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

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

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

  The newest and probably the last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Just, 69, grew up with the Stinker signs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A few, by contemporary standards, were offensive:

  “Report Indian massacres to your doctor.”

  “Beware of Curves and Soft Shoulders.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No argument.

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

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

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

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

  There was just one problem. 

  Mardi Gras.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No argument there.

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

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

  “Two miles.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We were on the wrong ferry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We gave him the name of the hotel.

  “I know it.”

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

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

  “Yes. I know the area.”

  “Do you have a GPS?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Amtrak, here we come. 

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

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

  They did it by winning a contest.

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

  Or the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   His reaction was low-key.

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

  No victory sign? No cheering?

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

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

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

   His process for writing captions is straightforward. 

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

  His advice to other entrants:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And I’ve never set foot in North Dakota.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Alexa, play the Beatles.”

  “Alexa, play Dirt Wire.”

  “Alexa play ‘Baby Shark.’”

  “Alexa, shut up!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Well, let me tell you …

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

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

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

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

  As Hall got older, things got weirder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  One instance was alarming enough that he called the police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  His story is an object lesson for our times. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sound familiar? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

  Wanted: exorcist. 

  This is not a joke. My house is haunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Until, inexplicably, they were. 

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

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

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

  Nada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   I could almost hear the poltergeist laughing. 

  Some things vanish permanently at my house.

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

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

  Those keys are still missing three decades later.

  This brings us to the Phantom Robe.

  And the Vanishing Vacuum Cleaner.

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

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

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

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

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

  Except that no one was in the kitchen.

  Or anywhere else in the house. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A car? 

  A child?

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

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

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

  And she’s not a dog or a car. 

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

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

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

  She did.

  Sixteen years later.

  The doctor had retired.

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

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

  An asterisk.

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

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

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

  And it stuck.

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

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

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

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

  Not that there weren’t occasional incidents.

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

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

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

  The response was bureaucracy at its annoying best:

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

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

  Punky was crushed.

  And embarrassed.

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

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

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

  Her mother told her they sounded like strippers’ names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And got her driver’s license.

  Almost everyone calls her Tamara now.

  Except her family members.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I won’t talk to you,” he said.

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

  “No,”

  “How about the store manager?”

  “Maybe. I’ll walk you down there.”

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

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

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

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

  Times change, businesses evolve.

  Or don’t.

  Nothing lasts forever.

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

 

 Most young people today have little or no idea what the expression “basic training” means. If they’ve heard of it at all, they could be forgiven for thinking it was a course on the Internet for Dummies.

  Firsthand experience with basic training, also known as boot camp, has become far less common since Congress ended the draft in 1971. The draft, for young people unfamiliar with it, was conscription into the armed forces. Young men received “greetings from the president of the United States” ordering them to report for military service, the first component of which was boot camp.

  Boot camp involved weeks of being shouted at and humiliated, coupled with grueling physical exercise and instruction on how to march, shoot and perform other military activities.

  There were two things you learned quickly. One was to blend in. Standing out meant being singled out for extra humiliation and grueling exercise. The other thing you learned almost immediately was that boot camp was something you never, ever wanted to repeat. Right up there with fraternity hazings and chicken pox.

  Jeff Currie is an exception.

  Currie, who lives in Homedale, repeated basic training in the army reserve at age – wait for it – 48.

  Almost all of the other recruits in his company were teenagers. He wouldn’t have stood out more if he’d been wearing tights and a tutu.

  I happen to know something about standing out at boot camp. When the Navy sent me to San Diego, United Airlines sent my luggage to Chicago. For four days, I was the only one of thousands of recruits who was marching around in beige slacks and a black trench coat. This did not escape the notice of my drill instructor, who made those the longest four days of my life.

  What would possess someone to subject himself to boot camp at an age when most men are scheduling prostate exams?

  “I ran into my old battalion commander from when I was in the reserve at Gowen Field 17 years ago. … He said I was an idiot because I had 13 years in the reserve and left without completing my benefits. He said I should go back in and finish. I thought I was too old to do that, but he said I wasn’t. That came as a complete shock to me.”

  A financial advisor, Currie realized that the advice his old battalion commander gave him was exactly the advice he’d give a client. He’d be saving $700 a month on health insurance alone.

  Patriotism also was a factor. 

  “There’s always a patriotic element,” he said. “It’s tremendous not just to be a veteran, but to be someone who’s actively serving. I like the job and the people I work with. It wasn’t just about the benefits.”

  So he signed up. His case was so unusual – returning after 17 years away and as an enlisted man (he’d previously been a combat engineering officer) – that he had to apply three times. Final acceptance came with an unexpected twist.

  “The boot camp requirement was a bit of a shock. They initially told me it it would just be a six-week refresher course, but at my swearing-in they said not enough guys had signed up so it was canceled and it would be full-on boot camp. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Well, I’ve done it before. I can do it again.’ That might have been misplaced confidence.”

  A thought that surfaced repeatedly during his ten weeks and four days at Fort Jackson, S.C.

  “Not that I was counting.”

   The training included up to four and a half hours of grueling exercise a day – running, marching up to 13 miles with a heavy pack, obstacle courses, pushups beyond counting … Drill sergeants were constantly in his face, shouting things that are unprintable in a general-circulation newspaper. Their nickname for him was “old man.” His fellow recruits were more creative – “Grandpa,” “Pops,” “Father Time.”

  The training was divided into three phases. The first was classic boot camp. The second and third involved less shouting and exercise and more skill-oriented training.

  That was one of several surprises. The food was better than it was his first time at boot camp, about a fourth of the recruits were women, and “the instructors really want you to succeed.”

  An example?

   “On the rifle range, they wanted everyone to shoot at expert level. My first time in basic training, they didn’t care what you shot as long as you met the minimum requirement. This time, we really did have to qualify at expert level.”

  The hardest part of Boot Camp II?

  “The kids. The women were more mature and a pleasure to work with, but the guys weren’t very kind to me or to each other. They had a hard time thinking about their fellow soldiers or anybody but themselves. When I was in basic training the first time, we had to learn to stop thinking about ourselves and help the weakest member. With a few exceptions, that doesn’t seem to be happening now.”

  That said, he adds that the training at Fort Jackson was for non-combatants – clerks, cooks, mechanics, etc. 

 “Combat people are held to a different standard. In the volunteer army, people who won’t be going into combat are being treated differently to get them to stay in long enough to do their job to support the combat troops. And maybe it works.”

  Currie will be a clerk this time around and plans to stay in the reserve until he’s 60. Not as challenging as being a combat engineer, but the right fit at his age.

  Having done it twice, would he do it again?

  He would. He’s an exception to the rule that nobody ever wants to repeat boot camp.  

  And for him, it worked out okay. He’s a youthful 48. And he wasn’t wearing slacks and a trench coat.

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

   

 

 Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, which is odd when you consider that it’s often been a disaster at my house.

  Who doesn’t love Thanksgiving? The seductive aroma of turkey roasting, the annual gathering of friends and relatives from near and far, the uniquely American-ness of it all?

  True, Thanksgiving is celebrated in other countries, but nowhere is it enjoyed more universally, or ravenously, than here in the U.S. It’s a documented fact that Americans eat more food on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year, as anyone who has downed an after-dinner Alka Seltzer and groaned through a quarter or two of football can attest.

   Last year, after cooking and hosting Thanksgiving dinner forever, my wife ceded the job to one of our daughters, who has a bigger kitchen and is a wonderful cook. It’s less work for us, but it wasn’t without mixed feelings. We missed hosting the dinner – the anticipation, the crowded kitchen, the joyful chaos of it all.

  That said, no other holiday has been so apt to run off the rails for us.

It’s been that way forever.

   I was four the year my mother hosted Thanksgiving dinner in the dilapidated, two-story house where we lived at the time. She’d invited, among others, my great grandmother and her last husband, who lived in Notus. (She outlived three husbands, but that’s another story.)

  We were having dinner when Grampa Chandler slumped over. My last memory of him is of the medics carrying him out on a stretcher.

   It was sad, but he’d lived a long life, it was his time and Grandma Susie seemed to take it in stride. They hadn’t been married long and she was nothing if not resilient. She remained the upbeat, jovial woman she’d always been, and the story of her last husband’s last Thanksgiving went on to occupy a unique place in the family lore. Little did we know that it was the beginning of a long run of Thanksgiving misadventures.

  When it came to hosting Thanksgiving dinner, my mother was a perfectionist. Everything had to be just so. The dining table had to be carried to the living room, which was larger than the dining room, to accommodate the guests more comfortably. Out came the best tablecloth, used only on Thanksgiving, the crystal, the best dishes. And woe to anyone who interrupted the cook while she was preparing dinner. The meal, especially the turkey, had to be absolutely perfect.

  It’s a myth that domesticated turkeys can’t fly. No one who was there when it happened will forget the time my mother’s perfect turkey decided it was a swan. She was taking it out of the oven when the roasting pan slipped and the turkey took flight as if jet propelled. It flew, dove and skidded halfway across the kitchen, leaving a grease slick and a trail of dressing. My mother locked herself in her bedroom and cried.

  We cleaned up the mess, carried the ruptured turkey to the table and talked her out of the bedroom to join us for an imperfect but delectable feast enjoyed by all. Even Mom was quick to see the humor of it. It was a Thanksgiving remembered and laughed about for years to come.

  The flight of the Flightless Turkey was a predecessor to the belly flop of the Flaming Turkey. No one was sure quite what what wrong, but when my wife opened the oven door the turkey ignited.

  Instant panic. Everyone shouting at once.

  What do you do with a turkey doing a highly successful imitation of a bonfire? Luckily, it was one of those rare Thanksgivings with snow on the ground. It’s safe to say that we were the only family in Idaho that year whose Thanksgiving centerpiece ended up smoldering in a snowbank.

  Fire was also the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving disaster narrowly averted. My mother was getting up in years by then, and her eyesight wasn’t what it had been. The dinner table was decorated with little bowls filled with oil and floating wicks. The burning wicks lent a festive touch to the proceedings – until my mother tried to drink one of them. The flame was almost to her lips when a collective shriek arose, preventing a trip to the emergency room.

  That came the following day, when I choked on a turkey sandwich. The doctor recommended a procedure that involved swallowing a scope with a light and a camera. The drugs he used made it such a pleasant experience that I asked him if there were any leftovers. He glared, muttered something under his breath and told me to stick with pumpkin pie.

  Thanksgiving doesn’t even have to be at our house to backfire. We were visiting relatives in neighboring Washington one year when a storm hit and the power went out. If it had happened after dinner, it might have been fun. We could have built a fire in the fireplace and remembered it as a cozy, candle-lit Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the power went out at about noon, with the turkey barely warm in the oven.

   Power outages in western Washington can last hours, even days. After waiting an hour or so for the lights to go back on, the hosts decided that waiting was futile and opted for an alternative method to cook the bird.

  A Hibachi.

  It was all they had.

  It was a sorry sight, all those ravenous people standing around a hibachi with a pitifully small bed of glowing coals struggling to cook  a lily-white turkey. We drove away in a howling storm that night, still hungry and hoping to find an open convenience store with Jojos or overcooked hot dogs.

  This year it will be another Thanksgiving at our daughter’s house, where everything will be perfect. 

   But in a way I miss the old days, when turkeys flew, crash-landed in  snowbanks, and each Thanksgiving held the promise of delicious disaster.

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

TROY, Alabama – The scene:  a motel on the outskirts of Troy, Ala. In the parking lot, a black Dodge Charger that practically screams Boise State University football.

  Stretching the width of the front windshield are the words “Boise State,” across the top in blue and orange letters several inches high. Painted on the rear windshield:  “#Game Day Bound! #Bleed Blue.”

  Blue and orange dice hang from the rearview mirror. Two BSU flags dangle from the back windows. The rest of the car is all but wallpapered with Bronco logos. Its license plates are in BSU frames.

  It was the opening day of what was expected to be the Broncos’ dream season, before Oklahoma State and San Diego State downsized the dream. My wife and I and some friends had traveled to Troy for the season opener. We assumed the car belonged to someone else from Boise who had driven there for the game.

   Until we took a closer look at the plates inside the Bronco frames. No Rocky Mountains; no red, white and blue.

   The plates were from Alabama.

   They belonged to Alabama native Micah Burney. He and his girlfriend, Judith Sanders, had driven to Troy from their hometown of Muscle Shoals, Ala., for the game.

  It’s an understatement to say that Burney is a Bronco fan.

  “Huge!” he said. “Most people in Alabama root for Alabama or Auburn. I’m diehard Boise State. I like the fact that they beat bigger schools, and it’s cool that their coaches suspend even really good players if they break the rules. Not all schools do that.

  “I watch all of their games on TV and go to at least one game a year. I went to the games against Georgia and Virginia, to the Ole Miss game in Atlanta, the Fiesta Bowl against Arizona State … ”

  He says “we” when referring to the team.

  “We played great against Oregon in the Las Vegas Bowl last year. …Someday I want to go to a game in Boise and see what that’s like.”

  Burney’s dedication to a team so far from his Alabama home and roots  came as something of a surprise. Even knowing that the Broncos’ games are nationally televised, it hadn’t really occurred to me that they would have diehard fans wearing the colors and decorating their cars with Bronco paraphernalia well beyond Idaho. This, after all, was Boise State – not Alabama, Notre Dame, Michigan or another major program with instant national name recognition.  

  Yet here were Micah and Judith, who live 2,000 miles from Boise but were proudly sporting the blue and orange. 

  To fully appreciate how far Boise State football has come, you have to go back quite a ways. At the first Bronco game I attended, with my sister who was a decade older and then a freshman at Boise Junior College, the number of people on the field was almost as large as the number in the stands. It was played on a grass field lined with wooden bleachers. BJC was playing Dogwater Junior College.

  OK, I made that up. But the Broncos in those days did play small, obscure colleges, at venues resembling those of lower division high school  games today. 

  A sea change came the first time the Broncos played the University of Idaho. Boise’s little college had recently progressed from Boise Junior College to Boise College to Boise State College. U of I students decorated Bronco Stadium with banners that read “BJC, BC, BSC, BFD,” and “Welcome to the Big Time.”

  The Broncos won, 42-14.

  The program continued to grow. BSC became BSU. The turf turned blue. The team played bigger, higher profile schools and began making a name for itself beyond Idaho. 

  Fast forward to 2011. My wife and I were having dinner while traveling through Memphis,Tenn. when a man asked where we were from and, upon hearing the answer, replied, “Boise? What’s Coach Pete puttin’ in the water up there?”

  A reference to then BSU Coach Chris Petersen and his team’s successes  against some of the big names in college football.

  But it wasn’t until the Troy game that the extent of BSU’s national reputation hit home. It wasn’t just Micah and Judith, either.

  Mellanie Chorney and her daughter Emma traveled over 200 miles from their home in Kennesaw, Ga. to be at the Troy game. Both were wearing blue and orange BSU T-shirts and carrying Bronco stadium chairs. Emma had orange paint on her legs and blue and orange Scrunchies on her pigtails.

  Both had painted their fingernails blue and orange.

  “We stay up till 2 a.m. to watch Boise State games on TV,” Mellanie said.

  Why would someone from Georgia, which hardly has a shortage of good college football teams, be that interested in Boise State?

  “I like their chemistry,” Mellanie replied. “They aren’t a big school, but they play like one. Their boys aren’t recruited by the Georgias and Ohio States, but they’re good football players. I love that.”
  Steve Carew and his family also were decked out in blue and orange. A pharmacist who lives in Birmingham, Ala., he seemed mildly surprised when told that I lived in Boise. As if all of the blue and orange-clad fans at the game were from someplace besides Boise.

  “I grew up in Indiana, and ever since I was a kid I thought Boise would be a cool place to live,” he said. “I honestly don’t know why. But I did live in Meridian for a while before getting a job offer I couldn’t refuse in Birmingham, and I think Boise is one of the most beautiful cities and Idaho one of the most beautiful states in the country. I’d like to get back there someday. And it goes without saying that we always root for the Broncos.” 

  Ryan Williams traveled to the game from his home in Navarre, Fla.

  “I go to as many BSU games as I can,” he said.

  One thing that stood out, in addition to all the Bronco fans who don’t live in Idaho, was the hospitality of the Troy University fans. Even after the Broncos had defeated their team 56-20, they remained gracious, welcoming.

  “Thanks for being here,” several of them said as we filed out of the stadium.

  “Welcome to Alabama. It’s great to have you here.”

  The next morning, back at the motel, Micah and Judith were packing his Boise State billboard-on-wheels for the drive back to Muscle Shoals.

  “Great game, wasn’t it?” he said. “We played really well.”

  Then, a bit wistfully, “Maybe I’ll see you at a game in Boise someday.”

  Here’s hoping he gets his wish. And, if that happens, that Bronco fans will   give him the sort of welcome their team’s distant but dedicated fans deserve.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press one Sunday a month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got a column idea for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

   A.A. changed my life.

   No, not Alcoholics Anonymous. I’m referring to a publication called Advertising Age. Journalism students at my college were encouraged to read it. I was then a student in the advertising option of its journalism program.

  Most of A.A.’s pictures were of advertising executives in suits standing around with cocktails in their hands. The cocktail part sounded okay. I was, after all, a student at the University of Idaho, where drinking beer was practically the school sport. It was the suits that bothered me.

  Did I really want to spend my life in a suit and tie, mingling with other people in suits and ties, talking about the hottest trends in underwear and mouthwash commercials?

  It led to one of the best decisions of my life. I decided it made more sense to do what you do well and enjoy doing than something that will pay you a lot of money but make you hate going to work every day. My advisor spluttered and fumed when asked if it was possible to change majors as a senior, but he made it happen. The rest, as they say, is history. I went to work at my hometown newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, and spent 40 years there.

  Now, here I am at The Idaho Press.

  The reason for changing horses way past midstream is simple. I did what I do best and enjoyed doing for most of my time at The Statesman, including writing columns in semi-retirement. Recently, that changed. I was limited to writing once a month about “people in the community.”

  Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about people in the community. But personal columns are what readers have been telling me for years are their favorites. Being told not to do them was a little like telling a piano player to use only one color of keys.

  So, when Idaho Press Editor Scott McIntosh told me he believed in hiring good people and getting out of their way to let them do what they do best, what could have been a difficult decision became an easy one.

  And here I am.

  I owe The Statesman a lot. It gave me a career that was almost never boring. It opened doors to meeting scores of colorful Idaho characters, interviewing famous people, traveling the world. Lifelong friendships began there.

  You don’t leave a place where you spent most of your working life  without some reservations. But it was the right time, the right fit. The Statesman is focusing heavily on digital; the Press is more committed to print. It’s signed up 5,000 new subscribers since June, a  circulation percentage increase few newspapers anywhere can claim. I’m a print  guy. Most of my readers are print readers. And in a way, this brings me full circle.

  My first job at the Statesman was in the Canyon County Bureau. Those were flush times for newspapers. The Statesman had full-time bureaus in Canyon County, Twin Falls, and Ontario and Vale, Ore. Canyon County’s was in a corner office in downtown Caldwell.

  It was an ideal place for a rookie reporter to learn the ropes. I covered city council and school board meetings, cops and courts when the other bureau reporter was off, wrote business, general-assignment and feature stories, took photographs, pretty much everything.

  It yielded some memorable moments.  No one who witnessed it will forget “the Underwood Incident,” in which a reporter in a fit of rage hurled her prized, vintage typewriter across the Caldwell bureau office. Journalism could be pretty colorful in those days,.

  One day my editor sent a message asking the bureau folks to be on the lookout for weather photos. I happened to drive by a Caldwell golf course that afternoon just as two elderly golfers were teeing off in a snowstorm. They were dressed head to toe in Scottish golf outfits – kilts, tam o’ shanters, the works. The snowflakes were the size of quarters. It was the perfect weather photo, 

  Only it never made the paper. A few days later, my negatives were returned with a message that read, “These are great shots of these golfers, but the negatives are covered with black dots.”

  The black dots, of course, were snowflakes – which would have been obvious had anyone gone to the trouble of making prints of the negatives. (I can tease my then editor about it now because he’s a longtime friend.)

  I’d been on the job less than a month when he asked me to review a symphony orchestra concert at the College of Idaho. I was ridiculously unqualified and said so.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “Just go and describe the concert and get some quotes from people in the audience.”

  It seemed to work until, a week or so later, a letter to the editor described my review as being “egregiously bad.” Only after looking it up did I realize that that meant extraordinarily bad. Flagrantly bad. As bad as a review can  possibly get.

   A retired College of Idaho teacher influenced me for life. Margaret Sinclair was a master grammarian who wrote to say she enjoyed my stories but had noticed that I didn’t always use the language correctly. Would I mind if she sent me an occasional lesson?

  Mind? She taught me more about the finer points of English usage than all of the textbooks combined.

  I owe a lot to the late Margaret Sinclair, and to the late Canyon County Bureau. A new reporter couldn’t have had a better grounding. 

  Now, a few thousand columns later, I’m back, doing what I love and looking forward to sharing some of your Sundays with you. Sometimes one Sunday a month, sometimes more. 

  And, like any good piano player, I’ll be using all the keys.

Tim Woodward’s column appears in The Idaho Press on the first Sunday of each month, often more frequently, and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Got a column idea for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

Dear Blog Subscribers,

This is to let you know that as of last month I’m no longer writing for The Idaho Statesman. I hadn’t been happy for some time about a restriction from writing personal columns there. There were other factors In my decision to leave after so many years, including the frequency of my columns being cut from every other Sunday to once a month, but it was mainly not being able to write personal columns that led me to resign. I love writing them, and readers have told me for years that they enjoy reading them.

The good news is that starting this Sunday, my columns will be published in The Idaho Press. I’ll be writing for The Press at least one Sunday a month, often more than that. The Press is committed to print journalism and has signed up thousands of subscribers in the Boise area in the last few months. I’m a lifelong print guy and am looking forward to this new start. If you live in the area and haven’t seen The Press, you might want to check it out.

I’ll continue to post columns on my blog the Mondays after they’re published in The Press so you’ll continue to get them by email, starting Nov. 5.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate every one of you.

Tim

 

https://www.idahostatesman.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/tim-woodward/

Here’s the link to my August Statesman column.  I hope you enjoy it.  — Tim

 

Boise woman ‘needed a life,’ and found one helping people cope with death

 

Buried treasure: Lost for 5 years, wedding ring is back on ‘shocked’ Boise woman’s finger

  A photo above a desk at the Ada County Highway District offices depicts “a blind, one-armed marsupial with a head wound.”

  The stricken marsupial, according to a long-ago Statesman letter to the editor, could easily do a better job of timing Ada County’s traffic signals than the guy who actually does the job.

  The computer-generated photo graces the office of the guy who’s been doing the job longer than anyone. I’ve silently (and not so silently) cursed this gentleman while stopped at red lights that seem to have no earthly reason for being anything other than green. Cursed him without even knowing his name.

  That, of course, is patently unfair. What do I or other motorists who take his name in vain know about how he does his job, how difficult it might be or the problems he faces?

   So I spent some time with him to see if he’s as incompetent as  we think he is.

  He isn’t. The man with much of the responsibility for timing the county’s traffic signals, all 432 of them (plus some 80 pedestrian signals), is neither blind nor a marsupial with a head wound. His name is Mike Boydstun, and he’s quite good at doing a difficult and often thankless job.

  “It’s not rocket science,” he says, only half joking. “It’s more complicated than that.”

   ACHD’s traffic operations engineer, Boydstun divides his time between working in his office, driving to trouble spots and working in the district’s Traffic Management Center.

  I’d envisioned a cramped office with a single display of  complex information about traffic flows. The reality is quite different. The traffic management center is a spacious room painted a soft shade of blue, with 52 flickering video screens on one wall.

   The screens display real-time images of intersections throughout the county. The images come from 181 closed-circuit television cameras at intersections around the county. Boydstun and five other district employees take turns watching for traffic-flow problems.

  If they see one, they can activate advisory messages on  electronic reader boards along roadways. They can send pertinent information to the Idaho Transportation Department, the media and Micron (the valley’s largest employer) so it can alert its employees in the event of freeway traffic blockages. Engineers can fix problems by changing signal timing remotely, or by making changes at the signals themselves.  

  A big part of Boydstun’s job, a part that can keep him awake nights, is adjusting the timing of signals to make traffic flow more smoothly.

 “Sometimes the problems are troubling and we keep thinking about it and not coming up with a solution,” he said. “Sometimes it helps to get away from it. You have to walk away, and when you’re not even thinking about it, sometimes in the middle of the night, the answer hits you.”

  A recent example is a new timing plan to improve northbound rush-hour traffic on Glenwood between State and Chinden. It was an idea that hit him when he wasn’t thinking about it.

  “I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet; maybe a tin bullet,” he said. “It made it so that it doesn’t seem to be quite as congested during the afternoon peak.” 

  Two of my pet peeves are the lights on Front at Avenue A and Park Center at Mallard, both of which tend to evoke the frustrated motorist’s refrain:  “Why can’t these (expletive deleted)  signals see that there’s no traffic on the side streets?” 

   Actually, they can. Like many signals in the district, they have a  “vehicle-detection” feature. In the case of Front and Avenue A, however, traffic flow improved when it was deactivated.

  “If there’s just one car on Avenue A, we could use vehicle detection to give it a green light for a short time and then turn the green back to Front,” Boydstun said. “But that would mean that drivers would get to the next signal early and have to stop there, resulting in a choppy traffic flow on Front.

  “By changing it to a fixed-time operation regardless of the number of vehicles, you get stopped at Avenue A but then you should be be clear all the way to 13th during non-peak hours.”

  The key phrase being non-peak hours.

  OK. But what about Mallard?

  “You say the light is red on Park Center when there’s no cars on Mallard?” he asked me. 

  “Yes. Even on Sunday morning, when there’s no traffic at all.”

  “Hmmm. We may have a problem there. I’ll send a signal tech out to check the cabinet.”

   Every intersection in the county with a traffic light has a traffic signal controller cabinet. In Downtown Boise and certain other locations, they’re the boxes decorated with artwork. Traffic signal engineers adjust equipment in the cabinets to change the timing of traffic and pedestrian signals.  

  Later the same day, Boydstun sent an email saying the technician had found a problem at the Mallard-Park Center cabinet and that it would be fixed in a couple of days. 

   Red lights at pedestrian crossings can be another source of frustration. Why do we have to wait forever for flashing red lights when there are no pedestrians in the crosswalk?

  Answer:  We don’t. Stopping is only required for the flashing yellow and solid red. It’s okay to proceed on the flashing red – provided you don’t mow down any lingering pedestrians.

  “A lot of people don’t realize that they can go on the flashing red, which is the benefit of it. It helps move traffic.”

  Many people, he added, also don’t know the meaning of dashes painted on the pavement at the ends of solid lines denoting bicycle lanes. They tell motorists they can turn there (while yielding to any bicyclists that may be present), and they warn cyclists to watch for vehicles making turns. 

   Boydstun, 54, has worked at ACHD for 17 years as a traffic operations engineer and before that an assistant traffic operations engineer. Prior to working for ACHD, he spent just over 13 years as a signal technician and engineering assistant with the Idaho Transportation Department. His degree is in electronics engineering technology.

  He likes his job “most days because every day is different. I never know when I come in what will happen that day.”

  The days he doesn’t like?

  “When everybody’s calling and yelling at us.”

   He responds to every phone call or digital complaint from motorists who think that anybody, just anybody, can do a better job of timing the traffic signals than he’s doing.

  “Most people are nice, but some just want to vent. They ask me if I actually drive the problem spots. Yes, I do.

  “… A lot of people who complain focus on just the one thing that’s bothering them. They don’t see the big picture, that changing something in one place can affect other places. 

  “The biggest thing for people to be aware of is that we do try to be proactive and make things as efficient and effective for the public as we can. There are times when we have peak congestion and there’s not a whole lot we can do. But what we can, we do.”

Tim Woodward’s column appears monthly in The Idaho Statesman and is posted a day later on woodward blog.com . Know someone with an interesting story for him? Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.