the crowd and made a beeline for Loving, who, as you’d expect, was a knockout. He introduced himself, as if he needed an introduction, and the three of us had a brief conversation. Brief because it was interrupted by a photographer.

  “Hey, how about the three of you get in that bathtub and I’ll take your picture?” he said. 

  Three of us in a bathtub? He had to be kidding.

  He wasn’t.

  It was a large, heart-shaped bathtub in what, if memory serves, was the honeymoon suite. To my surprise, Eastwood and Loving obliged him by hopping into it (fully clothed). I joined them. If it was good enough for people as famous as they were, it was good enough for me.

  The photographer wasn’t one I recognized; nor have I seen him since. But I’d really like to have a copy of that picture. It isn’t every day, after all, that you get your picture taken in a bathtub with Clint Eastwood and a famous model. If the photographer reads this, I’d love it if he emailed me at the address that follows the end of this column,

  Loving, incidentally, could not have been nicer. She also was smart (she went on to earn a masters degree and work as an account executive in the health insurance industry), fun to talk to and didn’t suffer fools gladly. 

  “So you’re this year’s bunny?” a reporter at one of the television stations asked her.

  “We’re not bunnies,” she said. “We’re people.”

  She said that on television! I was in her corner from that moment on.

  Between Loving’s visit and Eastwood’s movie, it was an interesting time to be in the Treasure Valley. Kirshner’s new book, if she finds someone to help her with it, should provide a fresh perspective on the filming of a movie in which countless Idahoans participated.

  As mentioned above, you don’t have to be an editor or a writer to finish  what could be an interesting and entertaining book. If you’re interested, she’d like you to write to her. Her address is:  Sandy Kirshner, 18969 Upper Pleasant Ridge Road, Caldwell, ID 83607.  

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

  Sometimes when we really need it, we get help from people we’ve never laid eyes on until we need them most.

  It happened to my wife and me many years ago in Davis, Calif. Our car had broken down on a Friday night at the beginning of a three-day holiday weekend so we had to wait until Tuesday to find someone who could fix it.

  We were young and had so little money in those days that our “hotel” during our vacation was a pup tent. We pitched it in a park, and to kill time waiting for Tuesday we played a lot of tennis. The temperature on the coolest of the three days was 107, and I got the worst sunburn of my life.

  We were sitting by the tent, commiserating, when they happened by – a couple, professors at the university in Davis. My sunburn stopped them in their tracks.

  “That’s a terrible burn you’ve got!” the woman said. “Do you have anything for it?”

   “No. Our car broke down and there aren’t any stores around here.”

  They mulled that over, wished us well and an hour later returned with an offer: 

  “We’ve been thinking about it. You can’t sleep here in the park, especially not with a sunburn like that. Why don’t you come to our house?”

  We were initially skeptical. We didn’t know these people in the least. They could have been a serial-killer tag team.

  They did seem awfully nice, though. They said their house had an entire wing that we could have to ourselves, and some sunburn ointment that bordered on being miraculous. That decided it. 

  They were as good as their word. Their sunburn ointment stopped the pain almost instantly, never to return. They fed us wonderful meals, trusted us in their house while they taught their classes. We spent two nights with them. A week later, home from our trip, we received a package with a note: 

  “You left these clothes at our house. We washed and ironed them for you.”

  Decades later, their kindness isn’t forgotten. It never will be 

  I’m revisiting that long-ago tale as an introduction to a similar kindness recently experienced by one of my granddaughters and her husband.

  Kelsie and her husband, Christian, were subjects of one of my columns last spring. If you read it, you may recall that they’re the couple who sold their Boise home, bought an old Air Force bus and spent months converting it to a “schoolie.” (Schoolies are buses converted to motor homes.) They did a smashing job on it. It’s so nice inside that I wanted to stow away and go with them when they left on their cross-country adventure. 

  They’ve been gone almost a year now and have been to Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, worked as camp hosts in Wisconsin and Michigan, enjoyed live music and standup comedy in Austin, Texas. They’re currently in Quartzsite, AZ, where the year-round population of 3,400 swells to a quarter of a million or more as a mecca for snowbirds.

  It was there in the Arizona desert that the trusty schoolie that had taken them so many miles threw in the towel. 

  “We drove about two minutes to a spigot to fill our water tank, and when we finished the bus wouldn’t start,” Kelsie said. “It was turning over, but not starting.”

  Christian can fix or build just about anything, but the vagaries of old Air Force buses were outside his experience.

  “I went and got our neighbor Josh (Josh Barks, coincidentally a fellow Idahoan) because his setup is a semi-truck front with a custom flatbed and fifth wheel and a winch and crane,” Kelsie said. “… He towed us back to our spot.” 

  Quick, what’s the first thing you suspect when your car won’t start?

  The battery, of course. Or, if your vehicle is an old Air Force bus, three batteries. Christian replaced them with new ones, but the bus still wouldn’t start.

  By this time the ailing schoolie had attracted the sympathetic attention of neighbors. Mark Hillebrand, a mechanically inclined neighbor from Michigan, offered to help. He and Christian spent three days checking everything they could think of – every wire, every fuse, every sensor, everything but the kitchen sink and couldn’t pinpoint the problem.

   “I did some research and noticed that a prominent thing with these engines is a certain sensor that can be the problem,” Christian said. “If you can unplug it and the engine starts, that could be what’s wrong.”

  Finding the plug was about as easy as finding ice water in the Arizona desert. 

  Enter “Diesel Dave” Atherton. A mechanic Christian found on Instagram recommended Atherton, a retired mechanic familiar with the type of engines used in the schoolie. With his help, Christian, Kelsie and Mark were able to find  the plug. Christian installed a new sensor, and the engine sprang to life.

  Altogether, it had taken five people and more than a week.

  Kelsie and Christian are in another part of Arizona now, having bid farewell to their Quartzsite neighbors. But they’ll remember them and their acts of kindness for their rest of their lives. 

  We’re forever hearing about bad people doing bad things. They’re so often in the news that we tend to forget about good people – who greatly outnumber them – and who, asking for nothing in return, share their time and knowledge with complete strangers in times of need,  

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

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  Everyone loves a puppy, but they tend to come with some bad habits –  crying, excessive barking, jumping up on people …

  The new puppy at the Woodwards’ house doesn’t have any of those habits, but she does have one that’s truly annoying, to say nothing of expensive.

  She reminds me of something a friend of mine did in high school to try to get out of writing an essay for English class. When it was time to read his essay to the class, he stood and announced that his essay was about his dog. This was a bit unexpected, as he didn’t have a dog.

  “My dog chews everything,” he read. “He chews bones, sticks, slippers. He chews …”

  At this point he held up the “essay” he was reading to show that most of it had been chewed to oblivion. The students thought it was hilarious. Our elderly, no-nonsense teacher, Miss Woesner, did not see the humor. She gave him a withering look, and an F on his assignment.

  He could have been writing about Jojo, the aforementioned puppy. Jojo is a good dog. She’s smart, affectionate and gets along well with both people and other dogs. But she chews everything. She’s a chewing machine. We’ve had a lot of dogs over the years, and none has come close to her when it comes to chewing everything she can get her paws on.

  It’s not as if we haven’t given her things that are okay for her to chew. We’ve bought her chew toys made of rubber or nylon. She chews on them constantly.

  Until she finds something more interesting to chew.

  My reading glasses, for example. Left where she can get them – and few places seem to be beyond her reach – she has the arms of my glasses looking like pipe cleaners in seconds.

  At least she doesn’t discriminate, though. She chews on my wife’s reading glasses, too.

  One of my favorite things in our back yard is an ornamental grass plant. It’s several feet tall, with green stalks culminating in feathery plumes. It was, that is, until Jojo discovered it. Now it looks like 

Guy Fieri on a bad hair day.

  She almost chewed up the latest Idaho Public Television Channels guide. If I hadn’t gotten it away from her in the nick of time, it would have looked like confetti.

  We find confetti in virtually every room. She chews tissues, newspapers, paper napkins, book markers, the instructions that come with medical prescriptions, the box for an expensive Christmas ornament, a package of Lik-M-Aid left in a bedroom by our nine-year-old grandson. This had the added benefit of staining part of a white bedspread blue.

  While I was writing this, she snuck behind a lounge chair, found a  charger the grandson had left for his favorite game and in less time than it took to yell “Jojo, don’t even think about it,” she’d chewed its cord in half.

  We worry that she’ll chew her way into a lamp cord or appliance cord and get a nasty shock. Not that that would stop her from chewing. A 7.0 earthquake wouldn’t stop her from chewing. 

  She chewed the plastic lid on a jar to the point that it was all but unrecognizable as a lid. Actually, I rather like it. It looks like abstract art. Picasso would have loved it. 

  She chewed up a ballpoint pen. How she avoided getting ink on herself, or, worse, the carpet, is a mystery. 

  She pulverized a set of toy wooden blocks. How she finds some of the things she chews is another mystery. We hadn’t seen those blocks in years. How or where she got them is anyone’s guess, but she’s spooky smart. The only thing that comes to mind, improbable though it may be, is that she found a way to pull down the attic ladder, climb up and help herself to the contents of an old toy box.

  We have to be careful not to leave things within her reach that could splinter when chewed and injure her if she swallowed the splinters. Popsicle sticks, one of her favorite victims, could be deadly.

   Our older daughter, who owns Jojo but has us dog-sit her while she’s working 12- and 24-hour shifts on her job, bought her a supposedly safe deer-antler chew. She loves it.

  But not as much as she loves paper, cardboard, pens and pencils, the television remote …

  Why, you may be asking, have we failed to keep those things out of her reach. We’ve tried, and to an extent succeeded. But she finds things in the least likely places. She crawls behind lounge chairs, squeezes into the cramped spaces behind couches, and comes up with things we forgot we ever had.

  Things you’d think would be out of her reach aren’t. Her jumping ability is extraordinary for a small dog. She’s the Michael Jordan of canines. She once jumped from a standing start over the back of a couch and landed on the other side, where our astonished daughter was napping and almost came out of her skin. 

  A few days ago, the mail brought a pitch for a publication called Whole Dog Journal. Its purported benefits include, among other things, “five easy ways to prevent your dog from chewing.”

  Our check’s in the mail.

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

When we think of artists, we tend to think of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, O’Keeffe, Picasso … Fine artists.

  There’s another kind of art, however, done by artists who aren’t famous, but their work is ubiquitous. We see it every day, on everything from billboards to cereal boxes.

  Commercial art is used primarily for advertising. It appears in newspapers and magazines, on packages, websites, television, you name it, to promote services and products.

  Idaho, and Boise in particular, has been home to many commercial artists. Last month I received a news release about one of them, Roscoe “Duke” Reading.

  Reading died in 1990. The release was from his daughter, Kathleen Haws, who is working to make sure her late father’s artwork isn’t forgotten.

  “When people ask me why I want to make my father’s artwork available after so many years, I reply that it’s too good not to share,” she said. “Mid-century commercial art was produced from the skilled hands of the artists without any technology. Just a keen eye, a steady hand and a great sense of what makes great art.”

  Mid 20th Century commercial art, she said, “was all done by hand, well before computers. It was design-oriented, very clean and used certain styles in the actual lettering. It was very stylized. You can almost tell when you look at it whether it’s mid-century or not.”

  Boise in the 1950s was home to a profusion of commercial artists. Haws’s “keen eye and steady hand” comment could have been about my late friend John Collias. John did commercial art and was a fine artist as well. He drew and painted everything from portraits to pool halls.

  He and Reading were roughly contemporaries, working in Boise doing somewhat similar kinds of work. Both were drafted during World War II and worked as artists for the army. But while Collias leaned more toward fine art, Reading concentrated on commercial art with a fine touch. A painting he did for the 1963 Idaho Centennial of a syringa, the state flower, is an example of how good he was.

  For both longtime Idanoans and newcomers, his work constitutes a mini-history lesson. His range was impressive, and, as his daughter put it, his work is “tied into Boise history, and to a smaller extent, Idaho history.”

  He did artwork for billboards, Christmas cards, murals, movie advertisements, portraits of athletes and politicians, and, notably, the original design used for a 33-foot tall “Last Chance Joe” statue now at a museum in Sparks, Nev. 

  The statue began as a drawing Reading did for the Last Chance Cafe in Garden City. If you’re a newcomer, you may not know that Garden City use to have legalized gambling. When it was outlawed in the 1950s, its owner moved to Nevada, where Last Chance Joe became an icon at Nugget casinos. The statue stood outside the Nugget in Sparks for half a century before being moved to a museum.

  “If you’re in Sparks, Last Chance Joe is kind of your guide,” Haws said. “You can see him from the freeway. The statue is the only thing in town that’s that tall.”

  Though the artist behind it wasn’t well known to the public, Reading’s work was. Three of his paintings graced the Royal Restaurant, once the place to dine in Boise. Those paintings are now in the Owhyee County Historical Society Museum in Murphy.

  His drawings of movie stars adorned the Egyptian and Pinney theaters. (The Pinney, arguably the nicest theater in town, was torn down in 1969. In its place is a parking lot that exists to this day at Eighth and Jefferson streets.)

   His work appeared on posters at the Western Idaho Fair and the outfield signs at Braves Field, the minor league baseball park that once stood on what is now the site of the Idaho Fish and Game Department’s headquarters in East Boise. You almost couldn’t get through a day without seeing his work somewhere.

  None of his work was ever signed. It would be all but forgotten if not for Haws’s efforts to keep that from happening. She’s created a website to make it available to view or purchase. The site is https://www.midcenturyartbyduke.com/.

  “It’s not about keeping his memory alive,” she said. “His memory is alive and well with his family. It’s about what he created. He represents the wonderful commercial artists of his time.”

                                                 ***

  A recent column told the story behind lost-dog fliers – hundreds of them – that have been posted in East Boise, the BSU area and along the Greenbelt.

  Daisy is a beautiful white Husky mix, belonging to Steven Moore and Kristi Bronkema. I’m sorry to report that Daisy, who has been missing since Thanksgiving, still hasn’t been found. Her owners are offering a $1,000 reward for her return. Her picture is on the fliers. If you’ve seen her or know where she is, please call them at 916 534-0774 or contact the Idaho Humane Society.

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