By now you’ve probably watched “A Christmas Story” on television, and not for the first time. Or the second, or third … It’s a Christmas classic most of us have watched more times than we remember.

  The movie, for whose who have been living in a cave or for some other reason haven’t seen it, tells the story of nine-year-old Ralphie Parker and his dream of getting a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.

  Filmed partially in Canada, the movie won two Canadian Genie Awards and airs annually for 24 hours, from Christmas Eve to Christmas night. The Library of Congress honored as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

  The feel-good ending alone is a classic. After hearing repeated objections from grownups convinced that BB guns are dangerous, Ralphie wakes up on Christmas morning to find the gift of his dreams, a present from his father. The movie ends with him as a grownup, remembering “the best gift I ever received, or ever would receive.”

  Have you received such a gift? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

  Mine came on the Christmas when I was 17. I had dreams of playing in a rock group and already had a guitar, if you want to call it that.

  It was a black Silvertone, purchased at a pawn shop for $50. I paid half; my sister paid the other half. Even at $50, it was probably overpriced. It wasn’t exactly ugly, but it was far from being beautiful. It didn’t play particularly well or sound particularly good. It was what it was. A cheap, used guitar.

 Like my friends who also wanted to be in a rock band, I was a huge  fan of the Ventures, an instrumental group from Tacoma credited with being the band that influenced more rock guitarists than any other. I spent hours mooning over a picture of them on one of their early album covers.

 Bob Bogle, then their lead guitar player, was playing a Fender Jazzmaster guitar in the photo. With its beautiful sunburst finish, two big, white pickups and mottled, tortoise-shell pickguard, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was to my Silvertone what a Rolls Royce is to Yugo. I had to have one.

  The price, however, was a bit of a problem. A new Jazzmaster in those days sold for $402. Today, used ones sell for many thousands, but $400 then was a fortune for a kid who was making a buck an hour on the end of a shovel for a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. It would take forever to save that much money. I might as well have been saving for a Rolls Royce.

  I saved for well over a year, keeping the cash in a special box. It was a small, wooden box with a hinged, wooden lid on which I’d laboriously carved “Jazzmaster $.” That box is still in my dresser drawer these many years later. The lid is broken in half so it’s not much good for storing anything, but it has too much sentimental value to throw it away.

  With the Christmas season of my junior year in high school approaching, even after saving those hard-earned dollars for all that time, I was still roughly $150 short of the $402 need to secure the dream.

  Hints to my sister that it would be greatly appreciated if she helped out fell on deaf ears. She’d already helped with the Silvertone, and it was an understatement to say that rock and roll wasn’t her thing. She was ten years older than me and a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan. (Think “Edelweiss,” “My Favorite Things,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” etc.)

  There weren’t many gifts for me under the tree that Christmas morning, and those that were were pretty ho-hum, mostly clothes. I was feeling a little down about it until my mother suddenly seemed to notice a red string lying on the floor amidst the shredded wrapping paper.

  “Wonder what that string is,” she said to me. “Why don’t you follow it and see where it goes.”

  With that a faint hope was kindled. Could it be?

  No. No way my folks would have bought the Jazzmaster for me, even though I’d talked of little else for months. They were far from being wealthy, and money was tight enough that year that my mother had started a business, converting our dining room to a home office.

  The string led from the living room, through the kitchen and office and down a hallway to my bedroom, ultimately disappearing under my bed.

  It was than I knew that, against the odds, the seemingly impossible had happened. I reached under the bed, felt the distinctive Tolex covering of the case and slowly pulled it out into the light.

  Knowing it was an experience that would be remembered for life, I waited a bit before opening it, savoring the moment. Then, when the latches were opened and the lid lifted, there it was – arguably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It looked just like Bogle’s guitar on the cover of the Ventures album. It had a sweet, woody smell. Lying on the  plush, red velvet lining of the case, reflecting the light from its gleaming finish, it was almost too perfect to touch.

  Unknown to me, my folks had ordered it from the old Leon Burt Music Studios on Latah Street in Boise, making up the difference between the purchase price and the $250 I’d saved. They’d been hiding it at my sister’s house (she was married by then) for weeks.

  That afternoon, I took it to the home of the bass player in the band we hoped to start, for the sole purpose of showing it off. Neither of us knew how to play well enough to show off. It was an important enough occasion that even the drummer came by to “ooh” and “aah.”

  A couple of years later, actually playing in a band by then, I sold it to buy a Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar like the one played by George Harrison of the Beatles.

  Many guitars and many Christmas gifts have come and gone since then, some of them costly and wonderful, but none are remembered as fondly or sentimentally as the Jazzmaster. With due respect for all of them, that guitar, like Ralphie’s BB gun, was the best gift I’d received, or ever would receive.

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

  Father Rick Frechette has devoted his life to helping the poor in Haiti. He’s been there for 37 years, witnessed suffering most of us can barely comprehend and says things have never been as bad during his time in the island nation as they are now.

  Haiti doesn’t get a lot of attention in the news. No matter how bad things are there, other stories – the Epstein files, Venezuelan boat bombings, the end of penny, etc. – make headlines while Haiti is pretty much ignored.

   I’m writing this because what’s happening in Haiti now is atrocious, because Father Rick is in the forefront of efforts to relieve the suffering, and because Boise’s St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center’s Project Haiti is one of his major supporters. (More on that presently.) 

  Father Rick is a priest of the  Passionist religious order, a core mission of which is to aid the suffering, especially the poor and neglected. I’ve written about him several times through the years because few people have impressed me as much.

 This is a man who grew up in Connecticut and could have had a comfortable life as a parish priest there, but  volunteered to go to Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere. Deciding he couldn’t do enough for the poor as a priest only, he went back to school and became a medical doctor, caring for Haitians’ physical as well as their spiritual needs.

  Last week he was in Boise for some needed rest and recreation, courtesy of local Project Haiti volunteers. An earlier trip to Idaho was postponed in part because he was working to free two girls kidnapped by one of the criminal gangs that have overrun the island. He vowed not to leave until he’d secured their release, an effort in which he succeeded.

  The criminal gangs have all but absolute control.

  “Three-thousand bandits,” he says, “are holding 13 million people terrorized.”

   He estimates that he and those working with him have rescued some 100 kidnapping victims in the last five years. Armed criminal gangs routinely kidnap victims and demand money for their return.

  Crimes against women have become commonplace. The United Nations and human rights organizations report that “violence, which includes rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and murder, overwhelmingly targets woman and girls.”

  Father Rick himself has had his life threatened, been held at gunpoint.

  Bad as things are, he is adamant that Haiti isn’t a lost cause.

  “I think most people feel helpless to do anything about it, but we can try,” he said. “The focus shouldn’t be on Haiti as a lost cause. The focus should be on the innocent millions who are in excruciating suffering and who deserve to be led to some kind of balance which is civilized, discordant but civilized. It’s a time to focus on saving civilization and trying to restore civility and normalcy, to stand with the people and give them direct, concrete relief.”

  Project Haiti has been helping Father Rick do that for more than 30 years, sending medical supplies and teams to Haiti, treating victims of gang violence, helping build clinics, distributing food, medicine and water, helping provide shelter and relocating people to safer parts of the island.

  Is it possible to restore civility and normalcy?

  “Yes, but it takes will, and it takes being able to talk to the opposition in a clear way which adds to the correctness of choices instead of just leading to defamations like, ‘you’re crazy, you should be killed or deported.’”

  With so much of his time spent negotiating with gang leaders and treating victims of violence, primarily gunshot wounds, I asked him how much time he has to perform the normal duties of a priest. Is he, for example, the pastor of a church? 

  “No. I celebrate the sacraments and anoint the sick and dying, but not in a parish. … Seventy parishes have closed because of the bandits.”

  Is he able to say Mass, one of a priest’s primary duties?

  “There was a home for the destitute and dying that was destroyed. There were four sisters (nuns) there plus their staff who took care of them. When their place was destroyed, we took all of them to our hospital so the sisters live there and function there with the original purpose of their mission. I say Mass for the sisters at a small house where they live.”

  I asked him if he does that in other people’s houses.

  “No. Almost nobody in Haiti has a home now. Four-thousand people have been killed by bandits since March.”

  He is among those who don’t have a home. He lives in a warehouse.

  “I lived for a long time at St. Damien Hospital. But when Covid came, I started taking care of Covid victims and didn’t want to be tracking it anywhere so I moved into the warehouse.”

  He was 35 when he came to Haiti. Now he’s 72.

  Is retirement part of his plan?

  “If I saw what I do as a job, I’d put a retirement age, but I see it as a calling. It’s dangerous where I am, and people say ‘don’t you think you’ve done enough. Why don’t you just come back (to the U.S.)?’ But we’re a team of people in Haiti and a community. We’re all in this together. We’re a ‘we.’ It would be strange to take myself out of that.

  “… No matter how dire things get, we lose ground but we slowly regain the improvements. We can still get things done and even recover lost ground. That counts for something.

  “I think that standing for human life and human dignity where it is most degraded is a huge service to the human family. In no way, shape or form should concern for the Haitian people or donations to help them be considered futile. Investing in humanity can never be futile.”

Note:   Every dollar donated to Project Haiti goes to supporting Father Rick’s efforts in behalf of the poor. Online donations:  https://donate.saintalphonsus.org/ProjectHaiti-Donate. Checks may be mailed to Saint Alphonsus Project Haiti, Attn. Jill Aldape, 1055 N. Curtis Road, Boise, ID 83706.

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

  Halloween isn’t what it used to be.

  This year’s Halloween was, once again, a quiet one where I live. 

  Traditional trick or treating, with kids going door to door, has largely been replaced in our neighborhood by a Halloween parade. Kids in costumes, many accompanied by their parents, line up at around 5 p..m. – well before dark – and parade in unison down streets lined with candy-dispensing grownups seated in lawn chairs. It’s become a neighborhood tradition that everyone, kids and grownups alike, seems to enjoy.

  The number of trick or treaters who independently came to our door after sundown that evening:  zero.

  I enjoy the parade as much as the next person and look forward to it as the social event it as become. But, at risk of being branded a codger, I can’t helping thinking that what once was a venerable part of traditional Halloweens has all but been lost.

  The words “trick or treat,” though still spoken on countless doorsteps, have virtually lost their relevance.

 Treats are handed out in abundance.

 Tricks? Largely an anachronism.

  Tricks used to be half of the fun on Halloween. In the old North Boise neighborhood where I grew up, it was hard to say which we looked forward to most: the treats or the tricks. Tricks added spice to the sugary evening. They were expected and, with rare exceptions, they were harmless.

  A perennial favorite was lowering the street lights. Streetlights in those days hung from cables attached to telephone poles catty corner from each other at intersections. Devices on the poles allowed power company workers to lower them for changing bulbs or performing other repairs.

  It wasn’t just power company workers who knew about these  devices, of course. Every kid in the neighborhood knew about them. It was a rare morning after Halloween night that they weren’t hanging far below their usual height.

  Tipping over trash cans was another Halloween prank. It made a mess in the alleys and was annoying to the property owners, but nobody got hurt and the messes were quickly cleaned up.

  The most common form of mischief, by a wide margin, was soaping windows.

  Soaping windows, for those unfamiliar with the practice, was the simple act of writing on a window, using a bar of soap as the writing instrument. It was a popular Halloween trick, fun but harmless. The soap was easily removed the next day. 

  This brings us to Howard.

  Howard was the neighborhood fix-it man and a mentor to most of the kids within a block radius. He worked as a troubleshooter for a utility company and seemed capable of making or fixing just about anything.

  Howard was the go-to guy for making a soapbox derby racer. They were primitive as vehicles go,  four wheels on a wooden platform with a seat, a plywood body and ropes attached to the front wheels for steering. A soapbox derby race was held every summer on the Capitol Boulevard hill, with hundreds of participants. Thanks to  Howard, no kid in our neighborhood ever lacked a racer.

  If you had a flat tire on your bicycle, Howard could fix it in no time. 

  A broken chain on your bike? Howard was your man.

  When we were older, he took us fishing and hunting, teaching us how to do both successfully and safely. He knew all the best places to go. We seldom returned empty handed.

  He was the kids’ best friend every day of the year but one. For reasons that were never known, Howard hated Halloween.

  It was a perennial mystery where he and his wife, Fern, disappeared to every year on Halloween night. With the exception of church on Sundays and occasional get-togethers with friends, they seldom went anywhere. On Halloween night, however, their home was dark and silent as a grave. Not a single light burning, no box of candy or popcorn balls on the front porch.

  As you can imagine, this was both inexplicable and a bit galling to those of us who had come to think of Howard as a friend. How could he be so friendly and helpful to kids all year and become such a grinch on Halloween?

  One year I decided to get even. I would soap his windows.

  To make absolutely sure he wasn’t home, I watched the house carefully for signs of life.

  Nothing. No moving shadows, no flicker of a flashlight. Once again, Howard and Fern had vanished. The coast was clear. Time to make my move.

  Quiet as a church mouse, I crept to the picture window on the front of the house. Looking both ways to make sure no one was watching, I retrieved the soap from my pocket and reached for the window, intending to write something incredibly clever and cutting on it.

  Then, a disembodied voice:

  “Don’t touch that window!”

  I about came out of my skin. A few yards behind me – silhouetted against the Halloween moon – was the unmistakable figure of Howard perched on the limb of a tree, holding a shotgun.

  It was known to those who knew him well that Howard loaded some of his shotgun shells with rock salt, the dubious theory being that they’d cause pain but not a serious injury. Not that that made a difference on this particular occasion. There was but one prudent course of action.

  I ran like Dracula with his hair on fire.

  I never did know whether Howard recognized me in my costume that night, or what it was that he had against Halloween. The incident was never mentioned, and we remained friends into my teenage years and beyond. He built me my first guitar amplifier.

  Frightening as the window-soaping experience was, it remains one my favorite Halloween memories. The shotgun was over the top, but long after the treats have been forgotten I still recall the spine-tingling thrill of sneaking up to that window, soap at the ready.

  Treats are fine.

  But there was something to be said for tricks as well.

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.

In my early years as a journalist, a recurring subject of my columns was an old North Boise house that came to be known  as Maintenance Manor.

  In buying the house, my wife and I placed our faith in the time-honored real estate maxim, “location, location, location.” Buy the worst house in a nice neighborhood, bring it up to the standards of the houses around it and your investment will more than pay for itself.

  It was a fixer-upper, with apologies to proper fixer-uppers everywhere. What it really was was a nightmare.

  The exterior made it plain that it was the worst house on the street – white, clapboard siding that was original and looked it, a hideous, rose-colored roof, a back porch enclosed with plastic sheeting instead of windows, a chimney that was falling apart …

  The interior was worse – a single bathroom that could only be reached from the back porch, woodwork that had been painted glossy black, pea-green carpet with multiple cigarette burns, single-pane windows that let in so much cold air they might as well not have been there, an ancient furnace that burned $300 worth of oil a month …

  A few weeks after buying it, we invited my in-laws to visit and have a look at the place.

  “I had no idea!” my shell-shocked mother-in-law said. “If you’d told me you’d bought a shell, I might have had some idea. And even that wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it is.”

  My father-in-law, a skilled handyman, walked all around the house and yard before delivering his verdict:

  “It is a nice neighborhood. If I were you, I’d tear down the house and build a new one on the lot.”

  It was the best advice we ever got. We totally ignored it, of course, and spent the next 13 years fixing the place up and adding on to it. We bought it for $20,000 and sold it for $70,000. After deducting the costs of materials and professional help with the addition, plumbing and electrical, we made next to nothing for the countless hours I spent with hammers, saws, chisels, paint brushes, etc., turning a house of horror into a home.

  Early this month, its current owners emailed to ask whether we’d “like to see what’s going on at your old place.”

  We would. A date was arranged.

  We expected the house to look different, and probably better. It had been a lot of years and a lot of subsequent owners since we’d live there. Most had probably made improvements resulting in an attractive, inviting interior.

  The reality couldn’t have been more different. The interior had been gutted. The addition we’d built on a slightly lower level than the rest of the house was gone, and a new floor had been built on the same level as everything else. The finish work is weeks away. It was a stick house –  nothing inside but framing, with holes in the floor where sinks, toilets and other fixtures would be installed.

  It’s fair to say we were thunderstruck.

  Everything I’d spent so many hours working on was gone:

  The living-room archway with bookcases on either side, gone.

  The China hutch, gone.

  The bathroom with wallpaper I’d hung and tile I’d installed, gone.

  The “new” bathroom with the beautiful vanity and sunken tub, gone.

  The family room, gone.

  My office, gone.

  The original fireplace with the ornate copper trim, gone.

  The new owners have big plans for the house: A bathroom with a sauna. A bedroom closet almost as big as the old bedrooms were. A kitchen several times the size of the old one. A deck on the back of the house. It’s going to be a beautiful home.

  Their plans are a tribute to the staying power of traditional old neighborhoods like North Boise. Successive generations pour  thousands of dollars into their venerable homes to preserve and improve them.

  The work being done on the onetime Maintenance Manor also is a testimonial to a basic human need. No matter a home’s condition when it’s purchased, people need to alter it, to make it their own.

  It doesn’t bother me in the least that my old home’s new owners have gutted it. On the contrary, it’s great that it was purchased by people who care enough to give it a major overhaul. Here’s wishing them the best.

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. 

  “Robert Redford died? That’s impossible! He should have lived forever!”

  That was a neighbor’s reaction to the news that film legend Robert Redford passed away earlier this month.

   A lot of people felt that way. He’d been around so long, and was such an enduring and popular figure in our collective life, that it seemed as if he would always be here. 

   With Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, he was one of the great heartthrobs of his generation. All were strikingly good looking, charismatic, seemingly youthful even when they weren’t. They weren’t’ ageless, but they weren’t far from it. If only the rest of us were lucky enough to look as good as Redford did at nearly 90.

  All three spent at least a little time in Idaho. McQueen had a home near Sun Valley, Newman visited his daughter Nell when she was living and working in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area near Murphy, and Redford came to Idaho for the premiere of “Jeremiah Johnson,” in which he played the title role. I was fortunate enough to have had at least secondary brushes with all of them. 

  McQueen’s wife, Barbara, co-wrote a book about him – “Steve McQueen, the Last Mile.” The book was about his final years before dying too soon, of cancer. I interviewed her about it and about her time with him in Idaho. It was almost surreal knowing that I was talking to someone who had shared the life of the star of “Papillon,” “The Sand Pebbles” and “The Great Escape,” three of my favorite movies. All are now considered classics.

  He wasn’t a man to be trifled with. An often repeated story had Keith Moon, drummer for the rock group The Who, learning this the hard way.

 Moon’s Malibu home was next door to McQueen’s, and its lights shone into McQueen’s bedroom window. It should have been an easy problem to solve. McQueen could have had shutters, room-darkening shades or drapes installed. Or, more logically, Moon could have simply turned off the lights. McQueen asked him repeatedly to do so. He refused.

  Deciding that his sleep had been interrupted enough, McQueen loaded up his shotgun and blew out the lights.

  When Newman’s daughter was working in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, I was a correspondent for People  Magazine. This was when People did more actual people stories than celebrity gossip, and my editor assigned me to interview her and write a story about the work she was doing there.

  She was living in a trailer house miles from anywhere. It was a long, hot, dusty drive to get there. When she opened the door, I was looking at Paul Newman’s electric blue eyes. She was very nice, but she said she’d have to get her father’s permission to do an interview.

  “Would you mind coming back next week?” she asked.

  This was before cell phones. There was no way to simply call and ask whether Dad had said it would be okay. So, the following week, I made the long hot, dusty drive again.

  “What did your dad say?” I asked her.

  “He said the only thing he wanted to do with People Magazine was hang its editors by their thumbs.”

  In other words, no story. I never knew whether it was true, but was told that every time People raised its prices it put Paul Newman on its cover. Like most celebrities, he had to have valued what little privacy he could get. If was disappointing not to get the story, but it wasn’t hard to see his point.

  A former co-worker who used to live in Los Angeles had a great story about a woman she knew who had a memorable encounter at her home. When the woman answered a knock at her door, a stranger on her doorstep asked if she could use her phone. She said her car had broken down, and she needed to call her husband.

  The woman seemed nice enough, and it was a reasonable request. The home’s owner welcomed her in, let her use the phone and they made small talk while waiting for the husband.

  A short time later, another knock at the door. You can imagine the woman’s surprise when she opened it and standing an arm’s length away were Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The stranger who asked to use the phone was Joanne Woodward, Newman’s wife. Though an accomplished actress herself, she wasn’t nearly as famous as her husband, which was why the woman hadn’t recognized her.

  When Redford came to Boise for the “Jeremiah Johnson” premiere at the Egyptian Theater, I was invited to attend because I’d written a biography of Idaho author Vardis Fisher. Fisher’s book “Mountain Man” was one of two books on which the film was based.

  One of my main sources for the biography was Fisher’s widow, Opal Laurel Holmes. I interviewed her on the phone a number of times and also at her Foothills home. It didn’t take long to realize that she was something of a recluse, seldom leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. On the few times I visited her home, she tended to be wearing a housecoat or a dress long out of fashion and had done little with regard to her hair or makeup.

  Well, now! At the premiere, I almost didn’t recognize her, dressed to the nines in a chic, floor-length gown, makeup tastefully applied, hair professionally done. She looked years younger and almost glamorous, sandwiched between Director Sidney Pollock and Redford himself, clearly delighting in every second of it.

  When she introduced me to him, I was all but tongue-tied. There he was just a few feet away – Robert Redford himself, impossibly handsome, larger than life, the personification of a major movie star.

  Which he undeniably was. Writing in the Wall Street Journal a few days after Redford’s passing, essayist Joseph Epstein called him “the last movie star.” His death, Epstein wrote, “marks the end of the Hollywood phenomenon of the movie star. A star is different from an actor. … More than an actor, he was the kind of man you would go to the theater to see.”

  It didn’t matter what the movie was. If he was in it, you knew it would be good.

  We’ve lost so many big names recently. Redford was arguably the biggest, but others include Brian Wilson, Gene Hackman, George Wendt (Norm from Cheers), Loretta “Hot Lips Houlihan” Swit from M*A*S*H, Val Kilmer, Ozzie Osbourne, Connie Francis, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and more. 

   We didn’t know these people, but it felt as if we did. We listened to their music, they came into our homes on television. They were people we never met and never would, but in a sense they felt like friends.

  We knew they wouldn’t live forever. But the world still seems a lesser place without them.

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

  Readers long ago came to look forward to my vacation columns. Not because they were tales of idyllic holidays or travel to exotic places, but because my vacations were so bad they made readers’ look good by comparison.

  Our kids got sick, our car broke down on mountain passes, we pitched our tent on red ant hills … it was always something.

  Our latest vacation lacked the drama of those adventures, but it wasn’t without its share of mishaps.

  Our destination was the family getaway in Washington state. It used to be my in-laws’ house, but my wife inherited it when they passed away. Invariably, it needs work.

  “Will you take a look at the shed door?” my wife asked “It seems kind of loose.”

  It was loose for a good reason. The trim boards around the door were rotting. This sort of thing is fairly common in western Washington, due to its infamous “liquid sunshine.” It rains an average of 160 days a year there.

  The trim boards, obviously, would have to be replaced. This meant a trip to a lumber store (with apologies to well stocked lumber stores everywhere) in the nearest town. This so-called lumber store had barely enough boards to do the job. We’re talking normal boards here, the kind most lumber stores have oodles of, but this store had – count ‘em – three! Dinged up on the edges and riddled with knots and knot holes.

  The next closest lumber store was farther away than I wanted to drive, so I bought those miserable excuses for boards and took them back to the house, muttering clever and cutting expletives about the lumber store the whole way.

  The boards had to be cut with 45-degree corners to go around the door opening. Fortunately, my late father-in-law owned a tool for doing that. Buried under an assortment of hand tools, extension cords and other oddments was a mitre box. It was old, made of plastic and rickety, but it still worked.

  With the corners cut, the boards needed to have their knotholes filled and be sanded, primed and painted. This took several days of working off and on, meaning whenever I wasn’t finding even more fun-filled ways to enjoy our vacation.

   With the trim boards painted and looking better than they had a right to, all that was left was to nail them in place. This proved to be a challenge as the two-by-fours they needed to be nailed to were (surprise) beginning to rot. Happily, enough solid spots were left to finish the job.

  Even more happily, the shed door opened and closed properly. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing when it occurred to me that the trim boards around the window might need work, too.

  An understatement. They were boards only in the sense that they were once made of wood. Now they more closely resembled moldering sawdust. They obviously would have to be replaced.

  The good news was that boards in that condition are easily removed. A few easy pulls with a hammer and out they came. 

  The bad news is that they weren’t the only thing that came out. When the last board was removed, the window fell out.

  This was so unexpected that it rendered me momentarily frozen, staring mutely at the window as if it were an alien object that had fallen from the sky.

  When my wits, or what there was of them, returned, I went to look for some nails to reinstall the window. My father-in-law had every kind of screw imaginable, but none were long enough to use on the window.

  Strangely, he had almost no nails at all. It took some diligent searching to find a small handful of them, in a cupboard otherwise containing nothing but cans of paint. There were just enough of them to nail the window back in place.

  This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The liquid sunshine was also rotting the studs that had supported the window. There were barely enough solid spots left to nail it back in place. That done, I breathed a sign of relief, put away the tools and looked forward to enjoying a trouble-free remainder of the vacation.

  Less than an hour later, the phone rang. It was our granddaughter who was keeping any eye on things at our house in Boise.

  “I think there’s something wrong with your sprinkler system,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Your lawn is turning brown.”

  “Has there been a power outage? That can mess up the sprinkler clock. Maybe Christian could come over and take a look at it.”

  Christian is her friend who has a landscaping business and knows a lot about sprinkler systems. She called back a few hours later.

  “Christian says the clock is working fine. He’s not sure what’s wrong.”

  The problem turned out to be a broken pipe. The repair bill:  $600.

  Thankfully, we’re back home at the house with the brown lawn now and life has returned to something resembling normal.

  A good thing. I’ve had about all the vacation I can stand.

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.

  Quick, do you remember Bronco Billy?

  If you didn’t live in the Boise area 45 years ago, chances are you don’t.

  Bronco Billy was a Clint Eastwood movie, sort of a Western comedy/drama. 

  It was filmed mostly in Boise and Garden City, in 1979. Hundreds of Idahoans watched the filming. Some were extras in the movie and a lucky few had speaking parts. Eastwood has been quoted as saying that it was one of his most enjoyable film making experiences.

  So why am I writing about it?

  The answer is that a Bronco Billy Weekend was planned for Saturday to commemorate its 45th anniversary. The main event would have been Saturday evening at the Riverside Hotel, where locals who either were involved in the movie or simply enjoyed watching the filming could have met to share their experiences.

  Unfortunately, the event was canceled. But the news release about it  triggered memories about meeting famous people that seemed worth sharing regardless. (That the column was ready to go before the cancellation and needed only a bit of tinkering to reflect the new reality also may have been a factor.)

  There’s something uniquely exciting about seeing famous people in person. It happened to my wife and me in San Francisco, early in our marriage. We were having lunch at a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf when two distinguished looking men walked by.

  “A movie star just walked right behind you,” I said to my wife.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know his name, but he played General Bradley in ‘Patton.’’’

   Karl Malden. He was accompanied by a relatively unknown sidekick, then a rising star name Michael Douglas. They were filming a scene for a television series, “Streets of San Francisco.” We quickly finished lunch and followed them to a dock to watch. It was fun seeing them at work, up close and personal. 

  My first view of Eastwood, during a Bronco Billy scene being filmed in Fort Boise Park, was anything but up close and personal. Crowds were kept at a distance from the action. But even from 30 or 40 yards away, he was unmistakable – Clint Eastwood himself, resplendent in cowboy garb and looking every inch the movie star he was.

  My second view of Eastwood was up close and personal – and then some.

  It happened that the movie’s filming was happening at the same time as a Boise promotional visit by Playboy Magazine’s 25th anniversary “Playmate.” (The magazine still uses that degrading term.) Her name was Candy Loving. My assignment for the paper I was working for at the time was to shadow her for a day.

  The first indication that Ms. Loving was as no-nonsense as she was beautiful came when a television reporter asked an ignorant and demeaning question:

  “So, you’re this year’s bunny?”

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

  I liked her immediately.

  Loving (her real name) went on to work in television and film, earn a masters degree and design benefit packages for health insurance companies.

  There was no connection between Bronco Billy and her being in Boise, but she ended up that evening at a party attended by none other than … Eastwood. She and I were talking when he walked in and immediately made his way to the most gorgeous woman in the room.

  What struck me most was how tall he was – 6 feet 4 according to Google. The three of us stood and talked until a man wielding an old-fashioned camera with a huge flash attachment suggested that we hop into the suite’s heart-shaped bathtub for a photo.

  We obliged (fully clothed, obviously). My one claim to uniqueness may be that I’m the only person ever to have been in a bathtub with Clint Eastwood and a Playboy Playmate.

  Thanks for the memories, Bronco Billy. Sorry your weekend got canceled. 

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 hear so often about bad people doing bad things – examples abound in the news – that it sometimes seems as if bad people are ubiquitous. 

  Then something happens that makes you realize how far from the truth that is.

  It happened to me recently in a grocery store. A small act of kindness – three of them, actually – that reaffirmed my faith in the everyday goodness of our fellow humans.

  It has been, as you know if you haven’t been living 24/7 in air conditioned buildings, a very hot summer. My approach to getting through a recent stretch of 100-degree heat was a low-tech solution hearkening back to childhood.

  A kiddy pool.

  I hadn’t had one or so much as seen one in years, but they must still make them, right? You know the kind:  kiddy pools, plastic circles just big enough for a couple of kids to play in a few inches of cold water from a garden hose.

  My wife and I used to buy one every summer when the kids were small. They’d splash and squeal to their heart’s content on hot afternoons while the grownups of the neighborhood enviously looked on and suffered. By summer’s end, the pools were dinged, dented and ready to be recycled, but had more than paid for themselves in grins and giggles.

  If kids could get cooled off in them, why not adults?

  Why not indeed? This was my thinking recently upon seeing a display of royal blue kiddy pools at a supermarket on a hot afternoon. Not only were they strategically placed outside near the front door where you couldn’t help but see them, they were bargain-priced. Normally $18, they were on sale for ten bucks.

  Ten bucks? That’s less than it costs to use the air conditioner for a couple of days. At least I think it is, and apologies to Idaho Power if it isn’t. And instead of a couple of days, the relief is available for the price of a few gallons of water from a garden hose whenever you need it.

  Sold! I chose a pool from the display and toddled inside to the checkout line to pay for it.

  It was a long line. You’ve undoubtedly noticed that with growth we’ve become accustomed to long lines. They’re everywhere from grocery stores to traffic lights. I queued up with my pool, expecting a long wait.

  “Is that pool all you have?” the woman ahead of me in the line asked.

  I told her it was.

  “I have quite a few things so why don’t you go ahead and get in line ahead of me,” she said. 

  “Thank you. That’s really nice of you.”

  Noticing this, the woman ahead of her told me to go ahead of her as well.

  The checker rang up the pool. The price on the register:  $18.

  “The sign outside says they’re on sale for $10,” I told him.

  “That’s only if you’re a rewards member. Do you have a rewards card?”

  I didn’t.

  “Here, use mine,” the woman behind me said, handing it to the checker.

  The checker didn’t seem to care that it wasn’t my card. Bottom line: $10.

  It wasn’t so much the money that mattered. Not getting the sale price wouldn’t have ruined my day. But the kindness of those  complete strangers made my day – and then some. If any of you considerate women read this, know that your small acts of kindness to a guy buying a kiddy pool meant more than you know.

  Not long after this, I happened to read a story about a group of young boys at a Taco Bell. They all hungrily perused the menu, but only one of them ordered anything. They were sitting at their table when a man described as “a 6 foot five giant” approached them and stood over their table. The boys were understandably nervous until he asked them if they’d like some slushies.

  Slushies ordered, he asked the boys who hadn’t ordered anything if they’d like something to eat. They ordered; he paid for their lunches. Then he turned to leave without waiting for a thank you.

  As he waved goodbye, all the boys shouted in unison:

  “Thank you!”

  “Today,” the story ended, “love and kindness looked like a 12-pack of tacos and three Starburst Freezes.”

  Yes, there are lots of bad people doing bad things and making headlines in the process. But for every one of them, there are way more good people doing wonderful things without any recognition at all. And that’s a good thing for all of us. 

                                                          ***

  To readers who expressed concern after reading my most recent column, thank you, 

  For those who missed it, the column was about symptoms that made me think I could have been having a stroke:  numbness and tingling in my feet, lower legs, hands and lower arms. The feeling lasted about 90 minutes and was scary enough that I was all but out the door to go to the E.R. when the symptoms subsided. 

  Happily, tests done over the next few days ruled out a stroke. The cause of the symptoms, however, remained a mystery. 

  A mystery, that is, until a health care provider told me that one of the lesser known side effects of a prescription medicine I’d been taking was … numbness and tingling.

  Bottom line: I’m fine. But again, thanks for your concern.

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.

  There are wakeup calls and there are Wakeup Calls.

  The former might be things like getting on the scales and realizing it’s time to lay off the fast food and desserts. Or checking your credit card balance and realizing it’s been way too long since you made a payment.

  The latter, more serious wakeup calls are the kind I had recently. I was watching a movie with my son when my feet, lower legs and one of my hands and lower arms went numb. 

  Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It was sort of a cross between numbness and tingling. It was the oddest feeling – one I fervently hoped would go away quickly.

  It didn’t. It lasted long enough that I considered going to the nearest emergency room. These things always happen late at night, of course.

  The nearest E.R., fortunately, was only a few minutes away. The wait after arriving there, however, could be much longer.

  “Let’s give it a while,” I said to my son. “Maybe it will go away in a few minutes.’

  It didn’t.

  I vaguely recalled that numbness could be a symptom of a stroke.

  Google confirmed this. There are lots of other stroke symptoms, however, none of which were happening. That seemed to justify waiting. No point in rushing to the E.R. if it wasn’t serious.

  Presently the numbness/tingling subsided. Altogether, it lasted about an hour and a half. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t return, though, and it was concerning enough that I sent a MyChart message to my doctor.

  It happened that my doctor was out of the office that week, but a nurse returned my message the next morning, saying that a triage nurse would be contacting me about my symptoms. Instead, a doctor at the same clinic contacted me and ordered a CT scan.

  The scan didn’t find anything alarming, but a physician’s assistant followed up by ordering another test. We’re still waiting on that one, but so far so good. I’m still having occasional numbness and tingling, but no drooping face, arm weakness, slurred speech or other stroke symptoms. The jury’s still out on what actually is causing the symptoms, but at this point it appears that I dodged the stroke bullet.

  This brings us back to the wakeup call.

  When you experience something that you think could change your life for the worse, whether it be a stroke, a heart attack or an accident, it scares you. Frankly, it scares the hell out of you. All sorts of things go through your mind, none of them pleasant: 

  Am I going to be partially paralyzed?

  Am I going to lose my memory? 

  Will I have trouble speaking?

  Am I going to die?

  When none of these things happen, when you you realize that you seem to be okay and  that life will go on pretty much as it always has, two things happen.

  First, you feel intensely aware of your mortality and incredibly fortunate that you’re still around and able to function. Life is a gift, one for which we should never stop being grateful.

  I’ve been lucky. It recently occurred to me that I now have more friends who are dead than living. If you live long enough, that’s inevitable. Many of my absent friends were younger than I am, some considerably younger. To still be here and in relatively good health is something I’m thankful for every day – especially since the wakeup call.

  Second, you want to make the most of the time you have, to try to be deserving of it. Realizing, not intellectually but in your gut, how quickly your life can change – or end – makes you want to live a better life, to try be a better person.

  Saying that and doing it, of course, are two different things. But what better goal is there? Who knows when the next bullet might come along?

                                                        *** 

 Boise lost a longstanding member of its musical community last week when Mike Wallace – singer, guitarist and colorful character – died of a heart condition.

  Mike was a member of a number of groups through the years, most recently Gerry and the Dreambenders, of which he was a founding member. The name was patterned after the British group Gerry and the Pacemakers. There was no Gerry in the band, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

  I’ll remember him for a number of things:  his amazing 

collection of guitars, his love of British rock and roll, his wry sense of humor and his way with words.

  The Dreambenders virtually always dressed in suits for their gigs. One summer night they were playing on a parking lot at a drive-in restaurant when the temperature was near 100 degrees. The pavement was like a griddle.

  “Mike,” I asked him, “why don’t you wear something cooler on nights when it’s so hot like this?”

  I’ll never forget his answer:

  “Because I don’t want us to look like just another bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts playing Mustang Sally.”

  In a few words, he described a thousand bands.

  A good man, gone too soon. He’ll be missed.

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

  My wife and I now have one of the most peculiar looking trees in Idaho.

  It is, or was, a sweetgum tree. My son and I planted it when he was a kindergartener. He’s now in his early 40s, which gives you an idea of how big it was.

  It was one of several trees we planted in the back yard – too close together. You tend to do that when trees are are fresh out of the nursery and not much taller than you are.

  You don’t give much thought to their eventually becoming big trees, their branches growing into one another. And if you do, you think of it being so far into the future that you won’t have to worry about it. You’ll have sold the house by then and it will be someone else’s problem.

  The thing about the future, though, is that it often tends to come more quickly than we think it will. It doesn’t seem like it from day to day, but in retrospect it seems to have happened almost in a flash. The trees are small and in what doesn’t seem like much time at all they’re towering. The little trees we planted when the house was new have shaded almost the entire back yard.

  And that was a problem.

  With so much shade, there wasn’t enough sun to grow things. The daylilies are embarrassing. Other daylilies in our neighborhood are several feet tall with verdant stalks and a profusion of blossoms. My daylilies are pitiful runts, just a few inches tall with only a few buds and nary a blossom. A passerby could be forgiven for thinking they were weeds.

  My wife’s back-yard tomato plants are better off, but not by much. They’re planted in pots rather than in the ground, which is fortunate  because they have to be moved around to catch the sun, a bit like sun worshipers on a beach. A few have blossoms; none have actual tomatoes.

  Speaking of sun worshipers, I happen to be married to one. I’m only half joking when telling her that she should donate her body to medical science. She almost never gets sick, and she can lie in the sun for hours with no ill effects. She’s never seen the inside of a dermatology clinic.

  So it was a continual source of annoyance to her that there were so few spots in the yard to bake in the sun. Removing one of the trees to allow more sun in the yard wouldn’t have been sad or traumatic for her; she’d have welcomed it.

  This brings us to the smaller matter of the pokey balls. Anyone who owns a sweetgum tree is familiar with their unusual seeds. Slightly smaller than ping pong balls, they’re covered with sharp spikes. If you step on one with bare feet, you’ll take care not to do it again. Our grandson Ryan did that when he was small, tearfully lamenting that he had stepped on a “pokey ball.” It was a perfect name for them. 

  I love trees and hate the idea of cutting one down. But in the case of the sweetgum, it wasn’t hard to make an exception. It was dying. And we certainly wouldn’t miss the pokey balls.

  So I called Bob Parziale. A certified arborist, Bob has done work for us in the past and has always done a great job. He quoted us a price to remove it, and we agreed on a date.

  When he arrived, we asked him a question he wasn’t expecting:  Instead of cutting the tree down to the ground or to a short stump, would he be okay with cutting it to a height of a little over six feet, just above the two lowest limbs, and leaving about two feet of those limbs?

  Odd as that sounds, there was a reason for it. For years, those limbs were where we hung a set of chimes and a basket of flowers. If enough of the limbs remained when the rest of the tree was removed, we could still do that.

  Bob was fine with that. He had the tree down and gone in about the time it takes me to mow the lawn. And we still had a place to hang our flowers and chimes.

  Granted, it does look a bit odd. How many 36-year-old trees are six feet tall with only two limbs the size of salamis? But the flowers still bloom, the chimes still sing, and now there’s a story behind them. We lost a tree, but we gained a conversation piece. 

                                                           ***

  The Post Malone/Jelly Roll concert at Albertsons Stadium on June 24 attracted, if I’m not mistaken, the biggest crowd for a musical performance in Boise since Garth Brooks played here in 2019.

  I live close enough that I could hear the music at my house. Neighbors who live closer and were concerned that the show would keep them awake, however, had nothing to fear. It was over well before most people’s bedtimes.

  Though not all that familiar with Malone or Jelly Roll, I was glad that another big-time show returned to Albertsons Stadium. Smaller venues have done a great job of attracting talent, but many of the really big names aren’t interested unless there’s a venue like, well, like Albertsons Stadium with a capacity approaching 40,000.

  Country, rap and hip hop are among the most popular types of music these days so there’s every indication that more of those types of acts will be coming there if the stadium continues to host concerts.

  But they aren’t the only kinds of music that would draw crowds, and now and then it would be nice to change things up with acts for the generation that started rock and roll. The Rolling Stones, John Fogerty, Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney are all still touring.

  McCartney, winner of 19 Grammy Awards and recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most honored performer and composer in music,” might have enough Idaho fans to fill the stadium twice.

  Something for promoters to consider.

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 circus is in back in  town. And no, that’s not a reference to the legislature.

  The El Korah Shrine Circus is finishing up its three-day run at Idaho Expo today, continuing a tradition dating back more than a century. The first El Korah Shrine Circus reportedly was in 1916. 

  For me the circus’s annual arrival comes with a touch of sadness. The reason is that, for all its many attractions, what was once the main attraction for those fortunate enough to have known him is no longer part of the circus he loved.

  Bill Kay brought the Shrine Circus to Boise for what seemed like forever. He was its producer, ringmaster and colorful character extraordinaire. He lived in Sarasota, Fla., unofficially known as “circus town” because so many circuses are headquartered there, but he spent so much time in Boise that it was like a second home to him.

  He arrived in town each year weeks before the circus opened, doing advance work and hanging out with the locals. He probably had more friends in the Boise area than some of the locals did. I never heard of him having any enemies. To know him was to like him instantly.

  His annual visits to the newsroom of The Idaho Statesman, where I worked in those days, had an effect similar to that of a power outage.  Everything stopped. Regardless of what they were working on or how close it was to deadline, reporters and editors gathered round to be regaled with his wit and stories.

  His friends included Jack Haley, who played the tin man in The Wizard of Oz, and Spike Jones, a band leader famous for his spoofs and satires of popular songs and classical music. Both, like Kay himself, were first-rate characters.

  Whether in the circus ring, a newsroom or on the streets, he was instantly recognizable. A hefty man who loved to eat and knew all the best restaurants in every city where the circus played, he invariably was attired in a gray or blue suit and his ever present Shriner’s fez. No one else looked remotely like Bill Kay.

  He was a master of practical jokes. I’d been attending the circus since childhood and thought I’d seen it all, but when he invited me to attend the show at the Snake River Stampede grounds one year there was no choice but to go. No one could refuse an invitation from Bill. Little did I know what was coming when he asked me to join him during the intermission.

  “You can stand over there by the chutes when the show’s getting ready to start again,” he said.

  He began the second half of the show with an announcement:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we’re fortunate to have a guest artist with us tonight. In chute number three, Tim Woodward!”

  He’d planned it perfectly. Directly over my head was a huge number three. Every eye in the arena was focused on me. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Embarrassed isn’t a big enough word.

  The circus may not have been his life, but it wasn’t far from it. How dedicated was he? During one of his visits to Boise, word came that he’d been gored by an elephant. St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center was just across the street so I walked over to see him and find  out how he was doing.

  He wasn’t there. He’d left against medical advice. That evening, he was back in the ring, announcing the acts.

  The most famous of them was Karl Wallenda, elder statesman of the famous high-wire act, The Flying Wallendas. When the paper needed a photo to run with a story about the circus, he had Karl pose for a photograph, balanced atop a log fence. Other circuses had publicity packets with photos. He had Karl Wallenda.

  He brought the circus to Boise for 29 years. He loved the city and spent more time in it than anyplace other than his home in Florida. It was a blow when the shrine replaced him. His health deteriorated; he died not long afterwards.

  I still miss him. He was one of those unforgettable characters you miss long after they’re gone. The shrine circus has been coming here for 109 years and may well come for that many more. But there will never be another Bill Kay.

                                                   ***

  He was 82, but will forever be associated with youth, summer and California beaches. The death of Beach Boys founder and songwriter Brian Wilson on June 11 touched all of us who loved his groundbreaking music.

  He played in Boise three times. I first saw him with the Beach Boys at the Boise High School auditorium in 1964. The auditorium was packed even though it was the height of Beatlemania. The British Invasion may have displaced the Beach Boys as the country’s number-one band, but they hadn’t lost their ability to draw big crowds.

  Two things amazed me about that concert, both of them involving Wilson. One was his ability to sing the high falsetto parts that were so much a part of the Beach Boys’ sound. He sang them effortlessly, never straining or grimacing. The other thing was the way he made playing the bass guitar seem effortless. I don’t recall him looking at it even once while he played.

  It was a long time before he came back. The second concert was 49 years later, in 2023 at the Morrison Center. 

  He was an old man by then, the hair gone gray, the voice not what it had been. Perfectionist that he was (he was famous for it), he compensated by having backup singers sing the high parts he could’t reach any more. The five-piece Beach Boys had given way to a ten-piece group. They sounded great.

  Tributes following his death came in from all over the world. Everyone from Carole King  to Keith Richards to Bob Dylan had good things to say about him.

  My favorite tribute was Paul McCartney’s:

  “Brian had that mysterious sense of musical genius that made his songs so achingly special. … I loved him and was privileged to be around his bright shining light for a little while. How we will continue without Brian Wilson ‘God Only Knows.’”

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.

So which of your favorite TV shows have been canceled?

  The executives who think they know what we want to watch better than we do canceled some 60 shows last month.

  A short list of some of the more popular ones includes The Conners, House of the Dragon, FBI International, FBI Most Wanted, Magnum PI, S.W.A.T., Yellowstone, Young Sheldon, NCIS Hawaii and The Equalizer.

  Granted, losing a favorite TV show isn’t the end of the world. It doesn’t come close to losing a championship game, a loved one or even a pet.

  But that doesn’t make it insignificant. We come to love certain shows. We feel as if we know the characters personally and look forward to seeing them every week. We know their personalities, their quirks, their strengths and weaknesses. We tend to think of them almost as friends.

  That’s never been truer than it has with some of the classic series. A few that come to mind:  M*A*S*H, The Fugitive, I Love Lucy, All in the Family … 

  The Fugitive was a must-see at our house during my teenage years. It told the story of a doctor wrongly convicted for killing his wife. After escaping en route to death row, he spent years trying to hunt down the real killer while law officers tried to track him down. We felt terrible for him – his plight was so wrong – and cheered when he was exonerated. 

  I Love Lucy, starring the late Lucille Ball,was the country’s most watched show for years. Lucy was forever getting into one hilarious jam after another. My favorite episode was “The Chocolate Factory,” in which she and her friend Ethel had jobs wrapping chocolates moving along a conveyor belt. It moved so fast that they were stuffing chocolates into their mouths, their shirts, even their hats. I watched a clip while writing this, and it was funny as ever.

  M*A*S*H and All in the Family were more recent classics. M*A*S*H, which stood for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, featured humorous and occasionally tragic episodes involving a M*A*S*H unit during the Korean War. It was one of the highest rated shows ever.

  All in the Family was about a working-class family headed by a loud-mouthed bigot named Archie Bunker.  One of the worst things you could say to someone is that he or she sounded like Archie Bunker. 

The show’s often controversial subjects included the Vietnam War, infidelity, rape, religion, antisemitism and more, yet it was often funny and occasionally hilarious.

  This year’s cancellations included three of my favorite series – FBI International, FBI Most Wanted and NCIS Hawaii. (Yes, as a matter of fact I am a sucker for police procedural dramas.)

  FBI Most Wanted and FBI International were spinoffs of the original FBI series. All were or are (FBI hasn’t been canceled) produced by Dick Wolf, who seems to have produced about half of the series on television – three FBI shows, three Chicago shows, four Law and Order shows and more. His newest, yet to premiere, is titled Chicago Pope. Talk about staying current!

  My favorite of the three series I regularly watched that were canceled this year was NCIS Hawaii, one of six spinoffs of the original NCIS series starring Mark Harmon. It was canceled because it was expensive to film in Hawaii and because the network wanted to revamp its lineup.

  Call me cynical, but to me “too expensive to film” sounds like a euphemism for replacing it with something cheaper to film, and probably not as good. NCIS Hawaii had a loyal and a growing fan base, which generated a significant backlash against CBS for canceling it.

  I was among those posting complaints. The prospect of losing my Monday evenings with Jane, Kai, Whistler, Jesse, Lucy, Ernie and Sam did not sit well.

  The same was true of FBI International. After four seasons, Wes, Cameron, Smitty, Amanda and company had come to seem like old friends.

  Ditto for Remi, Nina, Sheryll and Hana on FBI Most Wanted. It and FBI International were among the ten most watched network shows last season, but were canceled for financial reasons. Translation: Expect something cheaper to replace them.

  As if all these weren’t enough, Lester Holt left last week as the longtime anchor of NBC Nightly News. Another “old friend” gone.

  Life is change, of course. Nothing stays the same forever.

  But that doesn’t stop us from wishing some things would. 

                                                    ***

  Warren Buffet’s resignation as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway last week recalled a story about what may have been his only visit to Idaho. The person who told me the story was a limousine driver who drove him to Sun Valley for a conference in 1999,

   When he mentioned along the way that he was getting hungry, she asked him where he’d like to stop. 

  “McDonald’s,” he replied.

  He also told her he’d like to go somewhere to do some shopping.

  “Okay, where would you like to shop?”

  His response:  Kmart.

  This was a man who was once the richest person in the world. He could have eaten at the Sun Valley Lodge. He could have bought the Sun Valley Lodge.

  Some people who get rich become insufferable snobs, but the onetime richest man in the world remained the down-to-earth person he’d always been. Here’s wishing him the best in his retirement.

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

  Everyone dreads hearing that they might have a medical problem.

  I’ve been lucky when it comes to medical problems. The worst was a cancer diagnosis. Fortunately, it proved to be a small, non-invasive tumor, caught early and surgically removed. 

  The followup involved a procedure every three months for two years to make sure the cancer hadn’t returned. Then every six months for two years, then once a year. Thankfully, no tumors have  returned.

  As mentioned above, I’ve been lucky. Nothing worse than common illnesses, minor accidents and routine surgeries.

  Except for chicken pox. Chicken pox in my thirties. Trust me; you don’t want to get a childhood disease as an adult. It’s the sickest I’ve ever been. Flu and pneumonia pale in comparison.

  You can’t take luck for granted, though. Anything that looks or feels concerning should, obviously, be reported to a doctor right away. An old friend of mine failed to do that and paid for it with his life.

  That’s why, when a new mole seemed to appear almost overnight just below my collarbone, I texted a picture of it to my dermatologist. My father had a close call with a malignant mole, so they’re definitely in my gene pool.

  Dad was lucky. He also had a good doctor. They’d finished with his annual exam and Dad was literally on his way out the door when he realized he’d forgotten something.

  “I forgot to mention a new mole on one of my toes,” he told the doctor. “Would you mind taking a look at it?”

  “That has to come off,” the doctor said when he saw it. 

  “When?”

  “Right now,” he replied, reaching for his scalpel.  

  The mole was a melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer. If Dad hadn’t remembered to have the doctor check it and the doctor hadn’t acted decisively, my father’s life could have been shortened by a couple of decades.

  The mole under my collarbone looked disturbingly like photos of melanomas on medical websites. Still, having always been lucky with this sort of thing, I wasn’t all that worried. It was probably nothing. 

  To make sure, I sent a picture of it to my dermatologist. Because this sort of thing runs in the family, I’ve been seeing her for a number of years now. I’d sent her photos of other moles from time to time, and she always said they were nothing to worry about.

  This time was different.

  “Hello, I’m calling from the dermatology office,” a voice on the phone said.

  I waited for the usual report; the doctor had looked at the picture, and her assistant was calling to tell me to not to worry. It was nothing  serious.

  Instead, she surprised me by saying that “the doctor would like you to come in to have it evaluated.”

  This was something new. I’ve probably sent the doctor three or four pictures through the years, and not once had she expressed concern. No big deal, no need to make an appointment. Now she wanted me to come in to be evaluated. You don’t think of the word “evaluated” as being worrisome, until it is.

  An appointment was made for the following week. That may have been the hardest part. From my perspective, it would have been preferable to have hung up the phone and gone in right away. Instead, there’d be eight days to wait and worry.

  Not constantly, of course, but worry has a way of returning when you aren’t expecting it. You’re reading a book, watching a movie, working on a project or otherwise not thinking about what’s bothering  you, and suddenly the questions come:

  “What if it isn’t nothing?”

  “What if it’s something really serious?”

  “What if I discovered it too late?”

  Such were the thoughts that returned repeatedly over the course of those eight days. It didn’t help that a friend said he’d known two people who had died from melanomas. 

  The morning of the appointment came with a mixture of relief and apprehension. Relief that the wait was over, apprehension over what the diagnosis might be.

  The doctor said she was concerned when she saw the picture I sent her, but upon examining me in person found the mole to be    harmless. No need to remove it or treat it in any way. I’d been worried for nothing.

  The eight days of worrying served a purpose, though. Worrying that you could have something potentially life-threatening gives you a fresh appreciation of the obvious – that you won’t live forever. And maybe not even as long as you’d casually assumed.

 An occasional reminder of your mortality motivates you to make the most of the time you have left, to do things you’ve been wanting to do – things you should do – but have been putting off.

  In the short term, I’d like to lose a few pounds, do some projects around the house and see the three U.S. states I haven’t visited. Longterm goals are more challenging: becoming a better husband, father and grandfather, a better friend, a better person. 

  If those things can be accomplished, I’ll rest easier if and when a worrisome health concern turns out not to be nothing.

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.

 

  There it was on the used car lot, spiffed up and looking almost new. My car! One of the best of many cars I’ve owned.

  It gave me a turn to see it sitting there. A touch of seller’s remorse. What was I thinking to have traded in an old friend that had never been anything but reliable and accommodating.

  It was a Hyundai, one of only three new cars I’ve ever owned. I drove it for seven years and never had a moment’s trouble with it. Nothing but oil changes and other routine maintenance. Never once did it break down, fail to start or produce so much as a squeak or a rattle.

  The “many cars I’ve owned” statement above is not an exaggeration. I used to go through cars the way most people go through socks. There have been, through the years, at least 30 of them.

  With the Hyundai on the used car lot and a “new” car in the garage, it seemed fitting to reminisce about some of their predecessors.

  The first, which gets short shrift here because its traitorous nature has been a subject of previous columns, was a sports car. A bright red, MG convertible. Even the salesman who sold it to me warned me not to buy it. It cost as much to keep it running for a year as it did to purchase it in the first place. 

  It was the only British car of the bunch. The others have been German, Swedish, Italian or Japanese.

  The Italian car – there was just one of those – was a Fiat. It was also one of only three new cars I’ve ever owned, the rest all having been used cars. I debated between it and a VW bug and within a few weeks deeply regretted my choice.

  The Fiat went through a set of rear tires every 1,500 miles – worn  through all the way to the steel belts. The logical conclusion was that the tires were defective. Logical, but wrong.

  Virtually all cars need to have their front tires aligned now and then. The Fiat needed to have its rear tires aligned, and they went out of a alignment if you hit a pothole, drove over a curb or so much as gave them a withering look, which I did frequently.

  The car’s batteries had a nasty habit of catching fire, and both of its  side rearview mirrors fell off and shattered. Most unnerving, however,  was its habit of howling like a woebegone dog. A mechanic I hired to diagnose the mournful sound turned pale upon hearing it.  We jointly concluded that the car was haunted.

  One of my favorite cars was a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. It was the vehicle that took me on a memorable, overnight drive to San Francisco. I’d have been 19 or 20 at the time. Bored and restless, I gassed up the car and drove straight through. It was a lovely summer night, and long stretches of the Nevada desert were virtually traffic free. All these years later, that peaceful, solitary drive remains a cherished memory. 

  The Karmann Ghia came to a sad end, however, broadsided by a car that had run a stop sign going way too fast. No serious injuries, but the car was a total loss. I still think of it now and then, wistfully and with affection.

  Most of the German cars were VWs, but three were used Mercedes. The first was purchased for $400 while I was stationed in Germany in the Navy. It was was great around town, but 70 miles into its first road trip the oil pressure needle dropped like Vladimir Putin’s international approval ratings.

  The second Mercedes was nicer, pricier. But, like its predecessor, it used oil. A lot of oil! The problem, an expensive one, was diagnosed as a burnt piston. We sold it to a young couple who fell in love with it even knowing about the oil problem. When they realized how serious  it was, I offered to take the car back. Instead, they sold it. To a journalist!

  Readers who have owned them know that a certain defunct line of Swedish cars was known for being quirky. Saabs were famously quirky. Their styling was unique, instantly recognizable. Their engines were mounted backwards; the ignition was on the floor console instead of the steering column.

 I had four of them through the years, and they were all great cars – comfortable, solid, safe. A friend was surprised when he took his car  in for servicing at a luxury-car dealership to learn that the service manager there drove a Saab. Asked why, his response was, “Trust me. If you’re in a wreck, you want to be in a Saab.”

  Solid? It would have taken a tornado to blow one off of a freeway.

  My “new” car?

  It’s a departure for me, in more ways than one. My first American car, my first electric car – a used Chevy Bolt. Zero emissions, no gas to buy, good for the environment.

  The salesman told me it would be fun to drive, and he couldn’t have been more right. It handles almost like a sports car, and electric engines are hot. Give the accelerator a brisk push and your head snaps back.

  That said, I still get nostalgic thinking about the faithful Hyundai sitting on the used car lot. 

  It’s never easy to lose an old friend.

                                                       ***

  My favorite response to my last column, on whether we aren’t as happy as we used to be, came from reader Ray Guindon.

  Ray thinks we’re less happy now because we’re less connected. He  “grew up in a time when there were three TV networks and maybe four local channels. … No computers, cable, cell phones, internet, streaming, etc.  (With all those things) it’s just easier to disconnect.”

  He fondly recalled an incident in which he and another baseball fan were washing their hands next to each other in a stadium restroom. When he noticed that they were wearing T-shirts of the opposing teams, he suggested that they each use the other’s as a towel to dry their hands. 

  “A lot of laughter ensued,” he wrote. 

  Try getting that kind of connection on a computer.

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 month of March has a lot going for it – the Spring Equinox, Daylight Savings Time, Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s Day to name a few. It’s also the time of year when winter-weary residents of northern climes dream of escaping to tropical paradises.

  Like Mexico – the closest tropical escape to Idaho.

  Mexico has a lot going for it – warm, sunny weather, beautiful beaches and low prices. With current exchange rates favoring the dollar, Mexican vacations are a bargain.

  These were some of the motivations for a recent Woodward family vacation to Mexico. It had been five years since our last visit, just as the pandemic was beginning, and with Covid mostly in the rearview mirror the time seemed right to return.

  We spent two weeks in Mazatlan, a New Orleans-sized city on the Pacific Coast. Mazatlan is big enough that it isn’t just a resort city. In addition to tourism, its economy is built on manufacturing and agriculture. Its cultural attractions include historic theaters, an opera house, world-class restaurants, beautiful plazas and a magnificent cathedral. 

  Not to mention its friendly people. We didn’t run into a single local who wasn’t gracious and accommodating. And more often than not, smiling. Everywhere we went, we saw smiles, far more often on the faces of people who lived there than those of the tourists. Are Mexicans happier than we are? It was hard not to wonder.  

  No country, of course, is perfect. Mexico is well known for cartel violence, which we have been fortunate enough never to have experienced. 

  The same cannot be said, however, for another potential drawback to vacationing south of the border. I am referring, of course, to the dreaded Montezuma’s Revenge.

  Montezuma, for those unfamiliar with him (I had to look him up myself) was actually Montezuma II, an Aztec ruler in the 15th and 16th centuries. Spanish conquistadores conquered his empire and slaughtered his people, for which he was understandably disgruntled.  

  Montezuma was said to have enacted retribution by giving diarrhea to generations of visitors to his onetime empire. This, of course, is impossible, the actual cause being microbes in the water. But whatever the cause, there’s no denying that Montezuma has sold a lot of Pepto Bismol. 

  A friend and I were unfortunate enough to experience his revenge  following a trip to Mexico. We’d been scrupulous about drinking only bottled water, including that from the bottles the maids left in our room each day. So you can imagine our reaction when leaving for the airport on our last day there to see the maids filling the bottles with water from a garden hose. 

  If there was anything positive to be said about this, it was that Montezuma at least had the decency to wait till we got home before striking. I have seldom been sicker.

  Fast forward to the present – and Eduardo.

  Eduardo is, for lack of a more comprehensive title, a retired tour guide. He’s taken us on sailboat rides and a jungle tour. But, as we learned on this trip, calling Eduardo a tour guide is a bit like calling Leonardo Da Vinci a painter. He restores old cars, is an expert on antiques, has a law degree and has taught college-level archaeology.

  Knowing that his knowledge of the city was extensive, one of our daughters asked him to recommend a restaurant.

  “Somewhere with authentic Mexican food,” she said. “A place that the tourists don’t go.”

  “I know a place like that,” Eduardo replied. “Only Mexicans eat there. You will not believe how good the food is.”

  It was not without misgiving that we, or at least I, accepted. Every guidebook I’d ever read warned against dining at places the tourists don’t go, especially street vendors’ stands. The food may look good, but you’re taking a chance on spending the rest of your vacation in the bathroom.

  The next day, Eduardo picked us up at our hotel. We’d been to Mazatlan on two previous trips and explored quite a lot of the city, but he took us to a part of town we’d never seen before, a neighborhood definitely not on the beaten tourist path. 

  As he parked his van, I mentally reviewed the standard tips for avoiding a head-on collision with Montezuma:

  Don’t drink any water that doesn’t come from a bottle.

  Only eat foods that are hot and well-cooked.

  Only go to restaurants that are frequented by tourists – and never eat food from street vendors. 

  The establishment Eduardo took us to looked exactly like the sort of place the guidebooks warn you against. It wasn’t actually a restaurant. It was a couple of tables, a few chairs and a cooler of food in an alcove just off of the street. The menu, had there been one, would have stopped after a single entree – shrimp tacos.

  Eduardo ordered in Spanish for all of us; the waiter brought us glasses of water and plates of shrimp tacos, neither hot nor well cooked. They were raw. We’d be disregarding every one of the standard Montezuma-avoidance tips.

  With the image of the maids filling water bottles with a garden hose suddenly springing to mind, I passed on the water and guzzled a beer in the faint hope that it would counteract the shrimp microbes that would soon have us looking for the nearest clinic.

  There was no alternative, however, to eating the shrimp tacos. I didn’t want to offend the owner by not eating them, and the last person I wanted to offend was Eduardo.

  So … we ate the shrimp. And waited for the inevitable.

  It didn’t happen. The rest of the day and the night that followed  passed without a single one of us getting sick. No Montezuma at all! Except for our daughter catching a cold for the last few days, we were all in glowing good health for the remainder of the trip. 

  Bottom line:  If you go to Mexico, follow the standard recommendations: Don’t drink water not from a bottle. Eat hot, well-cooked food at restaurants frequented by tourists. And don’t eat food from street vendors – unless you go there with a local you trust!

  Thanks, Eduardo. The shrimp tacos were delicious.

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

 I went shopping for a cap the other day and found a  language barrier instead. 

  Not the language barrier you experience in a foreign country where don’t speak the language; the barrier I have in mind is the generational language barrier.

  Yes there is such a thing.

  The setting was the Boise State University book store, where I went to shop for a stocking cap.

  If you’re scratching your head after reading the last two words of that sentence, I rest my case about the language barrier.

  After wandering the aisles without success, I asked for help from a sales clerk, who, judging by her youthful appearance may have been  a BSU student.

  “Hello. Can you tell me where the stocking caps are?”

  Silence.

  I repeated the question.

  More silence. Her eyes weren’t exactly glazed over, but it was clear that we were nowhere close to communicating.

  “You know, stocking caps! Like you wear in the winter when it’s cold or snowing.”

  Now her eyes were glazing over.

  “Do you not know what a stocking cap is?”

  Judging by her bewildered expression, she didn’t have a clue.

  “You know, stocking caps! You put them on your head and pull them down over your ears to keep your ears warm. Some of them have fuzzy little balls on top.”

  The clouds lifted, the light dawned. 

 “You mean beanies!”

  “Beanies?”

  “Yes, beanies. They’re right over here.”

  She led the way to a display of stocking caps, now apparently known to pretty much everyone of a certain age as beanies. I thanked her, bought one and wore it home.

  Curious, I checked the site where America shops for its take on beanies vs. stocking caps. Amazon listed 60 individual entries for stocking caps, 67 for beanies.

  The initial lack of communication with the young woman at the book store got me to thinking about other words subject to the generational language barrier. People my age, for example, use all sorts of expressions that not only have fallen out of favor with younger people, but are so outdated that young people have little or no idea what they mean.

  Bread, for example. When we were their age, we referred to money as bread. The term was universal enough that an album cover by a band of the same name featured its members’ photos on dollar bills.

  Now bread is just, well … bread.

  Drag was a noun for something that was boring or depressing. It still means that to baby boomers. To younger folks, it’s limited to its original meaning, to pull something with force or difficulty, as in dragging yourself to school or work on a Monday morning.

  Gas was a noun for something that was fun or exciting:

  “That Grateful Dead concert was a gas, man!”

  Now gas is just something you put in your car.

  Cats were cool guys, often musicians. To anyone under, say, 40, the usage is pretty much limited to felines.

  And there’s no point in even talking about “groovy,” a term so dated that not even geezers in their 70s or 80s use it any more.

  Unless they’re hopeless squares, another dated term that would leave 20-somethings scratching their heads.

  It works the other way, too, of course. Twenty-somethings use expressions that leave older generations scratching their heads. To learn what some of them were, I asked one of my twenty-something granddaughters.

  “What made you want to know?” she asked.

  “Something funny that happened at the BSU book store. I was shopping for a stocking cap, and the sales person didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “What was it you were shopping for?”

  “A stocking cap.”

  Silence.

  “… What’s that?”

  I explained it to her.

  “Oh! You mean a beanie!”

  With that she offered some expressions currently in fashion.

  “Threads,” I was pleased to learn, is still used to mean clothes.

  The hip (does anybody still say that?) word for shoes is “kicks.” 

   My grandkids and their friends often refer to things as being “sick.”This initially baffled me because it seemed to make no sense at all. They described a litter of puppies, for example, as being really sick. I wondered why no one had called a vet – until it was explained that in their world, “sick” is the equivalent of “cool.”

  “Dope,” to their generation, means about the same thing. As in, “That’s a really dope beanie you’re wearing.”

  Cool, of course,  has been around since Elvis’s heyday and apparently is still in somewhat universal usage.

  “Sus,” in youthful usage, is short for suspicious.

  A “simp” is a weak, emotional man who tries overly hard to impress women. 

  “Cap,” according to my granddaughter, means lying to sound cool. Or, if you prefer, to sound sick or dope. 

  There undoubtedly are more, but she couldn’t think of any offhand, which is just as well. It’s time to wrap this up. I need to put on my beanie and take the dope dog for a walk.

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.

Editor’s Note:  This is the second of two columns from a recent trip to California. Originally planned to appear on Dec. 22, it was held for a Christmas column.

SALINAS, Calif. — Those who read the note at the end of my Dec. 8 column – “Next: The World’s Salad Bowl and the National Steinbeck Center” – may have wondered what salad had to do with John Steinbeck.

  The connection is that northern California’s Salinas Valley, “the world’s salad bowl,” is where the Nobel Prize-winning author was born and raised.

  Steinbeck has been my favorite writer since junior high school. I went from Hardy Boys mysteries to “The Grapes of Wrath.” What made me take Steinbeck’s masterpiece home from the library instead of “The Secret of the Old Mill” or “The Missing Chums” is long forgotten. Perhaps an older kid or a teacher recommended it. Whatever the reason, that book changed my life.

  It was the first time I read a book and found myself pausing to re-read passages because they were so beautifully written. Steinbeck’s books made me want to be a writer. Without them, I might never have worked for a newspaper.

  Last month I finally made it to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Salinas is 60 miles from San Jose, where my wife and a friend and I had gone for a Boise State University football game. We took Amtrak from San Jose to Salinas. At a museum next to the the train station,  we were treated to an unexpected history lesson about the Salinas Valley,

  The valley’s climate is perfect for growing vegetables – lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and tomatoes among others. If you had salad with your dinner last night, chances are it came from the Salinas Valley. Over half of the lettuce sold in U.S. supermarkets is grown there.

  The valley also was conducive to dairy farming in its early days. So conducive that too much milk was produced. The excess was used to make a mild white cheese. A local land baron, David Jacks, cornered the market on it. Jacks lived 19 miles from Salinas, in Monterey, Calif. Today we know the cheese as a staple of Mexican cuisine, Monterey Jack.

  The train station is a short walk from the Steinbeck Center and the author’s boyhood home.  Billed as “one of the largest literary museums in the United States dedicated to a single author,” the center opened in 1998 to honor Salinas’s most famous native son and “to create a forum for his writings and one that would inspire and launch successful literacy and educational programming.”

  Large and spacious, the center is home to priceless Steinbeck artifacts – his passports, pipes, glasses, checkbooks, letters, manuscripts, collections of his books, photographs, displays devoted to his books and – this one absolutely knocked me out – Rocinante.

  For those unfamiliar with Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel, “Don Quixote,” Rocinante was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. It was also the name of the truck Steinbeck drove and lived in with his dog  while traveling the U.S. on a journey that provided material for his last book, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” 

  There in the center, gleaming greenly with a camper shell on its bed, was Rocinante. Not a replica, but the real thing – Steinbeck’s fully restored1960 GMC pickup truck, complete with a replica of Charley seated on the passenger seat. At risk of repeating myself, priceless.

  The center isn’t merely a repository of oddments. Visitors learn a good deal about its honoree as a person. Surprisingly for someone who would go on to become world famous, he was shy as a boy and young man, seldom if ever going to parties or other social events. His family lived in a Victorian home in the city of Salinas, but he worked on farms and as a hod carrier and ditch digger.

  The Victorian home where he grew up has been restored as The Steinbeck House, a restaurant and gift shop. All of the waitresses who work there are Steinbeck fans and volunteers.

  Our waitress shared couple of stories about the author as a boy, describing him as “a handful.” He piqued the ire of a local farmer by skinny dipping in his water tank. One of his memorable pranks was tying up a friend in his basement, then forgetting and leaving him there all day. Only when the Steinbecks were having dinner that evening and heard strange noises emanating from their basement did he sheepishly remember. 

  Asked when he started to write, he said he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t write. Success didn’t come easily, however. He acquired a sizable collection of rejection letters. He and his first wife worried about money, of which they had very little.

 “Tortilla Flat,” his book about a group of hard-drinking paisanos in Monterey following World War I, changed that. His first best seller, it ended his days of poverty. Seeking privacy from well meaning but intrusive admirers, he built a fence around his property and named it Garlic Gulch.

  In all, he wrote 33 books, many of them a joy to read. But if there’s one Steinbeck book you absolutely should read, it’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” 

  Ironically, its author had reservations about how good it was. Ironic because it sold over 15 million copies, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and more than 80 years after its publication remains high on the lists of great American novels.

  So it wasn’t just some so-so book that changed my life. Thank you, Mr. Steinbeck, for writing it. And thanks to the National Steinbeck Center for helping me get to know you 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.

  You don’t realize how much you rely on your cell phone until you lose it.

  It happened to me on a recent trip to California to see a Boise State football game – and something else I’d wanted to see for a long time. More on that in a future column.

  Our flight took us from Boise to Salt Lake City to San Jose. All was well until we landed in San Jose I and opened my carry-on bag to get my phone.

  It wasn’t there.

  “It has to be here!” I said to my wife with growing alarm. “I’m sure it was in the side pocket.”

  It wasn’t in the side pocket. Nor was it in the main part of the carry-on or in my checked bag. It was just plain gone.

  “You stopped at the restroom on the way to baggage claim,” my wife said. “Maybe you left it there.”

  The restroom was up a flight of stairs, a long walk away and on the other side of a security barrier I wasn’t allowed to cross. A helpful airport employee offered to look for me, though. 

  The phone wasn’t there.

  It was with a heavy heart, to quote late President Lyndon Johnson, that I trudged back down the stairs to rejoin my wife and a friend.

  “You must have left it in the airport in Salt Lake,” my wife said. “You went to the men’s room while we were waiting to board the plane to San Jose. I’ll bet you left it there.”

  She was probably right. I had a vague memory of putting my phone down on a ledge in the restroom. It was probably still there, but there wasn’t much that could be done about it. We called the Salt Lake airport’s lost-and-found number and were told that no lost phones had been reported. 

  Nothing panics you like losing your phone. It takes losing one to appreciate all the things we use them for and take for granted. Foremost in this case was being able to call each other if we got separated at a busy airport. Not to mention the texts and emails, voicemails, apps, photographs, people who could be trying to call me … 

  Now the phone not only was gone, but in another city and state hundreds of miles away.

  There was, however, a scintilla of hope.

  The phone was far from being the first thing I’d lost recently. It happens that I am extraordinarily skilled at losing things. My keys, for example. They’ve been lost for weeks. Luckily there’s a backup set, without which I’d have been doing a lot of walking lately.

  The lost keys have to be somewhere in the house because I couldn’t have driven home without them. We’ve looked everywhere for them- in drawers, closets, cupboards, coat pockets; under beds, couches, dressers … We’ve done everything but have the walls X-rayed.

  And still no keys.

  This brings us back to the scintilla of hope. Because of my longstanding habit of losing things, it makes sense to take  precautions. One of them is putting my name and a phone number on items likely to be lost. Taped to the back of the lost phone was a piece of paper with my name, my wife’s phone number and the words, “Reward for Return.”

  For some reason (a premonition perhaps?), it occurred to me the night before leaving for California that the number on the back of the phone was my wife’s old number. All too familiar with my propensity for losing things, I printed a replacement piece of paper with the correct phone number and taped it to the phone.

  We’d been in San Jose for a couple of days when my wife’s phone rang.

  “It’s for you,” she said. “It’s Delta Airlines.”

  Specifically, it was Delta Airlines’ Terry Garcia, calling to say that some thoughtful soul had turned in my phone at the Salt Lake airport.

  “I thought I was the only one who put my name and number on the back of my phone,” Terry said. “Apparently you left yours in one of the airport restrooms.”

  If I purchased a United Parcel Service pre-paid address label and mailed it to her, Terry continued, she would mail the phone to me.

  And she did.

  So the story had a happy ending. 

  Thank you, Terry! 

  And if the person who turned in the phone to Delta happens to read this, thank you as well. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to get that phone back.

  Now if I could just find my keys.

Next:  “The World’s Salad Bowl” and the National Steinbeck Center. 

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.