I was sitting in a hotel lobby one evening when a man in a flowing orange African gown walked up, introduced himself and, over the next quarter hour of conversation, left little doubt that he was a force of nature. His name was Vincent Kituku.

  Kituku grew up in a mud hut in Kenya and went on to earn a PhD. from the University of Wyoming. You may recognize his name from the occasional Faith columns he writes for The Press. He is also a motivational speaker whose audiences have included, among others, the Boise State University football team. 

  More notably, he is the founder of Caring Hearts High School in his native Kenya. 

  Now, after years of growth and progress, the school could be in danger.

  Caring Hearts has been a game changer for Kenyan girls who otherwise would be living in poverty and have no chance at getting an education. They live on its campus, where they have good teachers, nutritious meals and a safe, supportive environment. Some have gone on to college. Without the school, their likely options with poverty and ignorance working against them would be arranged marriages to older men, prostitution or working as maids.

  I was fortunate enough to visit the school in 2016. It was remarkable even then. The girls were in class or studying from before dawn until bedtime. They were polite and respectful to their teachers. Even with the long hours and hard work required by their classes, they seemed happy. They smiled a lot, laughed a lot. They were beyond grateful to be there.

  Impressive as it was then, the school has improved dramatically in the three years since. When it opened in 2015, it had 56 students whose tuition, room and board were paid by sponsors. Now there are 165 sponsored students. Almost all of the sponsors are from the Treasure Valley. 

  The original school had four classrooms and a small science lab. Today it  has eight classrooms, a library, three science labs and a life-skills center where students learn to cook and sew. When the school opened, there was no reliable source of clean water. Now it has its own well and a commercial generator. A garden supplies not only vegetables for the students and staff, but produce to sell to help with expenses. 

  A new dining hall has replaced the corrugated metal shack where the students previously had their meals, and all of the buildings have been modified to make them accessible to students with disabilities. When a girl who is unable to walk was admitted as a student, Kituku bought her a wheelchair and built a stone walkway over the rough ground to make it easier for her to get to her classes.

  Only 13 percent of students who graduated from high schools in Kenya last year qualified for admission to universities. At Caring Hearts High School, 47 percent qualified. The rest were admitted to government-sponsored vocational training programs. 

  All of this has been largely due to the aforementioned force of nature.

  “It’s just amazing what Vincent has been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time,” Janet Benoit said.

  You might recognize that name as well. Janet is the mother of Katy Benoit, the University of Idaho graduate student who was fatally shot in 2011 by one of her professors. It was a big story, and one that had a lasting effect on Kituku. He had lost loved ones himself, and the senseless loss of such a promising young woman – gifted musician, outstanding student and recipient of multiple Congressional awards for achievement in public service and personal development, affected him deeply.

  “Katy’s successes in all she did and how she cared for others was inspiring,” he said. “… Her story inspires the vulnerable girls at Caring Hearts High School to believe in themselves and turn their dreams into reality.”

  Last year, Janet Benoit, her husband Gary and some of their friends went to Kenya to visit the school and its center named for Katy.

  “When we were there, we realized how perfect it was because of who Katy was,” she said. “She looked out for people. She loved other cultures and sought out and helped foreign exchange students. When I saw the girls at Caring Hearts, I thought, ‘Oh, my Gosh – Katy would love this!’”

  When they returned from Kenya, Benoit and two of her friends, Doneta Stephensen and Susan Thompson, wanted to continue to help the students. One of the girls’ greatest needs was for sanitary supplies during their periods. They were either unavailable or the girls couldn’t afford them, meaning missed school days. 

  Working with Days for Girls and Stephensen’s seamstress sister, Margaret Sheirbon, the women began making washable, reusable supplies for the students. They started a team that now numbers some 50 women who have volunteered an estimated 55,000 hours to the project.

  Want to help? The team has a constant need for materials (cotton and flannel) and volunteers. Financial donations also are welcome. Click on swboiseid@daysforgirls.org or call Thompson at 208 599-1885.

  The women’s goal is to start a sustainable business at the high school that will employ local seamstresses to teach the students sewing skills and produce salable kits of reusable supplies. 

  The high school’s overriding need at the moment, however, is to remove a potential threat to its students. A rental house has been built just outside the perimeter of its campus. Kituku worries that the school he and others have worked so hard to nurture could become a target of terrorist groups that have struck other schools in Africa.

  “It is safe to say that a property like that could be rented by a member of Al Shaban, the terrorist group that attacked and killed 148 students in a university in Kenya in 2014,” he said. “Or kidnap the girls like Boko Haram did in Nigeria.”

  A reference to the 276 secondary school students kidnapped in 2014 by militants pretending to be guards. Some of the girls have died; many are still missing.

  The rental house’s owner has agreed sell it to Kituku for $60,000. So far he’s raised about a third of that. If you’d like to help, mail your tax-deductible donation to Caring Hearts and Hands of Hope, P.O Box 7152, Boise 83707.

  Questions: Contact Kituku at (208) 376-8724 or Vincent@kituku.com.

  “We are already renting all the apartments near the school for our teachers and support staff,” he said “The house would provide a needed facility for school functions and short-term accommodation for out of town guests who are there to help our school.”

  Owning the house, of course, would also provide security for students, employees and school property.

  “In Kenya, it’s important to know who lives near the school and what they do. We need that house. It’s critical.”

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

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Brad Eells may have been right.

  “It’s all your fault,” he wrote of Hurricane Dorian setting its sites on  Florida and causing the Boise State-Florida State game to be moved from Jacksonville to Tallahassee.

  His email was one of a number of reader responses to a column of two weeks ago, warning Bronco fans that “Tropical Storm Tim” would be at the game. My ability to attract violent weather while traveling, particularly to BSU games, is well documented. The trip to Florida was no exception.

  DAY ONE:  The trouble begins. A thunderstorm in Dallas, our stopover en route to Jacksonville, delays our takeoff in Boise. Arriving three hours late in Dallas, we’re told that we have ten minutes to make our connection.

  At some airports, this wouldn’t be a problem. At the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, it is. Signs advertise that it’s a “global airport,” meaning that by the time you run to your gate somewhere in the next county, you feel like you’ve circled the globe.

  “How long do we have to board?” I asked the gate attendant between gasps and suspected coronary occlusions.

  “None. You have to board right now.”

  “But our flight from Boise was late and my wife and friends are behind me, running to catch this flight. Can you give them a minute?”

  She closed the gate just as they arrived. We’d have to walk to another distant gate to rebook for a flight several hours later. At the gate for that flight, an attendant announced that it had been changed to a different gate. 

  “But don’t worry, folks,” she said. “I think it’s still in the U.S.”

  She didn’t really say that; I made it up. But it was a very long walk, followed by still another gate change.

  Sensing our frustration, a friendly cart driver gave us a ride to a stairway leading to the next level, leaving us with only a quarter-mile or so to walk. Day One ended with our 3 p.m. arrival in Jacksonville being closer to 11 p.m. By the time we rented a car and drove to the day’s final destination, St. Augustine, Fla., it was after midnight.

  DAY TWO: Weather Channel headline:  “Hurricane Dorian upgraded to a Category Two. Takes aim at Jacksonville.”

  Jacksonville was roughly 40 miles away, too close for comfort. Floridians, however, take hurricanes with admirable aplomb.

  “I’ve lived here ten years and survived two hurricanes, both of them catastrophic,” a hotel employee told us. “This one only has 100 mph winds.”

  Only 100 mph. More than twice as strong as winds that blew down trees in Boise this summer. Hardly worth mentioning.

  DAY THREE: Dorian is upgraded to a Category Three, with landfall expected somewhere on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. This, of course, was where we were. I make a point when traveling in the Southeast to be  squarely in the path of any hurricane, tornado or tropical storm anywhere in the same time zone. 

  Speculation about where the hurricane would reach the U.S.  varied wildly among the hotel guests:

  “It’s heading for West Palm Beach.”

  “It’s turning toward Georgia.”

  “It’s veering west Toward Texas.”

  “It’s at Cape Canaveral and crossing the state to Tampa.”

  This from a man who lived in Tampa and was rushing home to board up his house.

  Hurricanes, in other words, are about as predictable as the president’s tweets.

  At stores throughout St. Augustine, bottled water and other essentials were selling out. Lines formed at gas stations, with supplies dwindling rapidly. We were in line behind a man who filled six five-gallon tanks, draining the regular pump before switching to premium. Then he filled the tank of his luxury convertible. At one point it looked like a fight would break out. It didn’t, but it was sobering to see how quickly things could get nasty.

  This was the day the site of the game was changed from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, out of the storm zone. We’d planned to spend the day in St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, but with the hurricane strengthening to a Category Four (catastrophic), it seemed prudent to leave early for the hotel we’d booked in Jacksonville, monitor Weather Channel updates and decide what to do next.  

  DAY FOUR: With the storm bearing down and Jacksonville in its path, what to do next was pretty obvious – get out of the bulls-eye as quickly as possible. That meant canceling that night’s reservation in Jacksonville, booking rooms in Tallahassee and, if possible, flying home from there after the game.

  The hotel part was easy. My wife booked rooms in Tallahassee on her phone while Jacksonville was still in the rearview mirror.

  The airline part was another story.

  Our friends who were flying on Delta changed their reservations to leave the morning after the game. American couldn’t get us out for another day and a half. We’d have to book an additional night in Tallahassee, where hotel operators were overwhelmed with calls from desperate BSU fans. The hotel where we’d booked the first two nights could squeeze us in, but the rate would be double. Taxi companies increased their prices as well. Hurricane rates.

  DAY FIVE: What’s it like to go to a football game in the deep South in August? It’s like being on hot, metal seats in a Turkish bath with the Southern sun parboiling you into a limp, soggy mess. Paramedics carried people out of the stadium. My wife was so shaky and sick it took ten  minutes in a cold shower after the game for her to become something resembling herself again.

  The game itself? The first half, as you know if you watched or read the sports reports, wasn’t one of BSU’s best.

  “I feel like we’re playing Boise High School,” a Florida State fan was overheard  to say. 

  The second half, as you also know, was a turnaround for the ages. It was a happy group of Bronco fans who left Doak Campbell Stadium that day. To their credit, FSU fans were gracious in what had to have been a bitter loss. They congratulated us, thanked us for coming, wished us well for the rest of our stay.

  Did the game make up for the hurricane?

  No. It was a great win for Boise State, but no game can make up for the suffering of those who, unlike those of us who were able to fly away, were left to rebuild their homes and their lives.

  We never saw more than light rain, but Dorian taught me a lesson. Bronco fans worried about attending future games in the Southeast can relax. Tropical Storm Tim will be watching them at home on television.

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

 Warning to Boise State football fans heading to Jacksonville for the Florida State game:  tropical storm likely.

  Disclaimer: There is nothing official about this warning. The forecast doesn’t call for a storm.

  But don’t rule one out.

  The reason:  Tropical Storm Tim will be at the game.

  Regular readers of this column are well aware of my ability to run afoul of the weather gods when traveling. I’ve been run out of mountain lakes by storms that turned bone-dry creek beds into knee-deep rapids, stuck in blizzards on mountain passes, celebrated Thanksgiving on Puget Sound with gale-force winds, a power outage and a lily white turkey languishing on a hibachi. 

  A group of friends trusting enough to travel with the Woodwards to Boise State road games have learned the hard way about my propensity for encountering weather-related emergencies. 

  The games are an opportunity to spend a few days taking in local attractions in other parts of the country. That was the case a few years ago with a Boise State-Virginia game in Charlottesville, Va. Charlottesville is a few hours’ drive from Kitty Hawk, N.C. and the Outer Banks. We planned on pleasant days of exploring beaches and learning more about the place where the Wright brothers invented the airplane.

  Until the storm hit. Hurricane Joaquin in the Atlantic combined with the highest tides of the year to flood much of the North Carolina coast. High tides, heavy rain and strong winds had us muttering the star-crossed travelers’ lament:

  “What the #$%@! are we doing here?”

  Waves battering the beaches were as high as we were tall. In a photo taken on a beach, my wife’s hair looks as if she’d been standing in the wake of Air Force One. Roads closed; normally busy resort towns were all but deserted.

  Did we come home early? Did we hunker down and ride out the storm? Did we try to get out of its path?

  No. We’d come to see the sights and weren’t about to let a little weather stop us. So, throwing caution (and everything else that wasn’t tied down) to the howling winds, we headed to Cape Hatteras.

  Cape Hatteras is a narrow, broken strip of islands stretching into the Atlantic from the mainland and back again. So many ships have sunk in its  treacherous waters that they’re known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The Cape Hatteras road is an alleged highway, with apologies to proper highways everywhere. Parts of it are single lane. There are bathrooms that are wider. 

  This was the road we drove as the storm was bearing down. Parts of it were underwater. It was a good thing our rental was a big SUV or we could have ended up doing a highly successful imitation of a sailboat.

  My most vivid memory of that day is of sitting in a little cafe where we stopped to have lunch and confer over whether to turn back to our B&B or continue on and have our names added to a future plaque memorializing those swept out to sea. The sky was the color of lead. Rain was blowing sideways.

  The conference was a short one, frequently punctuated by “What the #$%@! are we doing here?”

  We turned back.

  It was a good thing because the road closed a few hours later. 

  Back at the B&B, we vowed to avoid future games in hurricane country. A vow we kept – until last year’s game in Troy, Alabama. By then, memories of Cape Hatteras had lost some of their punch. And what were the odds of something like that happening twice?

  Pretty good, actually.

  At first we didn’t pay much attention to the red flag that went up on the beach. Clouds had replaced the blue skies of the previous days and the wind was picking up, but no big deal.

  Then a second red flag went up, meaning the beach was closed to swimming because it was too dangerous.

  The reason: Tropical Storm Gordon.

  The storm short-circuited a story I’d wanted to write for years. A public relations officer with the Navy had arranged a tour of the base in Pensacola, Fla., where I was stationed decades earlier and to which I had never returned. (A tornado, incidentally, flattened several blocks of Pensacola during my tenure there.) The helpful P.R. guy had gone so far as to set up interviews with Idaho students at the base.

  All for nothing. Gordon closed the base the day before the interview.

  It also ended our vacation. After yet another storm conference, we checked out early and drove to Mobile, Ala., to catch our flight home. The next day, the storm closed the causeway to Mobile. If we hadn’t left early, we’d have missed our flight. Lodging options were limited on the rural road we took to Mobile. Think Billy Ray’s Rooming House, Dogwater, Ala. 

  We were fortunate to get some of the last rooms at a hotel in Mobile, where we  spent the evening sheltering in the lobby comparing storm notes with other guests and Coast Guard emergency workers. Gordon wasn’t a hurricane, but it was as close as any of us had been. People were on edge. If you’ve seen  “Key Largo,” the classic hurricane movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, you have an idea of what it was like.

  Now, Tropical Storm Tim – clearly a slow learner – is heading to Florida during Hurricane Season.

  Of course there might not be a hurricane, tropical storm, tornado or other weather-related disaster there. The weather might be perfect. So don’t change your travel plans, and by all means enjoy the game.

  But don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

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

Navy Week Brings Events, Memories

  If you asked today’s teenagers what the draft was, they’d probably say it was a cold air current that made them move someplace else while they were texting.

  The draft, as in “your life as you know it is over,” hasn’t existed since 1973, long enough that most young people today have little or no idea that it was a call to mandatory military service. 

  Prior to 1973, the draft was something most young men dreaded. Barring a disability or other acceptable excuse, young men of my generation could expect to get “greetings” from the president and an all-expense-paid trip to the war in Vietnam.

  When my draft notice arrived, my father gave me some surprising advice. Dad had served in the Marine Corp during World War II. Expecting him to recommend the Marine Corps rather than reporting for an army physical, I was surprised when he suggested the Navy. It was some of the best advice he ever gave me.

  With Boise Navy Week coming up next week, Aug. 19-25, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about my sailor days. And with relatively few young people from landlocked Idaho joining the Navy, or for that matter knowing little if anything about it, it seemed appropriate to share what it’s like for a young person who has never been to sea or maybe even left Idaho to be whisked off to a different world.

  I was a struggling college student when my greetings from the president  arrived. Struggling as in flunking out for lack of interest and having no idea of what to do with my life. When he read my note apologizing for doing poorly on a final exam and saying it might not matter because my future probably included Vietnam, a kindly professor took pity and gave me a passing grade.

  That was when Dad’s advice sent me to see a Navy recruiter. He signed me up and promptly administered a battery of tests. My grades were 100 percent on three of them – and 55 on the mechanical exam.

  “Son,” he said with a trace of a smile, “we don’t want you anywhere near a ship. You should think about joining Security Group.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t tell you because it’s classified. But it’s good duty and almost all of it is shore-based.”

  First stop: Charleston, S.C. 

  In August! Never having been outside the western U.S., I wasn’t prepared for Charleston’s climate.

  “What’s the matter with the air?” I asked an elderly gentleman at the airport.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Why is there all this steam in the air? Did something explode?”

  “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, get used to it.”

 Nothing was ever dry. Sheets, towels, clothing, everything was damp at best. But Charleston itself was seductive – tropical flowers, cobblestone streets, antebellum mansions … It was a breathtaking new world for a kid from arid Idaho, and one I would have missed if not for the Navy.

  Next came a training center in Pensacola, Fla., where we learned the finer points of low-level spying on our Cold War enemies. Before Pensacola, I wouldn’t have believed that beaches could have sand as white as sugar and water so electric blue that you couldn’t stop looking at it.

  Then Germany, where everything from cafes to cathedrals seemed  impossibly picturesque. It was there that we intercepted a message one Christmas Eve that none of us would ever forget.

  Virtually all of the messages we copied were in code, but this one was in plain English. Our work and even our presence in Germany supposedly were top secret, but the message began by listing every one of our names and ended by wishing us a Merry Christmas from the Russian Navy. It wasn’t quite the stuff of “Seal Team” (the TV show), but it was exciting enough that we talked about it for weeks.

  While stationed in Germany, I was able to visit every country in western Europe except Finland and Portugal. Without the Navy, none of that would have happened. 

  Those kinds of experiences are unknown to many of today’s young people, who don’t have to worry about the draft and know little or nothing about the Navy. Navy Week is a way to address that.

  “It’s not a recruiting tool, but it does stimulate interest in young people,” Lt. Jacqui Maxwell said.

 Young people, and people of all ages. The lead planner for Navy Week, Maxwell added that its purpose is “to reach out to the public to tell them what we do for a living. A lot of people in inland cities don’t know much about the Navy. A common misconception is that our planes are Air Force planes.”

  That can’t sit well with Navy pilots, who among other things fly the fighter jets of the famous Blue Angels aerobatic team and pride themselves on their ability to land on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers. The last I heard, the Air Force doesn’t have aircraft carriers.

  The Navy is the only branch of the military that conducts outreach weeks in cities around the country. Boise’s will include dozens of events, including performances by a Navy band and rifle team, opportunities to meet Navy reservists and crew members of the nuclear submarine USS Boise, and Navy oceanographers displaying core samples and their weather glider at the Western Idaho Fair. Sailors will be popping up everywhere from the fair and the Grove plaza to the Boys and Girls Club, Aquarium of Boise and family night at the public library. The Press will publish more details later this month.

  “We try to hit every demographic, from youth to veterans,” Maxwell said. “We love to come to Boise. It’s amazing how many Navy veterans there are there, and they’re always happy to see sailors in uniform. It’s a way for them to reminisce.”

  One of those veterans is Eric Lowe, one of only two Boiseans ever to serve aboard the nuclear submarine USS Boise.

  “It’s always great to see the Navy come to town,” Lowe said. “Navy Week does a good job of doing a Fleet Week type of community event in cities that don’t have a port and a naval presence. It energizes local veterans’ groups, it’s an opportunity for members the USS Boise crew to visit the namesake city, and for me personally it takes me back to what it was like to serve. It brings back a lot of great memories.”

  Great memories? No argument.

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

  Dannie Wurtz was watching television at her home in San Diego when a commercial caught her attention. It didn’t make her day.

  The commercial extolled Idaho’s scenic beauty and other attractions and encouraged viewers to visit.

  “It didn’t encourage them to move to Idaho, but what’s going to happen?” she asked. “They visit, see how nice Idaho is and some of them move there.”

  The commercial was of interest to her because she lived in Boise for ten years. A San Diego native, she did the opposite of what thousands of Californians are doing and moved back to California from Idaho in 2004 following the death of her mother, who lived in Boise.

  “I wanted to go back to Boise sometime, but it’s not the same any more,” she said. “It’s sad to hear about all the traffic and other changes.”

  Sound familiar? It’s hard to get through a day any more without reminders of how much Boise and other cities in the valley have changed: gridlock, long lines, short tempers.

  I was slowing down to stop at a red light last week when another driver passed me on the right. Zooming past at well over the speed limit, he shouted something unprintable before cutting back in front of me in his haste to stop at the light before I did.

  In the same week, one of my daughters lamented an hour-long, stop-and-go drive to take her daughter to a piano lesson. It used to take 20 minutes.

  While I was writing this, my wife called to say she’d be late getting home because she was stuck in traffic.

  “I’ve been on the bridge on Emerald Street for 15 minutes,” she fumed. “The light turns green for about ten seconds and stays red forever. It’s insane!”

  One of the television news programs recently ran footage of a packed parking lot at Barber Park. So many people were floating the river that no parking places were left at the put-in.

  It hasn’t been that many years since that wouldn’t have happened. And, going back more years, the valley is so changed that it hardly seems like the same place.

  When I was growing up here, most of the land between Nampa and Boise was farmland. Boise was a city of 34,000, Nampa, 18,000.   Meridian was a sleepy farm town of 2,000. Eagle was so small it isn’t even listed in some reports for that year.

  Now, according to 2019 figures cited in World Population Review,  Boise’s population is almost seven times what it was then. Meridian’s is 108,000, Nampa’s 96,000. The once bucolic, blink-or-you’ll-miss-it berg of Eagle is 28,000 and has some of the highest housing prices in the state.

  Home prices have risen so much that many first-time buyers are priced out of the market. One of them is my granddaughter who just received her bachelors degree at Boise State and can’t even think about buying a house. Another granddaughter and her husband had to move when a woman in California bought the house they were living in and nearly doubled their rent.

  When I was in college, you didn’t have to worry about finding a parking place at Barber to float the river. You could float it on a weekday and not see another soul. You could drive across town in a few minutes. We used to fish and hunt ducks in a wooded, rural area that’s now a busy shopping center skirted by major arterials with non-stop traffic. 

  That’s not to say that all the changes are bad. The Treasure Valley’s cities aren’t just bigger; they’re more vibrant, attractive and interesting. We have cultural, educational, entertainment and business opportunities we once wouldn’t have believed possible.

  Newcomers have helped make that happen. Many of the newcomers have brought needed skills, given back to our communities, made this a better place to live. They aren’t all jerks who drive like lunatics and disrespect our way of life. 

 Californians included. Californians are famously resented, not just in Idaho but in other states where they’re moving, because there are so many of them. A recent New York Times story reported that last year alone 20,000 Californians moved to Boise (which also has a video pitching its attractions).

  No wonder it’s taking longer to drive anywhere.

  That said, should we hate Californians? Hate doesn’t accomplish anything. It would make more sense to look at why they’re moving here and ponder it as a cautionary tale. 

  “People from California are jumping ship left and right,” Wurtz said. “They’re moving to Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Arizona. The policies, prices, fees and taxes in California are pushing people out of the market. In Idaho, I paid $58 to register my car. In California, it’s $600. Our power bill is $250 to $300 a month, and we pay $8,000 a year in property taxes. We have sales tax, property taxes, luxury taxes,  retirement taxes … People can’t afford to live here so they’re leaving.”

  “… Idaho has always been 15 or 20 years behind California. Fast forward 15 or 20 years, and if things continue the way they are you’ll have what we have now.”

  When she first moved to Idaho and still had her California plates, “some guy tried to send me a message by trying to run me off the road at Lucky Peak. Another two feet and I’d have gone into the reservoir.”

  That’s appalling. Most Idahoans are known for being friendly and welcoming.

  But should we be doing things that encourage people to move here?

  At a time when we’re spending more and more of our time stuck in gridlock, our housing and infrastructure can’t keep up with the demand and home prices and taxes are at record levels and rising, maybe it’s time to rethink the time-honored idea of promoting growth. 

  Instead of doing glossy commercials telling people how wonderful Boise and Idaho are, perhaps we should be telling them about the things the best-cities surveys don’t mention: low incomes, the rising cost of living, traffic jams, winter inversions, summer air-quality alerts  …

  My guess is that a majority of the people who live here have had enough of being one of the fastest growing places in the country and would love it if we slowed down and let our infrastructure catch up.

  A late Boise Chamber of Commerce director was known for coining the phrase “Greater Boise.” These days, “Lesser Boise” sounds pretty good.

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

 

  Will researchers ever make up their minds?

  Time and time again, a researcher or team of researchers releases a study saying that something is bad for us. Or that something is good for us. Then, months later, another study is released saying it isn’t. 

  It’s happened twice in just the last couple of months. 

  Nothing exemplifies this better than egg studies. Researchers said for years that eggs were bad for us. They were high in cholesterol, would clog our arteries like sludge in a garden hose and cause us to keel over any minute. Eating eggs was Omelet Roulette. Two eggs sunny side up might as well have been twin gun barrels pointed at our livers. 

  Then a study was released saying that eggs weren’t so bad, after all. We could eat a few eggs a week and be just fine. The ink on the study had hardly dried when another study was released saying that eating any eggs at all would shorten our lives.

  So which is it?

  The answer, of course, is that no one really knows because whatever the latest study says is almost certain to be refuted by the next study.

  The chicken study, for example.

  The chicken study, published several weeks ago in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reported that white meat from chickens is just as bad for our cholesterol levels as red meat from cows.

  It’s an understatement to say this came as a shock. For those who have been eschewing rather than chewing red meat for health purposes, it was a little like saying that fruits and vegetables are as bad for us as doughnuts or lard.

  Though not a vegetarian, I’ve been cutting back on red meat for years. Not because of a dislike for it, but because the so-called experts who study these things said it was bad for us. While my wife happily consumed bacon with breakfast, a burger for lunch and steak or pork chops for dinner, I made a prolonged if not always successful effort to stick with chicken or fish.

  If you think that’s easy, try watching everyone else enjoy a juicy steak or a burger with all the trimmings while you’re opening a can of smelly sardines.

    It will be interesting to see how advertisers react to the chicken study. Will Chick fil-A switch from cows telling us to “eat more chickn” to chickens telling us to eat more cheeseburgers? Will pork go from being “the other white meat” to being “the other pot roast?”

  Red wine used to be good for us. Then any alcohol at all was bad for us.

  Butter was bad for us, until the researchers decided that margarine was worse for us.

  Coffee was bad for us. Until it was good for us.

  It isn’t just food, either. Even something as basic as walking, once universally thought to be a healthful form of exercise, has come under the skeptical eye of a researcher.

  My father walked every day of his life and enjoyed good health until he died at almost 84. I’ve tried to follow his example, and nothing has been a better incentive than the Fitbit received a few years ago as a Father’s Day gift.

  Until recently, the benefits of Fitbit’s 10,000 steps a day mantra were unquestioned. Dr. Oz, among others, repeatedly told us to walk “10,000 steps every day. No excuses.”

  Some Fitbit junkies were neurotic about it, which wasn’t great for their mental health, but for millions of people the goal was an incentive to avoid becoming a couch potato. I hit the target a couple of days a week, came reasonably close other days, lost weight, felt better.

  Then I-Min Lee came along. A Harvard epidemiology professor, Min Lee is the lead author of a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It reported that the previously accepted goal of walking 10,000 steps a day is little more than a marketing strategy.

  The conclusion was based on the premise that the Japanese figure for 10,000 looks like a man walking, and research claiming that 4,400 steps were enough to lower the mortality rate for elderly women.

  So what about the rest of us?

  If 4,400 are enough for elderly women, how many are enough for elderly men? 

  And how about everyone else? Do young, fit people need to walk more or less than old people?

  Or should we all just settle for a stroll around the block and a nice nap?

  My wife has a Sleepbit. I call it that because she uses it to track her sleep rather than her steps. She walks in moderation and eats pretty much whatever she wants.

  I religiously walk thousands of steps every day, try to avoid eggs and red meat, have increased my intake of fruits and vegetables – and still have to take a statin drug to lower my cholesterol. She doesn’t do those things and her cholesterol numbers are perfect. 

  So maybe the researchers are right. Maybe we should throw away our fitness trackers, increase our intake of eggs, meat lover’s pizza and pork rinds and wash them down with Singapore Slings.

  It might not improve our numbers, but it would be a lot more fun.

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

 Living quietly in a west Boise mobile home park is a man whose surroundings give few hints of his former life in the inner circle of stardom.

  The mobile home is much like those around it – neatly kept, flowers out front. Step inside and you’ll see a spacious living room with comfortable furniture and a big-screen television. The only clue to its owner’s career are two guitars on stands.

  His name is Bobby Gibson. He’s 84 years old, and though the term is typically used for the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and other pop stars, he is, in his own way, a guitar god.

  “There’s really nothing to playing the guitar,” he jokes. “After the first 50 or 60 years, it’s easy.”

  He started playing at ten. Like many great players, he grew up in a musical family. His mother taught him his first chords. An uncle who played the banjo taught him to accompany him. He made his first money playing music when he was 11, earning three dollars to play at a barn dance in Ridgefield, Wash. 

  When he was a teenager living in Vancouver, Wash., he met a young man who was working as a disc jockey at the local radio station. He played guitar, too, and so began a lifelong friendship. They played together at Grange halls and barn dances. The young man, then in his early twenties, was Willie Nelson.

  “He went by the name Texas Willie for his radio show,” Gibson said.

  Gibson spent his teens playing in the Vancouver area with whoever he could wherever he could for whatever he could make. His first job at a dance hall paid $17 a night. Then as now, local musicians were exploited.

  “We played at a packed Grange hall one night. It was so crowded you could barely move. We said, ‘Boy, are we ever gonna’ make a lot of money tonight!’ They paid us $3 each.”

  Young but talented, Gibson was destined for bigger things than playing for a few bucks a night at Grange halls. He went on to own a recording studio, front his own band and play with well-known musicians in Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and other cities.

  One was the late Merle Haggard, recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award and a member of Country Music Hall of Fame. They were drinking wine together one night when they decided to record a song at Gibson’s studio.

  “When we got to the studio, the drum kit that was usually there had been taken out for a gig. We improvised by using a microphone case and a toilet brush instead.”

  How did the song turn out?

  “It was beautiful.”

  When a talented but relatively unknown black country singer lost some work because of the color of his skin, the leader of the Bobby Gibson Band had him sit in for a few nights to help him make ends meet. Charley Pride went on to have 40 number-one hits on the country charts and be a part owner of a major league baseball team.

   Gibson opened for Johnny Cash. Among his memorabilia is a letter from Cash, thanking him for loaning him money for a set of tires.

 He played with Buck Owens, who sat in with the Bobby Gibson Band one night in Portland.

  “His whole band was sitting in the front row.”

  I asked him if that made him nervous, having all those musicians watching him.

  “No,” he replied “I’ve been doing this so long and had so many people watch me play that it doesn’t bother me who’s in the audience.”

  His guitar hero is the late Chet Atkins, whose influence can be heard in his playing. Atkins was known for playing base, rhythm and melody at the same time. Gibson does the same thing, so he’s as comfortable playing for audiences by himself as he is with a band.

  Atkins’s name was all but synonymous with the Gretsch brand of guitars. Gibson is a Gretsch-endorsed artist, which is a pretty big deal. There are only about 20 of them. 

  Gretsch guitars were favorites of the Beatles’ George Harrison.

  “Mr. Gretsch told me sales increased so much because of George Harrison that they couldn’t keep up. They couldn’t make them fast enough.”

  At an annual gathering of the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society, Australian  Grammy-nominated guitarist Tommy Emmanuel filled in as Gibson’s drummer. Gibson has a picture in his photo album of Emmanuel learning a guitar lick from him.

  He played for years with the late Nokie Edwards, a founding member of the Ventures.

  “In all that time, we only played one Ventures song,” he said. “I forgot which song it was, but I didn’t know it. I don’t care who you are or how good you are, you have to have at least a basic idea. I had to ask what the chords were.”

  In addition to names previously mentioned, Gibson either played or spent time   with Patsy Cline, Merle Travis, Jim Reeves, George Benson, Brenda Lee, Les Paul, Conway Twitty, Glen Campbell and some I’ve probably forgotten.

  Because he seems to have played with just about everybody who’s anybody in the country music of his generation, I asked him whether there was anything left that he’d still like to accomplish.

  “Yes,” he said. “I love playing beautiful melodies. I’d like to play with a symphony orchestra someday. That’s one thing I’ve never done.”

  Six years ago, he moved to Boise to be closer to a daughter and her husband. Last year, he was inducted into the Fingerpickers Hall of Fame along with Duane Eddy (famous for the twangy guitar sound in “Peter Gunn,” “Rebel Rouser” and other hits). Past inductees include his hero, Chet Atkins, which is as good an indication as any of what an honor it was..

  I asked him how hard he had to practice to be that good.

  “I’ve never practiced,” he said. “I got paid to learn my whole life. As the jobs progressed, I was able to play five or six nights a week and didn’t have to have another job. I’d play some nights in a cowboy outfit and some in a tuxedo. I learned everything on the bandstand. I didn’t have time to practice.”

  Never?

  “Never. There just wasn’t time for it.”

  With that I thanked him for the interview. Then I went home and smashed all my guitars.

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

 The three most popular toys for nine-year-old boys, according to an online site versed in such things, are an Anki Cosmo Robot, a Lego Tech Whack Building Kit and a Nerf Official N-strike Elite Strong-Arm Blaster.

  I have only the vaguest idea of what any of those things are.

  No surprise there; I have only a vague idea of how to use most of the things on my Smart Phone.

  Nor do I have more than even a vague memory of what comprised my ninth-birthday loot. A baseball glove, perhaps; maybe some model-railroad accessories or the gift sure to disappoint all nine-year-old boys – school clothes.

  Landon Palmer’s birthday gifts included books about American presidents, a presidential trivia card game and Christmas ornaments with paintings of presidents.

  His birthday cake was decorated with American flags and busts  of presidents.

  The guests at his birthday party wore presidential masks.

  “I just like history,” he explained. “Especially learning about the presidents.”

  Landon recently finished third grade at Nampa’s Lake Ridge Elementary School. A video he saw there ignited his passion for presidential history.

  “The video was about all the presidents,” he said. “It made me want to learn more about them.”

  Landon’s mother, Lyndsay Soule, says he “knows all of the presidents in order. He likes being asked things like who the president was in 1895.”

  Who was it?

  “Grover Cleveland’s second term,” he proudly replied, glad I’d asked. 

  He also knows all the states and their capitals, but that’s another story.

  His favorite president, without a close second, is Abraham Lincoln. He likes him so much that he asked for an Abraham Lincoln suit for his birthday. 

  And wore it to his birthday party. 

  “I like him best because he won the Civil war and made Idaho a state,” he said. “I like his second Inauguration address and his other speeches.”

  “He’s working on memorizing the Gettysburg Address,” Soule added.

   Expecting him to reel off names of the founding fathers, I asked him what presidents he liked besides Lincoln. Washington, perhaps? Jefferson? Madison?

  “No, none of those guys.”

  His favorites other than Lincoln: William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and Millard Fillmore.

  Millard Fillmore? The Whig who proposed sending the slaves back to Africa? He’s consistently ranked among the worst presidents. Landon had to be joking.

  He wasn’t.

  “I like him because he was president when California became a state. And I like California because of Disneyland.”

  A perfectly good reason for a nine-year-old boy.

 He likes Eisenhower because he was “a general who helped win World War II.” Wilson because he was “the last president to ride a horse to his inauguration.” Taft because he “had to get his own bathtub installed in the White House because he was so big. He was as big as a baby elephant.”

  “He wasn’t that big,” his mother interjected.

  “Well … almost.”

  Landon is a youthful encyclopedia of presidential trivia. He loves telling the story of Lincoln responding to a charge that he was two faced by asking whether he’d “be wearing this face if I had another one.” He smiles when recounting the tale of the president who got a speeding ticket.

  The president was Ulysses S. Grant. A cop named William West pulled him over for driving his favorite team of horses too fast, forced him to go to the police station and booked him for speeding. Grant, of course, was a towering figure at the time, not just as president but as the former commander of the Union Army. West may have been the bravest man in Washington.

  Credit Landon’s mom for nurturing his interest in history. When she learned during spring break that there was an A. Lincoln Exhibit at the Idaho State Archives in Boise, she took him there the very next day. When a staff member took a picture of Landon in his Lincoln suit and posted it on the archives’ website, it caught the eye of a household name in Idaho politics.

  The A. Lincoln Exhibit is comprised of Lincoln artifacts donated by Dave Leroy, former Idaho attorney general, lieutenant governor, congressional and gubernatorial candidate, and a lifelong Lincoln buff. When Leroy saw the picture of Landon online, he arranged to meet with him.

  And the nurturing reached a new level.

  Leroy gave Landon a coffee table book, “The Age of Lincoln,” and took  him on a tour of the Statehouse.

  Landon, his mother recalled, was “thrilled to meet Mr. Leroy and talk about their admiration and knowledge of ‘Abe.’ … It was such a gift to listen to the two of them swap stories about why they love our 16th president.”

  It was a two-way street. Landon learned things he didn’t know about Lincoln, and for Leroy spending time with Landon “reinforced my enthusiasm for those who have enthusiasm for history.”

 Being a lawyer and an admirer of Lincoln’s way with words, it didn’t take him long to come up with just the right nickname for Landon, “ the Little Lincoln.” He even invited him to appear with him at a seminar next fall, where Landon will deliver the Gettysburg Address.

  “When somebody does a presentation contemporary to Lincoln’s period, it can still send chills through people when you talk about the importance of his work,” Leroy said. “Landon would be well tailored in a Lincoln uniform and top hat to do that even at nine years old.” 

  With this being one of the more divisive periods in our history since Lincoln’s time, I asked the Little Lincoln what his hero would do if he could return and be president again.

  “I think his advice would be to do the good things and not the bad things.”

  “An acute analysis,” Leroy said. “Acute, and cute.”

  You might think a boy with a flair for history would want to teach it when he grows up.

  You’d be wrong.

  “No, I wouldn’t want to be a history professor. I want to go to Washington, D.C. and run for president.”

  A long shot?

  Of course. But somehow, just knowing that a boy that smart and passionate about history wants to be president makes me feel better about our future.

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

 

It’s not true that inanimate objects can’t speak to us.

I realized this recently during the annual rite of getting-the-back-yard-ready-for-summer.

  The yard  had gone unattended and virtually ignored for months. Weeds were sprouting, the lawn needed mowing, the deck was cluttered with lawn furniture and other oddments stored for the winter. All were covered with a formidable layer of grunge.

  The luxury of procrastinating was over. A public television crew was coming by to get my input for a documentary about Idaho, and the producer had suggested doing the filming in the back yard. It was time to get to work.

  Normally it’s a job I detest. But in freeing the summer yard art from winter storage in the garage, something unexpected happened. Unexpected and wonderful. 

  The first things to be dragged from the garage were the chimes. We bought them a few years ago at a shop in Port Townsend, Wash. I was reluctant because they were the most expensive chimes there, but my wife prevailed. She usually does when her husband is acting like a cheapskate, and in this case it was a good thing.

  The chimes were made by a company in a small town in Virginia and are hand-tuned. It took some experimenting to discover how significant that was. 

  The pricey chimes didn’t make a sound for the first week or two, even on moderately windy days. Not expecting much in the way of help, I emailed the company. My email was returned almost immediately by a woman named Cindy. Cindy suggested moving the chimes to different locations, where they’d be more likely to catch the wind. It didn’t help.

  “You probably need a bigger sail,” she wrote upon learning this. “I’ll send you one. Don’t worry. I’m sure your chimes will sing for you.”

  The bigger sail (the circular disc suspended below the chimes themselves) worked like magic. The chimes sang. They sang melodically, beautifully. The hand tuning was all it was cracked up to be. 

  They sang as I hung them up as the first step in the back yard’s resurrection. They made me think of the ever-helpful Cindy, and made me feel unexpectedly happy. Suddenly the spring cleanup didn’t seem as burdensome.

 Next came the beer-cap pot.

 A bit of explanation is required here. Attached to a back wall of our  house is a metal bottle opener. You insert the bottle, push it down with a flick of the wrist and the cap falls into a pot on the patio. For some reason, this never fails to make me smile. The pot, liberated from a garage shelf, spoke to me. It promised the imminent arrival of summer, cold beer and good times. 

  Lurking in a quiet corner of the dining room since October was the oldest member of the yard-art collection, the elephant.

  The elephant didn’t start life as yard art; it was an assignment for our younger daughter’s junior high school art class. It occupied a place of honor in the living room for years, but people kept running into it and breaking off its ears and tusks. 

  Now, glued together but for a missing tusk, it spends its summers in the back yard. It’s safer there. I put it in a patch of ivy, where it looked for all the world like a miniature elephant in a miniature jungle. It seemed pleased to be there. It pleased me to see it there.

  This brings us to the guitar-playing frog.

  No, that’s not a misprint. Every year a friend drives a truck to Mexico and loads it up with an eclectic assembly of yard art, from decorative glass balls to a life-sized metal bull. He sells it in a makeshift corral he set up at a busy intersection.

  The frog caught my eye when I stopped to visit him there one day. It’s frog green, of course, with a dapper purple hat and a bright yellow guitar. I dusted it off and carefully positioned it next to a pole that supports a birdhouse made by another friend. They complemented each other well, but gave me a twinge of guilt.

  “Go see your friends,” they seemed to say.

  They were right. It had been too long.

  Last came the copper pinwheel, the beach flag and the hanging flower pots. Flowers were chosen, purchased, planted. Then it was time to mow the lawn, sweep the deck and do other routine chores. 

  The final touch was calling the man who comes every spring to fill and fire up the fountain.

  Strictly speaking, fountain is too big a word. It’s actually a pot of water with an underground pump that pushes water to the surface, creating a sort of mini-fountain. 

  With the fountain back in business and a few other minor chores completed, the yard was presentable again. No need to be embarrassed when the TV guys came for their interview.

  Long experience with photographers has taught me not to be surprised when they change locations. They looked the yard over carefully, conferred and decided to do the shoot someplace else. I’m still not sure why. Maybe the light in the yard wasn’t right.

  Or the sound of the chimes would have been distracting.

  Or maybe they had an aversion to guitar-playing frogs in purple hats.

  It didn’t matter, really. When they left, I opened a beer, smiled as the first bottle cap of the season landed in the pot and pulled up a chair. The chimes sang; the fountain bubbled. The day was warm, the beer cold, the yard, its trappings and its owner in perfect harmony. 

  As the late, great columnist Charles McCabe would have put it, “Life, where is thy sting?” 

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

   It isn’t really Pinto Bennett’s last Saturday night.

  But it’s close enough that he can see it coming.

  “The Last Saturday Night” is the country singer-songwriter’s newest album, his fourteenth.

  The newest and probably the last.

  “I figured the one I made before it would be the last one,” he said. “When my producer asked me if I wanted to do another album I said, ‘aren’t there any young people out there who want to record an album?’ He said ‘yeah, but I want to make a Pinto Bennett album.’

  “I called it ‘The Last Saturday Night’ because it just felt like it. I can’t do this any more. My health and my brain won’t let me. I love it, but I just can’t hang out and play in the honky tonks any more. I’m in bed by 8 most nights.”

  You wouldn’t have known it if you’d attended the 16th annual Famous Motel Cowboys reunion last weekend at Boise’s Visual Arts Collective. It was packed several hours before Bennett, the group’s front man, took the stage at 8:30. Dressed in his trademark white shirt, gray cardigan sweater and matching cowboy hat, he played to a crowd that clearly loved him. Longtime fans danced, cheered, sang along with his lyrics:

  Work was all I thought of when we were man and wife.

  I was always just one step behind the Jonses’ life.

  When the boss man needed me I’d never hesitate.

  I would call you up and tell you ‘honey I’ll be late.’

  And you were always askin’ me to spend more time at home.

  And then one winter midnight I came in to find you gone.

  You took the kids and you took the car and you took my last dime,

  And you left me with nothin’ but my valuable time.

  Among those who came to see the show was Carl Scheider, host of Boise State Public Radio’s “Private Idaho” program.

  “Those guys (the band members) are getting older and some of them aren’t in real great shape, but there’s no doubt that they can still play,” Scheider said. “It was a magical night. … And nobody writes songs like Pinto. He’s an Idaho icon. There’s Gene Harris, Rosalie Sorrels and Pinto Bennett.”

  The band’s reunion sets were a mix of country and rock and roll, reminiscent of Bennett’s salad days in the 1970s with a band called Tarwater. Its slogan, once commonly seen on bumper stickers around the valley: “Tarwater – Hard Country Music.” 

 Then a fiery, hard-drinking party animal with a gift for writing  lyrics, Bennett went on to front the Famous Motel Cowboys, have a hit record in England and share stages with Crystal Gayle and Willie Nelson. He spent five years in Nashville, where he befriended Chet Atkins and counted Don Everly and Lyle Lovett among his drinking buddies. The late Sorrels was quoted as saying he “should have been a superstar.”

  It never happened. The music business is fickle, luck plays a disproportionate role, and some of Bennett’s lyrics were too rough-edged for the Nashville hit machine. “Old Dog,” from “The Last Saturday Night” album, is a case in point. It’s about his lifelong relationships with alcohol, drugs, women, music. 

  That ol’ dog inside me is barkin’ at the door.

  Knowin’ I’ll take the penalty and pay the freight for sure.

  He’s just like flies, he never dies; stuck with me rich or poor.

  That ol’ dog inside me keeps howlin’ out for more.

  In 2008, by then a devout Christian, Bennett  moved to his “retirement package,” a sheep wagon in the desert. A homemade travel trailer pulled by a tractor, it recalled his youthful days working as a shepherd for his grandfather near Elmore County’s Bennett Mountain, which was named for their family.

  “It was good for me to be out there,” he said. “It made me more introspective. I wrote two gospel albums out there.”

  He lived in the sheep wagon for six years, alone with his guitar, his Bible and his thoughts, before returning to his former home in Boise five years ago.

  “The V.A. needed me to move back. They worried about me, and it was just common sense.”

  Now 71, he sits when he performs, walks with a cane, wears glasses with a dark lens over his bad eye.

 “I’ve got problems from my eyes to my ankles. It’s a miracle the V.A. has kept me alive. They put compression casts on my legs to keep the swelling down. One leg hurts so bad sometimes I wanted them to cut it off, but that’s not elective surgery. … I’m going blind, I have heart problems, I’ve got flaky neurons. I have a neurologist, a pharmacologist, a urologist … I’m ologist-poor.”

  I asked him if there was anything he still hoped to accomplish, any goals not met or things left undone. Even with all he’s been through, his answer spoke of a life fully lived. 

  “No,” he replied. “I’ve done everything. I can sit with my neighbor and have a beer and shoot the breeze and that’s good enough for me. I’m happy. I’m quite happy.” 

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

 If you’ve driven the desolate stretches of desert that comprise much of Idaho and its neighboring states, you know something about boredom. The highways are straight as a string, the scenery monotonous, the nearest towns so far away you wonder if you’ll ever get to them.

   There was a time, however, when signs dotting the West’s sagebrush immensities brought humor to some of the most desolate places  imaginable. Those who remember them know exactly what I’m talking about – the Fearless Farris Stinker signs.

  Now, for those who never knew the iconic signs as well as those who remember them fondly but would like to know more about them, there’s a new book. “Fearless,” by Idaho historian and author Rick Just, tells the story of the signs and the man behind them.

  Just, 69, grew up with the Stinker signs.

  “When I was a kid learning to drive, all we had was a.m. radio and not that many stations on the dial. You’d be driving along, bored and not able to get a station you liked and you’d see a sign saying, ‘Ain’t this monotonous?’ You couldn’t help but agree. And it made you laugh.”

  The sign that was most likely was the best known quipped that some large, oval-shaped rocks along the highway near Bliss were “Petrified Watermelons. Take one home to your mother-in-law.”

 My favorite was on a desolate stretch of highway many miles from the nearest town, hamlet or even a gas station. Nothing but desert monotony for as far as the eye could see:

 “If you lived here, you’d be home now.”

 On another isolated expanse of wasteland, “Lonely Hearts Club Picnic Area.”

  These were a few of roughly 150 signs erected under the direction of Farris Lind, who started a chain of gas stations with the Stinker name and the company’s trademark skunk logo. Lind was the “stinker,” fighting the big oil companies by offering cut-rate gasoline. Big Oil wasn’t crazy about the promotions, but customers loved the cheap gas and the signs that enlivened their journeys:

  “Fishermen – do you have worms? (Smile anyway.)

  “This is not sagebrush. You’re In Idaho Clover.”

  “For a fast pickup, pass a state patrolman.”

  “Let there be a minute of silence while we change back-seat drivers.”

  On a godforsaken road in the middle of nowhere, “With a later start, you wouldn’t be here yet.”

  Just decided to write the book (available on Amazon, at Boise’s Rediscovered Bookshop and at Stinker stations) because posts about the signs on his Idaho history blog got more hits than anything else.

   “Typically a subject would get 1,500 to 2,500 views,” he said.
“The Stinkers got 25,000. I did the math; then I did the book.”

  It took him six months to research and write it, during which he “got a greater appreciation for Farris Lind. He was a go-out-there-and-get-it-done kind of guy. He accomplished a lot and is to be admired for it, particularly for how much he was able to accomplish after he got polio.”

  When the Sabin polio vaccine was introduced in 1963, Lind had an inexplicable feeling of dread about taking it. He did it anyway and within days was paralyzed and unable to breathe without being confined to an iron lung, a mechanical device that breathed for him. The odds of being paralyzed after taking the vaccine, according to a statistic cited in Just’s book, were one in nearly 3 million.

  Lind, then 47, refused to feel sorry for himself or let his illness stop him. He continued to run his business – from his bed – and traveled to his stations in a specially equipped convertible. In 1973, he was named Handicapped American of the Year.

  He was the first to admit that some of his signs were corny:

  “Grizzly bear feeding grounds. Count your children. Watch Your honey.”

  “This is sheep country. Let us pull the wool over your eyes.”

  “The only corn raised in the desert are these signs.”

  A few, by contemporary standards, were offensive:

  “Report Indian massacres to your doctor.”

  “Beware of Curves and Soft Shoulders.”

  In a reference to dipping sheep for parasites, “Californians must be dipped before entering Idaho.”

  That one brought an angry letter from California’s governor. The sign was taken down.

  “He wouldn’t have gotten away with some of them today, but then they didn’t raise an eyebrow,” Just said. “Those were different times. The times have changed, and it’s just as well that they have.”

  Lind opened his first Stinker station in 1941 at the corner of 16th and Front streets in Boise. I remember that station vividly, because I was nearly arrested there one night.

  A police officer had stopped me and some of my high school buddies, rightly suspecting that we were up to no good. We had a case of beer in the car and were sure to be busted for it – until one  the guys told the officer he was a trapper (he was a trapper) and that he kept his prey in the beer box. With that he surprised us all by producing a dead muskrat from somewhere under the seat and holding it up as proof. The officer rolled his eyes and walked away without a word.

  Lind, who enjoyed American ingenuity and a good story as much as anyone, would have liked that.

  The man behind the Stinker signs died in 1983. His sons ran the business until they retired in 2002. A longtime employee now owns the company, which operates 106 stores in Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado.

  Sadly, the signs have all but vanished, victims of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. The watermelon sign, near King Hill, and another in Idaho Falls, both on private property, are the last ones still  standing.

  “It’s doubtful that anyone would have complained much if the Stinker signs had stayed up,” Just said, “but the beautification act was definitely needed. If you look at old pictures of the signs, there are 14 other signs along the highways with them. We don’t want to go back to those days.”

  No argument.

  That said, we’ve lost something.  Without the Stinker signs, the desert is just desert, and driving it isn’t nearly as much fun. 

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

 My wife had a milestone birthday recently and chose to celebrate it by taking the kids and grandkids on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise. I was in favor of taking them on a rail trip – less expensive and no seasickness – but it was her birthday. 

  We looked first at cruises from California to Mexico, thinking they’d be cheap. Surprisingly, Caribbean cruises were less expensive. And they left from New Orleans, one of our favorite cities. Cheaper and New Orleans as a bonus? No contest.

  There was just one problem. 

  Mardi Gras.

  Our travel agent warned us to reserve rooms right away because hotels would be filling up quickly. This was in December, almost three months before Mardi Gras. She obviously was exaggerating,

  She wasn’t. New Orleans starts celebrating Mardi Gras weeks before it actually starts. As if that weren’t enough, thousands of real estate agents would be in town for a convention. The only rooms that would accommodate all of us in reasonable proximity to the city’s attractions would have cost approximately as much as dental implants. We booked what were almost literally the last three rooms in town. 

  By “town,” I mean Algiers, on the other side of the Mississippi from New Orleans proper. Algiers is not what most people think of when they think of New Orleans.

  “Are you sure this is right, Dad?” one of the kids asked as our Uber driver snaked through a neighborhood where sensible travel accessories might have included pepper spray.

 As we neared the hotel, something about the area seemed familiar. The reason became clear when we saw a water tower with a  faded inscription: U.S. Navy. 

  No wonder our hotel was available. It was conveniently located on an abandoned Navy base.

  As a Navy veteran, I had mixed feelings about this. Would breakfast be sea rations? Would the receptionist order me do pushups and shine my shoes?

  Eager to try some Cajun cooking, we asked the women at the reception desk the quickest way to get to the French Quarter. 

  “Hmmm,” she said, pondering the variables. “The quickest would probably be to take a taxi. But that depends on how long it would take a taxi to get here. This isn’t on the beaten track.

  No argument there.

  “Or you could walk to the ferry and take it across the river.”

  “Ferry? That sounds like fun. How far away is the ferry?”

  “Two miles.”

  Judging by the expressions of some of the family members, who looked as if she’d suggested hiking the Appalachian Trail barefoot, not everyone was keen on walking. We had, after all, spent the day shoehorned into cramped seats on packed flights with screaming babies and had had nothing but airline pretzels to eat since dawn. A bit of grumpiness was understandable.

  “Is it safe to walk two miles to the ferry?” I asked, thinking of a  sketchy area we passed through en route to the hotel.

  “Perfectly safe. And it’s a nice walk.”

  Four of us took her up on it. I was the oldest by decades.

  The receptionist was right. It was a nice walk, most of it along a landscaped levy where people strolled in the sunset and enjoyed views of the river and the city on the other side. The ferry was right on time, too. Huffing and puffing only slightly, I climbed aboard and prepared to enjoy the ride.

  The ferry had barely left the dock when it became obvious that something wasn’t right.

  We were on the wrong ferry.

  Instead of the French Quarter, we were headed for the business district.

  “That’s okay,” the kids said. “We’ll just walk.”

  Easy for them to say. They’re in their 20s and fast walkers. By the time I limped into the restaurant, they were near the front of the waiting line. The rest of the family, those who had taken a taxi to the restaurant, were finishing dessert.

  It was still early enough after dinner to explore the French Quarter. Normally this is a pleasant pastime, but during pre-Mardi Gras revelry  it’s like exploring a sardine can. So many people were packed into the narrow streets that we had to hold on to each other to keep from getting separated. After almost losing the 12-year-old to a surge of enthusiastically inebriated conventioneers, we agreed that we’d had enough fun for one night. Hotel Navy was sounding better by the minute. 

  Two Lyft drivers wanted a total of $150 to take us there. We declined, already having spent more than what our rooms cost to get everyone from the airport to the hotel. When a taxi driver offered to take four of us for $25, we couldn’t accept fast enough.

  It took about two minutes to realize that this charlatan had about as much business driving a cab as I would piloting a 787.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  We gave him the name of the hotel.

  “I know it.”

  This was reassuring. For about 30 seconds. Instead of taking a nearby thoroughfare, he happily plunged into the middle of a parade.  Gridlock on steroids. People were walking faster than we were moving, on the rare occasions when we were moving.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” one of my daughters asked him.

  “Yes. I know the area.”

  “Do you have a GPS?”

  “Yes. But I don’t like to look at it.”

  Sensing that he had only the vaguest idea of where to go, she opened the GPS on her phone and began giving him directions, which he not only ignored but became defensive and sullen in the process.

  Dozens of stops, myriad floats and thousands of milling revelers later, we crossed the river and found ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of our hotel.

  “Do I turn right or left here?” the driver asked at a stoplight.

  He lived in New Orleans, he had somehow managed to get a taxi driver’s license and he was asking tourists from Idaho for directions?

  I was relieved beyond words to say goodbye to this treasure and collapse in my hotel bed, hoping not to be awakened at dawn by a bugle playing reveille. 

  I’ll spare you details of the rest of the trip except to say that we’re over the colds we caught on the airplane, none of us were among the passengers who fell and broke their legs on the cruise ship’s rain-slick decks, and my stingray bite healed up rather nicely.

  It happens that my wife and I have a milestone anniversary coming up in a couple of years and a trip would be a great way to celebrate it.

  Amtrak, here we come. 

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

 Two Idahoans have made cartoon history in one of the nation’s prominent publications.

  They did it by winning a contest.

  There are contests, and there are contests. Winning a karaoke contest or the office March Madness pool is one thing. It’s quite another to win, say, the Pillsbury Bakeoff, an essay contest, the National History Day Contest …

  Or the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

  The New Yorker, for readers unfamiliar with it, is a weekly magazine that publishes, among other things, commentary, journalism, essays, fiction, poetry and cartoons. Indicative of its range, its contributors have included John Updike, James Thurber, Joan Didion, Annie Proulx, Phillip Roth, Ogden Nash, Garrison Keillor, Joyce Carol Oates and Groucho Marx, to name a few. 

  Its cartoon caption contest is simple. Each week, the magazine publishes a cartoon (drawing only, no caption) and invites readers to enter the contest by submitting captions for it.

  A simple process, but I can assure you that the contest is anything but simple to win. Some 6,000 captions from around the country and the world are submitted every week. The odds of winning are roughly twice as good as those of being struck by lightning.

  A cartoon assistant reads all 6,000 entries and chooses the 50 he thinks best to give to the editors. The editors narrow the 50 down to three. They’re published as the finalists, with the winner selected from among them.

  Most winners – and far more non-winners – have entered multiple times. Film Critic Roger Ebert, a smarter than average guy with a talent for putting words together, didn’t win until his 107th attempt.

  A friend who has authored or co-authored ten excellent books has been entering the contest for a decade and has neither won nor placed. So he could be forgiven some muttered expletives or airborne manuscript pages to learn that the only two Idahoans ever to win are thirty-somethings who had entered infrequently. One of them won on her second attempt. 

  The latest Boise winner, whose successful caption was published in the March 25 issue, is Zak Snoderly. Snoderly, who turned 30 shortly after winning the contest, is a BSU graduate with a degree in marketing. He has spent the last five years working as an English teacher in Thailand. The cartoon that inspired his winning caption was a drawing of a couple on a deserted island, looking at another island strewn with candy canes, ice cream and other desserts.

  His caption:  “I wish we’d seen that before we ate Dave.”

  I interviewed Snoderly in Bangkok, via Facebook Video. He said he’d been entering the contest about every other week for a year. He learned that he was a finalist in an email from the New Yorker, but was not notified that he was the winner. He found that out by seeing it online.

   His reaction was low-key.

  “I did a screenshot of the page so I could prove it happened. The first person I messaged was my dad. I knew he’d get a kick out of it.”

  No victory sign? No cheering?

  “No. I did giggle a bit. Then I showed a Thai co-worker. He wondered whether it was a contest that many people entered.”

  The New Yorker sends winners copies of the cartoons with their captions, suitable for framing. He says he’ll probably give his to his parents.

  “It would be a better keepsake for them to have. And I could see it when I come home to visit.” 

   His process for writing captions is straightforward. 

  “Typically I’ll have a couple of ideas that I’ll bounce between and then choose the one I think is best. When I first look at the drawings, nothing comes to mind so I let it stew for a few days and then something hits. When I came up with that one (the one that won), I just knew it was the one.”

  His advice to other entrants:

  “Don’t overthink it. Sit with the drawing for a while. Come back to it after a couple of days. Wait for that moment when something good hits.”

  Dejah Devereaux of Boise won the contest last summer – on her second try. Her caption, for a cartoon of a man commenting to guests on what he was barbecuing, was, “It sends the other rats a message.”

  Devereaux, 36, is a Boise State student who is finishing an art degree, already having earned a degree in Spanish. At first she didn’t realize the significance of her achievement.

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal until I found out what a big deal it was (upon learning how few who enter ever win). “Then it was a validation.”

  In addition to her artwork, Deveraux does standup comedy. She included winning the contest in her resume when applying to appear in an upcoming comedy festival.

  She doesn’t consider herself qualified to give advice to other entrants after having entered so few times. Her process, however, is similar to Snoderly’s: Think of more than one caption and choose the best. Don’t try too hard; just let it happen. If a really good idea hits you, you’ll know.

  Devereaux’s winning idea “hit me all of a sudden. It was a culmination of all the ideas I had.”

  The odds against two people from Boise winning the caption contest are considerable.

  The odds against two people who attended BSU winning? Probably greater than the odds of being stuck by lightning.

  Snoderly and Devereaux’s husband are friends who worked together at BSU – another odds-defying fact which, coupled with the others, would appear to make a BSU connection key to  caption-contest success. 

  The only states who have never had a winner or finalist, according to the New Yorker’s Madison Heuston, are Wyoming and North Dakota. (North Dakota, incidentally, is noted for being the last state people visit after venturing to the other 49.) 

  I’ve entered the caption contest three times, will continue to enter, and am confident of eventual victory.

 This is not cheap confidence inspired simply by Snoderly’s and Devereaux’s success. Two other powerful factors are in my favor:

  I attended BSU for two years, when it was still a junior college.

  And I’ve never set foot in North Dakota.

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

  The guest of honor had to be coaxed into opening his birthday presents and blowing out candles. He was having too much fun playing on the cargo nets at Planet Kid.

  The guest of honor was my great grandson, who was turning five.

  I was not ready to be a great grandfather when he was born any more than my daughter was ready to be a grandmother in her mid-30s. We were too young – no canes, no hearing aids, no long white beard. But there he was, ready or not, and life hasn’t been the same since. Nothing like a new kid to shake things up.

  As he opened his birthday gifts, it struck me how different life is from what it was even a generation ago, and how different his will be from those of previous generations.

  At age five, I was playing with kites, pea shooters and slingshots.  Shooting marbles, learning to swim, playing baseball. 

  Simple pleasures. Pea shooters, for those unfamiliar with them, were plastic straws designed for a pea to be shot through with a forceful exhalation of breath. For a reason now forgotten, the kids in our old neighborhood preferred beans to peas. There was something enormously satisfying about expelling a bean through a straw and hitting what you were aiming at, usually a kid who was aiming at you. By summer’s end we’d fired hundreds if not thousands of them, begetting a bean-sprout explosion in every lawn in the neighborhood.

  Model railroads were a source of wonder. Mine was on a pingpong table in the basement. It was a modest setup, but  it was more than enough. Sitting at the controls in a darkened basement with the crossing lights flashing, the whistle blowing and the beam of the locomotive’s headlight cutting the darkness remains one of the happiest memories of my youth.

  What a different childhood my five-year-old grandson is having. He’s into Netflix cartoons, super heroes and pop music. At an age when kids of my generation were dreaming of toy cars or footballs or bicycles, he’s dreaming of getting his own Alexa.

  An Alexa? We’ve had enough Alexa wars at our house to know that it can be a fast track to insanity. Everyone wants to hear something different at the same time: 

  “Alexa, play the Beatles.”

  “Alexa, play Dirt Wire.”

  “Alexa play ‘Baby Shark.’”

  “Alexa, shut up!”

  Luckily the lad has a sensible mother who says that if he does get his own Alexa – a big if – it will be restricted to the confines of his room, where he can order it around to his heart’s content without the grownups hurling themselves out the windows.

  We did not have a television, let alone an Alexa, when I was his age. Most of the neighborhood kids were in second or third grade grade by the time the flickering screens entered our lives with two channels and blurry, black and white images of Sheriff Spud and the Merry Milkman. Today, kids have hundreds of channels available 24/7, resulting in more screen time and less outdoors time. I’ll leave it to the experts to say how that’s affecting them, but my gut says kids need some time to switch off the screens, put the devices down and explore the real world.

  Not that the kid who has captured our hearts isn’t doing some of that. He enjoys playing in the snow with his aunt’s dog. He likes model railroads and spending time at the playground in a neighborhood park. He’s caught a fish, soaked in mountain hot springs. His other grandfather, an accomplished coach, is working with him on his baseball swing.

  Kids don’t necessarily need to hit baseballs or catch fish or play with model railroads to become responsible, well-adjusted individuals. And the reality is that comparatively few of them in today’s world will do those things. We who loved those pastimes when we were kids want our kids and grandkids to enjoy them at least in part for selfish reasons. We want them to love what we did and think it could help them on the hard road to becoming accomplished, self-reliant adults.

  The reality, of course, is that they’ll find and enjoy their own diversions, whether we like them or not. Every generation, to borrow from the late Vardis Fisher, thinks the generations after it are going to hell in a hayrack.

  Yet somehow they don’t. Yes, we have cyber bullies. We have kids who commit atrocious crimes, kids who are clueless and arrogant enough to do Nazi salutes. But for every one of those, there are way more kids who work hard, study hard and are committed to making the world a better place.

  I’d like to think that my great grandson will be one of those, that he’ll switch off his Alexa and put down his devices long enough to appreciate the real world and join his more thoughtful contemporaries in trying to improve it.

  Maybe one of the best things we can do as parents and grandparents is to expose them to that world, to introduce them to its beauty and wonders, to help them find the kind of meaning and fulfillment that aren’t found in digital entertainment. 

  Perhaps most important, we need to let them know how much they mean to us and that we’ll do our best, in our archaic, non-digital way, to help them lead purposeful lives in a changing world.  

  Know this, my five-year-old hot shot. Your families will always be here for you, and could not love you more.

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

 The poltergeist that haunts my house has a new name now: Casper, after the protagonist of the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoon series.

 A recent column about the poltergeist that inhabits the Woodward residence cited instances in which keys, a cell phone, a robe and other common items vanished for months, even years, only to reappear in plain sight. It asked, only half jokingly, if readers could recommend a good exorcist and encouraged them to share their own poltergeist stories.

  I didn’t really expect much in the way of responses. How many people, after all, even believe in ghosts these day? And how many would actually have stories about them, let alone be willing to share them?

  Well, let me tell you …

  The responses made my poltergeist seem like a harmless practical joker.

  Boisean Mary Barnett reported doors unlocking themselves as she watched, four screws simultaneously falling out of an air vent (it remained attached to the ceiling with the screws gone) and a drawer moving in the middle of the night from a dresser to a floor where her dog was sleeping, triggering enough barking to wake the household, if not the dead. And, perhaps creepiest of all, an invisible hand touching her foot while she was lying in bed.

  She claimed to have “numerous witnesses” to these episodes, adding that a former editor of mine whom I know to be perfectly sane would vouch for her.

  Madeline Hall, who lives in Caldwell, “grew up with a ghost attached to me. When I was little, he just stood watch. If my blankets slipped off, he pulled them back up and tucked me in. My mom thought I was crazy.”

  As Hall got older, things got weirder.

  “Things started disappearing. First was the TV remote. It was just gone. Dad bought a universal remote to replace it after making us get up to change the channel for several months as a lesson.”

  A few months later, her mother was getting canning kettles down from a cupboard to make jam and heard a rattle. It was the remote – inside a kettle that hadn’t been used for a year.

  Hall’s mother blamed her for losing a necklace that disappeared for several months. Then a teenager who had had her fill of being blamed, she angrily told her mother she wished whoever took the necklace would return it and stormed out of the room. When she got up to leave, the necklace was lying on the bed “right where I’d been sitting.”

  The occurrences went from weird to spooky. Hall’s fiance’, now her husband, was waiting for her to come home one night when he saw “a glowing image of a man wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, a wool vest and a fedora.”

  The next day, he happened to see an old family photograph at the home of Hall’s aunt. The man in the photo and the one in the glowing image, he said, were the same. The man was Hall’s great-great-uncle. 

  When the couple married, they moved into a house her great grandfather had  built.

  “We started to remodel, and things got really weird. We heard footsteps and voices. The voices spoke in Flemish, the language of my great grandfather. It was always at least two different voices speaking to each other. (Her great grandfather and great-great-uncle had lived in the house together.)

  “My dad was helping with the remodel, and it got to the point he’d only come over when we were home because the spirits tormented him so badly. Between the talking and things like hammers and saws moving, he couldn’t take it any more.”

  “… We still have weird things happen, but they’ve become so normal we don’t even notice much. It sure does spook our visitors, though.”

  Vincent Kituku, a Boisean whom I’ve known for years, wrote to say that his family’s home is “not only haunted, but bewitched. I see people leave. Always leaving. We have heard them talk and move around.”

  One instance was alarming enough that he called the police.

  “I was alone downstairs and my wife was asleep when I heard the garage door opening. I rushed in and sure enough, the unknowns had opened it. My kids were too young to play tricks then. So I called and the police came.”

  His son was so frightened at one point that he went to a neighbor’s house and refused to come home until his father returned from a trip.

  “He was and still is a strong young man, captain of the Eagle High School football team in both his junior and senior years. And he was still scared of those who have made it their calling to torment us.”

  Boisean Jesse Newman saw “a little girl ghost in our house about eight years ago.  … We’ve had things disappear never to be found. A platter in a hutch with several items in front of it that were not disturbed. Two cookie sheets from a drawer in the bottom of the oven. We’ve had keys disappear, bedding and numerous other items.

  “Stranger than things that disappear are those that reappear. The most notable was a mini Swiss Army knife that dropped between the seats in my car. I searched many times for it. About three months later, I’d just gone down the stairs to the laundry room. There was nothing on the stairs. When I returned, there was my my pocket knife – on the stairs in plain sight.”

  Craig Bullock was alone in his home in Emmett when he heard a door open and close and footsteps going up a stairway leading to two bedrooms. Every drawer had been opened in the dressers in both bedrooms. A few months later, he said, his wife was alone in the house when the same thing  happened again.

  Bullock was on a hunting trip in a mountain basin years ago when he came to a place where the ground became spongey, “with water showing and holes in the ground. One looked like a grave. It was about three feet wide and six feet long. I poked a limb into it and it wouldn’t reach the bottom.

  “ I’ve been back there several times since then. It’s a small basin that I know pretty well, and I’ve never been able to find anything that looked like what I saw that day.”

  Shirley Biladeau thinks the ghost at her Boise home is that of her late cat, “Miss Kitty.”

  “Since she passed on … more and more items disappear into the ‘Fourth Dimension,’ some never to be seen again. It’s our philosophy that when things move or disappear inexplicably, or the ice cream carton in the freezer is suddenly empty, it’s just Miss Kitty, and she will either make the times magically appear again or not.”

  Shirley Kroeger, who lives in Murphy, has “a sprite” that lives in a bedroom closet. Dogs bark at the closet. Cats won’t go near it. 

  This brings us to my request for an exorcist. Two candidates responded, but I’m out of space and that’s probably enough ghost stories for now.

   Maybe I’ll invite them over for a seance someday. If so, you’ll be the first to know.

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

  Anselme Sadiki knows what it is to be a refugee escaping a life of horror in his native country with little hope of being welcomed in a new one.

  His story is an object lesson for our times. 

  For the last three years, Sadiki has been the executive director of the Idaho Children’s Home Society. He has a good life in a city and country he loves.

  What it took for him to get get here, however, is a story that most of us with comfortable lives have trouble just imagining.

  A native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, he was a university student when the country’s dictator launched a campaign of terror against intellectuals. His thugs came with knives in the night, killing an estimated 250 students. Sadiki was wounded but escaped by jumping out a window and running for his life.

  “There were bodies everywhere. Bodies broke my fall.”

  It took him two months, walking and riding buses, to get to Nairobi, Kenya and apply for asylum. He spent two years there.

  When unrest in other parts of Africa brought a new wave of displaced people, then Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi ordered all refugees to leave the city. Thousands were herded into a stadium. Some of the children died.

  Sound familiar? 

  The refugees were sent to a camp with no sanitary facilities. Trucks delivered water and food, often not enough. Ten gallons of water per person had to last a week. Malnutrition, cholera, malaria and other diseases sickened hundreds.

  Now 50, Sadiki looks back on his time at the camp as being “worse than hell. Given a choice between hell and that camp, I’d rather be in hell.”

  When an aid team from Geneva, Switzerland visited the camp, he recognized one of its members. Jana Nwoko had interpreted for him while he was living in Nairobi.

  “When I saw her, I said, ‘Hi, Jana. Do you remember me?’ She didn’t. When I told her she had interpreted for me, she said,  ‘Anselme?’ The shock was so hard for her that she couldn’t speak –  only tears. She’d known me as a young man, and now I looked  sick and old like I was dying. My weight had gone from 133 pounds to 72 pounds.”

  Nwoko arranged for him to return to Nairobi for medical treatment. He regained his health, learned to speak Swahili, worked as a translator for refugees. He also met some American college professors who changed his life.

  Roger and Sonja Kurtz met Sadiki at the church where he sang on Sundays and invited him to lunch. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

  “I went to their house every Sunday for dinner. They drove me to see the animals in Kenya’s national parks. We just clicked.”

  When they left to return to the U.S., he was heartsick.

  “I thought I’d never see them again. I had lost something precious. These were the people who had made me feel human again.”

  He had no idea that, back home in the U.S., the Kurtzes were working to get him to America.

  “They called me at the church. It was overwhelming just to hear their voices again. … They told me to meet with an immigration officer at the U.S. embassy to tell my story.

  The immigration officer confirmed the details of Sadiki’s story and gave him some life-changing news. After surviving terror, starvation and “not feeling human,” he’d been cleared to go to the U.S. and search for the American dream.

  The Kurtzes had found jobs teaching at Idaho State University, where Sadiki enrolled as a student. He met his future wife while studying at ISU, graduated with a degree in social work and became ISU’s recruiter of African students.

 The American dream? The onetime refugee became an American citizen, earned a masters degree in international affairs from Columbia University and went to work for the United Nations.

He helped establish a government for South Sudan, then the world’s newest country, and oversaw its $250 million startup budget. He worked as a U.N. administrator in Mauritania, Cape Verde and Gabon. He spent a dozen years with the U.N., then returned to Idaho.

  “The travel and time away from my wife and daughter were a strain. It was time to choose between my career and my family.”

  Though he had virtually no experience working in mental health, his life experiences made him the winning candidate to fill a vacancy as director of the Children’s Home Society. The society  provides mental, emotional and behavioral health care to children and their families. It relies on donations to provide services regardless of families’ ability to pay.

  Board member Scott Schoenherr credits Sadiki’s exemplary job performance in part to his refugee background.

  “His story is almost stranger than fiction. He’s been through things you and I can’t even imagine. If we have a flat tire on the way to work, it’s the end of the world. It’s not that way for him because he knows what the end of the world is. He sees things on a different level, and it’s made him the kind of leader people want to follow. He’s always upbeat and smiling, and I don’t think he has an enemy in the world.”

  One of the first clients Sadiki met at the Children’s Home was a young couple whose son was “bouncing off of the walls. 

  “He was four or five and he was just losing it – pushing and pulling and screaming. It was clear from his parents’ faces that they had lost all hope of handling this little human being. I sat in my office and prayed for the clinician who was going to see him.”

  Forty-five minutes later, the clinician’s door opened to reveal a different child.

  “He was quiet and smiling and swinging between the arms of his parents. It was that moment that made me believe that this is where I should be and that this place should stay open. If we can do that for one child, we can do it for many others. I’ll stay here as long as I can to do that.”

  Sadiki’s transition from refugee to productive American citizen has made him passionate about his new country and the plights of  other refugees.

  “Many other countries are taking a chance for those who have lived the most horrendous experiences. They’re giving them an opportunity to live life as decent human beings. Nothing makes you love a country more than being given that second chance.

  “When my country says it doesn’t want refugees, it hurts  because you feel such a sense of love and loyalty for the country that gave you a second chance. It’s not true that all Americans hate refugees. I was accepted here. I was welcomed and loved. I have to work hard to separate that from the anti-immigrant views that are being promoted now, and from the kindness of those who have shown me what becoming an American can mean.”

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

 

 

(Note to subscribers. Sorry to be posting this a couple of days late. As you’ll discover from reading it, I tend to be a bit absent-minded. — Tim)

 

  Wanted: exorcist. 

  This is not a joke. My house is haunted.

  Not haunted in the sense of a horror movie – no apparitions, spectral voices or things that go bump in the night. My house is haunted by a harmless (well, relatively harmless) poltergeist.

  It’s been happening for years. One exasperating incident after another. Things simply disappear. Some vanish for good; others reappear in plain sight after weeks or months of looking for them. 

  The latest casualty was a Costco Cash Card. I laid it on a dresser, left the room for a couple of minutes and it dematerialized. I turned the room upside down, looked in drawers, under the bed, everywhere. My wife, who is better at finding things, also looked. No luck.

  The next morning, it was lying in the middle of the bedroom floor in plain sight. I almost stepped on it.

  Before that it was my glasses. The last place anyone remembered seeing them was on the arm of a couch. They were there one minute, gone the next.

  We looked everywhere. They weren’t on or under the couch, on the end table next to the couch or anywhere else that a pair of glasses could logically be expected to reside. These weren’t a cheap pair of readers, either. They were pricey, prescription glasses.

  To make sure they hadn’t absentmindedly been tossed in the trash or  recycling bin, we searched the contents of both. Nothing. 

  Several weeks passed. We continued to look in increasing frustration and in increasingly unlikely places. Still nothing.

  Then, there they were – in plain sight on a night stand where we’d looked a hundred times. We’d looked on the night stand, under the night stand, in the drawers of the night stand. The glasses weren’t there.

   Until, inexplicably, they were. 

   Before that it was the even more baffling disappearance – and reappearance – of my cell phone.

   Granted, cell phones are forever being misplaced. But what happened with mine is weird. Spooky weird.

  Here’s what happened: When the phone went missing, I looked looked in pockets, under couch cushions, on tables, countertops, desktops, etc.

  Nada.

   When looking in normal places doesn’t work, one tends to look in abnormal places. I looked in wastebaskets, the trash can, the laundry hamper. The workshop, the furnace room. Closets, medicine cabinet, refrigerator …

  Don’t laugh; I once found my shoes in the refrigerator. (Yes, as a matter of fact I am a tad absent-minded.) 

  The phone was in none of those places. It was as if it had been snatched up and transported to an alternate reality.

  The search went on for days. Everyone in the family looked. We looked in places where even the most hopelessly absent-minded person wouldn’t have misplaced a cell phone.

  “Have you tried the ‘Find My Phone’ app?’” my wife eventually asked.

  Of course! Why hadn’t we thought of that before?

  The Find My Phone map on my laptop showed the missing phone in what appeared to be the back yard. When I got up to go look for it there, my foot brushed against something lying on the office floor. It was the missing phone – literally under my feet! 

  That office had been searched repeatedly. Every millimeter of it had been searched. And there was the phone – in the middle of  the office floor! I practically tripped over it.

   I could almost hear the poltergeist laughing. 

  Some things vanish permanently at my house.

  The Vacation Eve Car Keys, for instance. They were lying right in front of me on a table where I was doing some last-minute paperwork before leaving on a trip. They were, at least, until they weren’t.

  “Not to worry,” my wife said. “They have to be around here somewhere. We’ll use my car keys for the trip and find yours when we get home.”

  Those keys are still missing three decades later.

  This brings us to the Phantom Robe.

  And the Vanishing Vacuum Cleaner.

  The robe absconded from where it was always kept, hanging on a hook in a bedroom closet. A robe is not a small thing, like keys or a wallet or a cell phone. A robe is big enough that it should be easy to find, right?

  Wrong. I looked off and on for months, gave up and bought a new robe.

  The old one was hanging on its hook again the very next morning.  

  Unlike the robe, the vacuum cleaner didn’t show up when we bought a new one. It was gone forever. We suspected one of our then teenage daughters’ friends of taking it, but both swore they hadn’t. Both are grown now, responsible adults, and they still say they have no idea what happened to that vacuum cleaner.

  Recently, the weirdness has taken an eerie turn. My son and I were watching television one evening when we heard the front door open and close and a woman’s voice upstairs in the kitchen. We assumed it was my wife, returning from a shopping trip.

  Except that no one was in the kitchen.

  Or anywhere else in the house. 

  A few weeks later, I was alone in the house on what had been a quiet evening and heard noises downstairs. Armed with a baseball bat, I descended the stairs to find that a large box had been toppled over and a television had been turned on.

  My wife was out of town. There was no one in the house but me.

  It took a long time to get to sleep that night.  

  If any of you reading this have had similar experiences, I’d love to hear about them. My email address is below.

  And if you know a good exorcist, I’m all ears.

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

  Quick, what’s the longest it’s ever taken you to name something?

  A dog or a cat, maybe? My wife and I took weeks to name one of our  dogs.

  A car? 

  A child?

  Most states require babies to be named before they leave the hospital. Some states allow a bit longer, but the idea is pretty much the same everywhere. Give the kid a name. Now. 

  What’s the longest it’s ever taken a kid to be named?

  Good question. But it’s a pretty good bet that Eagle resident Tamara Scribner would be in the running. She wasn’t legally named till she was 16.

  And she’s not a dog or a car. 

  How did this happen? To begin at the beginning, her parents hadn’t decided on a name when she was born. They still hadn’t decided when it was time to leave the hospital, either. They’d made lists of names, but  couldn’t agree on one they both liked.

  “I thought that maybe once she was born and I saw her, something would click,” her mother, Vicki Stevens, said. “Nothing did.”

  When it was time for her and the baby to be discharged from the hospital, the doctor came to their room and asked what the baby’s name was. He was carrying a form and expecting a quick answer. Stevens  nervously told him she was still trying to decide. He scribbled something on the form and told her to call his office once she’d chosen a name.

  She did.

  Sixteen years later.

  The doctor had retired.

  Naming her first baby had been a slam dunk for Stevens. She had the names picked out before she was even pregnant. The first name would be Regina, a name she loved. The middle name would be George, after her grandfather. Her own name is Vicki George Stevens, and she wanted to continue the tradition.

  Naming the second baby was anything but a slam dunk. When her birth certificate arrived, it showed the last name as Scribner (Stevens’s then husband’s last name; they’ve since divorced). The first name on the birth certificate was …

  An asterisk.

  A paper-clipped note added that the asterisk was temporary, in the off chance that some dim-witted soul would think the kid had been named for a punctuation mark. 

  Stevens didn’t fail to name the baby for lack of trying. She perused books and magazines, asked relatives, friends, even strangers what their favorite girls’ names were. Still, nothing clicked.

  Gradually, over time, Asterisk’s parents started calling her Punky. A cute, temporary name for a cute baby. It seemed to fit her. 

  And it stuck.

  “We liked calling her that. She just seemed like a Punky. And as time passed, it seemed less important to come up with another name.”

  The “temporary” name wasn’t an issue until it was time for her to  start school. Schools require birth certificates. Stevens had the birth certificate, but “Asterisk” posed a problem. What would the person in charge of registration have to say about that? Would it even be accepted?

  To her relief, the person in charge hardly looked at the birth certificate. Instead, she asked Stevens if her daughter had any nicknames. Relieved almost beyond words, she blurted out, “Yes, we all call her Punky.”

  Punky’s teacher and classmates were fine with that. Look at a list of names for just about any first-grade class and you’ll see names a whole lot weirder than Punky. Frostina, Zenith and Dweezil come to mind.

  Not that there weren’t occasional incidents.

   “I told a friend I didn’t have a real name, just an asterisk,” Punky said. “She said, ‘you could go by Assie for short.’ Then she realized what she’d said and blushed. She was a very prim Mormon girl.”

  Life without a real name went passably well until Asterisk/Punky was in high school and wanted to get a driver’s license. An elderly clerk took one look at the asterisk on the birth certificate, huddled with her supervisor and told the tearful applicant she couldn’t get a license because she didn’t have a real name.

  “What about the artist formerly known as Prince?” her mother asked. “He has a symbol for a name and he’s doing okay.”

  The response was bureaucracy at its annoying best:

  “Lady, this isn’t Hollywood. This is Idaho. And in Idaho, you have to have a real name to get a driver’s license.”

  Never mind that Prince was from Minnesota, not Hollywood. The woman had a point.

  Punky was crushed.

  And embarrassed.

  “I was already mad at my folks because the legal age to get a permit in Idaho was 15 and I was already 16. And here was my mom talking about Prince! I said ‘Mom, let’s just go. This is embarrassing.’”

  Back home, Stevens hit on an idea. She decided her daughter was old enough to choose her own name. How many people get to do that?

  Punky was delighted. She called all her friends and told them. Then she made a list of names she liked: Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Sapphire and Laredo. (She was, after all, 16.)

  Her mother told her they sounded like strippers’ names.

  Nutmeg-Cinnamon-Sapphire-Laredo replied that the only other name she liked was Tamara George.

  That time it was her mother’s turn to be delighted:

  “She’d accomplished what I hadn’t in 16 years. It was perfect.”

  So, off to court they went to make it legal.

  The girl with no name was “very nervous in court. I was shaking when the judge asked me what I wanted my name to be. I said, ‘Tamara George.’ He said, really — George? I started shaking even more. Was I making a horrible mistake?”

  She felt better when the judge confided that he’d never liked his own name and wished he’d been able to name himself. Murmurs of assent from around the courtroom made her feel even better.

  And so, at age 17, she legally became Tamara George Scribner.

  And got her driver’s license.

  Almost everyone calls her Tamara now.

  Except her family members.

  “In the grocery store, my sister will yell, “Hey, Punky!” People turn and stare. They think it’s a fight starting.”

  She has no intention of taking 16 years to name her own kids.

  “I’m going to have them named way before they ever come. I have some names picked out already – all with the middle name George.”

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

 This week, for the first time in most of its residents’ lives, Boise will not have a Sears store.

  When its doors closed last week, the store in Boise Town Square  joined one of 142 closing nationally – casualties of Sears  bankruptcy. A once unthinkable demise for a company that made history as the largest and most innovative retailer in the world.

  The rise and fall of Sears began in 1888, with the Sears Catalog. There was a time when virtually every home in America had a copy of the famous “wish book.” Customers used it to order everything from socks and sweaters to sewing machines and saddles.

  Sears and Roebuck opened its first retail store in Chicago in 1925. In its heyday, the company opened a new store every other business day. The Treasure Valley’s first Sears and Roebuck stores opened in Boise and Caldwell in 1949. Boise’s was at the corner of Thirteenth and State streets, in a building now occupied by the Idaho State Insurance Fund.

  I remember that old store well. It smelled like popcorn; a machine near the entrance popped non-stop. The store had several floors, but was still smaller than most department stores are today. You didn’t have to walk as far to find things, and a helpful sales person was never far away. It was old-fashioned, almost cozy.

  The store was a magnet for kids and their parents when school closed for the summer. My folks bought my first bicycle there, and the annual trip to Sears for new tennis shoes was a rite of summer.

  It was on the edge of downtown proper, so there were no parking meters. Parking wouldn’t have been a problem anyway, because the store had one of the city’s first parking garages. 

  The garage was the scene of one of the oddest accidents I’ve ever seen. Newlyweds at the time, my wife and I had finished shopping and were walking to our car when a young couple took one of the turns in the parking garage too fast and rolled their Volkswagen bug. Their purchases that day included multiple gallons of paint, and every single one of them opened – drenching the car’s interior and its owners with baby blue paint.

  The store was a popular destination for buying appliances, automotive products and tools. A Kenmore dishwasher we purchased there lasted forever, and you couldn’t go wrong with Sears tires or Diehard batteries. During the 13 years the Woodwards spent remodeling an old house appropriately nicknamed Maintenance Manor, the tool department was my second home.

  Two things were responsible for this – Craftsman brand tools and the Old Guys – upper case intentional – who worked in the tool department. They knew everything about every tool and how to use it. Seasoned professionals, they answered questions knowledgeably and happily volunteered tips to make projects go smoothly. 

  That changed. There were exceptions, of course, but at newer  Sears stores Old Guys tended to give way to younger sales people who lacked experience and often knowledge about the tools they were selling. I stopped buying tools at Sears after realizing that I knew more about them than the kids who were selling them.

  The new store in the Boise Towne Square mall was bigger and in some ways nicer than the old one, but lacked its character. It was a generic mall store. It was modern and efficient, but the warmth and personality of the old store were conspicuously absent. 

  Perhaps that was a factor in Sears’s downfall. While Macy’s, Dillard’s and Nordstrom continued to attract loyal customers and Lowe’s, Home Depots and Walmarts expanded, Sears languished.

  Many reasons are cited for its demise – competition from Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and other retailers, the ill-fated merger with Kmart, cutbacks in sales staffs, bad management decisions. Once the world’s most innovative retailer, Sears failed to innovate well enough  or nimbly enough to meet the challenges of rapidly changing times.

  I visited the Town Square store during its last days. The atmosphere was funereal. The store was plastered with “store closing” and discount signs. The few customers who had bothered to show up were trolling for bargains. With so few people to wait on, sales people chatted languidly among themselves. 

  Gravitating to the tool department, I asked a salesman there to share his thoughts on the store’s closing.

  “I won’t talk to you,” he said.

  “Will any of the sales people talk to me?”

  “No,”

  “How about the store manager?”

  “Maybe. I’ll walk you down there.”

  The manager was in his office, talking with two employees. I introduced myself and told him I had some questions. He said I’d have to talk to the company’s corporate P.R. people in Chicago, after which the three of them resumed their conversation as if I didn’t exist. To borrow one of my mother’s expressions, I left “feeling like two cents waiting for change.”

  That afternoon, it was announced that Sears had given its executives millions in bonuses while their employees were being handed their hats. So it wasn’t surprising that the folks in the manager’s office were feeling less than effusive. 

  A woman working in the Town Square manager’s office said the Sears entrances will remain barricaded until its space is filled. She had no idea who or what would do the filling.

  A week later, it was announced that one of Boise’s Shopko stores was closing – another casualty in a growing list:  Shopko, Sears, Kmart, Mervyns, the Bon Marche, C.R. Anthony’s, C.C. Anderson’s, the Mode, Ltd …

  Times change, businesses evolve.

  Or don’t.

  Nothing lasts forever.

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