My mother has been gone nearly nine years and a day seldom passes that I don’t think of her in one context or another.
Her colorful expressions:
“She made me feel like two cents waiting for change.”
“I read it in The Daily Blab (her moniker for newspapers.)”
“You need to have sticktoitiveness, Tim.”
Her sense of humor. Little things that tickled her, made her laugh and even now make me laugh remembering them.
Her meticulous housekeeping and her penchant for getting rid of anything that wasn’t being used – including my baseball card collection. (I’m over it now.)
Some things, however, she saved for life. One was a box of old photos, a gift from one of my nephews after my sister died. They gathered dust on a closet shelf for a long time before I got around to looking at them, and was treated to unexpected glimpses of my mother’s life.
The photos spanned more than a century. Many were of the sort you’d expect – snapshots taken on family outings, vacation pictures, group photos … Others were intriguing, funny, mysterious:
A photo of my mother, her brother and his wife, for example. It could have been taken on another planet. They were surrounded by eerie, steaming rock formations. Yellowstone Park came to mind, but I’ve been to Yellowstone in virtually every season and not seen anything remotely like the scene in the photo.
A photo of the same uncle at Yosemite Falls, on a road now gridlocked throughout the tourist season. His was one of two cars.
A winsomely smiling woman and a boy in a scout uniform. A dour-looking woman and two girls on a porch. An elegantly dressed woman seated on the deck of an ocean liner. All of their identities lost in time. People in the pre-digital era should have written names and dates on the backs of photos, for those of us who would come after them and wonder.
A postcard to my mother, postmarked a month before Pearl Harbor, featured an idyllic winter scene at “Sun Valley Village.” In those days, and for a long time afterwards, a village was exactly what it was. No condos, no mansions, no traffic. It was isolated, self-contained, magical.
On the back of the card, my father had written “Wesson you could be here with me.”
No, he wasn’t a terrible speller. But he was, for a time, a traveling salesman for the Wesson Oil Co.
My parents married for life after brief first marriages. One of the funnier pictures, to me at least, was of Mom’s first husband holding hands with a mystery woman. Mysterious because someone (my mother?) had cut all but her arm and hand out of the picture. I could picture my Irish-American mother – her maiden name was O’Leary – doing something like that.
Some of my favorite photos were of long-gone relatives. My Aunt Helen and Uncle Wayne, who seemed exotic to me because they had lived in Peru and he’d been the foreman of a mine there. I could listen forever to his tales of working deep in the Andes.
My Great Aunt Amy, who chased chickens around her barnyard as the first step in making what is still the best fried chicken I’ve ever had
My Great Grandmother Susie, cherished by all who knew her. She came across the plains in a covered wagon, outlived three husbands and three of her children, survived three house fires and somehow remained the jolliest of all the relatives. Mom counted the days till her grandmother’s visits. She’d come and stay with us for a week or two at Christmastime, filling the house with the aroma of baking and the joy of the season.
There were, of course, pictures our mother had saved of my sister and me when we were growing up. Mom used to complain that I ruined every picture she took by making goofy faces. Now I know what she meant.
In addition to the loose photos in the box was a scrapbook, meticulously assembled by my mother when she was in her early 20s. Her beautifully penned captions raised more questions than they answered.
Several of the photos are of couples posing on the road to Idaho City – on Easter Sunday, 1929. They looked so young, so happy – blissfully unaware of the economic catastrophe that waited just a few months down the road.
I’ll say this for my mother and her crowd: they got around. The scrapbook documented trips to Coeur d’Alene, San Francisco, Catalina Island, Dillon, Mont., Hollywood … She spoke wistfully of the California trip for the rest of her life, often saying that she didn’t want to come home.
This was the first time I’d seen pictures of her and her friends from that odyssey, and they were stunning – the men robust and handsome, the women svelte and beautiful. Some of the names and faces were familiar, but many were complete mysteries: Archie, Ed, Jack, Bud, Charles, Jida, Gertie, Skeet, Roberta. Their images appear again and again – never with last names.
Who were those people? My mother never mentioned any of them, and by now everyone who knew them is long dead. If you’re truly gone when the last person dies who knew who you were, my sister in this case, then those once striking people are truly gone.
I should have asked Mom about them.
I should have done a lot of things. I should have spent more time with her in her last years. I should have thanked her for all the times she made me laugh, for the long talks that helped get me through troubled times, for being the one person who was always there for me – from the first moment of my life till the last of her own – no matter what.
Most of all, I should have told her how much she meant to me. How much she still means. I couldn’t have asked for a better Mom.
Even if she did throw away my baseball cards.

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.

No, this isn’t one of my columns. And yes, I know that many of you don’t live in Boise. But I wanted to tell those of you who do live in the area or may be here soon about an event that’s coming up.
The Mystics’ 50th Anniversary Party will be May 21. I’ve played in the group most of my adult  life, and my fellow band members and I decided that before one of us keels over we should do something to observe half a century of playing music. So we’re pulling out the stops May 21 at the Mardi Gras Ballroom – special guests Jake Blues of the Blues Brothers Rock ’n Soul Revue, three of the surviving 1966 Mystics, prizes for best ‘60s attire, rock and roll trivia questions and a live and online auction to benefit the Ride the Wall Foundation begun by the late Paul Revere. Auction items will include Paul Revere and the Raiders memorabilia, the Mystics playing at the winning bidder’s event, a week at a condo in Mexico and an autographed set of my books – all of which are now out of print. Auction proceeds will benefit needy local veterans.
We’re hoping for a sellout, and with two weeks to go advance ticket sales look like we just might make it. People are coming from as far away as Beaverton, Ore.
If you live in Boise or plan to be in Boise on May 21, please consider  joining us. Advance tickets, $10, are on sale at brownpapertickets.com. That’s $5 less than at the door.
It should be a night to remember. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

— Tim

One of our cultural icons looks to be going the way of the horse-drawn carriage.
If you follow the automotive news, you know that time could be growing short for one of our beloved institutions. The Statesman recently reported that Tesla is likely to have trouble meeting demand for its new electric car. And Time reports that Tesla’s self-driving electric car, and those of other manufacturers following its lead, are poised to replace the cars Americans have driven, relied on, loved and hated for nearly a century.
And sooner than you’d think.
With humans in the driver’s seat in case of emergencies, Tesla’s driverless cars have gone from Los Angeles to New York in two days – with the car driving itself 96 percent of the time. Tesla predicts that its electric cars will be entirely self-driven within three years.
Think of that. We’ll hop in our cars and go from coast to coast with nothing to do but enjoy the ride. Or read … play a game … take a nap.
“Today,” Time reported, “you pay higher insurance premiums to drive a zippy roadster than a dowdy minivan. Tomorrow you could well be paying a steep price for any steering wheel at all.”
Such predictions aren’t new, of course. A Life magazine article predicted driverless cars decades ago. I remember the illustration, a drawing of a family cruising down a highway playing cards. No one was at the wheel because there wasn’t one. The same article also predicted heated highways on mountains passes (something a Sandpoint company is pioneering) and mowers that cut grass automatically without human assistance.
Then those things were in the realm of science fiction. Now they’re reality, or close to it. Self-driving cars offer significant benefits. But how willing will people be to give up driving themselves? Our love affair with the automobile – the kind we drive ourselves – is beyond well-documented. Virtually everyone has had cars they loved to drive, and favorite driving stories.
My first car was one of those zippy roadsters with higher insurance premiums. Zippy when it was new, that is. Its better days were history by the time I paid $400 for it at a used car lot and drove away with the wind in my hair – it was a convertible – and a song in my heart.
The bad news: it cost another $400 to keep it running for a year. But gosh was it fun to drive! And it had a secret weapon – a crack in the floor on the passenger’s side that, when adroitly maneuvered over puddles at a good clip, drenched whoever the passenger happened to be. Handy for getting the last word in an argument.
Everyone who drives has drives remembered for life. My first was a solo trip in an old VW Bug. I was 19, had a couple of months left before leaving on active duty in the Navy and was out for new experiences. One summer night, feeling more restless than usual, I decided on the spur of the moment to jump in the bug and drive to San Francisco. The trip was financed with the money residing in a pocket of my jeans, if memory serves about $40. (You could fill the tank of a VW for three bucks then.)
This was before my fear of heights kicked in, and nothing seemed quite as exotic or thrilling as driving across the Golden Gate Bridge into the beautiful city by the bay. I ate at Fisherman’s Wharf, bought trinkets in Chinatown, roamed the streets of North Beach. Running low on gas late at night in Nevada on the way home, I stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere and surprised an attendant and his girlfriend taking advantage of the solitude in a back room. He probably still talks about the time an embarrassed customer pumped his own gas and left the money on the desk.
The fear of heights had kicked in and then some by the time my wife and I drove the aptly named Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park – dizzying drop-offs, switchbacks rising to the clouds. My fingernail marks are probably still on the steering wheel. A self-driving car would have been a godsend; my eyes could have remained tightly closed till we reached a civilized altitude.
Our cars become cherished companions, or, in some cases, bitter enemies. I’ve owned half a dozen VWs and four Saabs and loved every one of them. The same was true of a briefly owned BMW. I sold it because I didn’t like paying for premium gas or insurance surcharges, but it was almost sinfully fun to drive.
Bitter enemy? No question about that one. A Fiat. It was one of the few new cars I’ve ever owned, and in less than a year it went through three sets of rear tires, burned out two batteries and left trails of glass from rearview mirrors falling off and shattering on the pavement. It also howled. Really. Imagine the mournful howl of a woebegone dog and you’ll have an idea of what it sounded like. That car hated me, and the feeling was mutual. I sold it cheap and celebrated with a stiff drink and a cartwheel.
If in time we’re forced to give up driving, according to Time, the number of traffic accidents will plummet. More than 90 percent are the fault of human drivers, with causes ranging from drunk driving to talking on cell phones to fumbling with a sandwich. Self-driving cars will maximize fuel economy, dramatically improve traffic flow and are even better at finding parking spaces.
All things considered, we’ll probably be better off for it.
I for one, however, would miss driving. For many of us, giving it up would be downright painful.
So what about a sweetener, something to ease the pain of giving up something we love? If technology has reached the point that cars can drive themselves, where are those self-driving lawnmowers?

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays (but is a tad late this week). Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

When woodwardblog.com started almost four years ago, I told subscribers I might be doing occasional “extra” posts in addition to the Statesman column. This is one of those.
As some of you know, I was fortunate to write the scripts and narrate Wide Eye Productions’ “Idaho, the Movie” back then. A hit by any measure, it won an Emmy and inspired viewers to ship it to every state and to more than 60 foreign countries.
Now we’re working on the sequel, “Idaho, the Movie 2,” to be released for this year’s holiday season. Viewers who loved the first movie have been asking whether we’d do another one, and we wanted to film some of the beautiful and intriguing parts of Idaho that we missed the first time around. Idaho is too big to fit into one documentary film.
This time we’ll go to the newly designated Boulder White Cloud Wilderness, the weird but wonderful Shoofly Oolite formations and the rugged Magruder Corridor. Viewers will meet Henrietta the long-billed curlew, visit geothermal hot springs, see other-worldly landscapes like Hell’s Half Acre. And much more.
As stunning as the photography was in ITM1 (as the writer-narrator I can’t take any of the credit for that), the sequel promises to be even more of a visual treat. Technological advances of the last four years are allowing Wide Eye photographers to do things that weren’t possible then, and they want to raise the bar even further by shooting scenes from a helicopter. Scenes that can’t be photographed any other way.
That’s nosebleed expensive, so Wide Eye is launching a Kickstarter campaign. Supporters will help its photographers film remote areas of Idaho  in a way it’s never been seen.
Why not use a drone? They will where possible, but in many cases it isn’t. Drones can’t be more than half a mile from the operator on the ground, and parts of Idaho’s back country are so remote and difficult to reach that putting operators there is virtually impossible. Also, drones are prohibited in wilderness areas. Cutting-edge, gyro-mounted cameras on helicopters will help the photographers film remote, rugged parts of Idaho with absolute smoothness and breathtaking resolution.
What’s in it for those who support the Kickstarter campaign? For starters, donors will receive a DVD of the movie and have the satisfaction of knowing their support helped make it better. Increasing levels of support come with posters and T-shirts, Wide Eye nature films and multipacks of Idaho the Movie 2 DVDs  up to joining the team on a shoot and seeing yourself in the finished film.
We could make the movie without helicopter photography, and it would still be beautiful. But we hope to use the best technology available to take it beyond beautiful. We want it to be jaw-dropping. I’d be honored if any of you choose to help make that possible.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s a link to a short video that will tell you more:

This is a few weeks late; I was committed to writing travel columns when he died. But I knew George Kennedy too long not to tell you about one of the most interesting and perplexing friends I’ve ever had.
There were at least two George Kennedys. The first was the one everyone who goes to movies knew – the bear of a man who could play anything from villains (“Charade”) to endearing heavies (“Cool Hand Luke”) to the straight man in the “Naked Gun” movies.
That was the Hollywood George Kennedy. The one I knew was very different.
I’d been a fan of his films forever. I must have watched “Cool Hand Luke” half a dozen times on movie nights in the Navy, and “The Dirty Dozen” was one of my wife’s and my favorites during our courting days. So it was a big surprise when I picked up my phone in The Statesman newsroom and heard the rich, baritone voice that couldn’t have belonged to anyone else.
“Tim, this is George Kennedy. We don’t know each other, but I’ve been reading your column since I moved to Idaho and I have an idea for a television series based around the sort of colorful characters you’ve written about. Is that something that would interest you?”
Would it interest me? I’d have been less interested in winning the lottery.
We met to discuss it, teamed up with a local production company and spent a little over a year working to bring his idea to fruition. We shot a demo about a colorful character in Owyhee County, worked with a producer’s agent in Portland and had two cable networks vying to come aboard. A major corporation was on the verge of signing as the primary sponsor when it all blew up in our faces.
More on that later. First, the George Kennedy I came to know along the way:
He could be the most charming of men. Maybe that’s part of why he became a star. He’d smile that winning smile of his, give you a compliment or make you a proposition in that signature voice, and he had you. I don’t mean to imply that any of it was insincere. It wasn’t. He wholeheartedly believed in everything he said.
Until he didn’t.
Ours was a business proposition that went beyond business. He didn’t need to spend time with me apart from the business end of it, but he did and we became friends. Maybe he needed a friend, isolated as he was in Idaho from his Hollywood friends. Whatever his reasons were, he invited me almost weekly to share meals with him – breakfasts at the recently departed Rodeway Inn across the street from The Statesman, lunch at the Sandbar in Marsing, dinner with our wives at Murphy’s, Italian feasts at Georgio’s, leisurely trips to Danskin Station in Garden Valley. George loved good food and good conversation, and conversations with him could be endlessly entertaining.
So many stories, so many stars: working with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, companionable dinners at Jimmy Stewart’s house, a life-changing moment with John Wayne, falling in love with Audrey Hepburn on the set of “Charade.”
“We were all a little in love with her,” he said. “We’d go to her place after work just to spend time with her.”
Things were different with the star of “Cool Hand Luke.”
“Members of the cast and crew would go out together after we were finished shooting. Everybody but Paul Newman. There was a star on his door, and there was never a doubt that he was the star and not the rest of us.”
Kennedy, of course, won an Oscar for “Cool Hand Luke.” Newman didn’t.
My favorite Kennedy yarn was about a scene he did with Clint Eastwood for “The Eiger Sanction.” As an acrophobiac, I had no trouble relating. The two of them were perched atop a needle-like rock spire, hundreds of dizzying feet above the desert floor of Monument Valley, their legs dangling over the edge. Weeks later, Eastwood called George to say the scene had to be re-shot because the cameraman had been so frightened that his hands were shaking.
The actors for whom he had the highest praise: his pal Jimmy Stewart and – this will surprise you – Margaret Hamilton, a.k.a. the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.
He’d led such an interesting life that I propositioned him to write his biography. He immediately accepted, and for months we met regularly for breakfast interviews. It went well until we reached his service in World War II, when he seemed to get cold feet. Not surprising; a lot of WWII veterans didn’t talk about the war. What he didn’t say was that he’d decided to write the book himself, and did. Frankly, he could have used a ghost writer.
He told me something one day that I’ve never forgotten. He said that every morning when he woke up, his first words were, “please, God, don’t let me hurt anybody today.”
So it was beyond surprising when he marched into the office of the producers who had worked so hard to make his television series a reality, told them they were subverting his idea, said hurtful things and walked out. That was the end of the project.
His reasoning didn’t make sense. Nobody was trying to subvert anything or had ever been anything but respectful and accommodating with him. My theory was that once it looked like the series was actually going to happen, he realized how much time, travel and work it would mean and in his 80s wasn’t comfortable committing to that.
For a while, we stayed in touch. We went to dinner a few more times, drank wine, solved the world’s problems. It wasn’t the same, though, and gradually our relationship sputtered to an end. Even after the painful way he ended the television project, I missed him. I wasn’t there to see it happen, so I never saw that side of him and couldn’t help missing the George Kennedy I knew and liked. It isn’t often you get to be friends with a movie star, and I was lucky to have had him in my life, however briefly.
The last time I saw him was a little over a year ago, in a Costco store. He was riding a motorized cart. He told me his wife had died, and he himself had aged considerably. Knowing it might be the last time I’d see him, I was tempted to ask the real reason why he abruptly ended what could have been a beautiful relationship.
I didn’t ask – it would have been awkward – and now I’ll never know for sure. The Hollywood George Kennedy was a man of many personae, and so was the private one. He could charm my socks off one day, dash my dreams the next, and somehow made the charming part what I’ll always remember about him.
A captivating, complicated man.

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.

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

STONE ISLAND, Mexico – It’s a shame that so much of the news about Mexico is bad. Drugs and cartel violence give the impression that it’s an unwelcoming and dangerous place.
That can be true in parts of Mexico, including the state of Sinaloa, where I spent a recent vacation. The Sinaloa Cartel is Mexico’s most powerful organized crime organization.
What rarely makes headlines, however, is that visitors often experience warmth and hospitality that’s exceptional. Sometimes over-the-top exceptional. It happened to us in a little place called Isla de la Piedra. Island of the Stone.
One of our neighbors at the place where we were staying recommended a restaurant there called Carmelita’s. He went on to add that the jungle road that led there was a little daunting, which was an understatement. It was under construction and in places all but non-existent. In a couple of spots, we were in mud up to our hubcaps. And those were the good spots.
We were hoping to make it there by sunset, but it wasn’t to be. The road, obviously, was one reason. The other was that the plastic cup I was holding in my teeth while trying to buckle a back-seat seatbelt cracked, drenching me with Cuervo and OJ. The only thing that didn’t get soaked was my hat. That meant going back to change, and by the time we got to the restaurant it was closed.
“Is the place next door open?” we asked some people who were still chatting at a table there.
“No,” one of the women replied. “All the restaurants are closed. People come here mainly for breakfast and lunch and spend the day on the beach. By this time, everyone’s gone.”
Her name was Anna Hayden. She and her husband, Gary, own Carmelita’s. We told them why we were late (spilled drink, car-eating road). After hearing our story and seeing our crestfallen expressions, she spoke briefly in Spanish to her husband and another woman at the table, then turned a thousand-watt smile on us.
“No problem,” she said. “We are closed, but for you we are open. I’ll go call Carmelita.”
Carmelita is the matriarch of the family. She’d gone home for the day, but in five minutes she was back. Anna put a tablecloth on a table and took our orders.
We were, as you can imagine, impressed. I’m not saying this sort of thing doesn’t happen at home, but it hadn’t happened to us before. I’ve arrived at stores, restaurants or other businesses just after closing any number of times and apologetically been turned away. And that’s okay. Too late is too late; closed is closed.
But not at Carmelita’s, at least not on this night.
While Carmelita and Carmelita Cecilia, Anna’s sister, were in the kitchen cooking our dinners, Anna told us her family’s story:
Anna is the daughter of the Carmelita who was cooking dinner and the granddaughter of Carmelita’s mother, who was also named Carmelita – obviously a popular name there. (I’m not using their full names because they’re only slightly shorter than the Gettysburg Address.) The first Carmelita started the restaurant in 1938. She grew up in California and came to Stone Island on a vacation with her family in1936. It was a stopover on their way to Guadalajara. At least that’s what it was supposed to have been.
They stayed a month, during which Carmelita met her future husband, Rodrigo. Rodrigo was working to build a jetty in the Stone Island harbor. When the rest of her family left for Guadalajara, she stayed. She never went to Guadalajara, never went back with her family to California. She was then 16.
It’s not hard to see why she stayed. The place is beautiful now – sandy beach, gentle surf, a smattering of homes and businesses. Its population, Anna told us, is about 8,000. But in 1936, it was an undiscovered paradise.
“There were about 20 people here then,” she said.
Carmelita was bewitched by the beauty and tranquility. (Rodrigo, the strapping jetty worker, may also have been a factor). She soon became popular with the people who lived there and the occasional visitors.
“They were happy to have someone who spoke English,” Anna said. “My grandmother earned some money by making tortillas and selling them.”
She also found time to marry Rodrigo. Together they opened Carmelita’s, little suspecting that they were launching a family business that would span three generations and continue into the next century. Carmelita died in 2011 at 93.
In 1996, a young American blew into town on a Jet Ski and came to the restaurant in hopes of finding a bathroom. No one seemed to be around so he helped himself to the facility. On his way out, he ran into Carmelita, told her how much he liked the area and said he hoped to start a Jet Ski business there.
An enterprising idea, but there was a problem.
“He was an American, and you have to be a Mexican citizen to start a business here,” Anna said.
That would have been the end of it, except that Carmelita had a granddaughter – Anna – who was studying law in the U.S. She reluctantly agreed to help the newcomer who was passionate about starting a Jet Ski business. In the process, he became passionate about Anna.
“He asked me out three times,” she said, laughing. “I said ‘no’ every time.”
“Three times she turned me down!” Gary Hayden added, feigning outrage. “But I don’t give up easily.”
They were married within a year.
It wasn’t long after that that Carmelita began to receive offers for her property.
“Pacifico Beer offered her a lot of money,” Anna said. “I told her she should be happy, but she started to cry. She wanted to keep the business in the family.”
Gary and Anna talked it over and made an offer of their own. In 2007, they took over the restaurant and a nearby hotel. They expanded the hotel, now a popular place for tourists on a budget.
“It’s a lot of work,” Anna said. “Gary handles the bookings and a lot of the other things at the hotel. I work in the office (she got that law degree) and help in the restaurant.”
It doesn’t take long to see that Carmelita’s is something special. We went back two nights later for a family-style dinner with a group of about 20 Canadians who were staying at the hotel, and seldom have we met a happier group of people. The same went for the locals who passed by. To a person, they smiled and waved. The place seemed to radiate happiness.
When we left, Anna hugged us as if we were old friends. The cartels and anything resembling violence seemed far away.
Until then I’d been thinking that maybe we’d been to Mexico too many times, that maybe we should try someplace different next time. The Bahamas, perhaps.
“Come here,” Gary said as we headed for our car. “I didn’t give you guys a hug yet.”
“Don’t be strangers,” Anna added. “You have our e-mail and our phone number. Call us any time.”
Bahamas? What was I thinking?

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.

SINALOA, Mexico – It’s hard not to like Mexico. Leave home on a cold, bleak February day and a few hours later step off of a plane to instant summer.
The Woodwards returned from there last week. But for a few panic-stricken moments while boarding the plane in Boise, it looked like the vacation would end before it began.
It was my fault, of course. Tired of groping for passports and boarding passes with busy TSA agents waiting for them on previous trips, I bought a murse.
A murse, for those unfamiliar with them, is a purse for a man. A manly purse. It has a strap so you can sling it over your shoulder, and it keeps the important stuff handy. We’d boarded and were stowing our carry-ons when we realized that the murse was nowhere in sight.
Panic? My blood pressure was rising faster than a Canaveral launch. Passports, reservations, wallet, everything we couldn’t do without was in the murse. Without it, we’d have to cancel the trip.
Reasoning that I must have set it down in the boarding area, I began fighting my way to the front of the plane like a fish swimming upstream against the tide of boarders. Then …
“Here it is, Dad.”
It was our son, Mark, who had spotted it on the seat in front of ours – absentmindedly left there by … let’s see, who could it have been?
“All right, Dad,” our daughter said in the tone of voice young people use to address doddering parents. “From now on, all four of us are watching the murse.”
With four sets of eyes eyeing the murse, like hungry dogs watching a pot roast, we made it to our destination. The place where we were staying was south of Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast. South as in approximately the distance from Boise to Horseshoe Bend – far enough from town, and virtually everything else, that we had to rent a car to get around.
Driving in Mexico isn’t like driving in the U.S. It’s something akin to every man for himself. Make that every man, woman and child. We were driving to a store to buy groceries when a car and a motorcycle simultaneously careened around us on either side, missing us by inches. On the motorcycle were a man, a baby, a woman and a toddler.
Seconds after that – I swear this is true – a man standing on a traffic island blew a scorching blast of fire at us. A fire eater, working for tips.
We were still reeling from the fire eater and four-person motorcycle when a man on a bicycle ventured into three lanes of heavy traffic pulling – again I am not making this up – a wooden cart carrying five little girls in what appeared to be First Communion dresses. We held our breath till, miraculously, they reached the other side.
The next day, a winter escapee from Canada reacted nonchalantly to being told about it.
“Things like that happen all the time here,” he said. “The way everyone drives is crazy. But you never see an accident.”
He was right. Lots of close calls. No accidents.
Because we were so far out of town, the store we were driving to while dodging fire eaters and families on speeding motorcycles wasn’t one of those catering to tourists. Everything from labels on packages to signs identifying products sold on the aisles was in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary would have lessened the confusion, but we’d forgotten ours. What would have been half an hour of shopping at home stretched into nearly two hours, highlighted by the Micodin Fiasco.
Micodin (at least that’s what I thought it was called) is an essential product for those doing their own cooking in Mexico. It’s a chemical for soaking fruits and vegetables. You put a couple of drops in a bowl of water, soak them for 15 minutes, and the microscopic demons responsible for Montezuma’s Revenge are vanquished.
“Por favor?” I asked a young store worker in my atrocious Spanish. “Donde esta Micodin? (Where is Micodin?)
“Micodin?” he asked, looking at me as if I had three heads.
“Si. Micodin.”
“Micodin?”
I wrote it down for him.
“Ah, Micodin! Follow me.”
We walked roughly half the length of a store to the pharmacy, where he proudly pointed to a display.
“Here is Micodin!” he said.
It was a display of … reading glasses.
Armed with grocery bags containing everything we needed but Micodin, we drove to the condo – where a bottle of it was waiting on the counter. The correct name: Microdyn.
The grocery bags’ contents included a package of hot dogs, which my wife bought to feed to the dogs that frequent Mexican roadsides. My grinch-like reaction was that it was a waste of money. Hadn’t the dogs been able to fend for themselves before we got there?
As we turned off of the highway onto a side road, the hot-dog lady shouted at our daughter to stop the car.
“Why?”
“A dog!”
The dog, a black and white collie mix, looked at us indifferently – just another carload of gringos.
Until he saw the hot dogs. Seldom had any of us seen a dog, or anything, eat so enthusiastically. Forget chewing; it was straight from the mouth to the stomach. My wife had made a hungry dog’s week. For him it was like winning the lottery. Whatever we paid for those hot dogs was worth it. In the face of my wife’s kindness, I was suitably chastened and vowed to try to be less of a grinch and more like her.
The condo’s remoteness turned out to be a blessing. We’d waited so long to make reservations that everything in Mazatlan proper was either booked or not in our budget. The condominium development may have been isolated, but it had a first-class golf course. We aren’t golfers, but that proved to be an advantage.
The place was beautiful – a pool as long as a football field and a beach that went forever – and almost no one using them. If half a dozen people were at the pool, it was crowded. Everyone but us was golfing.
On our first morning there, I walked to the beach and marveled at what, for me at least, was the chief benefit of being so far out of town. The beach was empty. I don’t mean empty as in not crowded. It was literally deserted. From a point on the south to another on the north, a distance of several miles, I was the only person. Miles of pristine beach – sand and surf, pelicans and dolphins – and not another human in sight. It was like walking into “Robinson Crusoe.”
For the rest of the clan, this was a minor attraction. They prefer the bustle and attractions of the city. For me, it was Shangri-La. I went to the beach every day and never tired of it.
The city is fine; it has its place. But for some, there’s no better company than nature – untrod, untrampled. It was the perfect antidote to missing murses, itinerant fire eaters and motorcycle daredevils with babies on board. A deserted beach, a good book and a cold beer – life, where is thy sting?

Next: Over-the-top Mexican hospitality.

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.

(Note:  Apologies for posting this a week late. I’ve been in Mexico and was unable to access the site. — Tim)

No one who ever met him forgot Gordon Peterson.

His appearance was roughly equal parts cowboy and aging hippie – full beard, white hair cascading over his shoulders, Western shirt, cowboy hat. He was known on occasion to wear chaps. His look was somewhere between those of Neil Young and Buffalo Bill. If you didn’t know him and saw him on the street, you might have given him a wide berth.

If you did know him, you knew that wasn’t necessary. His appearance was arresting, his demeanor curmudgeonly, but lurking under the cowboy exterior were a good heart and a rare intelligence. He was smart, principled, perceptive. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his commitment to excellence uncompromising.
Peterson, who died this month at 79, was a longtime Statesman copy editor. In the pre-digital age, which comprised the bulk of his career, copy editors worked nights at a large, shared desk shaped like a circle. The circumference was the “rim,” the center the “slot.” Editors working on the rim edited stories, wrote headlines for them and sent them to the editor in the center, the “slot man.” The slot man was the last stop on a story’s way to being set in type, the last line of defense against errors. Peterson was an editor/slot man extraordinaire. If a mistake made it into the paper, the odds were good that it wasn’t on his watch.
Former Statesman reporter and editor Tom Knappenberger, now of Vancouver, Wash., recalls his introduction to the newsroom and “an ‘older’ man dressed in a cowboy hat, vest, jeans and boots, with a silver keychain dangling from his belt. He had long white hair and a white beard, yellowed by the nicotine of countless cigarettes. ‘Is that the janitor?’ I asked. ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘That’s the chief copy editor.'”
He came by the cowboy look honestly. Prior to his long Statesman career, he was editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, the newspaper that covered Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. They were before his time, of course, but even then – perhaps especially then – his attire wouldn’t have been out of place.
Like all of us who worked with him, Knappenberger came to know Peterson as a mentor, confidant and friend. The crusty slot man who quickly became one of my mentors was the first person I met after being hired as The Statesman’s new Canyon County reporter.
“You get the job?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, flushed with success.
“How much they paying you?”
He tactfully refrained from laughing when told my starting salary.
“Did the boss pause for about ten seconds after telling you what you’d be making?” he asked.
“Yes … now that you mention it, he did!”
“That was your chance to complain. If you had, you’d have gotten another ten bucks a week.”
Former copy-desk denizen Tom Menzel, now of the Seattle area, recalled that on meeting Peterson, “he scared the hell out of me. But then he started talking, warmly and slowly, defying all appearances. Gordon was the boss of the English language – one of us but still very much in charge. I quickly knew I had a lot to learn from this character.”
As we all did. Among other things, he was a master grammarian. Time and again, reporters’ stories were returned with their mistakes noted. I learned more from Peterson than anyone else about correct usage, and about thinking twice before making careless mistakes.
A long-ago column about Japanese balloon bomb attacks during World War II comes to mind. In it, I wrote that some picnickers in Oregon were “the only war casualties on U.S. soil.” Peterson gently reminded me that there were “a few during the Revolutionary and Civil wars.”
Al Bunch, who worked on the copy desk with him before running his own newspaper in Alaska, knew him as a demanding boss who worked hard and played hard.
“He asked me one night if a page had moved (gone from the copy desk to production). I said I thought it had. His response was ‘dammit, Bunch; we don’t pay you to think. We pay you to know.’ He was also the only boss I ever had who’d come to my house and drink up all my whiskey.”
There was, in those days, still an element of truth to the stereotype of the hard-drinking newsman. Peterson liked Jack Daniels, Black Russians, and if they weren’t available, he liked whatever was. There was a rumor in the old days that someone on the copy desk kept a bottle in a desk drawer – strictly against company policy – for emergency use when things got crazy. I never knew for sure who it was or whether it was true, but if it was true my money was on Peterson.
That’s not to imply that he was a drunk or that he let drinking – or anything else – get in the way of doing his best work. In Menzel’s words, he was “calm and cool” under deadline pressure, “working toward perfection, helping his charges do the same. Gordon Peterson was a treasure – a gentle but demanding teacher, a perfectionist without pretension, a unique man who never seemed to change.”
It was a sad day at The Statesman when he retired because of a medical condition that caused occasional blackouts, “spells” as he called them, and kept him from driving to work from his home in Emmett. He lived on Frozen Dog Road. Even his address was colorful.
Menzel is correct in saying that he never seemed to change. He looked the same the last time I saw him, sipping a mint julep at a Kentucky Derby party last year, as he did on the day I met him half a lifetime ago, dispensing advice on how to make an extra ten bucks a week.
Behind the cowboy garb and crusty demeanor were a sharp wit and piercing intellect, a rare breadth of knowledge and a commitment to make each day’s newspaper the best it could be. We couldn’t have had a better last line of defense, a better teacher, or a more unforgettable friend.

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

Some of my earliest memories of the Twin Dragon restaurant, a Boise institution soon to be a memory, are of going there as a teenager in a rock group. That’s how long it’s been a Boise icon.
We went there after the dances we played, which ended at midnight. Boise was much smaller then; there weren’t many places that stayed open that late. Milo’s Torch Cafe and the Twin Dragon, 2200 W. Fairview Avenue, were night-owl magnets in that part of town.
Our orders invariably included Chinese pork and seeds, served with the fiery Chinese mustard for which such establishments are famous, or, in my case, infamous. No meal at the Twin Dragon was complete without my bandmates and our girlfriends egging me on to slather a slice of pork with way too much of the stuff. I sneezed; my eyes watered. Steam was said to have risen from the top of my head.
If a buyer isn’t found, the Twin Dragon will close in March. Owner James Lam, who has kept it going for 32 years, is hanging up his apron.
“I’m getting older now, and I need to take it easy,” he told me. “I want to relax and spend some time with my family instead of working every day.”
Thirty-two years is a long time in the restaurant business, but the Twin Dragon has been around even longer than that. Its family tree dates to the old Louie’s Golden Dragon, a Boise institution at the corner of Eighth and Grove streets. It closed in 1964. Larry Louie, whose father started the Golden Star Restaurant on Orchard Avenue, said that one of the Golden Dragon’s four partners returned to China, another started the Golden Star and the other two started the Twin Dragon – each taking half of the Golden Dragon name. Both opened in 1965.
The Golden Dragon was my parents’ favorite Chinese restaurant. Nothing if not consistent, I invariably ordered pork and seeds with mouth-scorching mustard even then. When my mother wanted to get me out of the way on days when she invited friends over to play Bridge, she’d bribe me with Golden Dragon pork and seeds and a new, one-dollar Hardy Boys book. That bought her a few hours of quiet time while I curled up in my room with the Hardys and Louie’s takeout. Nirvana.
Louie’s was the scene of a brief but unforgettable conversation with my father during my junior high years. For reasons now forgotten, my mother and sister weren’t there; it was just the two of us. He used the occasion to ask, as a father will, what I wanted to do with my life. I’d progressed from the Hardy Boys to John Steinbeck by then and answered without hesitation.
“I want to be a writer.”
His response was equally swift.
“You don’t want to do that, son. You need to do something practical. There are writers starving in the streets.”
I struggled with that dichotomy – the wide-eyed desire to be the next Steinbeck versus something that would pay the bills – well into college before settling on journalism as a kind of compromise. I sometimes wonder how life would have been different if Dad had encouraged my impractical dream.
It was a sad day when the Golden Dragon closed, but the Twin Dragon and Golden Star ably carried on the tradition. Both look and act the way local Chinese restaurants should. The Twin Dragon isn’t fancy – the decor consists of a few Chinese paintings and well-worn booths and tables – but the food is good, the menu extensive, the prices reasonable. You get hot tea and hot mustard without having to ask for them. It has a fiercely loyal clientele.
“Our customers feel like they’re getting something special that they don’t get anywhere else,” Lam said. “It’s not like they won’t get Chinese food when we close, but some of the dishes won’t be the same as we make them here.”
Something unique in my experience happened at the Twin Dragon shortly before my college graduation. You know how the fortunes in Chinese fortune cookies virtually never come true? My folks and I were at the Twin Dragon one night when one did. My wife and I had signed up for a ridiculously cheap flight to Europe, sponsored by our universities, and my parents were on the wire about whether to join us. Mom wanted to go, but Dad was resisting.
His eyes widened as he read the words printed on the strip of paper: “You will soon leave on a long trip.”
That did it. He could argue with Mom, but there was no arguing with a fortune like that.
Another memorable, though less positive, incident happened to us years later in the Twin Dragon parking lot. We’d had dinner and were walking to our car when another car sped around a corner in the parking lot and bumped one of our granddaughters. The driver panicked and took off. An off-duty cop who witnessed it joined me in pursuit. Happily, there were no serious injuries. The embarrassed driver was apprehended and was appropriately remorseful.
Lots of memories. For old times sake, I went to the Twin Dragon last week for a last lunch, slathered a slice of pork in hot mustard and enjoyed every bite of it. I sneezed; my eyes watered. Steam rose from the top of my head.
It seemed the least I could do.

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.

My appearance is grim. I’m wearing a puce-colored robe over gray sweat pants with a blue and orange Bronco logo and a pink, Manley’s Cafe T-shirt. My feet are resplendent in fuzzy ankle socks, canary yellow. Dangling from my neck are reading glasses on a lanyard and a battery-powered reading light. My hair looks like I was electrocuted and lived.
I am recovering from surgery. The first major surgery of my life. A plumbing problem common among men my age.
As men my age go, I’ve been uncommonly lucky. This was my first time spending a night in a hospital, and the lab tests found no cancer. The outlook is good. Soon life will be back to normal, only better. So … no complaints.
That said, one thing people who have had surgery can agree on is that recovering from it is not the most fun you can have. To get an idea of what lay ahead, I asked my doctor prior to the operation what restrictions there would be on my activities.
“You can’t do anything,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Not much. You can’t lift anything heavier than a newspaper.”
“What about walking? How far can I walk?”
“You can walk around inside the house. You can walk to the mailbox and work up to walking around the block if it’s not too big of a block.”
Clearly my pentathlon days were over.
I’d been considering the surgery for a long time because I’d been traipsing to the bathroom multiple times a night for years. When my doctor did a test last summer showing that if nothing was done there was a risk of bladder failure, I couldn’t sign up fast enough. On the list of Health Adventures To Avoid if Humanly Possible, bladder failure is right up there.
The operation was scheduled last summer for early this month. With that much time to think about it, you can turn something as simple as trimming a hangnail into open heart surgery. Your mind conjures up all sorts of things. I read too many grisly (and inaccurate) stories online and was looking forward to the whole thing with, if not dread, a goodly dose of apprehension.
It was totally unwarranted. The surgery went well, and thanks to the nurses who took smashingly good care of me at St. Luke’s Downtown, my first night in a hospital was as peaceful as can be expected.
The recovery, however – due in large part to one of its necessities – was another matter. I hesitate even to write the word. A catheter isn’t the most pleasant thing to write about so from here on I’ll refer to it as Larry, after a plumber I knew. Larry was my constant companion for a week. Ours was a close but not cordial relationship.
Larry was a pain, literally. Not excruciating – far from it – but relentless. There was almost no way to get comfortable while trying to sleep with Larry. Lying on either side was painful, sleeping on my stomach was out of the question and I’m no good at all at sleeping on my back. If not for the pain pills the doctor gave me and an occasional sleeping pill, I’d look like an extra from “Night of the Living Dead” by now.
Late one night, it seemed that Larry wasn’t doing his job properly. (Why do these things always happen at night?) Fearing trouble and not wanting to bother my doctor or hobble to the E.R. at that hour, I called my daughter Jennifer, an R.N. at the hospital where the surgery was done. Her husband, Wally, also is an R.N, with experience in these things.
“It sounds like the port needs to be flushed,” she said. “Don’t worry. Wally will be right over.”
The problem was scientifically diagnosed as an overactive imagination on my part. Everything was working fine. But never in my wildest imaginings had I envisioned a scenario in which I’d be lying naked on a bed with my son-in-law brandishing a syringe over my nether regions.
Life improved dramatically on the one-week anniversary of Larry’s and my relationship, when it was mercifully terminated. Liberated from Larry, I felt free as a bird – ridiculously thankful for simple things like sleeping in un-contorted positions and wearing actual clothes instead of slogging around in a bathrobe and slippers. I’m still not supposed to lift anything heavier than a newspaper, exercise or walk faster than a stroll for another week, but that’s okay. The hard part is over.
It would have been considerably harder without the kind and capable ministrations of anesthesiologist Raphael Streiff, recovery room nurse Jerry Johnson, nurses Brie, Grayson and Heidi (didn’t catch their last names) of St. Luke’s Six East, and especially Dr. Kara Taggart. I couldn’t have asked for a more skilled or caring surgeon.
Bottom line: If you’re a guy with symptoms that are worrying you, have it checked out. You may or may not need the surgery, but if you do, get it done. If I can get through it, you can, too. And the odds are that it will improve your quality of life.
You could even avoid having a permanent Larry.
Speaking of which, the nurse who removed mine unceremoniously dumped it in a trash can.
It was the first time I smiled all week.

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.

Hi,

Instead of the Mondays following the Sundays that my columns are published in The Statesman, I’m considering posting them a week later, on the Sundays after they’re in The Statesman. I think it might be more convenient for you to get the columns on Sundays, when you have more free time to read. And for those of you who live outside Idaho or for other reasons don’t take The Statesman, it wouldn’t matter whether you got them one day or one week after they appear in the newspaper.

The bottom line: Sunday is just a lot better day to spend time relaxing and reading over coffee or breakfast than Monday is. But I don’t want to make this change without hearing how you the subscribers feel about it.

Good idea? Bad idea? Please let me know your thoughts by e-mailing me at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Thanks!  I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Tim

It was 30 years ago last month that my father died – not long in historical terms, yet he’d hardly recognize the Boise and the world of today.
Dad grew up poor in Cripple Creek, Colo., and left in his early teens to escape a life of drudgery working in the gold mines there. He never graduated from high school, but he was smart, hard-working and had a good head for business. He started a food brokerage company and sold groceries to, among others, Joe Albertson. He started another company that exists to this day. And he was a keen observer of the local scene and the larger world, which in some ways bear little resemblance to the ones he left.
How much has Boise changed in three decades? Obviously, it’s a lot bigger. The city-limits population has almost doubled, and growth outside the city has transformed the county. Most of what was farmland between Boise and neighboring cities 30 years ago is now subdivisions. Dad predicted that would happen, but never would he have believed that Nampa and once sleepy Meridian would pass Idaho Falls and Pocatello as the state’s second and third-largest cities. Or that Eagle, then an agrarian backwater, would now be an upscale community of 20,000.
He was a Boisean by choice, forsaking Colorado and later Washington state for the place he came to love above all others. He was a bit of a booster when it came to signs of Boise’s growth and progress, modest as they were in his time. If a big new building was going up, he’d be one of the old guys standing on the sidelines watching the workers. That’s something you don’t see much anymore, old guys gawking and commenting at construction sites.
In that respect, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to die.Thirty years ago, most of downtown was an urban renewal wrecking zone. Building after building was torn down with little but weedy parking lots and cavernous holes in the ground to show for it. Since then, most of the city center we know today has been built: the Grove; the Washington Mutual, Zions Bank, Wells Fargo and Banner Bank towers; BODO, the C.W. Moore Plaza building, the Aspens, JUMP, the new Simplot headquarters … The old guys would have been gawking overtime.
The frequency and variety of entertainment options have skyrocketed. Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman or Mikhail Baryshnikov in Boise? No way.
Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ringo Starr, the Rolling Stones performing in the Treasure Valley? Forget it.
The Boise State Broncos playing on national television in a major bowl game? Dream on.
Boise Towne Square and the Connector didn’t exist 30 years ago. Boise State has gone from a fledgling university to Idaho’s largest. The number and diversity of students and degrees, the new buildings, the Stueckle Sky Center and other additions would have left Dad gaping.
As would quantum leaps in technology. If I’d told him that one day I’d have a phone that would fit in my pocket and allow me to see people while talking to them, shoot photos and movies, send messages to people anywhere in the world and hear back from them in seconds, make and send recordings, pay bills, check the weather, board a plane, record the number of steps I take each day, answer questions, give directions and a whole lot more, he’d have thought I’d slipped a cog.
And what would he have made of a device that allows you to pause, reverse or fast-forward television programs, record them to watch later and zap through commercials?
Or movies you can take with you and watch anywhere?
Or cars that are built largely by robots, get 50 mpg and stop themselves when collisions are imminent? Or, for that matter, cars that drive themselves?
My father was diabetic. He also suffered mightily from acid reflux disease, propping himself up in bed each night with multiple pillows and popping antacids like popcorn. Medical advances of the last three decades have made diabetes easier to live with and would have eliminated his nightly suffering.
If only other changes in Boise and the world were so positive. Dad lost his driver’s license late in life due to failing vision. He didn’t know the meaning of gridlock. Inversions were a new phenomenon that surely wouldn’t last. Red air alerts? What are those?
If you had told him about 9/11, he would have wept, just as we did. If he could have known a time was coming when mass shootings of innocent people – college students, movie audiences, even children – would regularly make news, words wouldn’t have been able to express the horror he would have felt. The horror we all feel far too often.
And if he could somehow have known that the same Internet we now use for so many beneficial purposes is also used to steal identities and life savings and convert people to ideologies that perpetrate acts of mass horror … again, there are no words.
For better and worse, the world never stops changing. My New Year’s wish for all of us is that we learn from the changes and that the decent, honorable people of the world find ways to make goodness and sanity prevail.

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.

Everyone loves a mystery. They’ve kept everyone from Arthur Conan Doyle to Sue Grafton in spending money.
But no one loves a mystery in the same way that genealogists do. That was one of many discoveries relating to my column of two weeks ago a bout a Christmas mystery. My in-box has been awash ever since with messages from genealogy buffs itching to solve it.
For those who missed the first column, the mystery’s subject was a man who showed up on my family’s porch each year during the Christmases of my youth. Well dressed and distinguished looking, he would hand me a gift, say it was for my sister and leave me wondering who he was. I was halfway through my teens before learning that my parents had been married before and that my sister was actually my half sister. The mysterious caller was her father.
Over time, I learned a little about him. His name (or so I thought) was Ben Coppes. My mother said he had worked at Hannifin’s Cigar Store in downtown Boise. And, obviously, they had divorced. But who was he besides a guy who worked at a cigar store and came bearing gifts at Christmastime? What was his relationship with my mother like, and why hadn’t their marriage worked out?
That brings us to the genealogy buffs, who seized upon the puzzle like a dog on a bone. The first thing I learned from them was that I was spelling the mystery caller’s name wrong. It was Ben Koppes, not Coppes.
The subsequent plunge into genealogical websites, old newspaper clippings and public records revealed things about my mother that I never suspected. To understand how surprising some of them were, you need to know a little about her.
Born Marguerite O’Leary in 1913, she was the youngest of three children in a staunchly conservative family. The O’Learys were hard-line, old-school Catholics, which my mother remained until her death at 92. Appearances and propriety counted for a lot with her. She would sooner have swallowed lug nuts than broken a tenet of her faith or done anything remotely scandalous.
I was 16 when she sat me down and told me that she was married and divorced before marrying my father. She added that she married young the first time, but didn’t say how young. Now I know that she was just 17. It’s not hard to imagine how the proper, straight-laced O’Learys would have reacted to their youngest child and only daughter marrying a man three years her senior while she was still in high school.
Christmas mystery? She and Koppes were married on Dec. 25, 1930 – Christmas Day. Though both lived in North Boise, they drove to Canyon County for the ceremony.
Why? At 17, she would have to have had her parents’ permission to marry, and the answer almost certainly would have been no. Did they elope?
Another surprise: on her 1940 census questionnaire – she’d have been 27 then – she wrote that she had completed two years of high school. In all the
decades I knew her, she never once mentioned that she didn’t graduate.
She and Koppes were divorced on Jan. 14, 1941. By then, according to the 1940 census records, they had been separated for nearly a year. She sued on grounds of desertion and was awarded custody of their three-year-old daughter and $35 a month alimony.
Koppes remarried just six months later, my mother nine months later. Census records show that she’d been working in Boise as a “saleslady” at a department store. But her and my father’s marriage license lists her place of residence as Portland.
Portland? She never got around to mentioning that, either.
Wherever she was living, it’s not difficult to imagine her predicament – a newly single mother trying to support a child on a saleslady’s salary. Her 1939 income, including sales commissions, was $810. My father, himself recently divorced, may well have struck her as a shining knight in businessman’s armor.
Thanks to the genealogy buffs – particularly the dogged efforts of Boisean Julie Gustavel Johnson – I now know more about my family’s Christmas visitor. He was born in Centerville and lost his father, who was killed in a fall from a horse, at age five. He served in Italy during World War II. He managed the Bouquet Cigar Store (not Hannifin’s) for over 30 years, was secretary of the local Bartenders and Culinary Workers Union and worked for the state as manager of its liquor warehouse. He and his second wife raised two sons, one whom I was able to reach. Jim Koppes, of Hermiston, Ore., remembered his father as “likable and easy going,” but knew as little as I did about his first marriage.
“He was a very private person,” Jim Koppes said.
Ben Koppes died in 1970 and is buried at Dry Creek Cemetery.
So, while the mystery of the Christmas caller is solved, the old records uncovered new mysteries about my mother. Why did she marry so young – on Christmas Day – almost certainly against the wishes of her family? And why didn’t she finish high school? The easy answer is that she was pregnant. But my half sister wasn’t born for another six years. It’s possible our mother lost a baby in her teens, but I’d rather not think that.
And why did she and her first husband remarry so quickly after their divorce – less than a year for both of them? Were they already seeing their future spouses? Was that the reason for the divorce?
I’d rather not think that, either. The mother I knew was an exemplary role model and a paragon of propriety. Her old-school parents would have been proud of the way she lived her life and raised her children. I’ll always think of her with respect and affection, regardless of what did or didn’t happen in her early years.
It’s best that some mysteries remain mysteries.

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

My apologies for being late posting this week’s column. I had surgery Monday, the day I normally post, and will be moving slowly for a while. Will shortly be posting this week’s blog, the second part of the Christmas Mystery Visitor – with intriguing details about my mother that readers/genealogists unearthed  and that I never suspected. I hope you enjoy it.

If you have friends or relatives who’d be interesting in getting my columns by blog, I’d be grateful if you asked them to click on http://www.woodwardblog.com and then on subscribe. As always, it’s free and they’ll get the columns by e-mail every other Monday. The blog is especially handy for people who live outside The Statesman’s circulation area, as evidenced by its subscribers in states as distant as Alaska and Florida.

As you know, recent years have been hard on the newspaper industry.  The more subscribers I have, the better the chances would be of getting a sponsor for the blog and continuing it in the event The Statesman should be forced to cut costs and discontinue my column. I’m not saying that will happen, have heard absolutely no indication that it it will  and hope it doesn’t, but as mentioned, these are uncertain times in this business. I love writing the columns and hope to do so for a long time, both for the Statesman and for those of you who subscribe here. Thanks for reading,

Tim

Every year at this time during my growing-up years, a few days before Christmas, a mysterious man would knock on our door.
It was always at night – he most likely worked during the day – and in my memory of his brief visits it was always snowing. We seemed to get more snow in Boise in those days. The image of the mystery man appearing in the glow of our porch light on snowy evenings is indelibly etched in my memory.
He was a nice looking man and was always impeccably dressed – a suit and tie, a dressy, knee-length overcoat. A fedora lent a distinguished air, heightening his aura of intrigue.
For some reason, probably that I was the youngest in the family and quicker than everyone else – I was almost always the one who answered the door. His greeting never varied.
“Hello,” he would say, politely removing his handsome hat. Then, holding out a package, “This is for Joan.”
The packages were beautifully wrapped. I was young and self-centered enough to wonder why he never had one for me, but never asked about it. In some vague way, I understood that he was a part of Joan’s past that was as much a riddle to me as the gifts he brought each year.
Joan was my older sister and only sibling – ten years older and in some ways as much a second mother as a sister. She helped me with my homework, paid for braces on my teeth, went halves with me on my first guitar. A good sister. But why did she get a Christmas present from the enigmatic man who came to our porch every year and no one else in the family did?
In addition to being beautifully wrapped, his gifts were tasteful and expensive – perfume, jewelry boxes, a Bulova watch. Gifts chosen to please a teenage girl. The only one in the family he seemed to care about was Joan, or Joanie as she was known to almost everyone else. He never asked to speak to my parents, who perplexingly stayed in the background when he came to call, and he didn’t seem remotely interested in me. Who was this guy?
I was 16, my sister married and gone, when my mother finally let me in on the family secret.
“There’s something I want to tell you about,” she said one morning before leaving for work. “It won’t take long. You might want to sit down.”
It sounded serious, and it was.
“Did you know that your father and I were both married before we were married to each other?” she asked.
She might as well have asked if I’d known that they were both vampires. There had never been so much as a whisper of a clue.
“Joanie isn’t your sister,” she continued. “She’s your half sister. That man who brings a Christmas present for her every year is her father. Any questions?”
Not one. The power of speech had left me.
In bits and pieces over time, I learned a little more about the mysterious caller. By then, with my half sister no longer living there, he’d stopped coming to our house at Christmastime. Maybe that was why Mom waited till then to tell me about him. If she’d done it while he was still popping by with presents, I might have asked embarrassing questions. He was clearly a part of her past that she had no interest in sharing.
My father’s first wife was even more of a conundrum. Not once did he or my mother mention her. I never saw a picture of her, never knew her name.
As the years passed and my mother acquired the nonchalance of old age, some sketchy details emerged. Her first husband’s name was Ben. They’d fallen in love at a young age, married, had Joan. He worked for a time at the iconic Hannifin’s Cigar Store in downtown Boise. His last name was Coppes. Ben Coppes.
The rather conspicuous subject of why they divorced was never touched upon. In their own ways, each of my folks was a private, old-school person. Some things simply weren’t discussed, and failed previous marriages were at the top of the list.
After Joan died, in 2012, one of her sons gave me an old photo album that belonged to her and before that to our mother. It was filled with pictures of her and Ben and their friends when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. Even allowing for the poor quality of the old photos, Ben and my mother at that age were striking people.
The pictures in the scrapbook made me want to know more about them. What was their relationship like? What were they like all those years ago, and why didn’t their marriage last? Most of all, who was Ben Coppes other than a guy who used to work at Hannifin’s and showed up at our door, clothed in mystery, once a year at Christmastime?
If any of his descendants or anyone else who knew him read this, I’d love to hear from them. Solving the puzzle of the man on the porch could be one of the best Christmas gifts ever.

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

One of the things parents hope for is that their children will like some of the same things they do. It helps bridge the generation gap.
This is especially true for grandparents – and doubly so in the digital age of kids barely tolerating their technologically challenged elders. With this in mind, my wife and I bundled up our grandson Grayson Saturday and toddled him off to the model railroad show in Old Boise.
This wasn’t the first such outing. A lifelong train buff, I have tried and failed to interest any of our other kids or grandkids in model trains – a pastime I enjoyed almost obsessively in my own childhood. Reasoning that part of the trouble could have been that the kids were too old, usually between the ages of four and six when carted off whining or pouting to train shows, I vowed to start Grayson off at an early age. He is one.
Well, almost two, actually. Old enough.
The show is in the basement of the Pioneer Building at Sixth and Main streets. It was in an upstairs room of the building for 13 years, but ran out of space; thus a recent move to larger quarters downstairs. This year’s display is three times larger than the old one. It has towns and woods, a gas station, a church, a hobby store, a Pillsbury factory. It has freight trains and passenger trains, steam and diesel trains, two switchyards, 120 switches, 1,200 feet of track …
The display is operated by the Old Boise N-Scale Model Railroad Club, which club member Jim Brostmeyer describes as “a group of about 15 guys and gals who love trains.” Though not always open, it’s a permanent display. That allows club members to make improvements year-round.
It shows. The structures, scenery and train layouts are meticulously planned and executed. N-Scale is the second smallest model-railroad gauge, allowing a lot of elements to fit in a compact space. By comparison, the Lionel trains popular with children are about three times as large. Club members have operated trains more than 100 cars long.
Impressive as the display was, I had misgivings about how it would go over with Grayson. Was he too young to appreciate the hard work and attention to detail that made it possible?
Probably, but it didn’t matter. He loved every minute of it. We stayed for an hour, and he smiled non-stop. Only afterwards did we learn from his mother that one of his favorite cartoons is “Thomas the Train.” The kid is a born train buff. That’s my opinion, at least, and no amount of logic is going to talk me out of it.
Surprising as it may be to traditionalists, model trains have gone high-tech.
“The lights are LED lights,” Brostmeyer said. “They make the scenery and figures pop, and they’re totally green. Two years ago, we went to a digital command control system. Every locomotive has a computer chip and its own address. There are no limitations; we can run as many trains at once as we want. You can even run them off of your cell phone. It’s a mix of old-school and today’s technology.”
Today’s surprising fact: an early form of digital command control was the brainchild of singer-songwriter Neil Young, himself an avid model-train buff.
It’s no secret, however, that old-school toys such as model trains have lost popularity with recent generations. The club is working to turn that around, and if the response to Saturday’s show was an indication, it’s succeeding. Train geezers were outnumbered by young parents with small children, and all of them appeared to be having a marvelous time.

One of the show’s displays is a game that teaches kids what trains do by matching railroad cars with the loads they carry. Another asks them to find elements of the display – signs, a Union Pacific repair shop, a windmill, etc. Videos play non-stop, kids can check out train-related materials from a small library, and there’s the occasional visit from Santa.
“Santa loves trains,” Brostmeyer said. “He comes here on his breaks.
“… We try to have things here for little kids to pique their interest in trains. One thing trains have going for them, unlike video games, is that they’re real. When kids see these trains and understand that they’re scale models of real trains and you see that spark in their eyes, that makes it all worthwhile.”
To help him make the connection, we took Grayson after the show to see Big Mike, the 1920 steam locomotive at Boise’s depot. He seemed a bit overwhelmed, which wasn’t surprising, actually. For such a little boy, Big Mike is probably just too much train.
But there was no doubt that a connection of some sort was made. From the time we got home until the time his mother picked him up, he said the word “train” roughly 116 times.
One of his Christmas gifts from us, a Thomas the Train set, arrived on our porch Tuesday. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he opens it on Christmas morning.
Unless some shameless train junkie has already opened it with him first.

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.

Most columns generate a modest response, but some strike a chord. That’s how it was with one published in August about my granddaughter the honor student – and drug addict.
The column detailed her years of Oxycontin addiction, stealing to support her habit, jail time and, ultimately, the glorious day that she graduated from Ada County Drug Court. She’s been drug-free since and – knock on wood – has her life back.
Few of my columns have had a greater response, much of it from recovering addicts or their family members. Many of the responses reiterated the August column’s point that addiction knows no boundaries. It’s a genetic disease striking families of every socioeconomic background.
John (last name withheld) wrote to say that his son, “a high school honor student, valedictorian, captain of three sports, college graduate and business owner – got hooked on opiates,” and was awaiting sentencing. “Despite cautioning my children that all four of their grandparents were addicted to either tobacco, alcohol or both, Oxycontin hijacked his brain during his last year of playing college football … If it can happen to my son, it can happen to anyone. And statistics show that it does so without regard to gender, ethnicity, religion or socioeconomic status.”
Chuck wrote that he and his wife were shocked to the core to learn that their daughter – a wife, mother of two and a respected professional – was addicted to meth and alcohol. A career military pilot, he added that he could “not begin to tell you how many times I preached no drug use in this family. Don’t even think about it.”
An Oregon reader shared a story of parental heartache caused by his young nephew, a heroin addict: “He got there through Oxycontin after a sports injury. … Heroin and opiates are a huge national problem in every socioeconomic rung.”
The stories, many of them heartbreaking, had a common theme of addiction at an early age and a system that too often fails to address the underlying problem of addiction as a disease. Some excerpts:
“As a grandmother, I am dealing with this disease hitting the third- generation victim, my 23-year-old-grandson.”
“The disease is always in control, and you would sell your soul to keep it that way.”
“My daughter is dealing with drug problems with her 16-year-old son, and it is heartbreaking for her and all the family who love him so much.”
“I am a 42-year-old woman who became addicted to prescription opiates at age 17. I’ve been in recovery for three years.”
“The real tragedy is that with few exceptions, our legislature, judiciary and law enforcement still see addicts as moral failures that need to be punished instead of treated. … we continue to lock them up at great expense to taxpayers and with no end in sight.”
Ginny Gobel wrote about her experience with her teenage son, which led to her ongoing role as an activist working to help other families and correct misconceptions about addiction and the stereotypes associated with it.
Gobel’s son started using marijuana at 14 and went from there to other drugs. He’d been popular and a good student with wholesome interests – pets, soccer, skiing, diving – he dove the Great Barrier Reef at 11 – but lost interest in them and became, in his mother’s words, “dark, secretive and nasty.”
Unable to find adequate services for him in Boise, she and her husband sent him to a therapeutic boarding school in another state. It helped a lot, but returning to Boise was problematic for a 15-year-old in recovery.
“Just when he started making new friends, his old friends started seeking him out and he started using again. Drugs robbed him and us of his high school years.”
Her son is grown now, lives in another state and is doing “all right,” she said. “But he knows what his life could have been without drugs. He’d have played sports and gone to college. … Drugs derailed those dreams, at least for now.”
These days Gobel devotes much of her time helping others deal with drug-related problems. She started a blog, http://www.blindersoff.org, on drug-use awareness for parents of adolescents. Boise High School is using it with positive results.
How widespread is drug use among teens? The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that one in four have used an illegal drug by the time they graduate from high school.
Is yours one of them? Red flags, Gobel says, include lying, irritability, changes in interests, sleep patterns, friends, health and acceptance of responsibility. If grades are plummeting and responsibilities at home are being neglected, you have reason to be concerned.
Help is available. Gobel’s blog has useful information, as does Dr. Ruth Potee’s video, “Addiction is a Brain Disease,” https://youtu.be/qjyvRQFbseQ. If you’d prefer a book, Gobel recommends “What’s Wrong with My Kid: When Drugs or Alcohol Might Be a Problem and What to Do about It,” by George E. Leary, Jr. Help also is available from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Behavioral Health Services and from private treatment centers.
Idaho is making some progress on treating addiction as a disease rather than a failure of morals or willpower. Boise is training police officers to deal more sensitively with the mentally impaired. Idaho will soon be the first Western state to have a chapter of Learn to Cope, a peer group for parents. Rep. Raul Labrador is supporting sentencing reform for non-violent offenders, many of them suffering with untreated substance-use disorder, and Idaho Atty. Gen. Lawrence Wasden is on record as supporting the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.
Much more remains to be done, however. Idaho has one of the country’s highest rates of opiate abuse among teens. One in five Idaho teenagers has taken a prescription drug belonging to someone else, usually a relative. We rank 21st among the states in deaths from opiate overdose.
We have a long way to go in fighting a disease that’s erasing the promise and threatening the lives of too many of our young people.

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.

So many people came to Grace Arnold’s birthday party that it was held at her church because they wouldn’t fit in her home. They came from as far away as Seattle and California.
She was turning 100, but that wasn’t my reason for being there. People live so much longer these days that 100th birthdays aren’t as newsworthy as they once were. I wanted to meet her to learn more about the early years of our mutual alma maters, Boise High School and Boise Junior College. That she had made history at BJC was an unexpected bonus.
Arnold and I had never met, but recognizing her in the crowded church hall shouldn’t have been a problem. How many people there would be a century old?
Actually, it was a problem. A number of the guests were getting up in years, and no one stood out as looking the way we expect centenarians to look. There was a white-haired woman seated at a table with a birthday cake big enough for a marching band, but she didn’t look anywhere close to 100. That couldn’t possibly have been her.
It was. Even after being introduced and conversing with her for a while, I had trouble believing how old she truly was. She walked unassisted, her hearing was better than some people’s half her age and her mind was clear and bright. We should all be so lucky.
It didn’t take long to realize that she was a force of nature, and had been all her life. At Boise High School, she was an “art girl” and a “letter girl,” a member of the art club, history club, home economics club and library staff, an honor student and a member of the National Honor Society. She didn’t tell me any of this herself; it was all in her 1933 Boise High School yearbook.
Then as now, students’ senior pictures were accompanied by predictions of what they’d end up becoming. Hers was “Old Maid.”
“I’m not sure how they came up with that,” she said, laughing. “I certainly wasn’t.”
Hardly. She was married twice, had three children and is a grandmother many times over. Her grandkids call her “GG,” for great grandmother.
I know. You’re wondering how she made history at BJC, now BSU. We’ll get to that, but first a wee bit more about Boise High in 1933.
Teachers stuck around in those days. My mother and one of my kids had the same English teacher I did – the redoubtable Inez Woesner. She was one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer.
“She influenced a lot of us,” Arnold said.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Woesner was her English teacher, too. The number of students she influenced would be in the thousands.
That brings us to BJC and Arnold’s role in its history. For years, I’ve heard that it was a woman who suggested blue and orange as the school colors. Every attempt to track her down, however, came to a dead end. So you can imagine my surprise upon learning that it was indeed a woman – namely Grace Arnold.
“There was a committee of us,” she said. “He wasn’t my husband yet, but my first husband and I were on it along with several others.”
BJC then was nothing like the BSU of today, which offers over 200 degrees to more than 22,000 students. It opened its doors (or quite possibly door, singular) in the fall of 1932 with 70 students and a full-time faculty of eight. It wasn’t even in the same place that the university is today. It was in the former St. Margaret’s Hall, an Episcopalian women’s academy on Idaho Street between 1st and 2nd. It was there that Arnold enrolled in the fall of 1933.
“We thought Boise was a big city then, but it was only about 25,000 people,” she said. “It wasn’t the Los Angeles of Idaho like it is today. And the school was very small. You knew just about everybody.”
A committee was formed to choose the school colors and a name for its athletic teams. Committee members thought that a Western theme would be appropriate, and chose the name “Broncos” for the wild horses of neighboring Owyhee County.
The first mascot was “Elmer,” a paper-mache’ horse that was cremated after every game. Belying a winning tradition that would span decades, the Broncos lost their first football game: St. Joseph’s Academy, 6; BJC, 0.)
A real horse as a mascot didn’t come along until 1965. By then, the word “cremate” undoubtedly had been used – figuratively, of course – to describe what the Broncos had done to opponents on the field.
When the time came for choosing school colors, Arnold suggested blue and orange because “Boise High School had red and white, and other schools had most of the other colors, but nobody had blue and orange.”
She still cheers for the Broncos and proudly wears blue and orange on game days.
One of her birthday gifts was a football signed by the coaches and players.
Appropriate. If not for her, they might be wearing pumpkin and puce.

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.

Note: Tim recently returned from Virginia and North Carolina. This is the second of two columns from the trip.

OUTER BANKS, N.C. – A recent segment on the evening news featured interviews with people on a beach about the approach of Hurricane Joaquin. That was “our” beach. We’d spent several nights in a house nearby and had left only the day before.
On previous visits to North Carolina, I’d seen little but cities and densely wooded hills and “hollers.” The Outer Banks couldn’t be more different. Topographically, ecologically and in just about every other way, they’re a world apart.
For readers unfamiliar with them, the Outer Banks are a strip of barrier islands and peninsulas separating three sounds from the Atlantic Ocean. The narrowest part, near Cape Hatteras, is about the width of two football fields. A baseball player standing in the middle could throw a ball to the sound on one side and the ocean on the other.
The house where we stayed was at Kitty Hawk, where motorized flight was born. It was a place I’d wanted to see since taking flying lessons as a teenager in hopes of becoming a dashing airline pilot. To go there is to appreciate the enormity of what the Wright Brothers achieved.
Until they made their first flights in 1903, most people thought human flight was patently impossible. The Wrights were ridiculed, dismissed as loonies.
They started out by studying birds and progressed to gliders, flying them with ropes, like kites. Above all, the brothers were scientists. They disproved existing theories of flight and devised their own. They made wind tunnels, built wings, propellers and other parts based on their theories, invented the first airplane engine.
And they were courageous, risking their lives with every flight. They never flew together, the rationale being that if one was killed the other would survive to carry on the work. When success made them “overnight sensations” after years of work, study and ridicule, their fans ranged from everyday people to kings and presidents. A towering monument to them was built at the summit of Kitty Hawk’s Kill Devil Hill, so named because buccaneers there favored rum “strong enough to kill the devil.”
One side of the monument bears a single word: genius.
A nearby museum features a replica of their plane, historic photos and other oddments, but to me the most interesting thing was the field where they made their early flights. Markers show the starting and ending points of successively longer attempts. You can walk the actual flight paths. The first was 40 of my footsteps. Forty steps that changed the world.
Fifty miles down the narrow highway that threads the Outer Banks is Cape Hatteras. A framed poster of its famous lighthouse, the tallest brick lighthouse in the world, graces a bathroom in our house and we were looking forward to seeing the real thing. Getting there, however, was a bit of a challenge.
If you saw the news reports, you know that Joaquin eventually changed course. But it was bearing down when we were there, and there had been so much rain that the road had reopened only the day before. Parts of it were still under nearly a foot of water.
After the towns of Kitty Hawk and Nags Head (combined population about 6,000), the character of the barrier islands changed. Vacation rentals and strip malls were left behind, and the highway became a lonely road lined by marshland, sound and ocean. It was a foggy, rainy weekday; ours was one of a very few cars on the road.
We spent a long time looking for a place my wife’s smartphone touted as a great restaurant but turned out to be a raw fish takeout, then stopped for lunch at Sunny’s Cafe in Hatteras Village. It was anything but sunny. By this time it was raining hard. We began to worry that the road, underwater in more and more places, might close again.
Sunny’s was downright dismal on this stormy, September day. Between the approaching storm and the absence of summer tourists, the lunch crowd was limited to us and a smattering of regulars. We ate, watched the rain through a window by our table and speculated about the course of the hurricane. It was a little like being in a scene from “Key Largo.” We paid the bill and, not wanting to chance the road closing, reversed our course and hurried “home” to Kitty Hawk – with one quick stop along the way.
The stop was the lighthouse. It looked exactly the way it does on our bathroom poster, but the setting was totally different. The foreground on the poster is sand and seashells, but all we could see were grass and trees. A National Park Service guide explained why. In 1999 (the poster is older than we thought), the lighthouse was moved 2,900 feet inland because of shoreline erosion.
How do you move a lighthouse that’s 193 feet tall and weighs 4,800 tons more than half a mile?
Slowly and carefully, on beams and rollers. The actual move, not counting years of planning and preparation, took a little over three weeks.
We spent four days in the Outer Banks and enjoyed every minute of it – Kitty Hawk, the Cape, the history, it was all great. But my favorite thing was standing on the beach, looking out at the eight-foot waves. There’s just something about the ocean, especially during a storm. I could have stood there all day, soaking it up – no summer crowds, no gridlock or honking horns – just the wild, natural beauty of the place.
Thanks, Joaquin, for sparing it.

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 http://www.woodwardcolumn.com.

Editor’s note: Tim recently returned from Virginia and North Carolina. This is the first of two columns from the trip.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Idahoans are known for their friendliness, but we’ve got nothing on Virginians.
My wife and I and some friends recently returned from Virginia, where people not only were friendly but Idaho-Virginia connections seemed to be everywhere.
Monticello, for example. I’d been to Thomas Jefferson’s home once before, to cover the opening ceremonies of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and have never been colder. The grounds were buried under a foot of snow and ice. Taking notes was all but impossible – the ink in my pens froze.
This visit was more congenial. We’d come to Charlottesville for the Boise State-University of Virginia football game. But our BSU shirts made us targets not of hostility, as happens in some cities civility prevents me from naming, but of southern hospitality.
“We’d like to welcome the Boise State people who are with us today,” a Monticello guide said to our tour group. “For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, they’re the ones who are going to beat the University of Virginia tomorrow night.”
That was a surprise. Hospitality is one thing, but predicting victory for the visiting team?
No one in the group – many of them Virginians – seemed to mind.
“Are you going to go easy on us tomorrow night?” a man in a UVA T-shirt asked us.
“I hope not,” one of his friends said. “I hope you beat us good. Then maybe we’ll get a new coach.”
A bigger surprise, however, was Ed Imhoff, our guide.
“I know Boise State better than you’d think,” he said. “I taught geology there when it was Boise College. It was only about five buildings then.”
Imhoff painted a different picture of Monticello than the one I’d come away with in 2003. Then it was all about Lewis Clark (and avoiding hypothermia). This time the weather was perfect, the grounds verdant and productive. Trees, over 160 species, showed the first hint of fall color, flowers bloomed along the walkways and harvest was in full swing in the sprawling garden.
In Jefferson’s time, Monticello was a cottage industry. Hundreds of workers, from artists and craftsmen to housekeepers and gardeners, built and maintained it. Many were slaves. Enlightened as he was in most ways, Jefferson was a paradox, condemning both debt and slavery while enjoying the luxuries they made possible. Our third president lived very well – French cuisine and fine wines, a butler and staff of servants, the best of everything. Even with the benefit of free labor – he inherited some 200 slaves – he died so deeply in debt that his grandson struggled much of his life to pay it off.
Monticello is four miles from Charlottesville, where a couple wearing BSU shirts gave us the standard “go, Broncos” greeting in a parking lot. Nothing unusual about that, except that they were Virginians.
“Our son works at BSU,” they explained. “And the Broncos are a great team so we wanted to show our support. Welcome to Virginia.”
In downtown Charlottesville, a coffee vendor outside a cafe was sporting a “Welcome BSU fans” sign on a chalkboard beside his cart.
“I’ve been a BSU fan ever since that game where they beat Oklahoma (the 2007 Fiesta Bowl),” he said. “That was one of the best college football games ever. Good luck tonight.”
Inside the cafe was the trip’s most colorful character. The specialty of the house was homemade ice cream; she was the dipper. She was in her 70s, had lived in Virginia all her life and had an accent thicker than Virginia sorghum molasses.
“Y’all are from Boise, huh? Y’all ever get out to Vegas?”
Without waiting for an answer, she added that she went “mostly to Atlantic City, but I like Vegas better. Y’all gamble? I do, but I’m not any good at it.”
With that she went on to say that she had won $19,000 on a dollar slot machine and $9,000 on a penny slot machine.
But she’s not any good at it.
Virginia all but reeks of history. In Richmond, we visited the Edgar Allen Poe Museum and learned that in addition to writing chilling tales, Poe was a boxer, set a school record in the broad jump and swam six miles upstream in the James river, a feat said to have never been duplicated.
We also ran into the grandmother of a BSU player there, and a woman from Idaho City who knew one of our daughters.
The most admirable example of Virginia hospitality came from a man we met in a restaurant. When a member of our group saw his UVA T-shirt, he couldn’t resist asking him what he thought of the game. The man hung his head and looked as if he was about to cry. When he noticed a couple of BSU shirts in the group, he smiled ruefully.
“Y’all beat us good,” he said. “But no hard feelings. I hope y’all have a wonderful trip.”
The Broncos had defeated his team on the field, but the Virginians’ hospitality was unbeatable. Some schools closer to home could learn from them.
Next: North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

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