David Triguiero's Idaho

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Around the Block in Payette

When I was five or six years old my grandfather gave me a little project. He told me to go out the front door of their house and walk around the block carefully observing everything then come back and tell him what had changed since our family’s last visit from Stockton, California one year earlier.

I was very excited. For one thing, using the front door at 1134 First Avenue South in Payette was a rare privilege granted only to important guests at my grandparent’s home. More than that, my grandfather didn’t entrust these projects to just any grandchild or great-niece/nephew. My cousin Rob Thurston, who was four years older than I, did them regularly. The previous summer, my older sister, DeeDee, was assigned her first project. This year, 1952, it was my turn.

Before going out the door, I proudly pinned my “I Like Ike” button to the pocket of my shirt. My great uncle Clyde had given me the button when neighborhood kids were teasing me saying I was for (Robert) Taft, Eisenhower’s opponent at the upcoming Republican National Convention. For good measure, I added a (Alf) Landon sunflower from the 1936 presidential election, also a gift from Uncle Clyde.

You couldn’t get any more Republican than my Uncle Clyde, who refused to sign up for social security, choosing to live out his years of retirement on savings carefully accumulated since 1902 operating Thurston Drug Company on Payette’s Main Street. I still have both buttons, although I have not voted for a Republican President since Gerald Ford in 1976.

I went out the front door onto First Avenue South. Walking towards town I first passed Christina Bergman’s house. She was my age and lived with her mother and grandmother, Lillie Soule, who made marvelous molasses cookies and didn’t much care for little boys, although she made an exception in my case. She had been a Jacobsen, one of Payette’s leading families, and had married Mr. Soule, a mining promoter.

Their daughter, whose first name I cannot recall, married Mr. Bergman, who had recently died of cancer. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. Only that Mr. Soule and Mr. Bergman were dead. Sometime later my mother told me that he had a mole on his neck that he kept fooling with for about a year. It turned out to be malignant melanoma and, by the time he went to the doctor the cancer had spread to most of his body.

Mr. Soule had persuaded my grandfather, a metallurgical engineer who had been teaching at the University of Arizona, to return to Payette and run a gold mine planned for Delamar, just over the mountain from Silver City. The mine never came about and my grandparents were stuck in Payette, which was all right with my grandfather who loved prospecting above all else. My grandmother, who loved the prestige of being married to a college professor, never got over it.

Next was Dean Daniel’s house. He was a year younger than I was and we played together regularly. His father was a lawyer. I never knew his first name as everyone called him Crabby. They had a brand new Buick Roadmaster with electric turn signals. When they took me for a ride, Dean said you didn’t have to roll down the window a put your arm out to signal a turn. All you did was push this little lever next to the steering wheel, which went click, click, and click. I couldn’t figure out how the car behind could hear the clicking and Dean said he didn’t know either, but that’s how it worked.

Crabby didn’t explain. He just kept driving. He had a bottle of beer between his legs and a Chesterfield dangling from the corner of his mouth. I learned later, also from my mother, that Crabby was something of a drinker. Once in college when he was waiting, already three sheets to the wind, for his date in the living room of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, he opened the drawer of and end table relieved himself in it and shut it. He thought he was alone, but my mother and Phyllis Ackers were still in the dining room and had a clear line of sight into the living room.

The next house was occupied by an older couple I did not know. On the corner was Pete and Nedra Laddig’s house. They were in junior high school and did not acknowledge my existence except to tease me. Once Pete accidentally hit me with a shovel opening a cut over my eye that needed three stitches from Dr. Woodward.

Pete and Nedra’s father was dead too. He had been a chiropractor and there was a full sized skeleton hanging in his office. Pete tried to scare Dean, Mark Iseri and I once by leading us there in the dark and shining a flashlight on it. It didn’t work, we knew it was already dead and couldn’t hurt us.
Many years later, my father told me that Dr. Laddig had a second medical practice that was a deep secret. Girls went to him when they didn’t want to have a baby.

In didn’t know anyone on the Second Avenue South side block. As I passed one house three American Legion baseball players were loading bats and gear into the trunk of a car. I asked them if they were the Melon Eaters because my grandfather had told me he saw Walter Johnson pitch for the Weiser Kids against the Payette Melon Eaters. They said they were the Payette Pirates. When it got home my grandfather told me the game he saw was in 1906.

Much later I learned that one of those players would be almost as famous as Walter Johnson. My mother told me that was where Harmon Killebrew the home run king of the 1960s grew up.

When I reached home my grandfather asked me what had changed since the year before. I told him I hadn’t seen anything new. He pointed out that there were now television antennas on some of the houses. I said that was nothing, there were TV antennas everywhere in Stockton. But not in Payette, he said.

Wild Zingerella

When I was about 12 Jimmy Connor’s father gave his kids a bunch of tickets to the Miss Washington County Pageant. The Chamber of Commerce was one of the sponsors and Mr. Connor, a druggist, was vice-president or something. Anyway, he had these tickets left over and he gave them to his kids.

There were 17 children in the Connor family; Jimmy was somewhere just after the middle. A number of them were too old to care about the pageant and gave their tickets to him. His oldest brother was a Roman Catholic priest somewhere and two of his sisters were nuns up in Cottonwood, so they didn’t even get tickets.

Jimmy said his father had read someplace that a man up in Quebec or some real Catholic place like that had 21 kids and had gotten a letter from the Pope and he wanted to get one too. But after Bernadette was born, Jimmy said, his mom was too sick to have any more. She didn’t look very sick to us – she could clear the living room of kids with a couple of mighty swings of a broom – but they didn’t have any more kids.

Jimmy said Mr. Connor asked to priest at St. Agnes’ Catholic Church in Weiser to write a letter to the Pope to see if 17 kids was enough to get a letter, but it must not have been because he never got one.

Anyway, Jimmy got enough tickets for a half dozen of us to go to the pageant. We only wanted to see the bathing suit competition, but had to get there early to get front row seats. The pageant was in the high school gymnasium and if you got stuck in the back or up in the bleachers you could see much of anything.

I don’t know why we thought it would be sexy. All the girls competing went to the swimming pool in the same modest, one-piece bathing suits. I guess the suits looked like lingerie when the girls wore them with their hair all fixed up and makeup on while they walked and posed on the stage decorated like a salon.

But on this night we got more than we anticipated. The talent contest turned out to be the sexiest show ever to appear on a Weiser stage. Most of the girls sang or played the piano, but Yvonne (pronounced Wyvonnie) Biggs did a dramatic reading of her own composition. 

She appeared in the spotlight at center stage wrapped in a full length cloth version of a tiger skin. Her hair was frizzed into a wild halo. A strip of tiger cloth was wrapped around her forehead pulled down behind her ears and tied at the neck. She had thick makeup on her face including black eye-shadow and a couple of black stripes down each cheek. Her lips were painted blood red looking like a gash.

“What is my name?” she inquired in a deep sultry voice. “Wild Zingerella,” she screeched pulling off the wrapper and holding it behind her back like a curtain. She was wearing what looked like fur two-piece bathing suit with about six inches of bare midriff showing.

“Where was I born?” she asked in her sultry interrogatory voice still holding the tiger curtain skin behind her. “High in the eagle’s nest,” she replied in her eagle screech dropping the curtain edge from her left hand and pointing to the rafters with her right hand still trailing the curtain and followed by her head as she sighted up her arm.

She slowly rolled her head back toward the audience resting her cheek on her extended arm and asked something else in her sultry voice. Her left leg was stretched behind her with her toe pointed into the floor. Her right leg was bent slightly at the knee completing the dramatic and, lets face it, quite sexy pose.

The rest of her recitation went much the same as she whipped the tiger cape around like a fan dancer. Some in the audience started laughing, a lot more gaped in agast horror. We in the front row simply stared in rapture. Yvonne Biggs was not the prettiest girl in school, but from then on she was certainly the sexiest.

Needless to say, the bathing suit competition was something of an anticlimax. The girls strutted their stuff around the stage displaying first their frontside then their backside finishing off with a sort of katykorner stance elbows cocked. a hand resting gracefully on each hip, one leg slightly forward knees slightly bent smiling like a grand piano at the audience.

Pretty they all were, but not sexy. Not after Wild Zingerella. Yvonne did not win the contest, but she did win the heart of every man and boy in the audience. And the women weren’t all that disgusted. They thought it was a pretty good show.
My father was a judge and he and my mother couldn’t stop laughing when they got home. He said he wished he could have voted for Yvonne, but didn’t dare as he was a high school teacher and had to maintain a high moral standard like not smoking in public and never going to bars.

The Four Uncool Stooges of Weiser High

After more than 30 years of please yourself dress, Idaho schools are moving back to dress codes with some considering uniforms.

Fruitland requires khaki or black cotton/polyester pants, shirts with collars, shirttails neatly tucked in and no designer labels showing anywhere.

Borah High School and South Junior High in Boise have seriously considered uniforms, and Ontario Middle School adopted them last year.

It really takes me back to my good old golden rule days. When I started high school it was the style to wear jeans low just as it is today. We stopped short of showing our underpants as they do today, but multicolored boxer shorts weren’t available in those days and it’s doubtful we would have worn them if they were.

Boxers were for old men, real men wore Jockey shorts -- what teenagers today call tighty-whities.  They came only in white as did tee shirts. It was the style then to wear a white tee shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the shoulder. If you were really cool, a pack of cigarettes was rolled up in one sleeve.
A thin white belt with at least two separate buckles finished the outfit. If you could afford them, which most of us could not, you wore black leather Wellington boots. Your jeans – Levis only! – were either turned up on the inside to create a straight blue line across your boots or, later, rolled up into a thin gray “cuff” no more than one-half inch deep.

The school dress code did not allow tee shirts, which were considered underwear and thus inappropriate for school. We therefore wore white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Jeans could rest no lower than hips or Mr. Crosby, the coach, would pull them down as you walked down the hall. The principal, Mr. Reeves, would yank them up as high as they would go and cinch your belt as tightly as it would go. If they happened to slip back down during the school day, you would be sent home.
That was about all there was to the boys’ dress code. The girls had it much tougher. They could not wear pants unless the temperature dipped below zero and the school announced its permission over the radio. Dresses and skirts had to reach the knee. If there was any question, the suspect was required to kneel on the floor in the principal’s office. If the hem touched the floor, the dress was legal. If not, the girl was sent home to change.

Hair was another matter altogether. Girls could wear pretty much any style they chose. There was some talk of regulation when they began teasing it up into great piles on top of their heads – it was called “ratting” in those days for some reason – but it never came to anything. Legend had it that there were nests of cockroaches in some girl’s hair, but no one I knew ever saw one.

Boy’s hair was as carefully measured as girls skirts. It could not stray over the back of your collar. It was several years before the Beatles and the accepted style was more like Fonzie – swept back in great piles on the sides and top. The back was also swept back sideways and parted in the middle to form a “duck tail” or “DA”.

Hardly any boys had hair thick and curly enough to carry it off well. But with lots and lots of Brillcream, most of us could achieve a decent approximation.

The problem was, when you took a shower after PE, your hair would only stay in place as long as it was wet.  Then it fell in a stringy mess over your ears and collar. You could bring a tube of Brillcream to school, but there was no place to carry it. The style covering pockets was very strict – nothing in the front and only a wallet and a comb in the back pockets.

Everyone carried a comb – a “rat-tail” comb. Anything else was very uncool. It was carried in the back pocket with the tail sticking up. Color didn’t seem to matter. In fact many boys carried pink ones which contrasted nicely with the blue-black jeans. Oh, by the way, jeans had to appear new. Any fading and they were consigned to weekend work wear.

Until the authorities cracked down, we sharpened the tail end of the combs in the pencil sharpener. It created a very sharp point, which looked cool and slightly threatening. I never knew of anyone being stabbed with a sharpened comb, but it might have happened.

It was not a good time to have bad hair, and boy did I have bad hair. It was thin and just lay flat on my head like a limp thin mop. Until I was 14 my parents forced me to wear a crew cut – the most uncool haircut possible. Haircuts cost $1.25 at Spin’s Barber Shop in the Vendome Hotel and “money doesn’t grow on trees,” my dad said, “although old Spin seems to think it grows on heads.” Ha, ha, ha.

What I wished for was a flat-top with fenders. It was so cool. Gary Edwards, a senior in high school, was getting one when I was waiting for my crew cut once. His hair was black like mine, but really, really thick and curly. The top stood up straight like a brush about half an inch deep. The sides were swept back into “fenders” that went all the way around culminating in a perfect DA in the back.

The best I could manage with my thin mopey hair was a dumb jelly roll. You combed the sides of the top into the middle then combed a line down the middle. Tony Krause could make a spit curl covering his forehead on each side, but I couldn’t and so looked like a queer trying hard to be cool

That turned out okay, because my best friend Barry was about the least cool kid in Weiser High School. His hair was cut short on the sides, parted on the side and clumped up in the front, just like an old man’s. He wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts in direct defiance of every clause in the fashion code.
Since Barry was my best friend, along with Glen who also wore a crew cut and Ron whose hair was like Barry’s, we settled for being not just uncool, but anti-cool. We talked national and international politics at the lunch table, wrote strident articles for the local newspaper, worked behind the scenes in student government creating winning candidates and never dated.

The called us The Four Stooges and we were proud. We loved the Stooges and we loved being anti-cool.