And now it’s McClatchy.

This month’s news that the nation’s second largest news company has filed for bankruptcy was inevitable. McClatchy had been struggling for years and was the latest in a long line of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs that have plagued print publications in recent years. The once highly profitable newspaper industry has become a shadow of its former self.

McClatchy owns The Idaho Statesman, where I spent virtually my entire newspaper career. Gannett, the company that owned The Statesman for most of that time, also has fallen on hard times and recently was forced to merge with another media company. Experts have said the combined company could slash up to $300 million in costs, which could cost a lot of journalists their jobs.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but my fellow journalists and I were lucky to have experienced a golden age of the industry. It didn’t seem like it when we were going through it, of course. The hours were long, the pay modest, the deadlines relentless. We regularly grumbled about “feeding the beast,” newsroom slang for having to fill the space every day.

God knows we didn’t do it for the money. We did it because, among other things, we believed we were helping our communities by reporting things people needed or wanted to know, from the outcome of the big game to things our elected officials and business leaders were doing in our interest, or, more importantly, not in our interest. Nothing else was as important as the watchdog role.

It was a golden era because we had the resources we needed. Newspapers were making lots of money. That those who worked in their newsrooms saw relatively little of the profits mattered less than having what we needed to do the job properly — enough reporters and editors, enough logistical support, enough funding to do what was required.

That changed, of course, with the advent of the Internet. Cheap or free online advertising cut advertising revenue to a fraction of what it had previously been. Layoffs became epidemic. The number of employees at most newspapers is now a minuscule fraction of what it was at peak employment. It’s a credit to those working for them that they’re able to put the papers out at all.

This is vastly different from the days when newspapers not only had the resources they needed to do important stories, but to do stories on a regular basis that weren’t necessarily important but were great reads.

One of my early editors sent me on a two-week train trip around the country. My assignment was to do a story a day. One was about an elderly man in a small town in Arkansas who helped Ernest Hemingway save the manuscript to “A Farewell to Arms” from a fire.

That trip, that story, wouldn’t happen today.

Early in my career there, The Statesman sent another reporter and me to the Soviet Union for two weeks to write about what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Those stories wouldn’t happen today.

A photographer and I went to Sicily and Albania to cover Idahoans involved in the Kosovo War. I spent weeks working on a series of stories that led to a corrupt state official going to prison, and the better part of a year reporting on two of Idaho’s Indian tribes. I was fortunate to be able to travel to every county in the state to write stories about the unique characters who helped make Idaho Idaho.

Few of those stories would happen today.

And far fewer newspaper journalists are doing what they do best today. The majority of those I worked with are now jobless or employed outside the industry. Talented reporters, photographers, editors and graphic artists, now working in everything from public relations to retail. A loss not just to themselves, but to the Idaho communities where they live. They were doing important work that made this a better place.

Now they’re doing whatever work they can find, in some cases entry level jobs. It’s happening everywhere. More than 2,000 newspapers, according to the Brookings Institution, have folded in the last 15 years. Cities across the country now have no local newspaper.

Do you LOVE local news? Get Local News Headlines in your inbox daily.

  Yes!  Include special offer & contest announcement emails

You may love your local newspaper; you may hate it. That said, how would your life be different without it? Sure there are other news sources. But for generations, it has been newspapers that have done much of the heavy lifting in reporting everything from national news to local stories about state legislatures, city councils, courts, schools, sports, arts, entertainment …

The plight of the newspaper industry isn’t just sad. It’s ominous. The founding fathers made freedom of the press the first amendment for an excellent reason. We need the free press, especially its watchdogs, to hold those in power accountable.

It’s no accident that one of the things dictators invariably do is smear the press or, worse, control it. They don’t like being watched. With the press discredited or in their pockets, they can get away with more.

I have never known a reporter who has written a fake news story. There are good and bad reporters, but at the very least every reporter I have ever known has made an honest effort to report the news as accurately as possible.

Why is it that almost anywhere you look, from your local paper to the big national papers to the network news programs, you see essentially the same facts reported? It’s because the reporters responsible are doing their level best to report news events accurately. They are rightly insulted by the term “fake news.”

Sadly, there are fewer of those reporters, and will be even fewer still. The thousands of dedicated journalists who have lost their jobs are working now as “spokespersons,” as ride-share drivers, as substitute teachers and stock clerks and waitresses.

We are less informed, our democracy less secure, without them.

The results of my request for readers’ opinions on a state legislator’s plan to make Standard Time year-round in Idaho were mixed. Six more readers said they preferred that to keeping Daylight Savings. Some wanted to keep both, and a few wanted to make Daylight Savings year-round. Seven states have approved legislation to do that, but it requires congressional approval.

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

  Some places you remember for life. When I was seven, an uncle took my mother, sister and me to a beach lot he’d recently purchased near Monterey, Calif. There for only a few minutes, I made what must have struck him as a ridiculous request.

  “I know I’m just a kid, Uncle Bill, but please don’t ever sell this place to anybody but me.”

  That’s how beautiful it was. A cliff with a wooden stairway overlooked the blue Pacific and Uncle Bill’s 200 feet of beach. He sold it a few years later for $10,000 and thought he’d made a killing. Today, it would be worth millions.

  We spent several hours in Monterey that day, walking around town and looking at marine life from a glass-bottomed boat. It’s unlikely but possible that we bumped into one of the true-life inspirations for a character in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” which was set there and would later become one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.

  Fast forward a lifetime. It took decades, but I recently returned to Monterey and realized, not for the first time, that few things in life remain the same.

  The Monterey remembered was a relatively quiet place. Monterey Bay at the time of our visit with Uncle Bill was in its fading days as one of the most productive fisheries in the world. The fish were sardines. Fishing boats unloaded tons of them at the foot of a street lined with packing plants. In honor of the book, the street later was named Cannery Row.

  Overfishing and other factors ended Monterey’s run as the sardine capital of the West Coast.  Asked what had become of the once plentiful fish, late Marine biologist Ed “Doc” Ricketts, a town fixture, ruefully observed that “they’re all in cans.”

  Ricketts was Steinbeck’s friend and the inspiration for one of “Cannery Row’s” characters. Monterey in their time was smaller than Kuna. I remember it as a quaint, quiet little town. Now it’s a magnet for tourists. It’s neither quaint nor quiet.

  It’s done a first-rate job, however, of paying homage to its past – particularly to Steinbeck and Ricketts. Banners with their images and quotes from Steinbeck’s writing fly from poles lining the streets. Busts of them seem to be everywhere. Overlooking the harbor is a statue of Steinbeck and characters from the novel. His image and quotes from his writing are ubiquitous. You can’t visit Monterey and not be impressed by its tributes to him. 

  It’s not the Monterey I remembered. It’s changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable.

  But how many towns don’t change?

  The visit recalled one three years ago to another city unseen in many years. In my early twenties, I spent a year in Bremerhaven, Germany, courtesy of the U.S. Navy. Those of us the Navy sent there considered ourselves lucky. The Navy was sending almost everyone else to Vietnam.

  It didn’t take long to fall in love with Bremerhaven. Like the Monterey of Steinbeck’s time, it was quaint. Quaint as in spires and turrets, winding, cobblestone streets, picturesque shops. You could buy a bratwurst and French fries for the equivalent of a quarter at vendors’ stands that dotted the downtown sidewalks and wash them down with a bottle of German beer, also a quarter.

  Bremerhaven today is a different place altogether. The train station, formerly graced by a spacious lobby with walls and a ceiling of hand-crafted, age-darkened wood, has been subdivided into small, faceless shops. A few of the cobblestone streets remain, but they’re  outnumbered by paved streets lined with characterless businesses.  

  The quaint downtown with its uniquely German shops has given way to a mall. Trendy stores, designer brands, hardly any shoppers. It was modern, efficient, sterile. Almost everything I remembered and loved about Bremerhaven was gone.

  Closer to home, change has been equally dramatic. Nampa and Caldwell have grown, developed and redeveloped significantly since my days as a Canyon County bureau reporter. Eagle and Meridian, once sleepy farm towns, have become bustling cities.

  And Boise? My father, who died in the 1980s, wouldn’t recognize it. Its downtown has been almost completely made over. The rubble and weedy parking lots he knew from the urban renewal era have given way to glittering new shops and buildings. New developments continue to pop up  everywhere.

  The alternative, of course, is stagnation. Some towns grow and change. Others die on the vine.

  But as we grow and change, we should make an effort to honor what is noteworthy about our state and its cities. Few places have done a better job of that than Monterey with its tributes to Steinbeck.

  Idaho could do a better job of honoring its literary heritage. Idaho authors have won Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, and currently have the number-one fiction and non-fiction books on the New York Times bestseller list. A tasteful tribute to them would be a great addition to our capital city.

***

  As you know if you follow the legislative news, a bill has been proposed  to make standard time year-round in Idaho. As a lifelong Idahoan, I’m guessing that a majority of Idahoans would be opposed to that because they like Daylight Savings’ long summer evenings for outdoor activities. 

  What’s your preference? Do you favor A) Changing to Standard Time year-round, B) Making Daylight Savings Time year-round, or C) Keeping both Daylight Savings and Standard Time as they are now? Please email your preference to the address below. The results will be in my next column.

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

Suggested headline:  Noted musician’s other passion? Clocks

  When John Hansen was a young man trying to decide what to do with his life, he got a student loan and spent the money on a guitar.

  “I was living in Pocatello then. I registered and started school at Idaho State University and bought a new Martin guitar. I played rock and roll covers in a band and eventually started working for a couple who would go back east and buy antiques. She died, and he was half blind so I started going with him on his trips to buy antiques.”

  Things have a way of working out. Hansen never did finish college, but he  ended up with two livelihoods. Most people know him as John Hansen the musician. He’s been a fixture at local venues forever. He’s recorded half a dozen albums, will have a new one out in the spring and has shared stages with musicians from Belinda Bowler and Rosalie Sorrels to Ramblin’Jack Elliott and John Sebastian.

  The John Hansen most people don’t know about is as different from a performing musician as a race car driver is from a banker.

  He’s a clock repairman and collector.

  “I loved the antique furniture we saw on those buying trips, and clocks fit into that category – with the added bonus that they were mechanical. They kept time; they chimed. That fascinated me, and I started collecting them.”

  Fast forward 50 years. Now 70, Hansen is still collecting. He has wooden clocks, metal clocks, porcelain clocks. He has clocks that are relatively plain and clocks so ornately beautiful and intricate that they qualify as works of art. He has miniature alarm clocks and grandfather clocks eight feet tall. When they all chime together, it’s like being surrounded by cathedrals on a Sunday morning.

  A native of Shelley, in eastern Idaho, Hansen keeps the clocks he likes best and sells others to collectors who prefer different kinds of clocks.

  “There are lots of different types,” he said. “Some collectors only collect China clocks with porcelain cases. There’s a whole series of canine clocks, and collectors who just collect those. There are bracket clocks, crystal regulator clocks, art deco clocks, clocks with wooden movements, Black Forest clocks, French clocks, German clocks, eight-bell clocks … I like swinging-arm clocks.”

  A swinging-arm clock is one with a tall classical figure, often a bronze sculpture of a woman, holding a swinging pendulum with a clock face on its top.

  Beautiful as they are, the value of antique clocks has fallen.

  “The prices of clocks have come down tremendously in recent years,” Hansen said. “Clocks that were $500 or so a few years back would be worth a couple of hundred now. It’s a great time to become a collector if you like them because it’s a buyer’s market.”

  Old clocks, like old cars, need to be repaired now and then. That required skills he didn’t have without going back to school.

  “I’d learned a little bit over the years about how they operated, but not enough to fix them. After running out of people to work on them for me, I decided to take a class and learn how to fix them myself.”

  The class was at the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors’  School of Horology in Columbia, Pa. (Horology is defined as “the art or science of making timepieces or of measuring time.”) Hansen’s original intent was to take the school’s introductory hobby course, but he found the art and science of repairing clocks so interesting that he signed up for the full curriculum – 13 courses over a period of seven months.

  “… It wasn’t hard for me at all. It was fascinating. I had this empty vessel inside of me that needed this information to go into it. It fascinated me to be able to address problems that were always mysterious to me before.”

  That was in 2002. His phone has been ringing ever since.

  “As soon as I came back, I had people bringing me clocks. Guys in the NAWCC’s local chapter recommended me to people. Then jewelry stores found me, and I started getting referrals from people who fix watches but not clocks. Other repairmen sent clocks they didn’t want to work on, and several repairmen retired. I’ve been busy ever since I finished school. I haven’t caught up yet.”

  We were sitting in the front room of his Boise home, talking clocks, when a customer knocked on the door. His name was Pete Darr. Darr had come to pick up a 90-year old clock Hansen had repaired.

  “John’s the only one around who knows how to fix old clocks,” Darr said. “There are other people who say they do, but that’s B.S.”

  Repairs vary from cleanings to replacing parts to making alterations.

  “If the bushings are worn, you have to take the clock apart and drill out the hole that it was in because it’s become egg-shaped instead of round. But then the hole is too big so you have to use a little brass bushing and …”

  This seemed an opportune time to tell him that my Navy mechanical aptitude score was so low that the recruiter didn’t want me anywhere near a ship, and that I understood about ten percent of what Hansen was telling me. He laughed and agreeably changed the subject to mistakes people commonly make with clocks.

  “People clean them with WD-40 without knowing it’s the worst thing you can do to a clock. WD-40 isn’t a lubricant; it’s a water displacer. It dries out, collects dust and hardens. When it dries with the dust it’s collected, it’s like cement.”

  “… Another misconception is that you can overwind a clock. You can’t. There’s no such thing as overwinding a clock. They’re meant to be wound all the way. If it’s wound all the way and it’s not running, there’s something wrong with it.”

  How much winding depends on the type of clock. Some clocks are meant to be wound once a day, others once a week, once a month or even once a year.

  I asked the musician/clock repairman which he prefers, fixing clocks or playing music.

   “Playing music is more fun than fixing clocks. Repairing clocks can be frustrating and tedious. But it’s really rewarding when you get something to work that hasn’t. They both have their satisfactions.”

  That said, he adds that technology has changed both, not always for the better. Streaming has changed the music business, often to the detriment of those who make the music, and the digital revolution has lessened the need for traditional clocks.

  “Analog clocks have really become kind of unnecessary. You just look at your phone to know what time it is. And there’s no such thing as, say, quarter to four any more. It’s 3:45.”

  True. The correct time is ubiquitous in the digital world. It’s convenient, but does it also mean that something once treasured is being lost?

  “Yes,” the man enchanted by clocks replied. “The beautiful sounds, for one thing. In the digital age, what you get is an electronic alarm or a horrible-sounding, computer-generated chime. With clocks there’s a plethora of different chimes. We’re losing that, and we’re losing the beauty of the clocks themselves.” 

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

 My wishes for the New Year are pretty basic. Good health, the well being of family and friends, the usual stuff.

  And one unusual wish. Wouldn’t it be a great New Year’s gift for all of us if Congress passed the Robocall Bill this year?

  The Robocall Bill would allow telephone carriers to block calls with pre-recorded messages. As you know if you’ve gotten them (and who hasn’t?),  the relentless barrage of unwanted calls is beyond annoying.

   My wife and I estimate that roughly three of every four times our phone rings, it’s a call from a scam artist who thinks he or she has a perfect right to interrupt our lives. They call every day, often at the worst possible times. There’s no end to it: 

  “Hi, this is Nancy, your patient advocate. We have tried to reach you numerous times about braces that would alleviate your pain.”

  Granted, I do have a few aches and pains now and then. But how did Nancy know about them? And braces? What kind of braces did she have in mind?

  “Mostly I get headaches, Nancy. Would braces help those? Would they go around my head?”

  Nancy wasn’t listening.

  “… If we do not hear from you, you will lose your eligibility.”

  “Fine, Nancy. I’ll tell you where you can put those braces.”

   I could say that because “Nancy” was a computerized, pre-recorded  Nancy. The only place she would have put them was in her database.

  Calls from “specialists” are big these days.

  “Hello, this is Maya, and I’m a vacation specialist.”

  “Hello, this is Brooklyn, and I’m a travel specialist. Do you need help with your upcoming trip?”

  I was tempted to tell Brooklyn she could drive me to the airport for an early flight, but, like Nancy and Maya, she was just a recording. 

  “Hello, my name is Hanna, and I’m a hearing specialist calling on a recorded line. Now … can you hear me okay?”

  Hanna had a friendly, engaging voice, the sort of voice that makes you want to have a conversation with her. And she was a hearing specialist, so it made perfect sense that she’d ask if I could hear her okay. The catch is that the only thing she wants – and that any of the so-called specialists want – is for you to say yes.  It’s their reason for existence.

  Do not fall for this! They’ll use the recording of you saying yes to claim that you agreed to let them bill you for their hearing aids, timeshare, libido enhancers or whatever else it is that they’re selling. 

  I’m embarrassed to say I once made the mistake of saying yes to a caller who said a virus had infected my computer and he needed my permission to access it. It would be nice to blame the mistake on my befuddlement with his nearly incomprehensible accent, but the real culprit was my own gullibility. Luckily, my credit card denied his fee of several hundred dollars to fix the non-existent problem.

  One of the more novel calls is from an organization billing itself as the Hope and Prayers Ministry.

  “If you need an urgent prayer, press one.”

   If they call again, I’ll ask for an urgent prayer asking that Congress passes the Robocall Bill.

  A woman who identified herself as Kathleen from Microsoft called to say my IP address had been compromised in several countries and unless I pressed nine to change it my computer would explode.

  Kathleen didn’t really say that, or at least not all of it. I made up the exploding part. But she sounded sinister and threatening, as if at the very least she might come to my house and body-slam me.

  The telemarketers have a virtual armada of these recorded voices – Kathleen, Brooklyn, Maya, Roy, Janis, Brandi, Connor, Hanna, Robert, Naomi … And though they might be calling from Los Angeles, Chicago or some other distant city, the Caller ID on our phones displays a local area code. There should be a law against that, too.

  The variety of approaches they use would be impressive if they weren’t so infuriating: 

  “This is a Visa-Mastercard representative calling to congratulate you on your excellent payment history. You now qualify for an interest-free offer. Press nine to speak to someone in our qualifications department.”

  A call allegedly from East Glacier National Park claimed that a new life insurance benefit is now available in Idaho.

  “To see if you qualify, press one.”

  Another call warned that it was “the last courtesy call we will give you. To talk to a representative, press one. To talk to a shyster, press two. To skip the small talk and immediately send us a large amount of money, enter your credit card number.”

  Okay, I made up most of that one, too. One company, however, did ask for my credit card number. It wanted to charge me a monthly fee that would allow me to see my health-care providers and have the company pay what my insurance wouldn’t. The company seemed to be legitimate so I checked its website. Not one of my providers was in its network.

  For tips on how to avoid these sorts of calls, I spoke with Dale Dixon of Better Business Bureau Northwest and Pacific.

  The easiest way to protect yourself, he said, is not to answer the phone if it’s a number you don’t recognize. If you answer and hear silence, hang up. Don’t press one, nine or any other number. That confirms that you’re a real person and you’ll get even more calls. 

  “And never return a call out of curiosity,” Dixon said. “Scammers use call spoofing that makes it looks like it’s a local call just a digit or two off of your own. If you’re curious and call back, you confirm in their database that you’re a real person and they turn around and sell your number.

  “…You can ask your carrier about anti-scam tools that it provides. And there are settings on smartphones that will help. I have one that sends calls from anyone not in my callers list straight to voicemail.”

  Or, maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe Congress will pass the Robocall Bill this year and we won’t have to worry about this anymore.

  That would be kind of sad for the likes of Kathleen, Brooklyn and Maya, though. They’d have to find another line of work.

  Picking pockets, perhaps. 

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.

  Artificial Christmas trees have come a long way. My wife and I had one of the early ones one year. One year was enough.

  When the holidays were over, we left it in the trash. The reason our artificial tree ended up in the trash was that it was patently ugly. It looked like it had been made with green pipe cleaners and smelled like shoe polish. No amount of tinsel, lights or ornaments could compensate for its existential hideousness.

  After that thankfully short-lived experiment, the trouble it took to have a real tree seemed worth it. The pipe-cleaner tree made us disdainful of artificial trees. People who had artificial Christmas trees, the reasoning went, would also have artificial flowers or garden gnomes that looked like the Oak Ridge Boys.

  “Wouldn’t have one if somebody gave it to us,” we agreed.

  A couple of years ago, my attitude toward artificial trees began to soften.

  “I was looking at some artificial trees at Home Depot the other day,” I said to my partner in artificial-tree hating. “They didn’t look too bad.” 

  “You’re right,” she replied. “I’ve seen a few that actually looked pretty good.”

  That same year, one of our daughters went to Home Depot and bought the very tree that had impressed me. We had to admit that with  decorations on it and colorful gifts beneath its boughs, it looked pretty darned good.

  The annual ordeal of having a real tree, meanwhile, seems to grow more  arduous with every passing year.

  First it’s the challenge of finding just the right tree. Our search took us to the mountains one year to cut one. You’d think that with all those thousands of trees up there, it would be easy to find one that was perfect.

  You’d be wrong. The trees in the forest were too tall, too short, too skimpy or had split or crooked trunks. We spent the day tromping around in knee deep snow and came home with sore muscles, frozen fingers, and no tree.

  The commercially grown trees sold in town look a lot better.  They seem to get more expensive every year, though. With what we’ve paid for real Christmas trees over the years, we could have bought a Christmas tree farm.

  Let’s say you find the perfect tree, or at least an okay tree. Then you have to get it home. Without a truck, this involves shoehorning it into the trunk or putting it on top of the car and tying it with twine. One year the twine came loose and the tree fell off of the car on the way home. It was a nice tree, too.

  Until a VW bus ran over it.

  Experts say to cut the bottom off of your tree’s trunk and soak it in water overnight  to keep it fresh and green though the holidays. (This assumes that the tree wasn’t cut in August.) I tried for years to do the job with a chainsaw, but the stupid thing wouldn’t ever start. My chainsaw has started maybe half a dozen times in all the years I’ve owned it. The alternative was my hand saw, which is a saw in name only. It more closely resembles a dull file. I’ve burned enough calories cutting off Christmas tree trunks to work off a quart of eggnog and a Martha Stewart fruitcake. 

  Duly soaked, the tree has to be squeezed through the front door, leaving enough needles on the porch and floor to fill a wastebasket and begging the question of whether the tree actually was cut in August.

  Once in the house, the tree must be muscled into its stand, rotated to show its best side and made to stand up straight rather than leaning in  one direction or another. This is when you’re apt to discover that the tree that looked great on the lot has deformed trunk that makes getting it to stand up straight almost impossible.

   The tree-balancing act at our house typically has involved placing cardboard, magazines or scraps of wood to serve as shims under the legs of the stand, a delicate procedure accompanied by spirited cursing.

  One memorable Christmas, with the tree finally up and decorated, we adjourned to the kitchen to celebrate. All was well with the world, until the sound of a crash came from the living room.

   Molly, the family dog, had knocked the tree over.

   If there is a more jarring holiday sight than your Christmas tree lying on the floor in a sea of flickering lights and broken ornaments, it doesn’t come to mind.

  I’m happy to report that Molly, may she rest in peace, did not spend Christmas in the dog pound that year.

  But it was a tempting idea.

  Taking the tree down can be almost as frustrating as putting it up. It has to be cut in half so the recyclers will take it (dull saw, more cursing) and wrestled from the stand, with which it is formed a more or less permanent attachment. Our approach to solving this problem has been for me to hold  the tree while my wife holds the stand, then engage in a monumentally awkward tug of war with what little is left of the stand’s murky water spilling onto the carpet.

  Squeezing the tree back out the front door results in a trail of needles numbering in the thousands. Even after repeated vacuuming and sweeping, I invariably find a needle or two as late as March.

  Thankfully, that won’t happen this year. The new artificial trees look so much better than the old one that we finally bought one. It was easy to put up, looks great and doesn’t have to be watered all the time like the real ones do.

  It has its own lights and stand and is perfectly straight – no magazine-shims needed.

  It’s lighter than a real tree, too. The segments come apart for easy storage and don’t weigh much so they’re easy to handle. If the tree was outside, a strong breeze would blow it over.

  Molly would have loved it.

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.

 Some of my favorite news stories are about treasures lost and rediscovered – a priceless painting found under decades of dust in someone’s attic, an unreleased Beatles song turning up in a vault, the discovery of a lost manuscript by a famous author.

  A lost manuscript by Vardis Fisher recently was found after lying untouched in a folder for nearly 80 years.

  “Vardis Who?” you may ask.

  A fair question. All but forgotten today, Fisher was once Idaho’s best known writer. He was brilliant, iconoclastic, infuriating. He wrote 36 books, evoking comparisons with Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. He also drove a wife to suicide and alienated both critics and readers with his acerbic observations – which earned him the nickname “Old Irascible.” 

  They also had a lot to do with the lost manuscript’s never being published.

  Until now.

  Alessandro Meregaglia, a Boise State University assistant professor and archivist discovered the manuscript. Meregaglia was researching the history of Caldwell’s Caxton Printers when he learned that Fisher had written several books for the Federal Writers Project, a Depression era program that provided jobs for unemployed writers, and that some  of them had never been published. 

  Fisher was the Idaho director of the Federal Writers Project and then the author of five novels and a book of poetry. Intrigued by a footnote that “Old Irascible” had written about the unpublished manuscripts, Meregaglia traveled to Washington, D.C. and found one of them. Gathering dust in an obscure folder in the Library of Congress was a guide to Boise, written in 1938.

  “There was a carbon copy that Fisher had made, and the original that the editors had marked up,” Meregaglia said. “If it had been published that way, it would have been a lot less interesting.”

  Eight decades later, the original is finally being published. “Vardis Fisher’s Boise” will be released in January. Far from being a dry historical tome, it gives us a glimpse of what Idaho’s capital city actually was like in those days, written as only Fisher would have.

  Boise, he wrote, was “physically attractive, but it is the trees and not the buildings that make it so.”

  He wasted neither time nor ink on buildings he found unworthy of  attention:

  If “the universities or other institutions or public buildings such as the state capitol are omitted, it is because they are unimpressive in comparison with corresponding features in many other states.”

  He happily lampooned two of the city’s architectural gems. 

  “… The Idanha Hotel some thirty years ago was the edifice at which Boise pointed with greatest pride, but nobody finds it beautiful today. It has been supplanted in public esteem by the Hotel Boise,” now the Hoff Building and an example of “old-fashioned stupidity.”

  “… Along any of several streets can be seen enough incongruous architectural ineptness to abash any lover of the beautiful…”

   “Fisher wasn’t afraid to describe places and things as he saw them,” Meregaglia said. “He was certainly no economic booster, which was most likely the reason the book didn’t get published. The city didn’t want it published. It was too acerbic, too sarcastic.”

  Parts of it, however, are complimentary:  

  Boise’s 85,000 trees, “more than any other city in the nation without an arboretum,” gave it the “somewhat legendary distinction of being one of the loveliest cities in the nation. … Boise today has many long, leafy avenues with ceilings arched over and dappled shadows on the concrete.”

  That said, he couldn’t resist a dig. Without the trees, “the city would not inappropriately invite the metaphor of a peacock divested of its feathers.”

  The book provides a snapshot of a gone era. High-tech and outdoor recreation are nowhere to be found in Fisher’s Boise. The principal industries: agriculture, dairying, mining and lumbering. 

  The city had 11 hotels, six downtown theaters (the Ada, Pinney, Granda, Rialto, Rio and Lyric), two newspapers (The Idaho Daily Statesman and the Boise Capital News), two radio stations (KFXD and KIDO), and two airports, one not far from where today’s airport is and another on the current site of BSU’s Albertsons Stadium. Charles Lindbergh once landed there.

  Readers may learn things they never knew about Boise. I was born in Boise, have spent most of my life there and didn’t know that Zoo Boise began with one monkey that escaped from a circus.

  Or that an early name of the Boise River, as shown on a Lewis and Clark map, was “the Coppoppabash, said to mean place of the cottonwoods.”

  Maybe we should change it back. Coppoppabash is a lot more fun to say.

  What would Fisher think of Boise today?

  “I don’t know,” Meregaglia said. “Do I think he’d like the growth? I honestly don’t know.”

  Having spent several years researching and writing a biography of Fisher, I have a pretty good idea. He would hate the growth. He would dismiss some of the downtown buildings as being patently hideous.

  He was blunt to the point of offending people, including critics who otherwise might have furthered his reputation, and readers today would rightly take offense at the book’s brief section on race. It includes some degrading stereotypes, which the editors deplored but let stand because it was “important to the integrity as a historical text to preserve the language and attitudes of the time in which it was written.”

  “Vardis Fisher’s Boise” shows its author at his best and worst. At his best, he was fiercely independent, insightful and almost never boring. And, unlike some city guides, this one is anything but boring.

  “It’s not a book you’d send to your grandmother,” Bruce DeLaney, co-owner of Boise’s Rediscovered Bookshop, said. “It’s not a typical guidebook. It’s one person’s view of what Boise was like at the time.”

  Priced at $19.95, it will be released at The Rediscovered Bookshop  at 180 N.  Eighth St. on Jan. 30.

  Without Fisher there to sign copies, it should go smoothly. At one of his signings, he insulted a customer and turned over a table of books.

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

 Here in Idaho, 3,000 miles away, we don’t hear much about what’s been happening in our hemisphere’s poorest nation.

    Few countries have known more suffering than Haiti – earthquakes, hurricanes, grinding poverty and, most recently, violent protests that continue to claim lives.

   Idahoans, long noted for their generosity, are providing assistance through a project that has been helping the people of Haiti for 25 years. 

  Coverage of the violence in Haiti has been scant, sporadic. Political news and disasters in the U.S. – floods, fires, Hurricane Dorian – have dominated the news cycle.

  That doesn’t mean that nothing newsworthy is happening in Haiti. Protests over rising inflation, lack of basic goods and government corruption have turned streets into battle zones, claimed some 20 lives and blocked so many streets and roads that garbage is piling up even in hospitals. Overcrowded morgues have no place left for the dead. 

  Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center’s Project Haiti has been working to help the poor in Haiti since 1994, sending medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and volunteers. It was founded to support the work of two Catholic priests who had established a hospital and orphanage to care for abandoned children dying of AIDS.

  One of them, Fr. Rick Frechette, could have had a relatively bland career as a parish priest in his native New England. Instead, he devoted his life to helping the poor in Haiti, where he has spent the last three decades. He didn’t think he could do enough for them as a priest so, working by candlelight during the country’s frequent blackouts, he became a medical doctor. He’s treated everything from broken bones to cholera, and continues to work on the front lines of the ongoing violence.

  It’s been my good fortune to have interviewed Fr. Rick, as he is universally known, during two of his visits to Boise to help raise money for Project Haiti. It’s impossible to spend time with him and not feel awe for what this one man has done to ease the physical suffering and tend to the spiritual needs of thousands. 

  He was scheduled to speak in Boise during Project Haiti’s 25th anniversary event in September, but the turmoil in Haiti and flight cancellations caused by Hurricane Dorian forced him to cancel. Fr. Enzo Del Brocco, who works with him in Haiti, was already in the U.S. when the hurricane struck so he came to Boise instead. By interviewing him and reading email updates from Fr. Rick, I learned just how horrific things are in Haiti now.

  The protests, Fr. Rick wrote, have become “incrementally worse and more destructive.

  “… Port au Prince (the capital and largest city) is cut off from the provinces, and vice versa. Businesses and banks are often closed and frequently attacked. Schools have not been able to open since September. … The sick cannot get to hospitals, nor can oxygen, fuel, supplies or even doctors. … Hunger is the problem of the majority; malnutrition is rising sharply. We are on the verge of civil war”

  Vehicles are smashed and burned at barricades, the barricades themselves set afire. Drinking water has to be delivered to poor areas where it’s no longer available. Fuel shortages and barricades have virtually  ended basic services. It’s a challenge just to bury bodies unclaimed at the morgue and hospitals. 

  “We have been trying for eight days to bury the overflowing dead,” Fr.  Rick wrote. At the morgue, “blood is flowing slowly out the bottom doors, full of maggots. There is not even room for a dead newborn,”

  Violence is a constant threat. He and his team were attacked while burying the dead, his truck “burned to oblivion.”

  Fr. Del Brocco came to Haiti to work with him in 2013, intending to stay a month or two, and has been there six years. For the first three years, he lived in a metal container box. He has masters degrees in philosophy, theology and human resources and is close to completing a doctoral degree in bioethics, the study of ethical issues arising from advances in medicine and technology.

  “Technology is so advanced here in the U.S. that you almost have a ventilator for every person in a hospital,” he said. “In Haiti, a hospital might have one or two. How do you use what limited resources you have? The toughest choices aren’t between right and wrong but between two things that are right.”

  He himself has been hospitalized twice during his time in Haiti, once with an intestinal disease and once with malaria.

  “I was fortunate in that I lived behind a hospital with doctors and nurses and medicine. I see children who come to the hospital with the same things I had and they don’t make it. By the time their mothers walk to the hospital with them, it’s too late. … In Haiti, people see their children die every day.”

  Even with all they have had to endure – the deaths, the violence, the suffering – the people he helps continue to be an inspiration to him:

  “From the very beginning, I’ve felt the love of the Haitian people. And they have a positive sense of pride. No matter how poor they are, they take care of themselves and their children. You see people coming out of shacks made of metal sheets, always clean and looking nice. When they take their kids to the hospital, they dress up. They have such a sense of dignity.”

  Despite one natural or manmade disaster after another, Fr. Rick and his co-workers have made remarkable progress:

  “A lot has been achieved and is being achieved, much of it due to Fr.  Rick’s vision of how to build a mission,” Fr. Del Brocco said. “Two hospitals have been built. We have oncology and heart surgery. Heart surgery in an environment like that! We have high level urological laser surgeries.

  “Thirty-one schools have been built. We have tilapia farms, chicken farms, our own pharmacy, a bakery and a tailor shop to make uniforms for the school children. We have a vocational school that teaches nursing, plumbing, carpentry and other skills.”

  Saint Alphonsus’s Project Haiti has been an integral part of the progress.

  “Donations help us manage all the problems,” Fr. Rick wrote. “Our strength is solid infrastructure. Project Haiti has been essential to that for 25 years.”

  With Thanksgiving approaching and all that we have to be grateful for in one of the world’s richest nations, you might want to consider helping those in one of the poorest. Donations, large or small, may be sent to:  Saint Alphonsus Project Haiti, Attention: Debbie Hamilton, 1055 N Curtis Rd., Boise, ID 83706

  A funny thing has happened every time I’ve interviewed Fr. Rick, and now Fr. Del Brocco. I leave feeling that, compared with their selflessness and all that they have accomplished, I’ve never done anything worth mentioning in my entire life.

   Their lives are guided by words worth sharing:

  “We live with death every day in Haiti,” Fr. Del Brocco said. “It makes you realize your life is short, and you have to spend each minute the best you can. You can’t waste it. It’s one shot.”

  Or, as Fr. Rick put it, “You have a limited number of heartbeats in your life; it is a finite number. And you have a limited number of steps you’re going to take in your life; it is a finite number, and it can be calculated. The question is, what is your heart beating for, and where are your steps taking 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.

 Some towns, even very small towns, are known for having at least one really great restaurant.

 Albion (population 270) was renowned for the now defunct Annie-Laurie Cafe, which served steaks big enough that, if the legs had been attached, you could have thrown a saddle on one and ridden it home.

  Mexican food at Kuna’s El Gallo Giro and Enrique’s draws customers from far beyond Kuna.

  Nampa’s El Charro started out as a taco truck and became a destination restaurant for diners throughout the valley.

  I was reminded of iconic Idaho restaurants in a recent email from online reader Judy Pray of Medford, Ore. Pray was writing in response to one of my columns she’d found on Google about the late, great Manley’s Cafe. This led to a phone conversation in which she shared a part of the Manley’s legend that, but for her, may well have been lost. 

  Food junkies in Idaho and beyond get misty-eyed just thinking about Manley’s, a modest but unforgettable eatery on Boise’s Federal Way. It was a small, low-slung, rundown building with faded white paint, a rickety screen door and a dirt parking lot. Inside were a few well-worn tables, beat-up stools lining a Formica counter and a bustling kitchen where cooks prepared meals remembered for life.

  There was absolutely nothing fancy about Manley’s. It served plain food and plenty of it. The unassuming little cafe was famous for its generous portions. If you ordered prime rib, you got a slab of meat big enough for two with enough left over for dinner the next day. In the off chance that you still had room for dessert, the options included a quarter of a pie with a pint of ice cream. The pies, and virtually everything else on the menu, were made from scratch. 

  People came from all over to dine at the little cafe with the big big reputation. Celebrity customers included Clint Eastwood, Arnold Palmer and concert violinist Eugene Fodor, who agreed to play in Boise on the condition that he be taken to the legendary Idaho  cafe where no one ever left hungry.

  When journalist-humorist-food writer Calvin Trillin visited Boise for a story he was writing for the New Yorker magazine, some co-workers and I took him to Manley’s for lunch. His reaction upon seeing the humble, grease-glazed interior was surprise, followed by a grin that illuminated his face.

  “People associate me with New York, but I’m from Kansas City,” he said. “When I travel, people always take me to the fancy restaurant in the revolving glass ball on top of the tallest building in town. The food is always awful. This is my kind of place.”

  The place had a unique history, part of which is all but forgotten. It was rightly famous as Manley’s, but it wasn’t always Manley’s. W. Manley Morrow, a chef who had a big appetite and assumed everyone else did, made it the cafe most of its fans wistfully remember. But its founder, now remembered by few of its fans, was a man named Eddie Barker. 

  Pray remembers Barker better than anyone. He was her father.

  “When I think about the fact that everyone knew it as Manley’s, I think, ‘Hey, what about Dad? He’s the one who started it.’”

  Her father, she said, was a Marine who served at Guadalcanal during World War II, attaining the rank of sergeant, and went on to become something of a Boise fixture.

  “He was well known around Boise because of his service during the war. They called on him for a lot of parades and patriotic processions with flags because he was a commanding figure. His picture was in the paper a few times.”

   Barker and his wife, Miriam, bought the property that would become known as Manley’s in 1942, the year they were married. It was then a large lot with a small house and a food truck. When her father returned from the war in 1946, Pray said, her parents started a restaurant there.

  “Dad worked and worked on it. He’d never run a restaurant, but he loved to cook. He built a rose garden around the little house and the food truck, leaving them as a kind of kitchen area. The cafe incorporated the food wagon.

  “There was a trellis with roses that you came through to get to the garden. Dad put tables and chairs in the garden and planted roses around them and watered everything with flood irrigation to keep it nice and green.”

  The Barkers named their enterprise the Rose Garden. It was locally famous, she said, for its hamburgers.

  “It had a big griddle Dad would cook the burgers on. They were very popular. Mom and Dad had to hire car hops to keep up. They never did branch out into fancier foods. They concentrated on burgers, fries, hot dogs, root beer floats and chocolate dipped cones.”

  Hearing her description of the Rose Garden brought back an early childhood memory. My folks were fans of the Rose Garden and occasionally took me and my sister there. I remember the trellis, the roses, the green, shaded lawn – and some of the best burgers ever.

  The Barkers sold the business in the early 1950s.

  “With just the two of them running it, it wore them out,” their daughter said. They were tired all the time and wanted to try something different.”

  They moved to Oregon, where Eddie Barker worked for the Electrolux vacuum cleaner company. Manley kept the restaurant’s original  name for a while – it eventually became known as Manley’s Rose Garden – but, like the roses themselves, the name faded and Manley’s Cafe became the name remembered today.

  The site where it stood is now Terry Day Park. The late Terry Day and her husband, Pat, lived next door to Manley’s and donated the land for it. It’s a pretty little park, with a walking path, playground and tennis courts. 

  One thing is missing, though. The cafe’s unique and colorful history deserves better than to be forgotten. The city might want to consider a modest sign or plaque telling the Rose Garden/Manley’s story.

  “I think Dad and my mother would have loved that,” Pray said. “It’s sad that no one in Boise remembers them.”

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

  Hoodsport, Wash. – You never know when or where you’ll run into colorful characters.

  Idaho has its share. I’ve been fortunate to have spent time with the likes of Free Press Frances, Buckskin Bill, Dugout Dick and other unforgettable individuals.

  In other states, it’s been my good fortune to have met a man who was traveling all the way from England to Idaho for the sole purpose of seeing Hells Canyon, a woman whose pet was an albino alligator, and a man who helped Ernest Hemingway save the manuscript to “A Farewell to Arms” from a fire.

  And the most recent, “Harley Bob” McFarland.

  McFarland lives in Hoodsport, Wash, on the Olympic Peninsula. His home overlooking a scenic channel of Puget Sound is across the street from the library where I go to check out books and movies while on vacation there. As I was leaving the library one day, he was sitting on his porch with a goat in his lap. Clearly this was someone I had to meet.

  “Is the goat a pet?” I asked him.

  “Yes. His name is Rudy.”

  “Why a goat?”

  “Because everybody else has a dog or a cat.”

   A “goat crossing” sign warns visitors of Rudy’s presence. A sign on a fence features a silhouette of a goat and the words, “I can make it to the fence in 2.8 seconds. Can you?”

  Rudy did his best to butt or hook me with his horns whenever I ventured too close to his owner. Diverting as he was, however, Rudy  was but one of many things that set Harley Bob and his home apart from the ordinary.

  He also has a pet named Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith is a chicken. 

  Gracing a porch is what I initially mistook to be a samovar but is actually a homemade smoker, made from Coors beer kegs.

  Parked outside his shop is a 1949 Austin that looks like a junker, but will do 80 mph in 8.5 seconds. Painted on one of its doors are the words, “Shine Runner.”

  “Shine” would be moonshine. Harley Bob’s moonshine is in demand. He gives it to a few select connoisseurs, who give it high marks.

  “Moonshine doesn’t get any better,” one of them told me.

  The Harley Bob nickname comes, as you might expect, from his passion for Harley Davidson motorcycles. His is nearly 40 years old and runs perfectly, due to his skills as a mechanic. The Harley is part of a vehicle collection that includes the Shine Runner, a 1928 Ford hot rod pickup, a 1938 Bantam coupe, a1955 Ford pickup and a 1941 Willys coupe, a story in itself.  

  McFarland has been a tool junkie virtually all his life. He grew up in Tacoma and has spent time in Hoodsport for as long as he can remember. His brick mason father brought him and the rest of his family there for vacations.

  “We’d go clam digging, oyster digging, boating, swimming … I loved it so much that when I had a young family of my own, I brought them out here camping. When I got close to retiring, I bought this place and remodeled the house. I did all the electrical and plumbing and do all the maintenance.”

  The idyllic family vacations of his youth were a prelude to some turbulent teenage years.

  “I got in some trouble. My older brother was the star in my folks’ eyes, my little sister was the star in the other eye and I was in the middle. I got caught drinkin’ and smokin’ and was kicked out of school for it. When I was 15, Ma’ said, ‘You’re a mess. I’m gonna’ call your Uncle Leno and talk to him about hiring you.’”

  A machinist who lived in Tacoma, Uncle Leno got him a job pushing a wheelbarrow and driving a truck. That led to a five-year apprenticeship as a machinist, jobs in multiple machine shops and a 20-year career as a machinist for the Port of Tacoma. He can build or fix almost anything made of metal.

  Which brings us back to the Willys.

  “When I first saw it, there was almost nothing left of it. It was sitting in some blackberry bushes. It was just a shell. Everything else was rotted out. I paid more than I wanted to for it, but I was in love with it. I told my buddies that in two years I’d have it ready for the speedway in Wendover, Utah. They thought I was nuts.”

  With a wave of a flame-tattooed arm, he directed me down the hill to his garage for a look. He’d already shown me a photo of the “shell,” so I wasn’t prepared for what was coming. He spent two years rebuilding and customizing the Willys. The rotted out shell is now a work of art, with a top speed of 150 mph.

   “I hadn’t had it very long when I met a guy who asked me if I knew what I had. He said it was called the Cranberry Carriage and that it had been in the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair and featured in Car Craft Magazine. I almost cried. You’ll never see another one like it.”

  No argument. Low and sleek with a gleaming cranberry paint job, it is uniquely beautiful. 

  Now a 75-year  year old divorced grandfather of seven, McFarland  supplements his Social Security income by working on other people’s cars and motorcycles and machining parts. His shop has, among other things, a lathe, a hoist, a grinder, plasma cutter, arc welder, hydraulic press …

  A sign on the side of the shop jokes that its owner is “retired, but I work part time as a pain in the butt.”

 I asked the man who lives in an idyllic place surrounded by his pets, the tools of his trade and stunning vehicles whether he still had anything left on his bucket list.

  “No,” he said. “I reached my goal to become one of the top machinists in Tacoma, I’ve tinkered around with cars and motorcycles and racing, and these days I’m happy just helping my buddies out and machining a few parts for people. A little of this and a little of that. I’m pretty darned content.”

  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.

Editor’s Note:  This is the first of two columns from Tim’s summer travels. The second will run two weeks from today.

HOODSPORT, Wash. – The road to Hoodsport, Wash. is so familiar my car could almost drive there without me. I’ve driven it over a hundred times.

  Hoodsport is the closest town to the Woodward family getaway, a cabin on a finger of Puget Sound. When my wife’s folks were alive, we’d go there to swim, fish and otherwise enjoy ourselves. With their passing, the cabin passed to my wife. Now we go there to weed, paint, replace the deck, replace the flooring … We liked it better when we could lie around like slugs, but there you are.

  This summer, we decided to fly there instead of driving. It’s a beautiful drive through the Blue Mountains and the Columbia Gorge, but it takes all day. We had lot of hard work ahead of us, so we figured we’d treat ourselves and save time by flying.

  “Maybe we’ll fly over Jenny,” our son joked as the plane taxied to the runway.

  A reference to our younger daughter, who was driving home from the cabin with her family the same day.

  “It’s going to be a rough departure,” our pilot announced. “Be sure to buckle yourselves and any children in tightly. Make sure all loose items are securely stowed so they don’t fly around. Flight attendants, remain seated. There’ll be no beverage service. We’ll be lucky to escape with our lives.”

  He didn’t really say that last sentence; I made it up. But you get the idea. We were in for a rough trip.

  In more ways than one. Hoodsport isn’t on the beaten path. Getting there by air involves taking a train from the Seattle-Tacoma airport to downtown Seattle, a ferry from Seattle to Bremerton, Wash., and a “foot ferry” (passengers only, no cars) to relatives’ home in Port Orchard, Wash., where our older daughter had left her car a few weeks earlier. From there, it’s an hour’s drive to the cabin.

  The walk from the train station in downtown Seattle to the ferry dock is normally a pleasant one. Without luggage to haul, it’s an easy 15 minutes or so. We had enough luggage for a soccer team.

  Did I mention the dog? Our daughter’s dog had made the trip in the plane’s cargo hold. In addition to multiple suitcases, backpacks and assorted bags and packages, we were pulling a dog crate the size of an air conditioner. The only one not working like a dog schlepping baggage was the dog itself.

  Huffing, puffing, sweating like pigs, we arrived at the ferry terminal in the nick of time to catch the ferry. We would have caught the ferry, that is, if the Boarding Nazi hadn’t stretched a rope in front of us just as we were getting in line to board.

  “Sorry, line’s closed,” he said, clearly enjoying the moment.

  “But the ferry hasn’t left yet! And you just put the rope up two seconds ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  We considered throwing him off the dock, but settled for cursing him and his ancestors while waiting an hour and a half for the next ferry.

  The next ferry was 20 minutes late. It’s supposed to connect with the foot ferry, but being late it pulled into the dock as the foot ferry was pulling out. We’d missed two ferries by a total of less than minute and were looking at yet another wait.

  That said, the second wait wasn’t without entertainment. One of the couples waiting for the foot ferry had to have been the friendliest people in Washington.

  “Hi!” they said in unison. “Are you having a nice day?”

  “Now that you mention it, no. Almost everything has gone wrong, and …”

  “Great! Glad to hear it. We’re having a wonderful day, too!”

  With this they were off to accost other passengers.

  “Hi! Are you having a good day?”

  “Well …”

  “Great! We sure are!”

  Then, back to us again, “Have you met Mister?”

  “Uh … no. Who’s Mister?”

  This struck them as inordinately funny.

  “Can you believe it?” the man asked his girlfriend. “They don’t know who Mister is. This is Mister!”

  With this he produced a plastic skeleton with glowing eyes.

  “We bought Mister in Seattle today. Isn’t he amazing?”

  While he regaled us with Mister, his girlfriend danced off to annoy other passengers. It was at this point that we decided they weren’t merely friendly; they were stoned out of their minds.

  “Let’s get a picture of Mister with your dog!”

  He helped Mister straddle the dog for a cell phone photo, which reduced them both to peals of shrieking laughter. Luckily, the foot ferry was pulling into the dock, sparing us further examples of their finely honed wit. It was a good thing, because we weren’t in a laughing mood. It had been a long, frustrating day. We were weary, grumpy, snapping at each other.

  Murphy’s Law, however, wasn’t finished with us yet. When we arrived at our relatives’ house to get the car …

  Its battery was dead. 

  Here we’ll draw the closing curtain over our trip to the family cabin, except to say that by the time we arrived there it was well after dark.

  Our other daughter – who had left the cabin to drive back to Boise at about the same time our flight left Boise for Seattle – had been home for hours.

  Next:  An unforgettable character – Harley Bob McFarland.

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.

  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.