Idahoans owe a lot to the Little Free Libraries that have sprung up in neighborhoods throughout the state. The one in my neighborhood has introduced me to books I never would have discovered without it – and reunited me with a pivotal figure from my past.
The libraries hold roughly 30 books. You can go to public libraries with acres of books and come home empty-handed, but with just a few you’re less selective. You choose books you wouldn’t at a big library and more often than not are pleasantly surprised. Some of my favorite books of recent years have come from my neighborhood’s mini library.
A recent pick was “The Osage Rose,” by a University of Arizona professor named Tom Holm. The most surprising thing thing about it was the inscription:
“For Roy Schiele: Writing about this was pretty easy because it takes place where I grew up. Best wishes, Tom Holm, 2008.”
Roy Schiele? Not exactly a common name. Could it be the same one?
A Google search found a Roy Schiele with a nearby address. Not quite in the neighborhood, but not far away. If it was the same guy, he changed my life. That Roy Schiele played guitar in a band called the Squires. They played at my high school’s Welcome Freshmen Dance.
I went to the dance with a friend, Justin Bonner. We were 13. It was the first time either of us had seen a live band, and it’s an understatement to say that we were smitten.
Justin decided that night that he wanted to be a drummer. I spent most of the evening watching Schiele, the beginning of a lifelong love affair with electric guitars. We started taking lessons, started a group. A few years later, we were running our own ballroom. It was the most fun we’d ever had.
A lifetime later, I’m still playing guitar in an evolution of that group. And it all started with Schiele and the Squires.
Prepared to be disappointed, I called the number from the Google search.
No answer. I left a voicemail identifying myself and asking whether it was the number for the Roy Schiele who used to play in a band called the Squires. A few days later, he called back.
It was the same Roy Schiele.
“You’re kidding!” he said upon learning the impact he and his guitar had had on me. “That’s amazing.”
He said his wife bought the book that turned up in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library for him at a book fair in Arizona. Its author was there signing books so she asked him to inscribe it to her husband.
“We took some books to the Little Free Library in our neighborhood a couple of months ago,” he said. “Someone must have taken them from there to yours.”
We met for coffee, and he updated me on his life since high school. The Squires were fairly short-lived, he said, but two of the band’s members went on to play with an excellent group called Dick Cates and the Chessmen, still fondly remembered by a generation of southwest Idahoans. Schiele went on to Gonzaga University, became an electrical engineer and later started his own telecommunications consulting company.
He had quite a run, consulting for major corporations and living all over the world – Los Angeles, New York, the Mideast, London …
“I did a lot of work in Russia,” he said. “I’ve traveled to Russia something like 40 times.
“… But Boise has been my headquarters forever. We always maintained a home in Boise. When I retired, we moved back here.”
Why go to the trouble and expense of maintaining a home in Boise when you spend most of your career working and living in other parts of the world?
“Because I had such good memories of growing up here,” he replied. “Boise was maybe 40,000 people then. You could ride all over town on your bike. You could go swimming in the river. It was a great place to grow up. Boise’s changed a lot. It’s bigger and more vibrant now. But it’s still a good place to raise a family.
“I wanted my kids to experience that. All of them spent at least part of their growing-up years here.”
Retired for four years now, Schiele is giving back to the community that gave him his start. He volunteers for the Anne Frank Memorial and serves on the board of Idaho Public Television.
He still plays the guitar for his own enjoyment, still has the guitar he was playing the night he made such an impact on a high school freshman – without ever knowing it. He was gracious enough to bring it to the coffee shop, where I got to play the guitar that changed my life.
All because of a Little Free Library.
For those unfamiliar with them, Little Free Libraries are the wooden boxes on posts that seem to have popped up everywhere. You take a book; you leave a book. The first Little Free Library went up in a Wisconsin neighborhood in 2009, and the idea caught fire. There are now more than 50,000 worldwide. Boise has about 50.
The one in my neighborhood is decorated with solar-powered Christmas lights that come on at dusk. A nice touch. A neighbor, Jill Jasper, put it up about three years ago.
Those little boxes of books have a way of connecting people. Jasper says she’s gotten acquainted with people she never would have met if they hadn’t stopped for books at the library beside her house. Strangers have become friends there, united by a mutual love of reading.
Stories like that abound on the Internet. A shooting victim in Ohio wanted to do something for the children in his neighborhood while he recuperated, so he built a Little Free Library that looks like a rocket ship. An elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease filled a wagon with books for the people in his neighborhood. A California man dedicated the one in his neighborhood to his grandmother and hid a memorial to her behind the books.
Book lovers have come up with all sorts of unique twists on the libraries’ designs – bird houses, a telephone booth, a boat, a phone booth, a movie theater …The designs are creative, entertaining and give artists and craft workers opportunities to express themselves.
They’re secondary, however, to the libraries’ real purpose: to make books easily available, fostering a love of books and reading.
And you never know what characters from the past – fictional or otherwise – you might meet in the process.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got an idea for an interesting column subject for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Summer, as always, has passed in a flash. We’re now at that time of year when family vacations have ended and frazzled parents are catching their breath.
I know just how they feel.
It had been a long time since my family had taken a vacation with a dog and a small child in the car. This summer rekindled memories of those days. Nothing like 600 miles with a toddler and a puppy in the back seat to bring back memories of relaxing, restorative family road trips.
The logistics of this year’s jaunt to the family cabin in Washington state were a bit out of the ordinary. One difference was that instead of making the drive with us as usual, my wife joined us a week later. The reason was a potentially fatal conflict between – this is not a misprint – a dog and a lizard.
My wife has a pet lizard named Max. Our older daughter has a puppy named Roux. (A Cajun name; she got it from a border-terrier rescue group in Louisiana.) Like all puppies, Roux likes to chew things. There was no way my wife was taking a chance on Roux using her beloved Max for a squeaky toy so she spent a week making incredibly complicated arrangements for his care, then flew over to join us.
This should have saved space in the car. My wife typically takes Max, Max’s oversized terrarium and heat lamps, coolers, boxes, bags and suitcases containing everything from puzzles to pie crusts. Her idea of packing light is leaving the lawn chairs at home.
“What’s this?” our daughter asked her as she handed her a package to put in the car as the rest of us were about to pull out of the driveway.
“A mop.”
“A mop? You want us to bring a mop?”
“It’s a micro fiber mop. I thought it would be nice to have one of those at the cabin.”
Moments later, she returned with a quilt-sized piece of folded plastic.
“Here, see if you can fit this in.”
“What is it?”
“A portable mattress. I thought it would be nice to have over there.”
“A mattress? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
She wasn’t.
My wife’s and Max’s usual places in the car was taken by our three-year-old great grandson, Grayson, and his mother. We hadn’t even left yet when the bickering started.
“Where’s Grayson’s video player?” my daughter asked.
“I forgot it,” Grayson’s mother replied.”I’ll have to go buy another one.”
“You forgot? That’s his entertainment for the next 11 hours!”
Unsaid was that it was also a factor in the grownups’ peace of mind for the next 11 hours. Grayson is a good kid, but like all three-year-olds he gets antsy when stuck in a car all day.
“ I can’t believe you forgot it!”
A spirited exchanged followed, the two of them standing in the driveway exchanging verbal haymakers while I waited in the car.
“This could be a long day,” I grumped to myself.
“Why?” came a small voice from the back seat.
It was Grayson, who I’d forgotten was ensconced in his kid seat behind me. Leave it to an innocent three-year-old to lighten a moment.
While his mother went to buy a video player, my daughter fumed about leaving later than planned. She gets it from me. I used to be fussy about leaving on time, too. Years of family vacations changed that. Now I’m happy if we leave at all.
We were still in the driveway when the first mishap occurred, accompanied by shrieking audible in the next county.
“What happened?”
“Grayson dropped his breakfast on the floor and Roux is eating it.”
By 9 a.m., a mere hour behind schedule, we were underway. At approximately Ontario, the youngest member of the expedition made the first of an uncertain but large number of identical vacation wishes:
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
This was a reference to a previous vacation, during which he had fed bread to animals at a game park. The animals poke their heads into your car windows to beg for food as you drive through. The prospect of bison slobbering on my grandson did not warm my heart.
Somewhere between LaGrande and Pendleton, Grayson spilled a just-opened bag of potato chips on his mother, the dog and most of the the car.
“Grayson, you need to be more careful!”
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
At The Dalles, we stopped for gas at a station that had a single, unisex restroom with a waiting line stretching roughly to Portland. It also had a grassy area with shrubs, where Grayson and I took Roux to do her thing. Almost instantly, a belligerent-looking employee emerged from a back door to stand guard, as if I’d planned to beat the line by doing a poo in the shrubs. She loomed over us, practically snarling, until Roux finished and we returned to the car. Only then did she go back inside, looking disappointed at missing a chance to bark orders. Or possibly tase us.
“That lady wasn’t very nice was she, Grayson?”
“I wanna’ feed the animals.”
The last stop before reaching our destination was a supermarket.
“We have food at the cabin, so let’s make it quick,” I pleaded. “Just a few things to get us through the week.”
A few things turned out to be bread, milk, orange juice, lunch meat, butter, mayonnaise, bananas, frozen berries, fresh berries, lettuce, kale, carrots, celery, three kinds of cereal, four quarts of kefir, 36 cans of soda, cookies, NutriGrain bars, chicken, turkey burger, peppers, fajita seasoning, asparagus, yams, salsa, spaghetti sauce … $200 worth of “a few things.”
“What are these?” the checkout woman asked, eyeing the yams as if they might leap from the counter and attack her.
“Yams.”
“Hmmmm. Guess I’m the wrong person to check out vegetables. I only eat vegetables if they come out of a can.”
By the time we made it to the cabin, we were the ones who felt like we’d been in a can all day. Eleven hours on the road will do that to you. I ached in more places than I thought possible. Roux, Grayson and Grayson’s mother were doing a reasonably good imitation of coma victims.
We still love going to the cabin, though, and a good time was had by all once we settled in and our dispositions returned to normal. We’re already looking forward to going back again next summer.
The airfare will be well worth it.

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

One act of kindness.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Just ask the drive-through miracle woman.
That would be Valerie LaChapelle, a subject of this column in March.
LaChapelle works the morning shift at the McDonald’s drive-through window at 1185 S. Vista Avenue. Her “drive-through miracle,” as she calls it, was an anonymous donation from a customer to pay for dental work she needed. She estimates the cost at $10,000.
The March column The March column attracted a lot of attention and activity on social media. It wasn’t long before customers at the drive-thru began sharing their own miracle stories with her.
“One woman told me she had four kids and was walking everywhere she needed to go with the kids because she didn’t have a car. Somebody saw her walking with the kids every day and felt bad for her so they gave her a car.”
Another customer told her that “his son wanted to play T-ball but they couldn’t afford it. He was explaining to his son that they didn’t have the money, and somebody overheard and gave him the money so his little boy could play.”
At the drive-through, acts of kindness are happening regularly.
“I bought breakfast today for a guy who’d forgotten his wallet,” LaChapelle said. “The next time he came back, he brought me a card and gave me a $50 gift certificate. I don’t expect that. I don’t expect anyone to even pay me back. That’s not why I do it. When people do pay me back, and they usually do, I just save it for the next person who forgets their wallet.
“…Today I had eight cars in a row pay for each other’s meals. It starts with one person. I say that the person in front of you paid for your breakfast, and they say they’ll pay for the person’s behind them. People say they never would have expected that at McDonald’s, but it happens all the time here.”
People who read her story have offered her jobs, including at least one that pays more than she’s making now.
“I’ve been offered jobs at other restaurants and at a hotel for $11 or $12 an hour, but I don’t see any sense in changing. I love my job. I just think I belong at McDonald’s.”
Her friendly service has made her an institution at McDonald’s. She’s one of those people who almost never seems to be having a bad day, even if she is. Her welcoming smile and positive attitude are infectious.
It’s an understatement to say that she’s turned her life around. Addiction to meth amphetamines cost her five years in prison. After being released, she lived in a shelter and a halfway house and worked three jobs to pay her fines and restitution.
Meth did a number on her teeth – only eight were left. When she smiled, something she does a lot at the drive-through, she covered her mouth. That led to the anonymous customer paying for her dental work, which should be finished this fall. Until then, she has temporary dentures that have changed her life.
“I smile more now,” she said. “I’m more confident in myself and I feel like I don’t scare the little kids anymore. I think before they were kind of scared of my mouth. Now I don’t have to cover it up when I smile. I don’t have a problem smiling at anybody any more.”
Publicity made her something of an attraction:
“People came through just to see me. We couldn’t believe all the people. We had a customer all the way from Washington, D.C. who commented on my drive-through miracle.
“… A lot of people gave me kudos for changing my life around, for getting out of prison and working three jobs. (She worked at a pizza restaurant and cleaning her church in addition to her job at McDonald’s.) People complimented me for doing the right thing rather than trying to milk the system.”
Because she included her recovery from addiction in telling me her story in March, readers have approached her about their own addiction problems.
“I’ve gone to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with them. I’ve talked to parents who thought they’d done something wrong with their kids and and helped them realize it wasn’t their fault, that doing drugs or alcohol is a choice people make on their own. I took them to Al Anon meetings where they learned that it wasn’t their fault that their kids were addicted and learned to help the kids make better choices.”
I asked her if the generosity of the person who paid for her dental work and the attention resulting from it had changed her.
“I think it’s made me more generous toward people,” she said. “If somebody had handed me that much money, even if they’d said it was for my dental work, I’d have declined. But I think all this has made me realize that everybody has a story. If somebody comes through the drive-through looking down, I think that maybe their wife or husband is in the hospital or they’re going through something else that’s really hard for them. I think it’s made me nicer to people.”
She laughed.
“And I was nice to begin with.
“… My main focus now is just to be kind to people. You never know what one little thing can do.”

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

 

Art Jackson finally got the respect he deserved.
He had to die for it to happen.
A World War II Medal of Honor recipient, Jackson was honored with tributes at the White House and a ticker tape parade in New York City, but made a mistake that haunted him for the rest of his life. He was dismissed from the Marine Corps for it – by President John F. Kennedy – without a chance to tell his side of the story. He died last month at 92, seemingly forgotten by the country he served.
Until his memorial service.
Several hundred people, representing the military, veterans’ groups and police and fire departments among others, turned out to pay their respects at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery. The Marine Corps sent an honor guard and its band from Washington, D.C. When the band played the Marine Corps and Navy hymns, battle-hardened veterans brushed away tears. Marine Corps jets were dispatched from Yuma, Ariz., for a flyover. Marines in their distinctive dress uniforms seemed to be everywhere.
Perhaps it was the Marine Corps’ way of apologizing.
President Harry Truman pinned the Medal of Honor on Jackson’s uniform in 1945 for his role in a battle – known as “the bitterest battle of the war for the Marines” – on the Pacific Island of Peleliu. Then a 19-year-old private, Jackson singlehandedly took out a dozen Japanese machine-gun emplacements, repeatedly risking his own life and saving his platoon from almost certain destruction.
The fateful mistake happened 17 years later. By then a captain in the Marine Corps, Jackson was stationed at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was escorting a suspected Cuban spy off of the base when the man lunged at him and tried to take his weapon. Jackson shot him in self defense.
Self defense, terrible timing. It was a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis; tensions between the U.S., Cuba and the Soviet Union couldn’t have been higher. The shooting of a Cuban national by a U.S. Marine would have become an international incident. Instead of reporting the shooting, Jackson decided to hide the body.
“People disappeared there all the time,” his wife said. (She asked that her name not be used because of privacy concerns.) “He buried the body and hoped the whole thing would just go away.”
It might have, but for a fellow Marine who helped bury the body and told the story over drinks at the officers’ club. Jackson was ordered to Washington D.C., where Kennedy told the Medal of Honor recipient he could no longer be in the Marine Corps.
He also was ordered never to talk about what happened at Guantanamo, and didn’t until he told me the story in 2013. He was in his late 80s by then, Kennedy and almost everyone else involved was long dead and he figured it was time. Even so, he had misgivings. That long-ago night at Guantanamo and what happened because of it still troubled him.
But the full extent of how much it bothered him didn’t become clear until after his death.
While she was going through the files in her late husband’s office, Jackson’s wife found letter after letter that he’d written in hopes of returning to the military. He wrote to military officers, congressmen, anyone he could think of in hopes of getting a chance to clear his name and return to the military life he loved.
“He never had a chance to tell his side of the story,” she said. “He never had a court martial or a hearing or anything. They just booted him out.”
His side of the story was that he had little choice but to try to hide the suspected spy’s body. He was convinced that if he’d reported the shooting, he would have been tried in a Cuban court and sent to a now abandoned Cuban prison, which a history website describes as “a den of horror.” He believed to his dying day that he’d have been tortured and died in that prison.
All of his attempts later in his life to clear his name and return to active duty were denied. The tersest rejection letter found in his office files was from Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary and later a U.S. senator. The most sympathetic responses were from California Rep. Charles Gubser (Jackson was living in California at the time) and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy H.C. “Barney” Barnum.
Gubser wrote that “quite frankly, they are afraid of the public relations which would result from the press stories (about Jackson returning to the military after the Guantanamo incident). I feel this is entirely wrong since you have been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and have not been court martialed. This is like convicting a man after he has been proven innocent.”
Barnum’s letter to Jackson was equally candid:
“I understand the pain in your heart, and if it’s any consolation I remember you for the great Marine you were and still are in your heart. Life’s a bitch sometimes – real justice sometimes doesn’t prevail.”
Barred from returning to the military, Jackson worked as a mail carrier, at a liquor store and for the Veterans Administration. He worked multiple jobs and slept on a floor for seven years to pay off an ex-wife’s debts.
He spent his later years living quietly, almost anonymously. The Marine who was nicknamed “Bull” because of his physical prowess and courage in battle had a soft side. When a baby bird fell from a tree at his family’s cabin, he cared for it until it could fly. When he whistled, the bird flew to him.
Every now and then, a local reminder came that he was an American hero. He was honored on the blue turf at Albertsons Stadium. Gov. Butch Otter proclaimed a statewide Arthur Jackson Day in 2016. The Boise Police Department named one of its K-9 dogs Jackson after him. The name was suggested by a local boy, now 14, who befriended him and intends to become a Marine because of him.
At Boise’s VA Medical Center, doctors and nurses returned after hours to hold a ceremony honoring him on the night he died, and immediately lowered the flags to half mast. They didn’t know, or care, about what happened at Guantanamo. They knew their patient, and to know Art Jackson was to admire him. I knew him because he was my neighbor. I’ve never know a finer person.
National recognition came belatedly, at the end.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, paid tribute to Jackson on the Senate floor, saying that although he was gone, his example “will inspire future generations of Americans for decades to come.” (There were no such tributes from Idaho’s senators.)
Four Star General Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote shortly before Jackson’s death to say he’d heard that he was facing some health issues and wanted him to know “that the Marines are standing with you during this difficult time. … You played a vital role in shaping the warrior ethos of our Corps.”
Neller made sure that the Marine Corps pulled out all the stops to honor in death the hero it was unwilling or unable to acknowledge in life. No one, his wife said, would have been more surprised by the memorial service than Jackson himself:
“He would have been absolutely delighted.”

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

 

One of the things I was known for writing about early in my time as a columnist was Maintenance Manor, a scene of ongoing misadventures in home improvement.
Maintenance Manor was a 90-year-old house that the Woodwards, displaying poor judgment of colossal proportions, purchased in hopes of turning into a North End dream home.
Nearly everything about the place was a nightmare. It had one bathroom, accessible only from the back porch. The front porch was sagging. The roof, the plumbing, the wiring, nearly everything needed to be replaced. It had an oil furnace dating to Herbert Hoover, zero insulation and zero charm.
In our defense, I can only say that we took the real estate agent’s “location, location, location” advice too seriously. The one good thing was the neighborhood, which was beautiful.
Except for our house. We spent 13 years fixing the place up. The more colorful misadventures ranged from falling off of the roof into a rose bush to an electrical shock that catapulted me from a ladder and knocked out the power to most of the neighborhood. Medical highlights included soot and fiberglass inhalation, a nail through my foot and hammered thumbs and fingers, accompanied by a lavish amount of spirited cursing.
One of the rules I’ve lived by since we sold Maintenance Manor and moved to the house we’re in now is to avoid do-it-yourself home improvement projects, in the way that most people avoid timeshare salesmen or rattlesnakes. This is not to say that I haven’t done a few things around the “new” house – built the deck, done some painting and woodworking projects, but nothing really daunting.
Until now.
With the furniture in storage while we sweated out the flood threat posed by this year’s record snowpack, the timing was perfect to install the wood floor we’d been wanting in the living room. The problem was that everyone else in the valley seemed to have the same idea. Floor installers were booked solid for weeks. If a help-wanted sign at one of its Boise stores was an indication, even Home Depot is having trouble finding enough floor installers.
So … I decided to do it myself.
How hard could it be?
The salesman who sold us the materials said that a fair number of his customers had installed their floors themselves. It could take a while to get the hang of it, he added, but after that it should be smooth sailing.
Online videos of composite wood floor installation seemed to confirm that. In fact, they made it look ridiculously easy. Simply prep the floor, put down the underlay, cut the pieces to fit and click them together. The installer in the video clicked the boards together with the ease of someone snapping a pop tab on a beer can. There was no reason the floor couldn’t be finished in a day, with time left over for a nap and a cocktail.
The first step, obviously, was to take out the carpet. It had to be pulled loose from the tack strips, rolled up and carried outside. It weighed approximately as much as a small elephant. An elephant probably would have been easier to maneuver around a corner and out the front door.
Then the tack strips and carpet pad had to be removed. We’ll skip over this part except to say that the pad was attached to the sub floor with enough staples to supply a home office for several lifetimes.
With the baseboards removed – more on them presently – the new floor was ready to be installed. This was when the difference between the videos and reality became painfully apparent. Nothing I did would get the pieces to click together. They either didn’t click at all, or, if they did, they pushed the row of pieces next to them out of alignment. It took a day of hot, hard labor to do a pathetically small part of the room, most of it embarrassingly out of whack .
Sensing the desperation in my voice over the phone, my son-in-law stopped by and suggested starting over in a way that should have eliminated the problem.
It didn’t.
The guy who had done such a nice job on on our kitchen floor several years earlier was in the middle of a job when I called, but graciously gave me a couple of tips. (He could probably tell that I was near tears.)
His tips made a lot of sense.
But they didn’t work. Absolutely nothing worked.
Two and a half days I spent sweating like a pig over that easy-to-install floor. Two and a half days – before admitting bitter, ignominious defeat.
The guys who sold the floor to me couldn’t have been nicer. They checked around and found an installer who was willing to work us into his schedule on the Fourth of July.
“A nice square room!” he said when he arrived. “This shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
It took him less time to install the entire floor – perfectly – than it took me to sand and repaint the baseboards on a 101-degree day, in a garage hotter than the hubs of hell.
The installer, Tim McHail of Payette River Flooring, made me feel a little better about my do-it-yourself debacle.
“You didn’t have the right tools,” he said. “You need wall anchors so you have something solid to push against. And a special pounding block to pound the ends together.”
So it was all my tools’ fault!
Right.
Even with the right tools, however, it would have taken me longer and wouldn’t have looked as good.
And who knows? If I’d bought a pounding block, I might have smashed a thumb or a finger.
Or both.
Some things are best left to a professional.

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

I’m writing this one day before increased flood insurance on my house became effective…
And one day after reports that the flood threat had all but passed.
The Woodward timing.
It turned out that we didn’t need the increased flood insurance – and didn’t need to do any of the other things we did to prepare for the flood. We could have left the coverage at its former level, or, for that matter, had no flood insurance at all. We could have left all the furniture where it was instead of moving it to a storage unit. We could have done absolutely nothing and been just fine.
That’s okay, though. The flood that didn’t happen wasn’t without an up side.
Flooding did happen in low-lying places along the Boise River in Eagle, of course, and in other parts of the state. For the folks whose homes were flooded, there wasn’t an up side. Those of us who live in the flood plain in homes that stayed dry should keep that in mind. But for good luck with the weather and the expertise of those who manage the river flows, we’d be in the same predicament as those who were less lucky.
The neighborhood where I live dodged the flood bullet by a scant few inches. There were places along the bike path on the southern border of the neighborhood where the river was all but lapping at the path’s edges. If it had risen those additional inches, it would have flowed over the path and into our homes.
If the water managers had had to raise the flows those critical inches, the city was prepared to build a wall of sandbags on the bike path. Rob Bousfield from the city’s public works department fielded calls and emails from worried neighbors and spoke at a neighborhood meeting on what the city would do to protect us. Department employees walked the bike path every day to monitor the water levels and keep neighbors up to date. An example of local government at its best.
The flood that came within inches of us helped neighbors get to know each other as never before. People who had never previously met stood in groups on the streets and sidewalks, discussing the likelihood of flooding and their preparations for it. Many of us met for the first time on a neighborhood website, exchanging flood-related information. Neighbors helped one another move belongings to storage units. I’m on a first-name basis now with neighbors I wouldn’t know if not for the flood we so narrowly escaped.
The Woodwards moved furniture and other belongings in mid-May to the the last available 10- by 20-foot unit at a storage facility safely located on high ground. An employee there told us they’d rented dozens of units to potential flood victims.
Not everything was moved – you have to keep a few things if you’re staying in the house until you absolutely can’t – but we moved almost everything on the main floor and what we could from the finished basement. The move brought family and friends together and way more offers of help than needed. To those who did help – Andie, Jenny, Mark, Christian, Wally, Ryan, Chloe and Shawn – a heartfelt thank you.
The furniture and other oddments pretty much filled the storage space. Surprisingly, we didn’t miss a lot of it. It’s amazing how little you can get by with when have to.
The move was a perfect opportunity to cut down. We threw away or donated unused things that had been taking up space forever. Between that and moving things to storage, it was surprising how much bigger some of the rooms looked. The crowded dining room and the living room we’ve wished were bigger suddenly seemed spacious. We liked the dining room without dining-room furniture so much that we decided to turn it into a TV and reading room.
The absence of furniture also created opportunities. With the furniture out of the way, I stripped the outdated dining-room wallpaper and painted the walls.
We’d been talking about replacing the living room carpet with a wood floor for a long time, and what better time than with the furniture gone?
There was a bit of a hitch, however. The installer who did such a great job on our kitchen floor was booked six weeks out. If you’ve followed the news about Boise’s shortage of construction workers, you know that long delays are common.
So … I broke one of the rules I’ve learned to live by – don’t do it yourself – and tackled the living-room floor.
It did not go well. More about that in a future column.
Flooding, of course, would have been infinitely worse.
Now, with the record snows and the spring of our discontent behind, we’ve finally stopped worrying. The furniture came home last week. (Thanks, Matt, Jen, Cameo, and Andy for helping.) The level of the river has dropped so much that the inches that separated us from disaster have become feet. For the first time in weeks, we can’t hear the rush of the river from our back yard at night. The pools of standing ground water have even dried up.
Now all we have to worry about are mosquitoes.

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

The line begins to form the minute the word gets out.
“The burritos are here!”
“Hey, everybody! The burritos are here!”
They line up with their backpacks, grocery bags and sleeping bags. Some have children; some are in wheelchairs. On the busiest days, the line stretches to the back door and beyond. For some, it’s the first good meal in a long time.
At the front of the line is a table with coolers of steaming breakfast burritos, jars of salsa, jugs of orange juice. Richard Jackson and his wife, Sharman, smile as they serve it up.
The scene plays out Saturday mornings at Corpus Christi House, a day shelter for the homeless at 525 S. Americana Boulevard. Cooper Court, the tent city that made headlines for weeks before the city shut it down in 2015, was in the alley immediately behind the shelter. The Saturday burritos had their beginnings in Cooper Court.
And in a calling. The Jacksons believe a higher power was responsible.
“One day Richard said he thought he knew that we were supposed to go and feed God’s people,” Sharman said. “We took some food to Ann Morrison Park because that’s where we thought we’d find homeless people, but it was a Saturday and there weren’t any homeless people there.
“Then we drove by Cooper Court and saw all those people sleeping in tents and Richard said, ‘I think that’s where we’re supposed to be.’”
In addition to being homeless, many of Cooper Court’s residents were addicted to alcohol or drugs. The irony wasn’t lost on the Jacksons, both of whom are recovering addicts who have been homeless themselves.
“I was an addict for 30 years or more,” Sharman said. “I got in trouble and went to jail because of drugs.”
Richard was “addicted to meth and marijuana for 35 years. I was pretty much an everyday user. If I didn’t have it, I didn’t get out of bed or do much of anything. All I cared about was myself and my wife, and she was addicted, too.”
The Jacksons are fortunate. They’re among the small percentage of people who overcome chronic addiction. They are also deeply religious. They say their lives turned around when they found God, some seven and a half years ago.
“That’s when I stopped doing drugs, Richard said. “And I still have my faculties about me. That’s rare for someone who did it as long as I did.”
Not only do they have their faculties about them; Richard is a successful businessman. He does network marketing and owns a maintenance and remodeling company. Sharman is retired, but helps with both businesses.
The’ve been feeding the homeless on Saturday mornings for nearly two years now. They started with sack lunches.
“When we went there on that first day, we had no idea that so many people would be there,” Sharman said. “We ran out of food way too soon.”
“We had about 30 sack lunches,” Richard added. “The size of the crowd when we got there was jaw-dropping to me. We didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the alleyway before we ran out of sandwiches.
“When we first started walking through, we were getting scowled at. When we came back a second time carrying more sandwiches, the people who were scowling were smiling and friendly. That one act of kindness changed the atmosphere completely.”
When the city shut down Cooper Court, he said, “we spent a couple of weeks looking for the people who had been there. Then we came here (to Corpus Christi) and asked where they’d gone. When the people here realized that we were the burrito people, they invited us to come here on Saturdays. We’ve been here ever since.”
On a typical Saturday, they make and serve from 120 to 150 burritos. On busy days – when its cold or wet outside or late in the month when the people in line are low on money – it can be close to 200. They make sausage, ham and plain burritos, plain being a relative term. All of the burritos contain eggs, potatoes and cheese.
The ingredients initially cost the Jacksons $150 to $170 a week.
“The Love Center Ministry supplies us with about 80 percent of the food now,” Richard said. “Because of that, it’s only costing us about $60 a week.”
Their church, Life Church in Meridian, lets them use its kitchen to make the the burritos. Volunteers help. It takes about two hours. The Jacksons arrive at the shelter between 8:30 and 9 a.m. By then, the crowd is waiting.
“They’re here even when it’s snowing,” said a homeless woman who asked not to be identified. “I don’t think they’ve ever missed. Their burritos are all freshly made and tasty, and they’re always pleasant and have an encouraging word for people.”
Rick Bollman, Corpus Christi’s operations manager, says the Jacksons bring more than food:
“They give our guests validation. It’s validating for them to know that someone cares enough to do this for them every week.”
A guest named Samira added that they “don’t care what race or religion you are. They don’t ask you about your ancestry or what God you pray to. They do this for the love of humanity.”
The perspective from the other side of the table?
“We can see the joy in their faces,” Richard said. “We can see the hope there. It makes us feel amazing. Sometimes it makes me get tears in my eyes.”
“It gives you a good feeling inside to help people,” Sharman added. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it?”

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

If you’ve lived in Boise long enough, you probably think you know the story of the iconic Westside Drive-in and its owner, Chef Lou Aaron.
You don’t.
The story you do know is that the North Boise drive-in has been around forever – it’s celebrating its 60th anniversary this week – and that Aaron gave up being a chef in fine dining establishments to run a drive-in. That story has been told by every media outlet in town and on network television.
The story few people do know is actually several stories. One is that the drive-in has become something of a haven for troubled souls. Another is that its owner has battled alcoholism, cancer and the loss of his home and come out on top. Yet another is the evolution of the man himself.
Aaron left his job at the now-defunct Murphy’s, a fine dining establishment on Broadway Avenue, for the Westside gig. He had previously been a chef at Top of the Hoff, a Hilton hotel, upscale restaurants in Texas and a country club in Aspen, Colo. John Denver was one of his customers there. Martina Navratilova was the tennis pro.
“I wanted to have my own restaurant,” he said of the switch from the upper crust to burger buns. “I was going to open a restaurant by Hawks Stadium but the deal fell through, and one day I was driving by Westside and saw a little for-sale sign. I grew up on 27th, just a few blocks away, so it interested me.”
He, his wife and her father bought the drive-in in 1994. By then Westside was a North Boise institution. A Westside Grocery store occupied roughly the same location early in the 20th Century. The drive-in opened in 1957.
Aaron and his wife, Renee, have been Westside’s sole owners since 2004. One of the changes under their tenure has been the addition of menu items seldom seen at drive-ins. You can get anything from a rack of barbecued ribs to a peanut ginger chicken salad at Westside.
Another change has been an emphasis on employing those down on their luck.
“We have 15 cooks here,11 cashiers and three dishwashers. We train the cooks in-house. Some of my best cooks used to be dishwashers. If they’re good at that, we move them up quickly. We hire a lot of people who are struggling. We have four women who were in prison, two people who were homeless and one refugee from Africa. We kind of look at this as a ministry.”
Aaron knows what it is to struggle.
“I was a drunk all through the 80s and up until 1993. I was gifted as a cook so I could get away with it. I’d come home drunk from Murphy’s and then drink at home. I was drinking a case of beer a day, vodka, Long Island Teas …
“On April 26, 1993, I came home from work and my wife asked me why we had so many beer cans in a cubby hole behind the refrigerator in the garage. I said it was because I was an alcoholic. I’d prayed for months that I’d stop, and that night I did. I just celebrated 24 years of sobriety.”
Alcoholism isn’t the only thing he’s had to battle. On October 28, 2015, he was diagnosed with an incurable type of lymphoma. Instead of chemotherapy, which was recommended, he studied alternatives and changed his diet, eliminating sugar, white flour and most dairy products and relying heavily on juices.
“My latest CT scan, in October, showed that my tumors had shrunk 25 percent in a year and my blood counts are almost perfect. I’ve lost weight and feel better than I ever have. My doctor laughs when I tell him I’ve mainly been drinking celery juice, carrot juice and Japanese green tea.”
On November 6, 1996 – he doesn’t forget the life-altering dates in his life – his family’s house burned down.
“We lost our house, our car, our pets … We lost everything. We found out what it was like to not have anything. But we were alive. We were okay.
“That’s when we started going back to church. We realized that the important things are our relationships with other human beings and with God. That spiritually changed our lives forever. It was six months of hell, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
Now 55, he’s a deacon in his church and a different man from the one I interviewed in the same room of the Westside complex 24 years ago. The red hair is mostly gone; the beard is mostly gray. He seems less driven, more at peace.
“I’ve mellowed,” he said. “I used to get so mad about things. Now I realize that in the bigger picture those things don’t matter at all.”
He’s proud that Westside has been around for 60 years, and of what he’s done to make it unique in the drive-in world.
“We make almost everything from scratch. We roast our own meats, make our own stocks and sauces, and we don’t use anything pre-battered. It’s more work, but you can tell the difference.”
The most popular menu item – it is still a drive-in – is a bacon cheeseburger, closely followed by ice-cream potatoes. In addition more conventional fare, its offerings range from salads to focaccia sandwiches to prime rib.
And more.
A lot more.
The concept has been successful enough that in addition to the original Westside at 21st and State streets, the Aaronses’ son, Josh, is using it at the new Westside on ParkCenter Boulevard.
Looking back, Aaron says his decision to leave the world of haute cuisine for a drive-in was one of the best he ever made:
“Most of my employees weren’t even born when I started at Westside. I love it when people drive up and say their first job was here. Both of my kids grew up in the business, and there’s nothing like having your kids with you every day at work. It’s been a blast. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

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

(Note to subscribers:  Sorry this is a day late. The Statesman is now posting videos with my columns, the first of which ran Sunday, and I’m working on posting them with the blog. Hope to post the one for this column as soon as we can work it out. — Tim)

The first reward for the feverish activity at my house these days was my Navy watch cap, missing since fall.

It was under a pillow on a closet shelf.
Next was the case for my prescription glasses. It was under a bed in a downstairs bedroom.
Then, the “woo-hoo” moment – the missing recipes: my late father’s spaghetti sauce and buttermilk pancakes, a friend’s killer chili, another friend’s “devil dog egg nog” and other favorite recipes. Paper-clipped together, they’d fallen behind a desk drawer that had to be moved.
The reason for the feverish activity and reappearance of missing oddments is a short walk from our house: the raging Boise River. Like many other southwest Idahoans, we’re getting ready for The Flood.
This is not meant to alarm anyone. Maybe there won’t be major flooding in Boise. Not even the experts know for sure. That said, this spring is the first time I can remember actually hearing the river from my house. Not a background murmur, but a deep, powerful sound audible from a sobering distance away. And even with the high flows, water is coming into the reservoirs faster than it’s going out. Where I live, it would be foolish not to prepare.
Friends who don’t live in the flood plain ask if we really think our house could flood. They ask in polite but skeptical tones, as if the threat were remote and the real issue is our sanity.
We haven’t gone round the bend yet, thank you. Another few thousand cubic feet per second and all but a few rooms of our house could be partially underwater.
Like many who live near the river, we naively had our house built in what is now designated as part of the flood plain. We worried at the time that it might be too close to the river, but the building lot was approved so it had to be safe, right?
It wasn’t long after that that the flood plain maps were redrawn, with our then new house lying just inside the flood-plain boundary. We worry every year that there’s a big snowpack, but never have we had a snowpack like this year’s. If the weather turns hot and stays hot …
So, we’re preparing.
In February, with the snowbanks waist-high, we increased the flood-insurance coverage. In April, after crews sealed the manhole covers in our neighborhood to prevent floodwater from getting into the sewers, we started moving things upstairs. This month, we continued moving things and signed up for the county’s Code Red alerts. Last week, I rented a storage space.
Nothing can fully protect you from the ravages of a flood, of course. I covered enough of them during my Statesman career to appreciate how devastating they are. Still, there are things you can do to soften the blow.
Flood insurance covers only the building, not the contents. Even if you have enough insurance to repair the damage to your house, you’re on your own for replacing damaged furniture, appliances, paintings, televisions, clothing … And some things – photos and other personal treasures – can never be replaced.
The first things to go to the second floor were my guitars. It’s not that they’re worth a lot of money, but they’re worth a lot to me. I’ve played them on recordings, at gigs from Christmas parties to the governor’s ball, at venues from Pengilly’s Saloon to the Stueckle Sky Center. They’re part of who I am.
Then came the “irreplaceables.” High school and college yearbooks. Photos of the kids growing up. A folder of photos that belonged to my father, with pictures dating to when he was a boy. A scrapbook my mother made when she was young. Important documents: tax returns, insurance policies, contracts, tickets, birth certificates, passports, medical records, warranty papers.
Next were things that aren’t especially valuable or crucial, but you’d still hate to lose: CDs, DVDs, stereo components, memorabilia.
The “oh, well” stuff stayed where it was. Food, small appliances, furniture not worth the trouble to move … Things you wouldn’t want to lose, but “oh, well” if you do. Things no longer needed went to the Youth Ranch. Things that couldn’t be donated or recycled went to the trash.
If the flood predictions become more dire, we’ll move the TV and its accessories upstairs. We’ll put some things up on blocks and, if dire turns to inevitable, move as much as possible into storage and decide where to live till it’s over.
Disclaimer: I’m a worrier. I tend to over-prepare for things like this. Don’t start sandbagging or moving your furniture around just because you read this. Get the best information for where you live and decide for yourself what you need to do.
It’s possible that we’ll dodge the bullet. I’ve lived in Boise most of my life and remember very few floods that could be considered remotely serious. My dad and I stood in ankle-deep water piling sandbags around St. Luke’s Hospital during my growing-up years. Decades passed before a flood caused limited damage in North Boise.
If the flood doesn’t happen, the preparations won’t have been wasted. There is, in fact, something liberating about them. Clutter is eliminated; space is created. And there is comfort in knowing that everything recycled or carried to safety is a thing saved.
The generosity of friends and family can’t be overrated. A friend of one of my daughters helped move furniture and brought over a bilge pump. One of my friends offered his truck and his time for a sandbagging party. Others have offered to help if the authorities warn that we’re running out of time.
Here’s hoping the weather cooperates and those of us who live in the flood plain stay high and dry. And if not, here’s hoping we’re as ready as possible.

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

This is a few weeks late. I was committed to some travel columns when he came to Boise, but I can’t not write about Brian Wilson, one of my early musical heroes.
The former Beach Boy played at the Morrison Center on April 6. This isn’t intended to be a review of the concert. It’s too late for that, and other Statesman writers are far more qualified to write reviews. I’ll include some impressions from the concert, but this is less a review than an overcoming-adversity story. Those who struggle with mental illness or substance abuse can learn a lot from the life of Brian Wilson. His is a success story for the ages.
Success in the usual sense came to him early. He was virtually a kid when the Beach Boys, of whom he was a founding member, started making hits. The first time I saw them was when they played at, of all places, the Boise High School auditorium. We won’t get into how long ago that was except to say that I was still a student there.
Actually, it wasn’t surprising that they played at a high school auditorium. The Morrison Center, Taco Bell Arena, CenturyLink Arena, the Idaho Center and other venues we enjoy today didn’t exist then. The auditorium was one of the larger venues around, and the Beach Boys were one of the hottest groups in the country then. Every seat was filled.
My most vivid impression of the show that night was how effortless Wilson made it look to play music. He played bass as if he were on autopilot, rarely looking at his guitar. He sang his signature falsetto parts as easily as you or I hum in the the shower, without grimacing, straining or breaking a sweat. His voice when he was young was a phenomenon. No one else, with the arguable exception of his brother Carl, could come close to making the high vocal parts that were so much a part of the Beach Boys sound sound as good as he did.
How wrong impressions can be. Performing onstage was anything but effortless for him. What the audience at Boise High didn’t know that night, and audiences wouldn’t know for years, was how ill he was. His memoir, “I Am Brian Wilson,” details a lifelong struggle with mental illness. Drugs, alcohol and an incompetent doctor compounded it. Mere stage fright, though he certainly experienced it, is insignificant compared with the other demons that haunted him.
Then as now, it took courage for him to join his brothers, cousin and a friend who comprised the band at their performances. Even now, he has to psych himself into going onstage for every show.
One of the symptoms of his illness is that he hears threatening voices that are only in his head. They compete with his own voice and that of his bandmates. A serious problem in a group known for intricate vocal harmonies, but not the only problem. When he was a child, a kid in his neighborhood hit him in the ear with a pipe. He’s been deaf in that ear ever since. If his stage monitor isn’t placed perfectly for his good ear, he can’t hear himself or the other band members singing above the instruments and the voices in his head.
Effortless? Anything but.
As if that weren’t enough, he had to overcome the abuse of a violent father and the Beach Boys’ troubled history. His illness often alienated him from the group, leading him to stay home and write songs while the band toured without him. He lost both brothers, one to heavy drinking and an accident, the other to lung cancer.
In 2012, his cousin Mike Love, who owns the Beach Boys’ name, opted to tour without Wilson and founding members Al Jardine and David Marks. This would be like Ringo Starr touring as the Beatles without John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Wilson shook it off and started his own band, the one that played in Boise last month, and it’s as good or better than any Beach Boys band.
I went to see them because he was one of the last geniuses on my bucket list. I’d seen three of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Steely Dan and others, but not Brian Wilson. Not since he was a kid yet to prove his genius.
His current band is what the Beach Boys of that time may have wished they’d been. In addition to the usual drums, bass and guitars, the 12-piece group has a grand piano, multiple electronic keyboards, percussion, a xylophone, harmonicas, woodwinds …
At their worst, they sounded okay. At their best, they sounded magnificent. Wilson can’t hit the high parts anymore, but Matt Jardine, Al’s son, covers them. (Al is in the band, too.) Vocal harmonies were one of the best things about the Beach Boys, and at times in the Morrison Center they all but enveloped you. One song had nine harmony parts, arranged by … who else?
When the group played “God Only Knows,” the beautiful Brian Wilson ballad that McCartney says is one of his all-time favorite songs, you didn’t have to look far to see tears streaming down faces.
I have mental illness and addiction in my family so I know something about the difficulty of overcoming them. The percentage of those who do is small.
Wilson is one of those who has. He’s fragile and his voice isn’t what it used to be. He limps on and offstage, sometimes leaving before a song is finished. He clearly isn’t the kid who once made performing look easy. But at 74, he’s put together a band that more than makes up for the limitations of age and illness and does justice to the music he’s created.
He deserved credit just for walking onstage at the Morrison Center. But he did much more than that. He overcame his demons, made his audience feel young again, gave us goosebumps and moved us to tears. If that isn’t overcoming adversity, nothing is.

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

MAZATLAN, Mexico – At one time or another, those of us with even a trace of adventure in our souls dream of chucking it all and living the good life in a tropical paradise.
Few are immune. Even my cautious, conventional parents dreamed about it for decades. At one point, they and my cautious, conventional aunt and uncle hopped on a plane to check out the possibilities in Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica for a sun-drenched escape from the routine of daily life at home.
It didn’t happen, of course. They came home, resumed their old lives and never looked back.
Except for my mother the romantic. Mom occasionally waxed wistful, declaring with a faraway look in her eye that she wished they’d pulled it off.
Gene Morgan is one of the relatively few who have.
A Texan by birth, Morgan served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, worked in marketing for Holiday Inns in the United Kingdom and at one point was making $200,000 a year as a hospitality-industry executive on Hilton Head Island, S.C.
For the last 14 years, he’s lived in Mexico. His home there is near Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast, but he travels all over the country. When he tires of the routine at home, he packs a bag and spends several months in whatever part of Mexico sounds good to him. He’s had extended visits in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa, Zihuatanenajo …
What does he do there?
In the big cities, he enjoys the cultural attractions. In the resort cities, he does pretty much what he does in Mazatlan. He meets people and makes friends. He goes to the beaches. He plays golf, drinks beer, enjoys life.
“My home in the states is Memphis, Tenn., but I haven’t been there in a long time,” he said. “I like it here too much. I love living in Mexico, and from here I can go anywhere in the country. I can fly to Mexico City round-trip for $150. I can take a bus to Guadalajara for 650 pesos ($35). And it’s not a Greyhound, either. It’s a beautiful, first-class bus with big, comfortable seats, wi-fi and a complimentary lunch. You eat lunch, watch a couple of movies and you’re there.”
I asked him which of all the places he’d been in Mexico he liked best.
“Right here,” he said. “When I come through that gate, I’m home.”
The gate is the entrance to the resort community where he lives and works as a real estate resales specialist.
Translation: he resells condominiums when their owners decide to make a change. He shows properties, answers e-mails, handles the details of closings. He keeps busy, but it’s not what you’d call a high-stress job. He makes a point of spending an hour every day on the beach with his iPod and a cooler of beer.
The beach, from a point on the north to another on the south, is five miles long. On a busy day, you might see eight or ten people there, swimming collecting shells, building sand castles. On a slow day, there might be two or three people. Or none at all.
“Some people wouldn’t like it here,” he said. “They’d rather be in town, where they’re closer to restaurants, stores, clubs, that sort of thing. But I love it here. I love the peace and quiet, the tranquility of it.”
In July and August, when most of the condominium owners have gone back to Canada or the U.S., he’s virtually alone at the resort. You’d think it would get lonely, but he doesn’t mind.
“I like it then, too,” he said. “We get lightning storms every day, and you’ve never seen such a light show. The lightning strikes light up the sky for miles. It rains so hard you can’t see those buildings over there (about 50 yards away). The storms make it lush and green. When the sun comes out, you can’t believe how beautiful it is.”
No argument. It’s beautiful even in the dry season. But it has to get at least a little bit lonely rattling around a resort development with almost everyone else gone for the off season.
“I never get lonely,” he said. “I have lots of friends here, and lots of girlfriends.”
Living there is cheap, especially when the exchange rate for Americans is as favorable as it’s been recently.
“You can get a pretty good car down here for $3,000 to $5,000. And there are guys here who can fix anything that goes wrong with it for a fraction of what it costs in the U.S. Groceries are cheaper, the cost of going out to dinner is cheaper … everything costs less here.
“… A lot of the locals live on 200 pesos a day (about $11). They’re poor, but they’re happy. If they like you, they’ll do anything for you. People are out walking at night, enjoying life. Everybody knows everybody and takes care of everybody. If a kid has a birthday here, everybody chips in and buys a present. It’s like a big, extended family.”
So … are there any drawbacks to living so far from what used to be his home in the U.S.? He is an American, after all.
“I miss certain people in the states. I go visit them every now and then, but I don’t impose. I’m the guy who comes to visit but stays in a hotel so I don’t put you out.
“When I’m through visiting, I come back. These days, this is where I’m happiest. Maybe I’ll live in the U.S. again someday; anything’s possible. But for now I really love being here. Here, every day here is another day in paradise.”

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

Note: Tim Woodward recently returned from Mexico. This is the first of two columns from the trip.

MAZATLAN, Mexico –  There was a time early in my column-writing days when I was best known for writing about travel mishaps. Readers liked my vacation-disaster stories because they made their own vacations look good by comparison.
The Woodwards of those days had a genius for getting sick on the first day of a two-week vacation, breaking down on mountain passes during howling blizzards, pitching tents on red ant hills … On one memorable odyssey, my daughters gave me the chicken pox.
A trip to Mexico last month was, to borrow from Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again.
At our destination airport in Mexico, travelers were instructed to push a button while passing through customs and immigration. If a red light flashed when you pushed the button, your luggage was searched. The only time we ever saw the red light flash for anyone was when my wife pushed the button. If the immigration inspector had known that searching my wife’s luggage is roughly equivalent to searching the contents of the Titanic, he’d have waved her through.
He didn’t. By the time he’d pawed through her clothing, DVDs, medicines, lotions, ointments, cosmetics, magazines, laptop, chargers and the collected works of James Patterson, the other passengers were having Margaritas on the beach.
But the real trouble was yet to come. It was a sneaky sort of travel disaster; we didn’t even know it had happened until we were in the checkout line at a grocery store after checking into our condo.
“OMG!” my wife said, rummaging through her purse with increasing alarm. “My debit card isn’t here! I must have left it in the ATM machine at the airport.”
This was a big deal. A very big deal. Our debit cards were our only way of getting cash and otherwise paying for things in Mexico. The pesos she’d gotten at the airport ATM wouldn’t last more than a couple of days. Without our cards, it was only a matter of time before we were sleeping on the streets.
“We’ve got to go back to the airport,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way to get the card back.”
True, in theory. Security officers can unlock the machines and retrieve lost cards. Back at the airport, however, we asked every security person we could find and were met with shrugs and apologetic smiles. Either they didn’t understand us, didn’t care, or were getting even for the guy who wants to build a wall along their border and trick them into paying us back for it.
Happily, I’d written down the number to call and cancel the debit card. Unhappily, it was the one number we were unable to call from Mexico.
We could FaceTime home to watch our grandson show us his new light saber.  My wife could call her mother to discuss the latest “Gunsmoke” rerun at the senior center. But no combination of country codes, area codes or voodoo incantations would allow us to call our credit union.
“No problem,” my wife said. “I’ll just call one of the kids and have them call the credit union from home.”
She called both of our daughters. No answer.
She called both of our granddaughters. No answer.
She called our son, who always answers his phone. No answer.
Desperate, she called her 91-year-old mother, who took time out from “Gunsmoke” to call and cancel the card. (We later learned that none of the kids answered their phones because they were all out of cell range. While we were in panic mode trying to reach them, they were frolicking in the hot springs at Idaho City.)
With the card canceled, we breathed easier. But our remaining pesos wouldn’t last long, and there was no way I was stuffing my debit card into another ravenous ATM. The good news was that one of our daughters would be arriving the next day with her debit card so we’d have backup.
Expecting to be met with waves and smiles when we picked her up at the airport, we got neither. She looked as if she’d lost her luggage, been pressured into buying a timeshare and struck by lightning.
“What’s wrong?” we asked.
“The ATM ate my debit card!” she said, practically steaming.
What were the odds of that? Two debit cards eaten by two different ATM machines in less than 24 hours.
Pretty good, actually. It’s a security measure. If you don’t retrieve your card in a reasonable amount of time from a Mexican ATM machine after the cash comes out, the machine sucks the card back in. One of our neighbors at the place where were were staying, said it had happened to him three times.
“The banks’ security people open up the machines, take out all the cards and cut them in half,” he said. “That way nobody can use your card to make charges to your account. I just call my bank, order a new card and have them Fed-Ex it to me. It takes about five days.”
Five days? What were we supposed to do for five days with no money in a foreign country? Wash dishes? Bag groceries at WalMart? Pole dance?
Out of the question. I haven’t pole danced in years.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” my daughter said. “We’ll go to an actual bank, find a teller who speaks English and say we’ll only use their ATM machine if they can absolutely guarantee that they can open it up and get Dad’s card back if the machine eats it.”
A good plan, except that the teller at the first actual bank where we stopped said it was possible only at the bank’s downtown branch, many confusing miles away.
“You can try our ATM here,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee it will work.”
Considering that two of our cards had already been eaten and digested, this was a little like an airline captain who had crashed twice saying that he couldn’t guarantee a safe landing.
At the downtown branch, a teller assured us that the machine would work, and that she could open it and get my card back if it didn’t.
“Do you have the key?” my daughter asked.
“Yes.”
“I want to see the key.”
Demanding? Yes. But you couldn’t really blame her, considering that she’d be staying in Mexico for two weeks and her only source of cash had been devoured in the first ten minutes.
The teller did have a key, but it wasn’t necessary. The machine worked, and the millisecond it spat my card out, I pounced on it like a starving hyena.
Cash at last! And it had only taken four days of our vacation.
That night while trying to fall asleep, I ruminated over all the things that had happened and gave thanks that we were solvent at last.
One thing bothered me, though.
Do they really cut up all those cards lost in ATM machines so no one can use them fraudulently? It would be the right thing to do, of course, but given the current state of Mexican-American relations it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity missed.
I think they’re going to use them to pay us back for building that silly wall.

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

His newspaper friends used to joke that he’d live to dance on all their graves, and he almost did.
Boise art icon John Collias, one of my oldest friends in more ways than one, was a few months short of 99 when he died Wednesday night.
He was of most vibrant, most “alive” people you could hope to meet. He grew up in a Greek-American family, emphasis on Greek. He was fluent in the language and, like many Greeks, he had strong opinions, loudly voiced. He peppered his conversations with frequent, emphatic gestures, was fiercely proud of his family and his work and was passionate about nearly everything, from his artwork to the lunch specials at his favorite restaurant.
We met at an Idaho Press Club New Year’s Eve party. The new Statesman reporter in Canyon County, I’d been with The Statesman for all of six weeks. The press club had asked him to do watercolors of some of the journalists who would be attending, this one included, to decorate the ballroom for the party. I was chatting with another reporter when someone grabbed my arm, spun me around and studied my face.
“You don’t have blue eyes!” he said, practically shouting.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He identified himself as the artist who had done the painting of me.
“All I had to work from was a black and white photo,” he said. “They told me you had blue eyes.”
That was the unlikely beginning of a friendship that lasted 46 years.
We were from different generations, but it didn’t matter. Soon we were having regular lunches at one of his favorite hangouts, the La Fiesta Restaurant on Boise Avenue. He called it “Hank and Marie’s,” the names of its owners. We must have had a hundred lunches there, by ourselves, with other Statesman friends, and once with someone famous.
“TIM!” he shouted one day over the lunch special, stabbing the air with a pointed finger. “This food is so good we need to bring Bill Kay here.”
Kay, producer of the Shrine Circus that came to Boise every summer for nearly 30 years, was a connoisseur of restaurants from Boston to San Francisco. The next time he came to town, we took him and a friend of his to Hank and Marie’s. The friend was Karl Wallenda, star of the famed Flying Wallendas. It was hard to say who was the most colorful character – Kay the matchless storyteller, Wallenda the high-wire artist or Collias the true artist, himself an adroit storyteller.
One of my favorite Collias stories was about the time he went out for football at Ohio State University. His only play was catching a kickoff. The ensuing tackle rendered him unconscious. Later, in the locker room trying to decide whether to quit the team, he noticed a player doing something to his eye.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “What are you doing there?”
“Putting in my glass eye.”
“Did you lose your eye playing football?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. You just made up my mind for me.”
The Ohio State washout was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., went to art school and worked in Chicago, and settled in Boise because it was home to the love of his life. He came to Boise by train during World War II with his brother Nick, both newly minted army recruits. Sick when they arrived, he looked down at the city from the depot and said, “Nick, what the hell did we ever do to deserve a place like this?”
It was a statement he would regret. While stationed at Gowen Field, he met Lily Kepros, and was instantly smitten. She was six years younger than he was, the daughter of a protective, old-school Greek who was less than enamored with the soldier who had taken a shine to his daughter. The soldier had to ask repeatedly for permission to date her.
That was the beginning of a storybook romance. By the time the army sent him to England, he had won her heart, if not her father’s. He had a flower sent to her every month, mailed her a letter every day.
Every single day, until he came home from the war.
They were married for 70 years.
That was more than enough time for him to become a Boise institution. He did hundreds of drawings, mainly portraits, for The Statesman. He painted miners and sheepherders, governors and senators. He painted “the big three” of corporate Idaho – Harry Morrison, J.R. Simplot and Joe Albertson. He designed the Idaho Bicentennial Medal. His drawing of a Bronco graced the 50-yard line at Albertsons Stadium. His drawings and paintings are in public buildings and private homes throughout the state.
He loved fine portraiture, the work of Picasso, Rembrandt and El Greco; blues and big band music, pastries from Pastry Perfection, Smoky Davis’s pepper-bacon burgers, city bus rides, the Boise State Broncos and the Chicago Cubs.
Most of all, he loved people. Borderline dangerous behind the wheel, he walked everywhere, meeting people on the street, chatting them up, having coffee or lunch with them. He was the quintessential man about town.
Occasionally he accompanied me on my trips to interview column subjects. On one of them, he found a painting subject.
“STOP!” he said, finger stabbing the air.
It was a deciduous tree, its autumn colors vibrant against an evergreen forest. His painting of it, reproduced in a coffee-table book of his work, is striking.
He was his own harshest critic. If he didn’t think a drawing or painting was good enough, even if he’d spent months on it, he scrapped it and started over. Reminiscing over the paintings in his coffee-table book last week – portraits, landscapes, abstracts; clowns, cowboys, Christmas cards – I was reminded once again of just how good he was.
“TIM! I’m as good as (he would name a famous artist). If I’d lived in New York, I’d have made a lot of money. I might have been famous. But I don’t have any regrets. I can’t say enough good things about Boise. The people of Boise couldn’t have been better to me.”
How many times did he tell me that? He knew he might have made a name for himself in a big city, and I think it haunted him that he didn’t try. But he came to love the city that the sick soldier of his youth disparaged from the train station, and his gratitude to those who helped him make a name for himself in his adopted home was boundless.
The last time I saw him was the day before he died. He was barely conscious; it was hard to know whether he even recognized me. For lack of anything better to say, I told him we’d have lunch in a better place one day with Hank and Marie. He opened his eyes, gestured weakly and mumbled something that sounded like a very faint version of “TIM!”
The call telling me that he was gone was what prompted me to reach for the coffee table book. It had been several years since I’d looked at it, and I’d either forgotten or never noticed the inscription he’d written on the first page:
“Tim, (it was easy to imagine him shouting it). To my very best friend for many years. – John G. Collias.”
That was when the tears came, not just for his passing, but for the passing of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. (Except this week. Am posting on Sunday as an experiment.) Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

How many times had I passed the old building, once so dear, without stopping?
It’s graced the corner of Sixth and Idaho streets for over a century. I’d walked or driven past it countless times, invariably with memories drifting back, but always in too much of a hurry to stop and venture inside to see how it had changed.
Until now. It was a slow day, no need to hurry anywhere, and the building seemed to beckon. Why not?
Now the Eagles Center, it was built in 1912 as the Fraternal Order of Eagles building. It had a beautiful hardwood dance floor on the second floor, which eventually led to its becoming an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. For much of the 1960s, it was known as the Fiesta Ballroom.
For its patrons, the Fiesta was a teenage dance hall. For me and my friends who played in a band there on Saturday nights, it was a clubhouse, a second home.
By the time we started playing there, in the mid-1960s, the ballroom had been closed for a couple of years. We were desperate to find a regular venue, but the man who previously ran it had had his fill of the dance business. No amount of reasoning or pleading would convince him to reopen it.
My father, who was more susceptible to inordinate pleading, agreed to sign the lease with the understanding that we, the band members, would run the place. It would be our responsibility to pay the rent and other bills, hire security and maintenance people and not lose our shirts. He made it clear that we were on our own. If we failed, there’d be no bailing us out.
We didn’t fail. We advertised on the radio, hired cops and one of the toughest kids in town to work as bouncers and paid friends to run the soft-drink bar and do the janitorial work. For two of the best years of our lives, the old ballroom was packed with teenagers every weekend, we made more money than we’d dreamed possible and we had an idyllic hangout. It was perfect for everything from rehearsals to parties to telling ghost stories while the vacant third floor creaked and moaned above us.
Fast forward to today. The building has been renovated and is now mostly offices, housing enterprises from the Snake River Alliance to the American Bird Conservancy. The former Idaho Street entrance is now an exit. Instead of taking two flights of stairs from there to the ballroom, now office space, you enter the building on Sixth Street and take an elevator to the second, third and fourth floors.
The fourth floor came as a surprise. Before the renovation, which significantly increased the useable space, there were only three floors. The first was a dress shop and tobacco shop, the second the ballroom, the third storage. I took the elevator to the new third floor, about where the ballroom used to be, and stepped into a hallway finished in muted greens and earth tones. Locked offices lined either side. Where hit songs once played and hundreds of people danced, it was absolutely silent.
A window on the north wall provided a view of the building across the alley, now an office building but then Boise’s jail and police station. On hot summer nights when the fire-escape door overlooking the alley was open, prisoners shouted song requests from the jail windows. Through some mystery of atmospherics, our amplifiers picked up police radio transmissions – a source of amusement to most in the audiences and of occasional strategic value to those planning illicit activities.
A window in a deserted conference room offered a view of a concrete ledge and the roof of an adjoining building. Both triggered memories.
The adjoining building also used to be a dance hall, where our primary competitors played. When some of our gear mysteriously vanished, we blamed them and decided to get even by breaking into their clubhouse and swiping some of their gear. The obvious choice to squeeze through an open window on the alley and let us in was our keyboard player, who was small and had experience in such matters. It might have worked, too, except that he got stuck halfway through the window. It was at this inopportune moment that a police car entered the alley.
The officer driving it was Vern Bisterfeldt, later a city councilman and county commissioner but then a cop who, among other things, patrolled our dances. Asked what we were doing in the alley, we told him we were waiting for someone to let us in so we could rehearse.
“Oh,” he said, seemingly satisfied as he started to drive away.
Then, stopping after a few feet: “Why is Vance stuck in the window?”
He’d recognized our keyboard player from his stubby legs, which were flailing madly. We made up a cover story, which he pretended to accept and drove away. We avoided jail (conveniently just a few yards away), and our one and only fling with attempted burglary was mercifully terminated.
The aforementioned ledge was our “emergency entrance” to the Fiesta when we’d forgotten the key. From the top of the fire-escape stairway, it was possible to half leap-half swing to the ledge. Then it was just a matter of prying up a window to get inside. The dangerous part the leap to the ledge. A fall to the alley would have meant broken bones or worse. Between that and some of the other stupid things we did, I sometimes wonder how we survived our teenage years.
Another elevator ride led to the fourth floor and more offices. It was late on a Friday afternoon; virtually all of the office workers seemed to have gone for the day. The fourth floor, like the third, was almost spectrally quiet.
Until an unexpected sound broke the silence.
Someone was playing a piano.
This had once been the part of the building that creaked and moaned, inspiring ghost stories. My first thought was of Vance, our late keyboard player. The music was coming from an office down the hall, but the view through its door window revealed … no one.
The song, haltingly being practiced: Billy Joel’s “The Piano Man.”
Vance?
I’m glad the developers saved our old clubhouse. Instead of being torn down, it was tastefully restored and is home to dozens of new tenants.
And maybe a ghost or two.

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

I’ll be gone a lot this month and won’t have access to my computer to post the columns. I’ll post both of them for March late in the month.

Stay tuned. A Woodward travel disaster story is always a possibility!

Thanks for subscribing,

Tim

 

It was a birthday party that once would have been almost unimaginable.
A reserved room at a restaurant. Tables pushed together, decorated with helium balloons and lined with presents. Pizzas baking in the kitchen, kids playing games in an adjoining room, grownups catching up since the previous get-together a year earlier.
The guest of honor took it all in stride. This was his third birthday party, and for him pretty much the normal order of things.
For some of the older members of the family, however, it was a case study in how much the normal order of things has changed.
The guest list was long and diverse – little kids, big kids, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. Conversation topics ranged from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to sports to politics. A striking contrast to what family birthday parties once were, and to what families once were.
Grayson, the birthday boy, is the son of single parents. They share the responsibilities of caring for him; they just didn’t get married to do it. That’s not uncommon now.
When I was their age, it was anything but common. Women who were pregnant were expected to be married or to get married as quickly as possible. Most of those who had babies without getting married gave them up for adoption. You didn’t hear much about single mothers then.
That’s changed, as have expectations of what constitutes a family. A typical family in those days was a mother, a father and one or more kids. Fathers were the breadwinners, mothers the “homemakers.” With the exception of a childless couple who lived across the street, I can’t think of a single family in my childhood neighborhood who didn’t fit that mold. It was what families were expected to be, the ideal family model.
But was it? Fathers spent most of their time working. When they were home, they tended to be the family disciplinarians. All of my childhood friends were, to one extent or another, afraid of their fathers. I was, to some extent, afraid of mine. This is not to say that they were cruel men. My father was a good man, and in his later years a gentle soul loved by all who knew him. But, like all the fathers in the old neighborhood, he was a strict disciplinarian in his younger years.
My mother, like the other mothers in the neighborhood, was in charge of running the household. She kept the house immaculate. She cooked most of the meals. She did the heavy cleaning, the laundry and changed the sheets on the beds every Saturday. She did all the decorating, from choosing the furniture and carpets to stripping the walls and hanging wallpaper.
My sister and I helped with the housework and yard work, but the lion’s share of the responsibilities fell to our parents. I’ll never forget coming home from school and finding my mother in tears because a cake she baked had fallen. Or my father walking the floor at night, worried about paying the bills. Both had separate burdens, which they shouldered pretty much on their own.
Birthdays were minor events – dinner with the immediate family, a small cake, a modest number of presents.
Fast forward to today, and a different world.
Both of Grayson’s parents are single, but they are far from raising him on their own. The kid is being raised by a village.
Both of his parents are in college; both have part-time jobs. On the days when his dad has him, his family helps out while Dad is working or in school. They take him bowling. They’ve taken him to high school games, and his grandfather on that side of the family is teaching him the finer points of hitting a baseball. They look forward to spending time with him.
On our side of the family, no less than ten family members help share the load while Mom is working or in school. My wife and I have Grayson one morning a week and occasionally overnight. We’ve taken him to basketball games and are regulars at the neighborhood playground. My former office is now a toy repository.
It’s not all fun and games, of course. We’ve all shared in the illnesses, the tears, the frustrations of potty training and trying to keep up with a kid who makes the Energizer Bunny look like a slug. Anyone who thinks raising kids is easy never had any.
But I think we’d all agree that for the most part it’s been a joy. I’ve laughed more in the three years since Grayson was born than I did in the previous ten. True, he wears us out. But it’s a weariness that gladdens the heart.
His grandfather on his dad’s side may have put it best:
“He has his life with his mom, he has his life with you and he has his life with us. And everywhere he goes, he’s marinated in love.”
The results speak for themselves. He’s a happy, well-adjusted kid. He smiles a lot, laughs a lot. He makes the people around him happy.
I’ve always thought I had a happy childhood. I grew up in Boise when it was an idyllic place to grow up. I had good parents, good friends, good teachers. But with all the societal changes since then, good and bad, I think Grayson may be a happier kid than my friends and I were in our early years.
There are things to be said for being raised by a village.

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

My younger daughter went on a tear recently and purged every room in her house of unneeded items, a.k.a. junk. It inspired my wife and me to do do the same. The results were impressive, and surprising.
Out went the seldom-worn clothes, the little-used blankets and old pillows, the unwanted knick-knacks and curiosities that had been wasting space and gathering dust. Bags upon bags of things discarded, breathing room in closets, shelves with extra space for the first time in years.
And an almost giddy feeling of accomplishment.
There was a time when we followed these semi-annual purges with yard sales. Now we just put everything in bags and boxes, take it to the Good Will and write it off on our taxes. When you consider that yard-sale shoppers expect to get things for pennies on the dollar, and usually do, it comes out about the same.
Some things, obviously, you can’t sell or give away. Cherished books, family photographs …
And the surprise – a forgotten package of memorabilia from my Statesman years.
I was absolutely certain when preparing to retire from full-time journalism that I’d cleaned everything out of my desk and assorted boxes, nooks and crannies around the newsroom. So I couldn’t have been more surprised while in purge mode to find an unopened package of newsroom flotsam lurking on a shelf in a bedroom closet.
A former co-worker had mailed it to me (in 2013, according to the postmark) with a note explaining that the contents had been found in the newsroom. I must have put the package on the shelf intending to open it later and forgotten all about it.
The contents included letters, cards, photos … memories.
One of the cards was from Fern Graham, the longtime postmaster of Bruneau. It was a thinking-of-you card, written when our oldest daughter was recovering from cancer. Her card took me back to the day we met, in the tiny Bruneau Post Office.
I had a letter with me that day that needed to be mailed, and after debating whether to wait and mail it after returning to Boise I took a chance and pushed it through a slot in the post office wall. Immediately, someone on the other side tugged it out of my fingers, a door opened and I watched as my letter was tossed into a rolling cart and whisked away by a waiting truck.
“That was quick!” I said to the woman overseeing the process. “I almost waited to mail it from Boise.”
“It’ll get where it’s going faster from here,” she said with conviction.
That was my introduction to Bruneau’s beloved postmaster, and the beginning of an enduring friendship. I’d stop to visit when passing through Bruneau; she introduced me to half the town. I drove 150 miles to attend her wedding in Mountain City, Nev.
One of the letters in the package was from a woman named Mary. Postmarked a decade ago, it was a pitch for a story, accompanied by a photo of Mary. She asked that her picture be returned if I didn’t do the story.
I know what you’re thinking, Mary. You’re thinking that that jerk Woodward lost your picture. So you’ll be glad to know that it isn’t lost, looks every bit as good as it did ten years ago and that I’d be happy to return it. It would make me feel better about some of the family treasures readers used to send me in the misguided hope that I wouldn’t lose them.
A Thousand Springs Scenic Byway postcard had me laughing once again at the humor of the late Tom Trusky, BSU professor extraordinaire and director of the Idaho Center for the Book. Trusky, who died in 2009, was forever sending me postcards supposedly ”signed” by late Idaho author Vardis Fisher. This was one of them.
“Damned fools!” it said. “First they plug ’em up, then they sell ’em on a postcard shaped like Oregon! — Vardis.”
Most of the springs were indeed “plugged up,” to develop hydropower, and the card was in fact shaped like Oregon. But at least it wasn’t the usual mistake; the card wasn’t shaped like Iowa.
It was always a pleasure to receive one of Trusky’s “Vardis” cards, which he mailed from as far away as Albania. They never failed to make me laugh. This one, however, was bittersweet. With him gone, it was as sad as it was funny.
Some of the package’s contents were routine – a card thanking me for speaking to a class, a letter from my late sister, a note from a former publisher. Others gave pause:
Oliver Gregerson’s memorial card, for example. Ollie owned and lived at Gregerson’s Wildlife Park, near Barber. He was publicly known for his legal battles to protect his privacy, which he guarded with singular intensity. The antithesis of a public park, his property was blocked by a locked gate and dotted with no-trespassing signs. There were rumors of rude welcomes for uninvited visitors, so I was skittish about going there to do a news story when his home burned.
My fears were unfounded. Gregerson turned out to be one of the sweetest people you could meet. He was in tears over his loss, and it would have been difficult to have imagined a more gentle soul. All he’d ever wanted was be left alone to care for his animals. The picture on the funeral card was of him cradling a baby badger in his powerful hands.
An eight-year-old card from an Elvis Gallagher was equally touching. It was in response to an interview I’d done with a survivor of a Nazi POW camp. Gallagher, who helped liberate the camp, had read my story and contacted him.
He was “bowled over,” Gallagher wrote. The two went on to meet and embrace 51 years after making history.
Re-reading his card, and the other cards and letters found in the forgotten package on the shelf, made the time spent worth it. An occasional purge is good for the soul.

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

Idahoans have little cause to complain about the weather. Even this year. We’re blessed with a pleasant, four-season climate and virtually none of the floods, hurricanes and other weather disasters that plague some parts of the nation.
But it sure would be nice to see the ground again.
How long has it been since we’ve seen the ground without snow or ice on it?
Forty-six days and counting. Not a record, but we’re getting there. The record is 63 days, in 1986.
Except for time in the Navy and college, I’ve lived in Boise all my life and this winter has given me a new experience. Never before have I had to hoe my roof. (Every store in town was sold out of roof rakes, which must be some kind of a record.)
Snowmagadden wasn’t entirely without redeeming factors, however. Kids enjoyed the snow days (though they used them somewhat differently than those of previous generations. More on that presently.) And the mountains of snow and ice, followed by rains and partial melt-offs, brought neighbors together.
Hunkered over shovels, picks and hoes, the folks in our neighborhood shared a sort of gallows humor about the unusual winter weather. Neighbors who had never previously met introduced themselves and commiserated over icy streets and rivers of slush. We helped clear each others’ gutters, push each others’ stalled cars. A neighbor named Mike – didn’t catch his last name – patrolled the streets with a snowplow and became an instant hero.
How bad is the winter of ’17?
For decades, old timers have rhapsodized about the snowy winter of 1948-49. It assumed almost mythic proportions. To see how the two winters compared, I spoke with Meteorologist Jay Breidenbach of the National Weather Service.
“The unusual thing about this year is that this is some of the deepest snow we’ve ever had in the valley,” he said. “The amount of snow on the valley floor is much more normal.”
More than in the winter of ’48-49?
That depends on how you look at it. That winter, Breidenbach said, had more snowfall than we’ve had so far this year – including a two-day storm beginning on Valentine’s Day that brought 13 inches of snow. But the snows melted more quickly that year; the maximum snow depth in Boise was nine inches. So far this winter: 15 inches.
“We had two storms of seven inches a week apart, and it was never above freezing so it didn’t melt or compact much,” Breidenbach said. “That’s very unusual. We’ll be talking about the winter of ’17 for a long time.”
Hard winters aren’t without benefits, of course. Snow has insulating qualities. Our house seems to have stayed warmer, even during the below-zero temperatures. Skiers, snowboarders, and snowmobilers love the snow. And it tends to bring out the best in people. I had surgery on the day of the Big Melt, and I can’t tell you how many friends, neighbors and relatives came by and helped or offered to help keep the gutters and storm drains clear.
That brings us back to the kids. Kids have always enjoyed snow, always will. But they love it differently in the digital age. Most of them don’t spend as much time outdoors so they aren’t as inventive when it comes to outdoor activities. When I asked my granddaughter Chloe, who is 10, if she’d ever made a snow fort, she looked at me as if I had three heads.
Snow forts used to be common during hard winters in Boise. They were made with snowman-sized snowballs arranged in a circle with an opening for a “door.” Snow forts were great for hanging out, making plans, cementing friendships over cups of steaming cocoa on winter afternoons. Their primary purpose, however, was to wage snowball wars – glorified snowball fights with opposing sides occupying forts, stockpiling “ammo,” and letting fly. If a particularly deadly projectile hurtled your way, you could duck and the fort would protect you.
Kids don’t do that sort of thing much any more, which brings me to something our state legislators might want to consider when they aren’t debating the finer points of sexual favors.
Everywhere you go, people have been complaining about snow that has made just getting out of the driveway an achievement. The snow has closed schools, hurt businesses, caved in roofs. Even kids don’t love it the way they once did. The only ones who are truly passionate about it are winter sports enthusiasts.
Therefore, in the interest of the majority of us who could do without snow, I hereby propose a winter-recreation tax. The tax would be imposed on skis, snowboards, snowmobiles, snowshoes and anything else related to winter sports. The proceeds would be used to transport excess snow in cities to the mountains, where it belongs. There’d be plenty of snow up there, clear roads and streets down here. Everybody’s happy.
I’m kidding, of course.
But one way or another, it sure would be nice to see the ground again.

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

When I saw the obituary, my initial reaction was surprise. A nanosecond later, guilt.
It was somewhat surprising that I saw it at all. Perusing the obituaries isn’t a regular part of my morning routine. The news, the editorials, sports, features, weather … yes. Fixating on obituaries, however, has always struck me as being a tad ghoulish. I skim the page and, rarely seeing a familiar name, move on to other things.
But there she was, smiling from the page where none of us are in a rush to be: Anita N. Bader, 1920-2016.
One of the sweetest women I’ve ever known.
She was my favorite neighborhood mom, apart from my own, during my growing-up years. The guilt was over a voicemail she left several years ago. It had been decades since I’d heard from her. The voicemail asked me to return her call, but I got sidetracked and lost her number. I had every intention of tracking it down and calling her back but didn’t get around to it. One of those things you mean to do but don’t, and then it’s too late.
Mrs. Bader, as she was known to the neighborhood kids, had four kids of her own. Bill Bader, Billy in those days, was one of my three best friends in the neighborhood. She also had a daughter Michaele (pronounced Michael), a daughter Janie and a son Danny, the baby of the family.
The Baders lived in one of the neighborhood’s largest and nicest homes, on the corner of 25th and Lemp streets. It was rumored that Mr. Bader made $1,000 a month, an impressive sum in the mid-1950s. The average U.S. income was less than half of that. Whatever he was making, it was enough to be able to afford what was, for the neighborhood boys, one of the reasons for hanging out at the Baders’ house. Billy’s model train set was flat out the nicest, most elaborate on the block, and most likely for blocks around.
We spent hours in his basement with all the lights turned off, mesmerized by the lights of the trains and the signals, the smoke, the whistles, the clatter of the trains on the tracks. Knowing how difficult it was for young boys to tear themselves away from that kind of enchantment, Mrs. Bader would bring us snacks and sandwiches to keep up our strength without missing any of the fun.
Occasionally she’d issue a dinner invitation. Dinner with the Baders qualified as an event. It meant not only sharing a meal with the wealthiest couple in the neighborhood but sitting at the same table with beautiful Michaele, who was several years older and with whom all the neighborhood boys were hopelessly infatuated. And on least one occasion, it was the setting for an incident that, had it been caught on camera today, would have been a sure winner on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
The main course that night was lima beans and ham, served from a large kettle in the center of the dinner table. Dinner was just getting started when the family dog, a cocker spaniel named Sandy, leaped from a sitting start on the kitchen floor into the lima beans. It was rather graceful, actually, a perfect arc from the floor to the main course, ending with a clunk, a splash and beans flying everywhere.
Mr. Bader was furious, but his wife took it in stride. I think she might even have laughed a little. And in years to come, Sandy’s belly flop into the lima beans was laughed at countless times in the old neighborhood.
The Baders were unique in the neighborhood in belonging to Hillcrest Country Club. None of the other neighbors could have afforded such a thing. Howard Snyder may briefly have belonged to Ducks Unlimited, in the faint hope that it would allow him to bag an unlimited number of mallards. Roy Moore belonged to the Bartenders Association, and several of the neighbors belonged to bowling leagues. None of them would have dreamed of joining a country club. It was about as likely as one of them attending the G8 Summit.
For friends of the Bader kids, however, the country club was a summer jackpot. Mrs. Bader would load us into the family car, a DeSoto if memory serves, and treat us to an afternoon at the country club pool – a far cry from the noisy, crowded public pool to which we were accustomed. It was beautiful, the people who frequented it were beautiful and Mrs. Bader invariably sprang for country-club delicacies for all of us. It was there, I think, that I came to understand the difference between the haves and the have-nots.
That’s not to say that she was a snob. Far from it. She was friendly to everyone – on good terms with all of the neighborhood women, a second mom to a lot of the neighborhood kids. The Baders lived in Utah after leaving Idaho, and it was no surprise to learn from her obituary that she was voted Utah Mother of the Year in 1986.
She didn’t even get mad when I knocked Billy’s front teeth through his lip. We were playing baseball in his back yard. He was pitching; I hit a line drive that hit him in the face with a sickening smack and sent him to the E.R. I felt terrible about it and was certain I’d be punished, but aside from a few moments of panic Mrs. Bader couldn’t have been nicer. She even hired me to water the family’s lawn when they left for a week’s vacation later that summer, paid me the unheard-of sum of $15 for doing it and complimented me in front of the other moms by saying “the grass grew a foot while Woody (my childhood nickname) was taking care of it.”
She had her share of heartache during her life, losing both her husband and two of her children too soon, but remained a cheerful, positive force. Ninety-six when she died, she was the last of the moms from the old neighborhood. Mrs. Hally, Mrs. Robertson, Mrs. Moore, my mother, all gone now.
Her passing reminded me of a survey of elderly people who were asked what they regretted about their lives. Very few said they regretted things they’d done. Almost all said they regretted things they hadn’t done.
Not returning her call is something I’ll regret. Now I’ll always wonder what she wanted. We tend to let months and years go by, thinking there’ll always be time to return the call, mend the fence, set things right … later. Chances are there won’t be. Quicker than we realize, later is too late.

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

The onetime president of the National Fruitcake Makers Association – yes, there actually was such a thing – is making Happy Cakes in a better place now.
Actually, he’s been making them there for some time. Dick Rodby – past president of the defunct fruitcake makers association, director emeritus of the Arizona Memorial Foundation and creator of the Hawaiian Happy Cake – passed away at his home in Hawaii in 2012.
I discovered his obituary online while trying to come up with an idea for a Christmas column. It had been years since I’d heard from him and I wondered what had happened to my old friend the Happy Cake maker.
I know – nobody is supposed to like fruitcake, let alone admit to it. Fruitcake has become the universal butt of Christmas jokes. People use it as doorstops, shoot it out of cannons. Fruitcake fusillades became so popular at one point that local practitioners made the news, chortling with glee as they fired flaming fruitcakes into the night sky at Quarry View Park.
But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when fruitcake was actually respectable.
Which brings me back to the Happy Cake maker. We became friends following a column I wrote in defense of fruitcake. Former Statesman columnist Judy Steele and I had had a friendly feud over fruitcake in our columns. Hers was anti-fruitcake; mine was pro-fruitcake. Rodby, fruitcake’s number-one cheerleader, ended up with a copy of mine and reprinted it in his newsletter. He had relatives in Boise, who had sent him the column, and whenever he came to town to visit them we’d meet for lunch or coffee. We became friends through a mutual love of fruitcake.
Fruitcake wasn’t merely his passion; it was his business, or at least a good part of it. He managed a rural Hawaiian restaurant, described in his obituary as “a refuge where time stood still and the gracious Aloha of old Hawaii resided.” The Kemoo Farm Restaurant was known for, among other things, Hawaiian Happy Cake.
He sent one of them to me every Christmas for several years. Happy Cakes are a uniquely Hawaiian twist on fruitcake. They’re made with pineapple and macadamia nuts. Think pineapple upside down cake with nuts and sprinkled with grated coconut. (My wife liked them, and she hates fruitcake.) They’re made with fresh ingredients that, if memory serves, were grown on Rodby’s Kemoo Farm. He invited me to visit there any number of times. Now I’m kicking myself for not taking him up on it.
His love of fruitcake began on Kemoo farm, where he grew up surrounded by tropical fruits. Mine began with my great grandmother Susie.
Grandma Susie was the kind of grandmother everyone wishes they had. She looked like a Norman Rockwell grandmother – aprons, old-fashioned dresses, a jolly face that belied a hard life. She outlived three husbands and all but one of her children, survived three fires that claimed everything she owned and somehow remained a cheerful, positive person, admired by all who knew her.
Her culinary skills were good enough to get her a job running the kitchen at what was then known as the Old Soldiers Home, in what is now Veterans Park. None of the old soldiers were ever known to complain about the cooking.
Her extended Christmas visits were a highlight of the year at our house. They were the happiest time of the year – old-fashioned lights gleaming on an old-fashioned tree, George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy” album playing on the stereo, the aroma of my mother’s and Grandma Susie’s baking filling every room.
My mother’s specialties were Christmas cookies and fudge. Grandma Susie’s piece de resistance was, of course, fruitcake.
Forget the fruitcake sold in supermarkets, the kind with the jellied candy that everyone loves to hate. This was real, homemade fruitcake, similar in texture to good zucchini bread but with Grandma Susie’s special blend of spices and dried fruit. She may or may not have doused it with rum or brandy. I was too young to care about such things in those days, but it’s a good bet that she did. Good fruitcake needs a dose of Authority, and she was too good a baker not to have known that.
Whatever the ingredients were, the result was almost sinfully delicious, a Christmas confection destined to become a cherished memory. In a perfect world, Grandma Susie would have included the recipe in her will. By now it would be a family treasure, at least at my house.
I thought of her and my late friend Rodby recently while passing a display of fruitcake at Costco. It was a bit of a surprise to see it there. It hasn’t been all that long since fruitcake’s reputation was at such a low ebb that it was almost impossible to find. The memory of asking for it in a store during that dark time and having a smart-mouthed employee shout that “this guy is looking for fruitcake,” as if I’d asked for illegal drugs or pornography, is still painfully fresh.
If it isn’t sold out (not likely), I’m going back to Costco this week to buy some. Christmas isn’t Christmas without fruitcake. And it’s the least I can do for Grandma Susie, and my departed friend the Happy Cake Maker.

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