Most young people today have little or no idea what the expression “basic training” means. If they’ve heard of it at all, they could be forgiven for thinking it was a course on the Internet for Dummies.

  Firsthand experience with basic training, also known as boot camp, has become far less common since Congress ended the draft in 1971. The draft, for young people unfamiliar with it, was conscription into the armed forces. Young men received “greetings from the president of the United States” ordering them to report for military service, the first component of which was boot camp.

  Boot camp involved weeks of being shouted at and humiliated, coupled with grueling physical exercise and instruction on how to march, shoot and perform other military activities.

  There were two things you learned quickly. One was to blend in. Standing out meant being singled out for extra humiliation and grueling exercise. The other thing you learned almost immediately was that boot camp was something you never, ever wanted to repeat. Right up there with fraternity hazings and chicken pox.

  Jeff Currie is an exception.

  Currie, who lives in Homedale, repeated basic training in the army reserve at age – wait for it – 48.

  Almost all of the other recruits in his company were teenagers. He wouldn’t have stood out more if he’d been wearing tights and a tutu.

  I happen to know something about standing out at boot camp. When the Navy sent me to San Diego, United Airlines sent my luggage to Chicago. For four days, I was the only one of thousands of recruits who was marching around in beige slacks and a black trench coat. This did not escape the notice of my drill instructor, who made those the longest four days of my life.

  What would possess someone to subject himself to boot camp at an age when most men are scheduling prostate exams?

  “I ran into my old battalion commander from when I was in the reserve at Gowen Field 17 years ago. … He said I was an idiot because I had 13 years in the reserve and left without completing my benefits. He said I should go back in and finish. I thought I was too old to do that, but he said I wasn’t. That came as a complete shock to me.”

  A financial advisor, Currie realized that the advice his old battalion commander gave him was exactly the advice he’d give a client. He’d be saving $700 a month on health insurance alone.

  Patriotism also was a factor. 

  “There’s always a patriotic element,” he said. “It’s tremendous not just to be a veteran, but to be someone who’s actively serving. I like the job and the people I work with. It wasn’t just about the benefits.”

  So he signed up. His case was so unusual – returning after 17 years away and as an enlisted man (he’d previously been a combat engineering officer) – that he had to apply three times. Final acceptance came with an unexpected twist.

  “The boot camp requirement was a bit of a shock. They initially told me it it would just be a six-week refresher course, but at my swearing-in they said not enough guys had signed up so it was canceled and it would be full-on boot camp. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Well, I’ve done it before. I can do it again.’ That might have been misplaced confidence.”

  A thought that surfaced repeatedly during his ten weeks and four days at Fort Jackson, S.C.

  “Not that I was counting.”

   The training included up to four and a half hours of grueling exercise a day – running, marching up to 13 miles with a heavy pack, obstacle courses, pushups beyond counting … Drill sergeants were constantly in his face, shouting things that are unprintable in a general-circulation newspaper. Their nickname for him was “old man.” His fellow recruits were more creative – “Grandpa,” “Pops,” “Father Time.”

  The training was divided into three phases. The first was classic boot camp. The second and third involved less shouting and exercise and more skill-oriented training.

  That was one of several surprises. The food was better than it was his first time at boot camp, about a fourth of the recruits were women, and “the instructors really want you to succeed.”

  An example?

   “On the rifle range, they wanted everyone to shoot at expert level. My first time in basic training, they didn’t care what you shot as long as you met the minimum requirement. This time, we really did have to qualify at expert level.”

  The hardest part of Boot Camp II?

  “The kids. The women were more mature and a pleasure to work with, but the guys weren’t very kind to me or to each other. They had a hard time thinking about their fellow soldiers or anybody but themselves. When I was in basic training the first time, we had to learn to stop thinking about ourselves and help the weakest member. With a few exceptions, that doesn’t seem to be happening now.”

  That said, he adds that the training at Fort Jackson was for non-combatants – clerks, cooks, mechanics, etc. 

 “Combat people are held to a different standard. In the volunteer army, people who won’t be going into combat are being treated differently to get them to stay in long enough to do their job to support the combat troops. And maybe it works.”

  Currie will be a clerk this time around and plans to stay in the reserve until he’s 60. Not as challenging as being a combat engineer, but the right fit at his age.

  Having done it twice, would he do it again?

  He would. He’s an exception to the rule that nobody ever wants to repeat boot camp.  

  And for him, it worked out okay. He’s a youthful 48. And he wasn’t wearing slacks and a trench coat.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press one Sunday a month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

   

 

 Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, which is odd when you consider that it’s often been a disaster at my house.

  Who doesn’t love Thanksgiving? The seductive aroma of turkey roasting, the annual gathering of friends and relatives from near and far, the uniquely American-ness of it all?

  True, Thanksgiving is celebrated in other countries, but nowhere is it enjoyed more universally, or ravenously, than here in the U.S. It’s a documented fact that Americans eat more food on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year, as anyone who has downed an after-dinner Alka Seltzer and groaned through a quarter or two of football can attest.

   Last year, after cooking and hosting Thanksgiving dinner forever, my wife ceded the job to one of our daughters, who has a bigger kitchen and is a wonderful cook. It’s less work for us, but it wasn’t without mixed feelings. We missed hosting the dinner – the anticipation, the crowded kitchen, the joyful chaos of it all.

  That said, no other holiday has been so apt to run off the rails for us.

It’s been that way forever.

   I was four the year my mother hosted Thanksgiving dinner in the dilapidated, two-story house where we lived at the time. She’d invited, among others, my great grandmother and her last husband, who lived in Notus. (She outlived three husbands, but that’s another story.)

  We were having dinner when Grampa Chandler slumped over. My last memory of him is of the medics carrying him out on a stretcher.

   It was sad, but he’d lived a long life, it was his time and Grandma Susie seemed to take it in stride. They hadn’t been married long and she was nothing if not resilient. She remained the upbeat, jovial woman she’d always been, and the story of her last husband’s last Thanksgiving went on to occupy a unique place in the family lore. Little did we know that it was the beginning of a long run of Thanksgiving misadventures.

  When it came to hosting Thanksgiving dinner, my mother was a perfectionist. Everything had to be just so. The dining table had to be carried to the living room, which was larger than the dining room, to accommodate the guests more comfortably. Out came the best tablecloth, used only on Thanksgiving, the crystal, the best dishes. And woe to anyone who interrupted the cook while she was preparing dinner. The meal, especially the turkey, had to be absolutely perfect.

  It’s a myth that domesticated turkeys can’t fly. No one who was there when it happened will forget the time my mother’s perfect turkey decided it was a swan. She was taking it out of the oven when the roasting pan slipped and the turkey took flight as if jet propelled. It flew, dove and skidded halfway across the kitchen, leaving a grease slick and a trail of dressing. My mother locked herself in her bedroom and cried.

  We cleaned up the mess, carried the ruptured turkey to the table and talked her out of the bedroom to join us for an imperfect but delectable feast enjoyed by all. Even Mom was quick to see the humor of it. It was a Thanksgiving remembered and laughed about for years to come.

  The flight of the Flightless Turkey was a predecessor to the belly flop of the Flaming Turkey. No one was sure quite what what wrong, but when my wife opened the oven door the turkey ignited.

  Instant panic. Everyone shouting at once.

  What do you do with a turkey doing a highly successful imitation of a bonfire? Luckily, it was one of those rare Thanksgivings with snow on the ground. It’s safe to say that we were the only family in Idaho that year whose Thanksgiving centerpiece ended up smoldering in a snowbank.

  Fire was also the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving disaster narrowly averted. My mother was getting up in years by then, and her eyesight wasn’t what it had been. The dinner table was decorated with little bowls filled with oil and floating wicks. The burning wicks lent a festive touch to the proceedings – until my mother tried to drink one of them. The flame was almost to her lips when a collective shriek arose, preventing a trip to the emergency room.

  That came the following day, when I choked on a turkey sandwich. The doctor recommended a procedure that involved swallowing a scope with a light and a camera. The drugs he used made it such a pleasant experience that I asked him if there were any leftovers. He glared, muttered something under his breath and told me to stick with pumpkin pie.

  Thanksgiving doesn’t even have to be at our house to backfire. We were visiting relatives in neighboring Washington one year when a storm hit and the power went out. If it had happened after dinner, it might have been fun. We could have built a fire in the fireplace and remembered it as a cozy, candle-lit Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the power went out at about noon, with the turkey barely warm in the oven.

   Power outages in western Washington can last hours, even days. After waiting an hour or so for the lights to go back on, the hosts decided that waiting was futile and opted for an alternative method to cook the bird.

  A Hibachi.

  It was all they had.

  It was a sorry sight, all those ravenous people standing around a hibachi with a pitifully small bed of glowing coals struggling to cook  a lily-white turkey. We drove away in a howling storm that night, still hungry and hoping to find an open convenience store with Jojos or overcooked hot dogs.

  This year it will be another Thanksgiving at our daughter’s house, where everything will be perfect. 

   But in a way I miss the old days, when turkeys flew, crash-landed in  snowbanks, and each Thanksgiving held the promise of delicious disaster.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press one Sunday a month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com

TROY, Alabama – The scene:  a motel on the outskirts of Troy, Ala. In the parking lot, a black Dodge Charger that practically screams Boise State University football.

  Stretching the width of the front windshield are the words “Boise State,” across the top in blue and orange letters several inches high. Painted on the rear windshield:  “#Game Day Bound! #Bleed Blue.”

  Blue and orange dice hang from the rearview mirror. Two BSU flags dangle from the back windows. The rest of the car is all but wallpapered with Bronco logos. Its license plates are in BSU frames.

  It was the opening day of what was expected to be the Broncos’ dream season, before Oklahoma State and San Diego State downsized the dream. My wife and I and some friends had traveled to Troy for the season opener. We assumed the car belonged to someone else from Boise who had driven there for the game.

   Until we took a closer look at the plates inside the Bronco frames. No Rocky Mountains; no red, white and blue.

   The plates were from Alabama.

   They belonged to Alabama native Micah Burney. He and his girlfriend, Judith Sanders, had driven to Troy from their hometown of Muscle Shoals, Ala., for the game.

  It’s an understatement to say that Burney is a Bronco fan.

  “Huge!” he said. “Most people in Alabama root for Alabama or Auburn. I’m diehard Boise State. I like the fact that they beat bigger schools, and it’s cool that their coaches suspend even really good players if they break the rules. Not all schools do that.

  “I watch all of their games on TV and go to at least one game a year. I went to the games against Georgia and Virginia, to the Ole Miss game in Atlanta, the Fiesta Bowl against Arizona State … ”

  He says “we” when referring to the team.

  “We played great against Oregon in the Las Vegas Bowl last year. …Someday I want to go to a game in Boise and see what that’s like.”

  Burney’s dedication to a team so far from his Alabama home and roots  came as something of a surprise. Even knowing that the Broncos’ games are nationally televised, it hadn’t really occurred to me that they would have diehard fans wearing the colors and decorating their cars with Bronco paraphernalia well beyond Idaho. This, after all, was Boise State – not Alabama, Notre Dame, Michigan or another major program with instant national name recognition.  

  Yet here were Micah and Judith, who live 2,000 miles from Boise but were proudly sporting the blue and orange. 

  To fully appreciate how far Boise State football has come, you have to go back quite a ways. At the first Bronco game I attended, with my sister who was a decade older and then a freshman at Boise Junior College, the number of people on the field was almost as large as the number in the stands. It was played on a grass field lined with wooden bleachers. BJC was playing Dogwater Junior College.

  OK, I made that up. But the Broncos in those days did play small, obscure colleges, at venues resembling those of lower division high school  games today. 

  A sea change came the first time the Broncos played the University of Idaho. Boise’s little college had recently progressed from Boise Junior College to Boise College to Boise State College. U of I students decorated Bronco Stadium with banners that read “BJC, BC, BSC, BFD,” and “Welcome to the Big Time.”

  The Broncos won, 42-14.

  The program continued to grow. BSC became BSU. The turf turned blue. The team played bigger, higher profile schools and began making a name for itself beyond Idaho. 

  Fast forward to 2011. My wife and I were having dinner while traveling through Memphis,Tenn. when a man asked where we were from and, upon hearing the answer, replied, “Boise? What’s Coach Pete puttin’ in the water up there?”

  A reference to then BSU Coach Chris Petersen and his team’s successes  against some of the big names in college football.

  But it wasn’t until the Troy game that the extent of BSU’s national reputation hit home. It wasn’t just Micah and Judith, either.

  Mellanie Chorney and her daughter Emma traveled over 200 miles from their home in Kennesaw, Ga. to be at the Troy game. Both were wearing blue and orange BSU T-shirts and carrying Bronco stadium chairs. Emma had orange paint on her legs and blue and orange Scrunchies on her pigtails.

  Both had painted their fingernails blue and orange.

  “We stay up till 2 a.m. to watch Boise State games on TV,” Mellanie said.

  Why would someone from Georgia, which hardly has a shortage of good college football teams, be that interested in Boise State?

  “I like their chemistry,” Mellanie replied. “They aren’t a big school, but they play like one. Their boys aren’t recruited by the Georgias and Ohio States, but they’re good football players. I love that.”
  Steve Carew and his family also were decked out in blue and orange. A pharmacist who lives in Birmingham, Ala., he seemed mildly surprised when told that I lived in Boise. As if all of the blue and orange-clad fans at the game were from someplace besides Boise.

  “I grew up in Indiana, and ever since I was a kid I thought Boise would be a cool place to live,” he said. “I honestly don’t know why. But I did live in Meridian for a while before getting a job offer I couldn’t refuse in Birmingham, and I think Boise is one of the most beautiful cities and Idaho one of the most beautiful states in the country. I’d like to get back there someday. And it goes without saying that we always root for the Broncos.” 

  Ryan Williams traveled to the game from his home in Navarre, Fla.

  “I go to as many BSU games as I can,” he said.

  One thing that stood out, in addition to all the Bronco fans who don’t live in Idaho, was the hospitality of the Troy University fans. Even after the Broncos had defeated their team 56-20, they remained gracious, welcoming.

  “Thanks for being here,” several of them said as we filed out of the stadium.

  “Welcome to Alabama. It’s great to have you here.”

  The next morning, back at the motel, Micah and Judith were packing his Boise State billboard-on-wheels for the drive back to Muscle Shoals.

  “Great game, wasn’t it?” he said. “We played really well.”

  Then, a bit wistfully, “Maybe I’ll see you at a game in Boise someday.”

  Here’s hoping he gets his wish. And, if that happens, that Bronco fans will   give him the sort of welcome their team’s distant but dedicated fans deserve.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press one Sunday a month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got a column idea for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

   A.A. changed my life.

   No, not Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m referring to a publication called Advertising Age. Journalism students at my college were encouraged to read it. I was then a student in the advertising option of its journalism program.

  Most of A.A.’s pictures were of advertising executives in suits standing around with cocktails in their hands. The cocktail part sounded okay. I was, after all, a student at the University of Idaho, where drinking beer was practically the school sport. It was the suits that bothered me.

  Did I really want to spend my life in a suit and tie, mingling with other people in suits and ties, talking about the hottest trends in underwear and mouthwash commercials?

  It led to one of the best decisions of my life. I decided it made more sense to do what you do well and enjoy doing than something that will pay you a lot of money but make you hate going to work every day. My advisor spluttered and fumed when asked if it was possible to change majors as a senior, but he made it happen. The rest, as they say, is history. I went to work at my hometown newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, and spent 40 years there.

  Now, here I am at The Idaho Press.

  The reason for changing horses way past midstream is simple. I did what I do best and enjoyed doing for most of my time at The Statesman, including writing columns in semi-retirement. Recently, that changed. I was limited to writing once a month about “people in the community.”

  Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about people in the community. But personal columns are what readers have been telling me for years are their favorites. Being told not to do them was a little like telling a piano player to use only one color of keys.

  So, when Idaho Press Editor Scott McIntosh told me he believed in hiring good people and getting out of their way to let them do what they do best, what could have been a difficult decision became an easy one.

  And here I am.

  I owe The Statesman a lot. It gave me a career that was almost never boring. It opened doors to meeting scores of colorful Idaho characters, interviewing famous people, traveling the world. Lifelong friendships began there.

  You don’t leave a place where you spent most of your working life  without some reservations. But it was the right time, the right fit. The Statesman is focusing heavily on digital; the Press is more committed to print. It’s signed up 5,000 new subscribers since June, a  circulation percentage increase few newspapers anywhere can claim. I’m a print  guy. Most of my readers are print readers. And in a way, this brings me full circle.

  My first job at the Statesman was in the Canyon County Bureau. Those were flush times for newspapers. The Statesman had full-time bureaus in Canyon County, Twin Falls, and Ontario and Vale, Ore. Canyon County’s was in a corner office in downtown Caldwell.

  It was an ideal place for a rookie reporter to learn the ropes. I covered city council and school board meetings, cops and courts when the other bureau reporter was off, wrote business, general-assignment and feature stories, took photographs, pretty much everything.

  It yielded some memorable moments.  No one who witnessed it will forget “the Underwood Incident,” in which a reporter in a fit of rage hurled her prized, vintage typewriter across the Caldwell bureau office. Journalism could be pretty colorful in those days,.

  One day my editor sent a message asking the bureau folks to be on the lookout for weather photos. I happened to drive by a Caldwell golf course that afternoon just as two elderly golfers were teeing off in a snowstorm. They were dressed head to toe in Scottish golf outfits – kilts, tam o’ shanters, the works. The snowflakes were the size of quarters. It was the perfect weather photo, 

  Only it never made the paper. A few days later, my negatives were returned with a message that read, “These are great shots of these golfers, but the negatives are covered with black dots.”

  The black dots, of course, were snowflakes – which would have been obvious had anyone gone to the trouble of making prints of the negatives. (I can tease my then editor about it now because he’s a longtime friend.)

  I’d been on the job less than a month when he asked me to review a symphony orchestra concert at the College of Idaho. I was ridiculously unqualified and said so.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “Just go and describe the concert and get some quotes from people in the audience.”

  It seemed to work until, a week or so later, a letter to the editor described my review as being “egregiously bad.” Only after looking it up did I realize that that meant extraordinarily bad. Flagrantly bad. As bad as a review can  possibly get.

   A retired College of Idaho teacher influenced me for life. Margaret Sinclair was a master grammarian who wrote to say she enjoyed my stories but had noticed that I didn’t always use the language correctly. Would I mind if she sent me an occasional lesson?

  Mind? She taught me more about the finer points of English usage than all of the textbooks combined.

  I owe a lot to the late Margaret Sinclair, and to the late Canyon County Bureau. A new reporter couldn’t have had a better grounding. 

  Now, a few thousand columns later, I’m back, doing what I love and looking forward to sharing some of your Sundays with you. Sometimes one Sunday a month, sometimes more. 

  And, like any good piano player, I’ll be using all the keys.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press on the first Sunday of each month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got a column idea for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

Dear Blog Subscribers,

This is to let you know that as of last month I’m no longer writing for The Idaho Statesman. I hadn’t been happy for some time about a restriction from writing personal columns there. There were other factors In my decision to leave after so many years, including the frequency of my columns being cut from every other Sunday to once a month, but it was mainly not being able to write personal columns that led me to resign. I love writing them, and readers have told me for years that they enjoy reading them.

The good news is that starting this Sunday, my columns will be published in The Idaho Press. I’ll be writing for The Press at least one Sunday a month, often more than that. The Press is committed to print journalism and has signed up thousands of subscribers in the Boise area in the last few months. I’m a lifelong print guy and am looking forward to this new start. If you live in the area and haven’t seen The Press, you might want to check it out.

I’ll continue to post columns on my blog the Mondays after they’re published in The Press so you’ll continue to get them by email, starting Nov. 5.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate every one of you.

Tim

 

https://www.idahostatesman.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/tim-woodward/

Here’s the link to my August Statesman column.  I hope you enjoy it.  — Tim

 

Boise woman ‘needed a life,’ and found one helping people cope with death

 

Buried treasure: Lost for 5 years, wedding ring is back on ‘shocked’ Boise woman’s finger

  A photo above a desk at the Ada County Highway District offices depicts “a blind, one-armed marsupial with a head wound.”

  The stricken marsupial, according to a long-ago Statesman letter to the editor, could easily do a better job of timing Ada County’s traffic signals than the guy who actually does the job.

  The computer-generated photo graces the office of the guy who’s been doing the job longer than anyone. I’ve silently (and not so silently) cursed this gentleman while stopped at red lights that seem to have no earthly reason for being anything other than green. Cursed him without even knowing his name.

  That, of course, is patently unfair. What do I or other motorists who take his name in vain know about how he does his job, how difficult it might be or the problems he faces?

   So I spent some time with him to see if he’s as incompetent as  we think he is.

  He isn’t. The man with much of the responsibility for timing the county’s traffic signals, all 432 of them (plus some 80 pedestrian signals), is neither blind nor a marsupial with a head wound. His name is Mike Boydstun, and he’s quite good at doing a difficult and often thankless job.

  “It’s not rocket science,” he says, only half joking. “It’s more complicated than that.”

   ACHD’s traffic operations engineer, Boydstun divides his time between working in his office, driving to trouble spots and working in the district’s Traffic Management Center.

  I’d envisioned a cramped office with a single display of  complex information about traffic flows. The reality is quite different. The traffic management center is a spacious room painted a soft shade of blue, with 52 flickering video screens on one wall.

   The screens display real-time images of intersections throughout the county. The images come from 181 closed-circuit television cameras at intersections around the county. Boydstun and five other district employees take turns watching for traffic-flow problems.

  If they see one, they can activate advisory messages on  electronic reader boards along roadways. They can send pertinent information to the Idaho Transportation Department, the media and Micron (the valley’s largest employer) so it can alert its employees in the event of freeway traffic blockages. Engineers can fix problems by changing signal timing remotely, or by making changes at the signals themselves.  

  A big part of Boydstun’s job, a part that can keep him awake nights, is adjusting the timing of signals to make traffic flow more smoothly.

 “Sometimes the problems are troubling and we keep thinking about it and not coming up with a solution,” he said. “Sometimes it helps to get away from it. You have to walk away, and when you’re not even thinking about it, sometimes in the middle of the night, the answer hits you.”

  A recent example is a new timing plan to improve northbound rush-hour traffic on Glenwood between State and Chinden. It was an idea that hit him when he wasn’t thinking about it.

  “I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet; maybe a tin bullet,” he said. “It made it so that it doesn’t seem to be quite as congested during the afternoon peak.” 

  Two of my pet peeves are the lights on Front at Avenue A and Park Center at Mallard, both of which tend to evoke the frustrated motorist’s refrain:  “Why can’t these (expletive deleted)  signals see that there’s no traffic on the side streets?” 

   Actually, they can. Like many signals in the district, they have a  “vehicle-detection” feature. In the case of Front and Avenue A, however, traffic flow improved when it was deactivated.

  “If there’s just one car on Avenue A, we could use vehicle detection to give it a green light for a short time and then turn the green back to Front,” Boydstun said. “But that would mean that drivers would get to the next signal early and have to stop there, resulting in a choppy traffic flow on Front.

  “By changing it to a fixed-time operation regardless of the number of vehicles, you get stopped at Avenue A but then you should be be clear all the way to 13th during non-peak hours.”

  The key phrase being non-peak hours.

  OK. But what about Mallard?

  “You say the light is red on Park Center when there’s no cars on Mallard?” he asked me. 

  “Yes. Even on Sunday morning, when there’s no traffic at all.”

  “Hmmm. We may have a problem there. I’ll send a signal tech out to check the cabinet.”

   Every intersection in the county with a traffic light has a traffic signal controller cabinet. In Downtown Boise and certain other locations, they’re the boxes decorated with artwork. Traffic signal engineers adjust equipment in the cabinets to change the timing of traffic and pedestrian signals.  

  Later the same day, Boydstun sent an email saying the technician had found a problem at the Mallard-Park Center cabinet and that it would be fixed in a couple of days. 

   Red lights at pedestrian crossings can be another source of frustration. Why do we have to wait forever for flashing red lights when there are no pedestrians in the crosswalk?

  Answer:  We don’t. Stopping is only required for the flashing yellow and solid red. It’s okay to proceed on the flashing red – provided you don’t mow down any lingering pedestrians.

  “A lot of people don’t realize that they can go on the flashing red, which is the benefit of it. It helps move traffic.”

  Many people, he added, also don’t know the meaning of dashes painted on the pavement at the ends of solid lines denoting bicycle lanes. They tell motorists they can turn there (while yielding to any bicyclists that may be present), and they warn cyclists to watch for vehicles making turns. 

   Boydstun, 54, has worked at ACHD for 17 years as a traffic operations engineer and before that an assistant traffic operations engineer. Prior to working for ACHD, he spent just over 13 years as a signal technician and engineering assistant with the Idaho Transportation Department. His degree is in electronics engineering technology.

  He likes his job “most days because every day is different. I never know when I come in what will happen that day.”

  The days he doesn’t like?

  “When everybody’s calling and yelling at us.”

   He responds to every phone call or digital complaint from motorists who think that anybody, just anybody, can do a better job of timing the traffic signals than he’s doing.

  “Most people are nice, but some just want to vent. They ask me if I actually drive the problem spots. Yes, I do.

  “… A lot of people who complain focus on just the one thing that’s bothering them. They don’t see the big picture, that changing something in one place can affect other places. 

  “The biggest thing for people to be aware of is that we do try to be proactive and make things as efficient and effective for the public as we can. There are times when we have peak congestion and there’s not a whole lot we can do. But what we can, we do.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears monthly in The Idaho Statesman and is posted a day later on woodward blog.com . Know someone with an interesting story for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

  I have a new appreciation for actors. 

  Not that I haven’t always appreciated them. How the best ones do what they do rises, in my opinion, to the level of high art.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum were my “performances” in last week’s production of “The Music Man” for Boise Music Week.

   This was Music’s Week’s hundredth anniversary. Boise’s 1918 Music Week was the first in the nation, and for a century our Music Week has relied on local talent. 

  “Talent,” in my case, being a bit of a stretch. 

  My first and until now only appearance in a play was in a high school production of a play whose name I’ve long since forgotten. I played the boatman who ferries dead people across the River Styx, a role which called for nothing more than dabbling a paddle in a sea of dry-ice fumes. Mercifully, no lines.

  So it couldn’t have been more of a surprise when Allyn Krueger, “Music Man’s” director, emailed to ask whether I’d be interested in a bit part in “The Music Man.” Mayor Dave Bieter and I would be the production’s “celebrities,” each of us playing a train conductor at alternating performances.

  Having been a bit of a train buff all my life, I enthusiastically accepted. The prospect of wearing a conductor’s uniform like the one John Irving wore in “The Cider House Rules” and shouting “All Aboard” from the stage of the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts was enormously appealing.

  Only after a couple of rehearsals did I begin to have an idea of the challenges involved. 

  The things that actors say and do onstage? The ones they make look so natural and easy? They aren’t. I had six lines. And do you think I could remember all of them and say them at the right times?

  Years ago, I memorized a considerable portion of Stephen Vincent Benet’s lengthy poem, “The Mountain Whippoorwill.” I’ve memorized the lyrics to scores of songs and sung them onstage without a hitch. But there’s something different about memorizing lines for a play. Whatever part of the brain it is that allows actors to do that I either don’t have or have in short supply. 

  On opening night, after diligently practicing them at home, I managed to say my first two lines without incident, but missed my queue for the third line. That left me standing onstage, as my mother used to say, “like two cents waiting for change.” As this was my last line in the scene, I was more or less hung out to dry, standing there like an inanimate prop before noticing people in the wings madly gesturing at me to get offstage. Happy to oblige, I lamely exited stage left.

  In the second scene, I was supposed to walk across the stage and say, “River City! We’re across the state line into Iowa. River City, population 2,212!”

  Except that I forgot to say the second “River City,” reducing Iowa’s 1912 population by roughly 99.9 percent. 

  Thinking about that while trying to fall asleep that night, alone in a darkened room, I felt myself blushing.

  My second and last outing went much better. I said the right lines at the right times and even managed to get a few laughs at a line I tried to make funny. 

  Move over, Daniel Day Lewis.

  If someone had told me a month ago I’d be onstage in a play at the Morrison Center, I wouldn’t have believed it. A career as a newspaper columnist brings a certain low-rent celebrity and some surprising opportunities, but a part in a play at the Morrison Center?

  This is one of the highest rated venues of its kind in the nation. Tony Bennett, Neil Young, Carole King, Mikhail Baryshnikov, casts of Broadway plays  … these are just a few of the great performers who have graced that marvelous (and intimidating) stage. If I’d thought about that while waiting in the wings, the power of speech would have left me.

  This would have been especially inconvenient given the fact that I had the play’s opening line.

   So next time you go to a play and see an actor falter or stumble, remember that it’s not anywhere near as easy as it looks. Good actors just make it look that way.

  Thanks to Allyn for giving me an unexpected and wonderful opportunity, and to all the members of the cast and crew who were so patient and helpful with a bumbling journalist pretending to be John Irving. 

  Blown line aside, it was a lot of fun. If Music Week ever needs someone to ferry dead people across a river of dry ice without speaking a word, I’m their man.

 

  

     

  Anyone who visits or drives by the Downtown St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center knows things are a bit chaotic there these days – closed roads, detours, mountains of dirt …

  The disruption isn’t limited to the hospital alone. A nearby clinic where one of my doctors works looks like the last thing standing in a bombing range.

  Amid the turmoil of the hospital’s expansion, however, are islands of beauty and tranquility. The flower gardens surrounding St. Luke’s – literally thousands of tulips, pansies and hyacinths in spring and marigolds, petunias and zinnias in summer – bring “oohs” and “ahs” from passersby and comfort to those dealing with pain and loss. They’re East Boise institutions. 

  Lee Barnard, who grew up in the neighborhood and lives half a block from the hospital, says he’s “always admired St. Luke’s commitment to the tulips and the other flowers. They’re gorgeous. I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember.”

   The grounds are beautiful even in winter. As a black-thumb  gardener who has managed to kill everything but weeds, I’ve often wondered who it is that keeps them looking like something out of “Gardens Illustrated.”

   That would be Jose de Jesus Garcia, himself an island of tranquility. He isn’t the only gardener at St. Luke’s, but he’s tended the gardens there for 26 years – longer than anyone. Gentle, soft spoken, he all but radiates kindness. Ask anyone at the hospital about him and the response invariably begins with, “Jose? He is just the nicest man.”

  Lead grounds worker Pat Allen, who regularly works with Garcia, describes him as “dependable and friendly.”

  And a really nice guy.

  Garcia grew up in a small town in Mexico, where his mother’s rose garden was locally famous, and has loved flowers all his life.

  “I like the way they look and the way they smell, he said. “I like everything about them.”  

  His favorite thing about his job?

  “Being outside. I worked in the laundry for a while when I first came here, but I’d rather be outside with the flowers. And I enjoy meeting people. That’s the beauty of my job. It combines the two things, gardening and being with people and answering their questions. Most of time I reverse the questions. I find out they have more knowledge than I do.”

  Somehow I doubt that. Still, it speaks to his intrinsic modesty. Asked his job title, he avoids overblown terms like landscape specialist or senior grounds work and answers simply, “gardener.”

  His work days begin at 6 a.m, with the first few hours devoted to cleaning the grounds.

  “We do a lot of entrance cleaning. Picking up papers and cigarette butts, things that blow in off the streets, making it look sharp. About 9 a.m. we start doing the actual gardening. This time of year it’s checking for dry spots and weeds and pulling out the spring flowers when they’re finished. Then we’ll start putting in the summer flowers.

  “… Children have a tendency to pick the flowers, but we don’t see much of that anymore because parents tell them not to do that. We don’t like to say anything. We keep our mouths shut. But the parents tell them for us. They want to keep it looking sharp, too.”

  The gardens are a source of accolades for the hospital. Sarah Jackson, who supervises the employees at the lobby’s information desk, says workers there “are frequently reminded by patrons of how beautiful our courtyard, the route up to the circle drive and the flowering planters are … I often see oncology patients in the courtyard, relaxing and enjoying the quiet, peaceful setting.”

  Garcia’s part in creating all that was considered significant enough that last year he was awarded a St. Luke’s President’s Award. Dr. Jim Souza, the hospital’s chief medical officer and the person who nominated him, noted that he “is routinely the first groundskeeper onsite during bad weather. In the particularly bad winter we just had (last year’s “Snowmageddon”), there were lots of opportunities to see Jose and his work. His long hours and commitment to getting it right made our campus safer for everyone.
  “He always did it with a smile and a pleasant attitude, which is what made it really stand out. Patients, staff members, runners and walkers … Nearly everyone in Boise has at one time or another been moved by Jose’s meticulous flower beds, brilliant spring tulips and the fall foliage he has nurtured.”

   His reaction to receiving the award?

  “I was overwhelmed.”

  Now 60, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1979. 

  “There were some Americans in the town where I grew up. From the time I was a little boy, I loved listening to them speak English. I thought it sounded really cool and wanted to be where I could learn that beautiful language.”

  He worked as a gardener at naval stations in California for nine years before moving to Boise.

  “I came here with a friend and liked the slower pace,” he said. “I thought it would be a great place for my wife and me to raise our children (a son and a daughter, now grown). Four months later, I was here.”

  I was surprised to learn that patients and visitors have a say in what’s planted  on the hospital grounds.  

  “We used to have daffodils, but a lot more people told us they liked the tulips so now we have tulips instead. People tell me which colors they like the most, what they think is beautiful. They comment about certain plants, and little by little we start cultivating those kinds of plants.”

  And not just flowers. Ornamental cabbage and kale in the winter, trees, ornamental grasses, shrubs … 

  Pansies, tulip bulbs, and ornamental cabbage and kale are planted in the fall. When the tulips fade, they’re replaced with summer flowers – mainly profusion zinnias and marigolds. 

  “Profusions are easy to grow, they’re tolerant to mildew and they cover the ground well so they don’t allow weeds to pop up,” Allen said. “We try to keep everything as low maintenance as possible.”

  Low maintenance, high public approval.

  “Every day ten to 15 people stop to talk about the flowers or take pictures of them,” Garcia said. “Pat jokes that we should charge $5 a picture.”

  The construction has taken a toll on the grounds. Several flower beds, including the prominent one at Broadway Avenue and Idaho Street, have been lost. 

  “That one will be replaced and will be triple its size,” Allen said. “As the construction progresses we’ll put in some other areas to make up for what we’ve lost.”

  No one is is looking forward to that more than Garcia. He takes pride in the grounds looking their best. Gardening may not be his life, but it’s a big part of it. He grows flowers and vegetables at home, volunteers to do gardening work at his church. When he and his wife want to relax, they take a picnic lunch to a park end enjoy the flowers there.

  One of the best parts of his job, he says, is making blossomy interludes available to those who need them most. 

  “I like knowing that this is here for the people who have loved ones in the hospital. They can come outside and enjoy the colors. They don’t have to go somewhere else to find beauty.”

Sorry, I don’t think the link I just posted for Sunday’s column works.

Could it be possible that I made a technical error?

Will try again later, when I can get a grandkid to help:) Sorry for the delay.

– Tim

Brothers keep treasure trove alive at Idaho Sporting Goods – but not for much longer

 

 

Longtime readers know that I am prone to vacation blunders, mishaps and occasional disasters. A recent trip to Mexico was no exception.

My wife and I sat in the seats next to the exit on the flight from Boise to Phoenix. Before we took off, a flight attendant woke me from dozing (we’d gotten up at 3:30 a.m.) by blurting out a mostly unintelligible – to us, at least – pronouncement. He finished by looking expectantly at me and saying I needed to answer him in the affirmative. I did.

Neither of us has the hearing of a teenager. After he left, we  looked at each other and confessed that neither of us had understood a word of what he’d said. Across the aisle, our daughter dissolved in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” we asked.

“You don’t know?”

“No. Why are you laughing?”

“When you said yes? He was asking you if you were capable of deploying the emergency exit.”

As we were boarding the plane in Phoenix, she started laughing again.

“Whats funny now?” I asked her.

“I’ll tell you when we get to our seats,” she said, tears streaming down her face.

That took a while, as our seats were near the back of a large, completely full airplane. She  continued to laugh as we bumped and jostled our way back. When we were seated and she’d finally stopped laughing, she told me that I’d been bashing passengers in the head with my shoulder bag for the whole length of the plane.

It used to be that my wife and I were the ones who handled the details, logistics, etc., when we traveled with our kids. Now we’re just along for our entertainment value.

To her credit, the daughter who was accompanying us has acquired a fair amount of tourist Spanish, meaning that it works some of the time.  The first place we went after clearing customs was to stock up on groceries. When she asked a clerk at the store a question, he responded in rapid-fire Spanish, giving her an excuse to try a phrase she’d seen on road signs and had been itching to use:  “Reducidar de velocidad.”

Reduce your speed. Or, “slow down,” right?

The clerk looked at her as if she had three heads. Later, we learned that it doesn’t mean reduce your speed, or, as she intended it, “speak slower.”

It means “speed bump.

The next day, after emerging from the pool and returning to what I thought was our table, I asked what had happened to all the towels we’d brought. No response, so I asked again. I was about to compliment our daughter on her new swimsuit when I realized I was at the wrong table. The woman I was talking to wasn’t my daughter all. She was a complete stranger, who looked as if she was about to call security.

This, however, were minor mishaps. No ATMS ate our debit cards this trip, and I didn’t screw up our plane reservations coming home,  lose my wallet and all my money in the ocean or otherwise court disaster.

More than a few readers have told me that my vacations make theirs look good.

Next year,  we’re thinking about going someplace more exotic. You’re going to love it.

From now on, I’ll be posting the Statesman link to my columns. Just click on the following link to read the latest one. If you have problems, please let me know using the comment mode. Thanks? — Tim

 

Eagle family’s secret ingredient to a successful college fund? Salsa

 

Note to Readers:  Apparently some of you were able to read this column by clicking on The Statesman link and some weren’t. I’ll do my best to have the technical difficulties fixed for the next one. For those of you who couldn’t get the link to work, here’s the column in the regular format. — Tim

 

Dick Dahlgren knows what it takes to enjoy life. He’s skied the great resorts of the U.S. and Europe, fly fished with celebrities, run with the bulls in Spain.
He also knows about being sick and depressed.
He’s had prostate cancer and a major heart attack that destroyed a third of his heart muscle. He’s had two stent surgeries, surgery to install a pacemaker, breast cancer and a mastectomy.
Yes, men do get breast cancer. It’s rare, but it happens,
“I was scared, bored and depressed,” he said. “Every day was a day of anxiety over my health problems. I had this big, black cloud hanging over me.”
Three years ago, he found something that made the black cloud go away.
And it didn’t come in a bottle.
“It happened so fast it seemed almost magical,” he said.
He has a routine. Most days he’s up by 6:30. He reads The Statesman and the New York Times. He checks his Facebook account and other things on his computer. By then the coffee is made. He has coffee and breakfast at an oak table beside a larger-than-life painting of a rainbow trout.
Then it’s time for work.
If doing what you love can be called work.
He sits down at the oak table, opens his laptop and starts to write.
“Once I start, I can’t take a break. My characters won’t let me.”
Dahlgren, 80, has written all his life. But it was never his profession. He spent 57 years as a real estate broker, 30 of them in Sun Valley. He and his wife have a home in Mackay, an hour away, where their guests have included actors Christopher Guest, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tommy Lee Jones.
“They come there to fly fish and hide from the world,” he said.
His children joke that Dahlgren has never worked a day in his life.
“I’d get a big commission from a sale and spend the next two or three weeks fly fishing.”
As he related details of his life, it was hard for me not to envy him a little. Before his health problems, he did a smashing job of just having a good time. He was a ski bum in Europe for two years and has fished every blue ribbon trout stream worthy of the name. He’s worked as a ski patrolman and managed a condominium development, where he spent most of his time playing tennis.
“I tried the corporate world for a while, but my buddies who did that all died of heart attacks so I left.”
When he had time, he wrote stories.
In 1972, he wrote a novel, a love story drawn from his skiing idyll in Europe. Three years ago, for something something to do and to take his mind off of being sick, he decided to rewrite it. He made it through 20 pages before switching to a historical novel he’d written in 1982.
“That one was to easier to read through and finish,” he said. “It became an obsession. It completely did away with my depression, my anxiety and my concerns about my health. At night, my characters would talk to me. I’d get up and make notes. The next day, I’d write it all down in the book.
“I’d work for five hours straight a lot of days. I couldn’t write fast enough to put down what my characters were telling me.”
I asked him if it was anything like what Bob Dylan says about the inspirations for his songs, that he has no idea where they come from.
“Without a doubt! I have no control over it. It just happens. It’s the same with my artwork. People ask me where it comes from. I don’t have a clue.”
His and other artists’ work grace the walls of his southeast Boise home. I’ve known other people who have hung their own paintings on their walls, but Dahlgren’s actually improve the walls. His painting of his home at Mackay, where he built a replica of legendary Idaho hermit Beaver Dick’s cabin, is striking.
He illustrates his books as well.
The rewritten manuscript he credits with turning his life around is a newly published novel, “Madam Esmeralda Margarita Magruder.” He published it himself through Amazon Books late last year. It might not make the bestseller lists, but it’s gotten some good reviews. It’s the first of several books he has in the Amazon pipeline.
“I’ve been obsessed with writing for three solid years now,” he said “It’s made me forget my problems entirely.”
His wife, Julie, says he’s “not thinking about his illnesses any more. That’s become more of a back-burner issue with him. He’s more cheerful. Writing and thinking about his stories have given him a more positive attitude about living and about the future.”
He’s written three novels, a novella and a young readers’ book about decline of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead runs.
The love story set in the Europe of his ski-bum days is his next novel to be published though Amazon, in the spring. A novella about trout fishing and a children’s book about the decline of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead runs are planned for a Christmas release.
His fifth book, “Trout War,” will follow next year.
“I spent eight years fighting the City of Los Angeles for drying up a trout stream. The book will be about that. It’s like ‘Chinatown.’”
If having a passion can improve our mental health, Dahlgren would be Exhibit A in the case for it. He smiles easily and often. His blue eyes sparkle. He clearly isn’t depressed any more, and thinks he may even be better physically.
“Sickness starts up here,” he said, pointing to his head. “I’m healthier now. I feel better.”
His advice to others battling illness or depression: Find a passion and use it to relive better times – as he’s doing with his writing.
“Focus on a happy time in your life and pursue what caused it. If you love butterflies, join a butterfly society. It can be anything. Think about something you love. Think about the most exciting time in your life and find a way to get involved in it again. It doesn’t matter how or what it was. With me, it’s writing. And what’s happening with my writing is beautiful.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears on the second Sundays of the month and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. He writes about Idahoans with interesting stories and is always looking for them. If you know one, contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Oops! It appears I made a technological blunder because the link doesn’t work. I’ll post the column tomorrow in the usual format, but you can read it now by going to http://www.idahostatesman.com.

 

Sorry for the confusion.

Tim

 

I’m trying something a little different this week. To read my latest column in The Idaho Statesman, please click on the link below.  Thanks! — Tim

http://www.idahostatesman.com/…/tim-w…/article199419274.html

Note to readers: This is the column The Statesman did not publish. But there’s no reason why my blog subscribers shouldn’t get it. — Tim

The car pulled up slowly and stopped at the end of my driveway. The driver rolled her window down.
“Who’s your doctor?” she shouted.
“Excuse me?”
“Who’s your doctor?”
I told her.
“I’m seeing her tomorrow. I think I have the same thing you do.”
This was one of the more unexpected responses to my Nov. 26 column about my brush with cancer.
It was, thankfully, the only one in which a reader appeared out of nowhere to interrogate me in my driveway. Many of the responses were from cancer survivors, who shared their experiences. Almost all included encouragement and advice; all were deeply appreciated.
To backtrack a bit, the November column was about being diagnosed with bladder cancer. I was lucky. My doctor caught and removed the tumor early, and it was non-invasive.
The bad news, if you can call it that, is that those kind of tumors tend to come back. I have to have a procedure called a cystoscopy every three months for two years and at less frequent intervals after that for the rest of my life to check for new tumors. If another one shows up, it’s back to the operating room and the clock resets.
That’s nothing compared with what some people have to go through with cancer. And it didn’t take long to learn that I have plenty of company.
“Welcome to the club!” the founder of a shelter where my wife and I volunteer said when I showed up for work the first time after the column was published.
“Club?”
“The cystoscopy club. I was diagnosed in ‘94.”
He doesn’t remember exactly how many cystoscopies he’s had. He does remember that he’s had to have eight tumors removed.
I’d rather not think about that. I’d rather think about lowering the risk through a healthy lifestyle, and about the good things that have happened:
A few days after the column was published, a neighbor I seldom see shouted at me to stop as I walked past her house. Then she ran out and gave me a hug.
Another neighbor brought over a box of chocolates. 
 One of my former doctors, now retired, offered to take me out for a beer. Former colleagues from Portland to Minnesota sent prayers, good vibes, good wishes.
A neighbor whose wife is a cancer survivor advised me to “continue to live life to the fullest. Make plans. Do things. Play the guitar – loudly and with gusto.”
I’ve lost track of how many readers have called, written, done Facebook posts or approached me in person to wish me luck and share their own experiences with cancer – or worse.
Reader Mike Van Vleet reminded me that my disease is “one that people can and have beaten. Some of us have diseases that have never been beat.”
His disease? ALS. His email was a vivid reminder of how truly lucky I am.
Nancy McDaniel wrote to say she realized after being diagnosed with cancer that “looking back doesn’t help. Looking to the future is what’s truly important, and appreciating your family and friends is what matters most.”
Good advice, whether you’re sick or not.
Hy Kloc said his cancer may have spread, but added that “the more we share, the more controllable the emotional roller coaster can be. It’s good to hear positive stories now and then rather than just gloom and doom all the time.
Peggy Mondada, who lost her parents and two brothers to cancer, recommended a book – Dr. Michael Greger’s “How Not to Die.”
Greger says four healthy lifestyle factors can help prevent chronic disease – “not smoking, not being obese, getting half an hour a day of exercise and eating healthier – defined as eating more fruits, veggies and whole grains and less meat.” Not doing these things, he claims, “accounts for 78 percent of chronic disease risk.”
He recommends a plant-based diet. I’ll never be a vegan, but it’s hard to argue with his basic premise, and I’m incorporating quite a few of his recommendations into my diet.
That brings us to longtime reader Gayle Speizer, who won her battle with breast cancer and added that even if she hadn’t, she’s “had a good life. Not all of it has been easy. I’ve known poverty, pain and tragedy. Still, it’s been a good life.”
Words to keep in mind. With illness as with so many other things in life, a positive attitude and the support of family, friends – and readers – can make all the difference.