David Triguiero's Idaho

Trip to Wallace Bordello

I watched National Lampoon’s Animal House again recently after reading in the newspaper that it was the most successful movie comedy ever produced. It is still hysterically funny, more than 25 years after it was first released on an unsuspecting American public.

That’s the kind of fraternity most of us would have liked to belong to in college. Well, I belonged to an animal house at the University of Idaho and it wasn’t very funny most of the time, although we did laugh a lot, mostly at other members of the house.

The boys at the Delta Tau Chi chapter at Faber College weren’t interested in being a “good fraternity” like the “creeps” living next door at Omega Theta Pi. Most of the boys running the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter where I matriculated wanted nothing more than to be exactly like the Beta Theta Pis who lived across the street in a grand Tudor castle.

Like the Alpha Delta Phi chapter at Dartmouth College that National Lampoon writer Chris Miller said was the basis of the movie, we had a fat, dumb and sloppy Flounder that we called Pear Bod, a smooth, sexy and rich swordsman like Otter, who was known as Fox, a never-study outlaw biker type like D Day (Greaser), and a loony, food-fighting, skinny version of John Belushi's Bluto called Beanie, who, unlike Bluto, was an excellent student.

There were also Hoovers, the frustrated but fun-loving president of the fictional Delta house, and Boones, who maintained decent grades and dated attractive, normal women; and numerous Larry Krogers, including me, who were immature, usually dateless, and just went along for the ride.

Unfortunately, Pi Kappa Alpha also had a dictatorial Niedermeir, the Omega ROTC captain whose horse Flounder unwittingly killed in Dean Wormer’s office. There were also smarmy, flaccid Greg Marmalard types striving to make us into Betas. They generally purchased large, bejeweled fraternity pins made of white gold and were known as the Big Pin Crowd, or BPC, by the rest of us.

Once some of us went on a road trip not unlike the one the Deltas took in the movie. They took the Lincoln loaned to Flounder by his brother and picked up fast and loose Dickerson College co-eds whom they took to a black night club by mistake with disastrous results. We took one of the BPC’s 1956 Chevrolet classic four-door hardtop to a whorehouse in a mining town called Wallace.

We were supposed to be attending the funeral of a national fraternity officer in Spokane. For some reason none of the BPCs could make the trip and delegated Fox, Beanie, Pear Bod and me to attend.
Everything was okay until we reached Spokane and couldn’t find the church. All the way up Pear Bod had been complaining that he was still a virgin and begging Fox to fix him up with a sure thing.  Finally Fox said, “You want a sure thing Pear Bod, we’ll buy you one in Wallace. What do you say, guys, you pitch in three bucks each, I’ll put in four and we’ll buy the poor guy a sure thing.”

In 1964, three dollars was not the piddling amount it is today. It was enough for a whole carton of cigarettes or a very nice meal at the Nobby Inn in downtown Moscow. I didn’t want to part with it, especially after Fox assessed each of us another dollar for a case of beer to fuel us on the ride from Spokane to Wallace. I wasn’t in a position to refuse, however, and was interested in seeing the famous bawdy houses in the Idaho mining country just east of Coeur d’Alene.

These house Fox selected was straight out of the movies – a well kept two story turn of the century white Victorian with a red light burning on the front porch. Velvet looking curtains with gold fringe were looped on either side of the front windows and a modest sign reading DeLux Rooms hung above the porch railing.

The Madam who opened the door to our ring was also straight out of the movies. She was between 60 and 70 years old and wore a flowing red satin robe with wide gold lame lapels cinched with a purple ropelike belt over an extremely low cut gown exploding with graying lace covering an extremely large set of drooping breasts, lacquered with cracking white makeup. Her face was similarly lacquered and her ample lips slathered with blood red lipstick.

Fox outlined our mission to her and she growled “Oh, that’s real nice” and lit a cigarette stuck in the end of a gold colored holder nearly a foot long. We all sat in the Victorian furnished front room while the girls slunk around displaying their wares. Pear Bod, who had consumed several beers and a large pizza on the ride over, was beginning to look a little piqued, but made his selection and she led him to a back room.

It wasn’t five minutes until a shriek came from the back room followed by stream of curses ending with “Get the #@&* outa here you *@!#%& fat ass *&%$#.” Pear Bod was standing in the hall in his shorts socks and shoes holding his clothes dripping with vomit. “I threw up on us,” he announced in a dumbstruck whimper.

Pear Bod threw up again on the rolled and tucked leather upholstery of the prized ‘56 Chevy on the way home and we were stopped by the police, who wrote Fox and Beanie tickets for having beer cans hidden under their sweaters. Pear Bod was asleep and I, thank God, had not drunk a drop.

Niedermeir fined us each $20 for “unfraternal conduct” and Fox had to pay to have the car detailed. Detailing wasn’t what it is today in 1964 and a faint, but clear whiff of vomit was always present in the BPC-member’s car especially on hot days.

Early Idaho Rancher and Family Scandal

When my great-grandfather John Samuel Thurston opened Payette’s first drug store in the early-1880s, he counted it a failure. He had been a pharmacist in Lafayette, Wisconsin. He wanted to be a rancher. That’s why he had uprooted his family in 1878 to homestead in Western Nebraska.

The land in western Nebraska was not nearly as good as the land in the eastern part of the state, but it was available and that was the most important thing. He arrived in late winter and carefully selected about a dozen head of cattle. That spring he planted his new ranch with field corn to feed them over the next winter. His wife, Elizabeth (Lizzy), planted a garden of potatoes, cabbages and carrots to feed the humans over the winter along with tomatoes, sweet corn, peppers and other delicacies to be gorged in the late summer and fall then canned for the cold months.

The Thurstons, including five-year-old Irwin LaRue, four-year-old Clyde Wilson, and my grandfather, two-year-old Ralph Victor, settled in for a life of prosperity on America’s great fertile plain. Then the locusts arrived leaving nothing for man, woman nor beast. John Samuel, who went by J.S., dipped into his savings to get them through the winter.

The following spring my great aunt Rachel was born and the land was planted again. The crops survived the locusts, which were much fewer in number, but not the pounding hail of late August. The cattle feed was beaten into creamed corn and the garden was shredded like cold slaw.

My great aunt Bess was born the following January and in March a raging prairie fire burned them out. J.S. and the older boys carried great-grandma Lizzy and baby Bess out of the burning house on a mattress. It was the only piece of the Thurston’s once rather grand suite of furniture purchased in their prosperous days in Wisconsin to survive the prairie holocaust.  The family took refuge in the root cellar, which fortunately was surrounded by hard packed bare ground. Their cattle were roast beef and the barn and crops, like the house, were reduced to a heap of ashes.

The Thurstons boarded a train for Payette, a town that was springing up across the Payette River from Boomerang where logs cut in the vast forests to the north were pulled out of the river after floating as many as 100 miles. J.S.’s sister, Bertha, lived there with her husband, George McDonald, whose parents, John and Mary, had emigrated from Wisconsin to a cattle ranch in Big Willow, just a little bit south and east of the new town.

George told J.S. that A.B. Moss had opened a general mercantile store there a few years earlier and that Clarence Brainard was developing an irrigation district. The weather was just about perfect for growing all kinds of crops, especially fruit. Land was cheap on Main Street, he said, and Payette needed a drug store. J.S.’s and Bertha’s younger sister, Amelia, had come to live with the McDonalds and Payette was a fine Christian town with a big new Methodist Episcopal Church under construction.

That was what my great-grandfather needed to hear. He missed his family and had been an elder in the Methodist Church in Wisconsin. The small town near their Nebraska ranch had only a Baptist and an Episcopal church and J.S. didn’t care much for either. One was not snobbish enough and the other too snobbish. There was, of course, also a Roman Catholic Church, but if he wanted to walk straight into Hell he figured there were easier and more fun ways to do it.

Thurston Drug Company set up business on Main Street and within 10 years it occupied a new two story brick building along with a meat market and a bar and pool room on street level and offices upstairs. The building is currently occupied by the Antiques and Collectables Market. Sometime in the 1960s it was covered with yellow and white metal siding.

J.S. built a house for his family at 1134 First Avenue South within easy walking distance of the store, the First Methodist Church and the Masonic Temple – the three pillars of Thurston family life. And, before very long, J.S. would once again be in the ranching business, though the circumstances were extremely embarrassing.

The McDonald’s ranch had slid into disrepair after the death of George’s parents around 1910. George was at heart a city man and regular patron of local taverns. His favorite hangout was the bar renting the space two doors down from Thurston Drug Company. Alcohol had never passed J.S.’s Methodist lips, but he saw no reason not to make money on the sinful habits of backsliders.

George considered his regular patronate of the tavern a contribution to the family’s welfare. “Might as well keep it in the family, he would slobber conspiratorially over his beer mug whenever J.S. came in to enquire about his plans to support his two sisters.”

One summer, news came from Wisconsin that the Thurston’s mother, Rachel, was seriously ill. Although their father was a doctor, the job of nursing their mother back to health was women’s work and Bertha boarded a train for Wisconsin leaving George and Amelia alone in the comfortable little house on Second Avenue South.

Bertha returned the following October having made plans for the senior Thurstons to move to Payette the following spring after Dr. Thurston had wound down his practice and sold their property. Now it should be noted that Bertha was as homely as her giggly little sister was lovely. Tall and angular with stooped, rounded shoulders and an overbite sufficient to eat corn on the cob through a picket fence, Bertha was, like her near contemporary Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of infinite kindness and forbearance.

She needed to be. Like Eleanor’s husband, the iconic president, F.D.R., elected a couple of decades later, George McDonald was a womanizer. And the woman he fancied most was none other than the cute and cuddly Amelia Thurston, who had not been permitted to marry until her older sister had found a husband.

When Bertha returned from Wisconsin it was discovered that Amelia was pregnant. A family meeting was called and it was decided that J.S. would buy the Big Willow ranch from George and the entire menage a trois would move to Missoula, Montana where he would acquire land for a ranch.  The pregnant Miss Thurston would be introduced as Mrs.Thurston, whose husband had died of unspecified causes.

The child, a boy, was raised as a McDonald, which must have caused some confusion, but, as the subject was never discussed in the Thurston household, my mother and her cousins never learned any more about the family scandal. What little they knew came from her older cousin, Bob, a future newspaper owner and novelist adept at overhearing adult conversations and putting two and two together.

J.S. Thurston was now astride the world with a successful drug store in town and a cattle ranch in Big Willow.