David Triguiero's Idaho

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Shooting BB Guns in Weiser, Idaho

The problem with a BB gun is there is nothing interesting to shoot with it. Manufacturers recommend target practice, but that gets boring fast when you’re 10 or eleven years old and can’t afford the targets. Birds are your target of choice, but are hard to hit, even harder to kill and, most important, in invitation to your mother to take away your gun.

The year Tony Krouse and I each got BB guns for Christmas was filled with fun and trouble. Trouble not only with our parents and neighbors, but the police.

We started out innocently enough by building snowmen as targets. We would go around the neighborhood setting up small snowmen like soldiers. We set up machine gun nests behind bushes and sniper posts in the limbs of fir trees. Then we built a Sigfried Line snow fort with snow Nazi’s manning Germany’s last line of defense.

We were the guys on Combat, a very popular television show of the time staring Vic Marrow as a World War II platoon leader. With plastic army helmets from The Ben Franklin Five and Dime on our heads and our BB guns at the ready we swept through the neighborhood picking off snipers and assaulting machine gun nests.

It usually took eight or 10 BBs to blow the heads off the small snowmen, which was all the better as far as we were concerned. The final assault on the Sigfried Line took most of the afternoon or until it got too cold.

When there snow melted in late winter we went bird hunting. This required a lot of hiking around because we didn’t dare shoot birds in town where people could see us and report back to our parents.
Birds were really hard to bring down, however, and killing them was really gross. They were always little birds and they would lie flapping and bleeding on the ground. Our options were to stand there pumping BBs into the dying body like Nazis exterminating Jews or club it to death with a rock. This sent us looking for more satisfying targets.

The closest place to hunt was along the Snake River south of the Railroad tracks. One day while waking along the river bank shooting at grasshoppers, bees and other insects, be came across the large pipe that deposited Weiser’s sewage into the river.

The river was the Treasure Valley’s sewer in the days before treatment plants. Weiser’s highly mineralized drinking water came from wells and had a reputation as the worst in the state. Actually, Moscow’s was considerably worse sometimes looking like mild iced tea.

As we watched Weiser’s toilets flushing into the river Tony came up with the idea of shooting turds. We also shot at pieces of vegetables and other more or less solid stuff that came flowing out, but, for pre-teen boys, turds were the most satisfying to hit.

There was not always time to trudge down to the river bank, which was often very muddy in the spring anyway. So, we took up shooting insects in the alley behind our houses. No one could object to that. Unfortunately, someone did and called the police.

We were shooting bees hovering over a puddle across the street from the Presbyterian Church when a black and white squad car pulled up. We lit out for home and hid the BB guns, but that was of little use. Chief Tindal Ragsdale knew who we were; in fact, he lived on the same block. 

Apparently someone thought we were shooting at the stained glass windows in the church. We pleaded our innocence to the chief, who seemed to accept that we were shooting at bees. But then he asked the killer question: “If you weren’t doing anything wrong, why did you run with I pulled up in the squad car?” he said.

“Wel-l-l-l-l-l-l-l,” we mumbled, “maybe some of the BBs could have, kinda, bounced on the windows after they hit the pavement. Yea, and maybe when we shot at a bird we might of hit the window a little bit, but nothing’s broke. See!” we said pointing at the large window.

Our rifles were confiscated and turned over to our parents. Tony got his back when school was out. I never asked for mine back. The only really fun thing had been shooting turds and even that got old. It was time for baseball and swimming.

David Trigueiro invites your comments to this post

Photos - Bonners Ferry, Idaho

  Kootenai River Inn, Bonners Ferry, Idaho

 

View from Kootenai River Inn's
hotel room balcony,
Bonners Ferry, Idaho

                                                                            

Kootenai Wildlife Preserve, near Bonners Ferry       

 

 

 

 

The North End of Boise

The north end of Boise has come full circle since the capital city’s earliest days. Originally the swankiest section of town, it was nearing its nadir when I was in high school in the 1960s.  Rich folks lived on the bench, except for a few who lived in new developments being constructed in the Highlands, which look down on the old north end.

The area around Hyde Park and Boise High School was inhabited by lower middle class working people and a large sprinkling of what was then called “intellectuals” – people who liked the downtown atmosphere of stately old homes, many converted into rooming houses, and turn of the century sandstone apartment buildings.

Many of these people had grown up in major cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco where working class, ethnic and professional class neighborhoods were mixed together with many retailers living in apartments above the store. The rest walked or took public transportation to work downtown.

In other words, they were real neighborhoods not housing developments. Unlike those big cities, where ethnic groups occupied separate sections of the neighborhoods, the north end was a true mixture with Jews living next door to White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs), Italians, Basques, Chinese etc.

It could be said that the professionals who chose to live in the north end, Wasps in particular, were effectively the advanced guard of the gentrification that has turned the north end again into the most desirable and expensive neighborhood in Boise.

That was clearly not their intent, however. I had many friends in Boise in the late 1950s and early 60s and virtually every one of them lived in the north end. Their parents were musicians, teachers, engineers, doctors and clergy including the Episcopal Bishop of Idaho, the Dean of St. Michael’s Cathedral, and the ministers of the Presbyterian, Congregational and Lutheran churches.

They chose to live in the north end because they like the inner city atmosphere and because the housing was relatively inexpensive. The last thing any of them desired was its gentrification.  When the Methodist Cathedral of the Rockies proposed an apartment complex with underground parking for church as well as residents’ use, early in the current century, they and their descendants stood as one against it.
In fact it could be said that the gentrification process began when construction of the massive  church building went up in 1960, although suburbanification might be a more appropriate word.

The magnificent gothic suburban cathedral was constructed not of granite or gray sandstone, but of a red and white rock commonly used in plush suburban homes on the bench at the time. The soaring interior was trimmed in white painted wood that was also used in the construction of the pews and sanctuary furnishings. Red cushions on the pews ensured the congregation a soft place to sit and acres of red carpet at soft place to walk.

They needed it because the sermons delivered by Dr. Herbert T. Richards were as long as they were inspiring. A Doctor of Divinity, Dr. Richards had filled the old Methodist Church and led the fundraising efforts to build what was then to be the largest church in the state.  The church was surrounded by a red rock mall of meeting and Sunday school rooms, each with its own piano, according to church advertising. 

My Episcopalian, Lutheran and Presbyterian friends referred to it not as the Cathedral of the Rockies, but as the Rock Pile of the West. They were jealous, of course, but they did have a point.  A more appropriate name might have been the Dr. Herbert T. Richards’ Cathedral, because everything about the place seemed to reflect his image in the same way that the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California as seen on television exudes the personality of its founder, the equally inspirational Dr. Robert Shuler.

I went on one of the daily tours of the church in the 1970s and most of the guide’s descriptions included references to Dr. Richards. Showing off the pulpit, he noted,  “Dr. Richards always pauses here at the edge of the pulpit to make announcements and welcome newcomers to the church before going up to begin preaching.” Moving on to the altar, he pointed out the Bible laying open on a rotating Lazy-Susan-style mount saying “When Dr. Richards comes to the altar, he turns the Bible around to read facing his congregation.”

I once attended a Sunday morning service at the rock pile with a girlfriend. An exchange student from Japan staying with her family was with us. He was a Shinto and martial arts black belt. Dr. Richards invited him up to the front to be introduced to the congregation.

“I understand you have a black belt in Judo and that that is part of your religion, Akai,” he said. “Why don’t you give us a demonstration? Come on, show us some of your religion.”

Akai modestly declined and made his way back to his seat crimson with embarrassment. I wanted to offer him a suggestion for an appropriate demonstration when he got back to our pew, but my girlfriend told me it would only embarrass him more.

Rumor once had it that much of the financing for the Cathedral of the Rockies came from C.C. Anderson, who once owned department stores in most Treasure Valley towns. It was said that Dr. Richards’ constant and devoted ministry to the iconic Boise businessman during his final days resulted in changes to his will acing out the College of Idaho, St. Luke’s Hospital and Boise Junior College.

The rumor was never confirmed and it no longer matters if it ever did. The other institutions have prospered without whatever C.C. Anderson might have given them. Dr. Richards’ rock pile continues to threaten north end traditionalists with suburbanification and their neighborhood is now the most desirable in the state. Even home sellers in the Highlands advertise them as being in the north end.
Plus ca change, plus meme chose, as the French say, the more things change the more they are the same.

Photos, Weiser Idaho

Downtown Weiser (click to enlarge)







Weiser houses

Why Hound Larry Craig?

“A quiet conscience makes one so serene!
Christians have burnt each other quite persuaded
That all the Apostles would have done as they did”.

Don Juan
Lord Byron c.1820

Lord Byron is probably the last person Larry Craig would identify with and yet the purportedly licentious Victorian poet and the purportedly homosexual U.S. Senator recently abandoned by his legislative colleagues, his party and most of the upright people of Idaho have a great deal in common.
Both were the victims of public hypocrisy, or cant, as the Victorians called it.

Byron, Great Britain’s most admired writer of his time, was forced to live in continental Europe most of his working life because he took up with another man’s wife. Written in Italy, his poem, Don Juan, was a humorous satire on how the British ruling classes publicly demand high moral behavior while privately practicing quite the opposite.

Craig, Idaho’s most admired senator since Frank Church, has been forced out of office because he may or may not have made a pass at an undercover policeman occupying the adjoining stall in a Minneapolis Airport men’s room. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and paid a fine hoping nobody would find out. Everybody did find out, of course, and The Idaho Statesman has been hounding him ever since to admit publicly that he is a homosexual.

Why does the Statesman care if Sen. Larry Craig is or is not a homosexual? A good question. It is not illegal. In fact, self-described liberals in the U.S.A. have been pressing to have homosexuality declared an acceptable lifestyle equal to heterosexuality. Craig has publicly opposed legislation granting equal rights to homosexuals leading the Statesman to declare him a hypocrite who should be exposed.

Beginning early last spring, the newspaper scoured Idaho and the nation in search of men who had been “cruised” (courted) or seduced by the popular senator. The initial investigation came up with nothing. One unidentified man in Washington, D.C. said he had engaged in homosexual trists with Craig at a men’s washroom in the capital. One unidentified Idaho man said the senator had cruised him in a Boise shoe store. An intense interview at the senator’s Boise home produced nothing.

The Statesman, to its credit, shelved the story. It came out again, however, and was published in full when a Washington, D.C. paper published news of Craig’s guilty plea in Minneapolis. Last fall, five men came forward and revealed homosexual contact with the senator. Three of them allowed the Statesman to publish their names.

Why did they break the cardinal rule of the homosexual community and publicly “out” one of their company? Because, they said, Craig was a hypocrite.

The paper announced it had won. Craig was obviously a practicing homosexual and a hypocrite. So, there! It followed soon after with a mawkish story about Craig and two contemporaries at the University of Idaho, an All America football player and successful political activist, whose homosexuality had ruined their lives leading to early deaths.

But, who is the real hypocrite? Is it Senator Larry Craig, who still staunchly maintains he is not a homosexual. Or, is it the Idaho Statesmen, the homosexuals who break their community’s most solemn oath to expose “a hypocrite”, the Republican Party and the rest of upright America now laughing and sneering at the senator.

Is Larry Craig a homosexual? No. He says he is not and that should be all there is to it. He is the only one that can know, just as presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who chucked Craig from his campaign team when the story first broke, is the only person that can state categorically that he, himself, is heterosexual.

Did Larry Craig engage in homosexual acts? Is he sexually attracted to men? Probably, given the evidence that the Statesman so assiduously uncovered. But that does not make him a homosexual any more than middle-aged men who buy Girls Gone Wild videos are child molesters.

Craig, like older men who lust after young women, may consider his attraction to men a temptation he must fight to overcome. Occasionally, he fails, as do old codgers who approach to 21-year-old-women in bars. But the fight goes on.  He opposes pro-homosexual legislation because he believes that is what his constituents expect and because he wants to be re-elected.

Thus Sen. Larry Craig is a flawed human being, as are we all. He is at times a hypocrite, as we all are. However, none of this excuses the humiliation he was forced to endure for being an ordinary human being, with self-proclaimed Christians leading the attack.

To paraphrase Lord Byron, we hounded him to his political death, convinced it was the only moral thing to do. Our consciences are quiet and serene.

When Boise was a Magical Place

There was a time when Boise was a far off, magical place for kids and many grownups in the hinterlands of the Lower Snake River Valley, as it was known before some promoter started calling it the Treasure Valley.

The Merry Milk Man lived in Boise. So did Sheriff Spud, news anchor Bill Gratton and all the other fun and important people who appeared in our living rooms every day on the television, which was still very much a wondrous machine in the mid-1950s. Being 10 years old I knew that Edward R. Morrow and Walter Cronkite didn’t live in Boise, even though they appeared on the same TV station as Gratton – KBOI..
They were in New York City, which was even more amazing.  Two world famous news men could come all the way from New York every night, sit in our living room in Weiser along with Bill Gratton from Boise and talk to us just like we were neighbors.

For some reason it did not seem at all astonishing to me that entire theatre companies were also beamed through the ether to perform in our living room on Playhouse 90, but it didn’t, probably because I was used to Roy Rogers and Gabby Hays coming to the Star Theater every Saturday afternoon.

Going to Boise was an all day affair for people in Weiser. The drive from downtown to downtown took about two-and-one-half hours if you obeyed the 50 MPH speed limit. There was no freeway and you had to slow down to 25 or 30 when going through Payette, Caldwell and Nampa.  Highways always went though the center of towns and cities in those days.

You drove into Boise on Fairview, which was a regular city street complete with parked cars and stoplights. You knew you were almost when you saw the Eddy’s Bread sign, a loaf the size of a bus turning slowly on top of a pole that seemed at least 100 high to me, but was probably no more than 30 or 40 feet.

We didn’t eat Eddy’s bread at home. Mom said it was too expensive and soft and squishy. The bread from Stoneman’s Bakery on State Street was fresher, cheaper and more nutritious. I knew Eddy’s was best, even though peanut butter did tend to tear it up when applied by kids, because it was on television with all those famous and important people.

Before long I discovered that the bread tore because we used crappy peanut butter. We used Sunny Jim, which consisted only of ground peanuts and had oil sitting on top. Skippy and Jiff, as seen on television, had sugar and various emulsifiers and spread across the softest bread like butter. Well, not like butter hard from the refrigerator – more like soft spreadable Imperial margarine in the plastic tub, which my parents also refused to buy.

My family made the trip to Boise no more than two or three times a year, for school shopping and to visit friends and relatives. Soon after school was out the kids of Weiser got to go to the Shrine Circus at Bronco Stadium on school buses. Subsidized by the local Shrine, the party rite of the Freemasons, the trip was the highlight of most kid’s summer.

Sadly, the Shrine has gone the way of most fraternal organizations in small towns like Weiser. As retail businesses abandoned the small towns with shoppers driving the freeways to Ontario and Boise, the base of the Freemasons’ membership eroded. The Shrine, which is by far the most expensive rite of the fraternity, dwindled to near zero.

There was a time when no parade was complete without the Shriner’s clowns, Oriental Band, and motorcycle and Tin Lizzy precision drill teams. Apart from great entertainment it was a great social and cultural leveler.  After watching District Judge Gilbert Norris wearing a bejeweled red fez maneuvering a Model T go-cart in time with Gene Stanford, owner of Ben Franklin Five and Dime, and hospital administrator Dick Randall you couldn’t see them as anything but ordinary guys who liked to have fun. Just like you.

My great-uncle Clyde Thurston, a Payette pharmacist, played a glorified kazoo in the Oriental Band along with Dr. Bob Woodward and bank president F.C. Moss wearing flowing pastel pantaloons, pasted on Fu Man Chu whiskers and massive turbans with Peacock feathers sticking up in front.

The Shrine still does quite a bit of charity work, principally running children’s   hospitals that offer burn and orthopedic treatment free of charge.  Sometimes there are clowns and one or two motorcycles or Tin Lizzies in local parades, but never an Oriental Band. Although the El Kora Temple in Boise remains active, its numbers are few and virtually all of them live in the capital city or its immediate metropolitan area. In some places, the Shrine has even taken to advertising for members on television.

Although Weiser continues to grow and Payette has nearly doubled in size since those halcyon days of the 50s, they are little more than bedroom communities with a significant proportion of their population commuting to Ontario or Boise to work. It only takes a little more than an hour to drive to Boise on the freeway now, but by the time most of them get home they are too pooped to do more than eat dinner and flop in front of the television.

Nobody marvels about having important and famous people in their own living room every night. They expect them to appear instantaneously at the command of the remote control to entertain and inform them.

The magic has gone and that is proving to be a good thing. People have begun to emerge from their living rooms in search of the community. In Weser there is an active Senior Center with nearly 100 members. The Elks Club, Kiwanis and Lions are gradually increasing their membership and community service.

Three women – The Two Evelyns and Sally -- cook Thanksgiving Dinner for the whole town every year. The Ho Ho Express ensures every kid has a happy Christmas, The Weiser Little Theatre puts on two plays a year and vaudeville, of all things, is revived once a year to mass audiences at the old Star Theatre by The Illustrious Onionskin Players.

Meanwhile organic foods are beginning to appear in the markets along with real peanut butter with oil floating on top and people are baking their own bread with machines. The drive to Boise, meanwhile, is actually getting longer, especially on weekdays. After whizzing along at 75 MPH on the freeway everything slows to stop and go at Nampa, as commuters, one to a car, crawl their way to work in the big city.