David Triguiero's Idaho

Anti-gay Just Newer Guise of Old-fashioned Bigotry

A recent column by Bryan Fischer in the Idaho Statesman requires response. Fischer a minister of the Deep Religious Right maintained that a bill promoted by the Idaho Commission on Human Rights (ICHC) to extend human rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity “is a danger to civil liberties (and) violates freedoms of business owners”.

I decided the best commentary on the Rev. Fischer’s anti-gay rights column would be to run it as it might have been written about 40 years ago when President Lyndon Johnson brought the first civil rights legislation before Congress. Whenever any group of people is singled-out to be excluded from basic human rights, civil liberties are at stake.

So, here it is, as it would have been written in 1963 with the changes italicized:

“Leslie Goddard of the Idaho Commission on Human Rights recently promoted S1323, a bill focused on “interracial marriage” and “racial identity” on the pages of the Statesman (It’s time for plain talk about fairness, Feb. 5).

“She says in her column that is matter calls for an open, respectful discussion.” I agree, and happily join the dialogue here. It’s exceedingly odd to see an organization with “Human Rights” it its title push a bill which represents such a clear and present danger to the civil liberties of good-hearted Idahoans. For Ms. Goddard’s bill would punish Idaho employers and landlords who take race into account in business decisions.

“The bill would violate freedom of conscience by forcing businessmen and landlords to compromise their own moral convictions or face potentially crippling lawsuits. It would violate an employer’s constitutional right to freedom of association, his basic right to select a work force that represents the values he wants his business to reflect, by giving government the power to drag him into court for making politically incorrect employment decisions.

“It also would violate the first freedom guaranteed to Americans in the Constitution, the free exercise of religion. Any Christian, Jewish or Muslim business owner who holds time-honored views of marriage and race would become immediately vulnerable to paralyzing legal action.

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.

Thunder Ray

In its seemingly never-ending quest to belittle U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, the Idaho Statesman recently ran a long story about two “homosexuals” who went to the University of Idaho at the same time he did and suffered significantly more because their proclivity for the same sex was discovered.

One, Chris Smith, an outstanding newspaper editor and political consultant, came out of the closet after graduating and, despite a glowing resume of success, was unable to get work in Idaho as a result. The other, Ray McDonald, an All America football player, never came out publicly, but had his professional career ruined by persistent rumors of his homosexuality. He died in his late 40s of AIDS related causes, according to the Statesman.

As it happens, I knew Ray McDonald and the guy who accused him of rape and started his decline to oblivion. We all lived on the second floor of Shoup Hall, a small three-story dormitory since converted into a Theater Arts classroom building. Ray, a sophomore, lived in one of the three single rooms. My roommate and I lived in a room directly across the hall from the showers. The accuser, whose name I honestly can’t remember, lived two doors down from me.

He was from Salt Lake City. He drove a gorgeous white MG TC sports car in near perfect condition. His roommate, also from Salt Lake, drove an equally impressive black Alpha Romeo roadster. One winter’s night when the mercury dipped well below zero, they pushed the furniture in the main-floor lounge to the walls and drove their cars in for protection from the weather.

Most evenings these guys wandered up and down the second floor hallway engaging people in idle conversations. If you went to the bathroom while studying and failed to close your door firmly, one or the other would usually slide in and be reclining on your bed waiting to chat when you returned.

They also enjoyed turning the shower into a steam room. The shower room at Shoup Hall was made up of a small anti room with wooden benches on each side and hooks on the wall for robes and towels. The shower itself was a large, maybe eight-by-eight-foot room immediately beyond it with six showerheads, two on each of the three walls. By turning all the showers on full hot, it was possible to create a cloud of steam in the anti room where they would sit on the wooden benches and, well, “steam”.

Most nights they were the only participants, although others did occasionally join them. I never saw Ray McDonald at one of these steam baths and am confident he never participated. Neither did I. I knew what was going on because my room was directly across the hall and the steam parties always involved lots of yelling and running around the halls.

McDonald was seldom seen in the hall. He was usually studying with his tutors in his room or at the library when not attending football workouts and practices. Once I had a casual conversation with him while we ironed our clothes in the ironing room. He was gracious, humorous and somewhat self-effacing. A good guy to talk and laugh with.

Occasionally he would watch television in the basement recreation room. People didn’t like to sit beside him on the couch, myself included, because he was constantly slapping his hand on your knee or putting his arm around your shoulders for a brief hug when something funny or exciting happened on the television show.

I never sensed any sexual meaning in them, but the squeezes and hugs were very annoying. Others in the hall started talking about him being “queer” – the still acceptable street slang for homosexuals. It became a running joke, which, I am ashamed to say, I participated in.

The night everything came to a head, so to speak, I was in my room studying and one of Salt Lake guys was taking a steam by himself across the hall. His roommate had gone home for the weekend. They never seemed to lack money for airline tickets and fine clothes.

At around midnight, the steamer was in the hall shouting that he had been raped by McDonald. He said he had gone to sleep on one of the benches in the anti room and Ray had come into the shower room and raped him. I remember thinking at the time that the story sounded fishy. McDonald was nowhere to be seen and the guy had apparently made no protest while the alleged rape was in progress.

He was not an especially attractive man. He was small, about 5’6”, and his face was pinched with close-set eyes and densely packed with brownish freckles. His roommate was about the same size and considerably better looking with doe eyes and black well groomed hair.

When I asked him why he didn’t say or do anything before or during the alleged rape, he said, “What would you do if you had 250 pounds of muscle on top of you?” I said I would at least yell for help to which he sneered, “Yea, I bet you would.”

The thing is, I couldn’t imagine Ray McDonald assaulting anyone, sexually or otherwise. He was one of the most instinctively gentle people I had ever met. In addition, I was so naïve at the time that I didn’t believe there was such a thing as homosexuality. I thought it was something guys talked about just to gross people out. Honestly, that’s what I believed.

With the aid of considerable hindsight I have come to believe McDonald was probably entrapped. Although his accuser complained bitterly and constantly that he was treated unfairly by the university and its athletic department, he and his roommate departed Idaho a month or so after the incident several thousand dollars richer. He never said how many thousand, maybe it was a condition of the settlement, but he did say he didn’t have to worry about college anymore.
McDonald moved off campus to an undisclosed location. He continued to play fullback on the football team and was named to both the preseason and postseason All America teams of every major sports publication. In his senior year against the University of Washington he gained more yards than the entire UCLA team did against the Huskies one week later.

On the street, however, McDonald was recognized more for his rumored homosexuality than his football prowess. “I hear you’ve got an All America queer over there, a Washington State University fraternity brother said when we all met in the pub one night.

My roommate and I joined a fraternity in the second semester of our freshman year. When the news got out, McDonald good-naturedly taped a sign on our door reading “Fratte Rattes”. He apparently suffered from a severe case of Dyslexia, a not yet recognized learning disability that transposes letters and seriously affects the ability to read and spell.

McDonald worked extremely hard to overcome his learning disability, I learned later from a guy in my fraternity who had tutored him in math and science. All athletes in major sports were offered tutors by the athletic department, but few took advantage of the service as much as McDonald, who, I am told, graduated in four years. According to the Statesman, he later attended graduate school.

Like Larry Craig, who persistently denies being gay despite mounting evidence to the contrary dug up by the Idaho Statesman, I don’t think Ray McDonald believed in homosexuality. He likely thought it was a temptation to be fought and overcome, like being attracted to young girls.

Had society accepted homosexuality on the same basis that it accepts heterosexuality and let people live the lives they have been given with dignity and respect, Ray McDonald would likely have been an All Pro running back instead of an NFL dropout. Larry Craig would be running for the Senate again this November and Chris Smith would likely be working for his opponent.

Simple acceptance of people as they are. It seems little to expect from society to save what should have been three very productive lives.

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When Bibles were Read in Idaho Schools

I often wonder if the primary reason so many people want to have Bible reading and prayer in public schools is that the U.S. Supreme Court said we couldn’t have it some 40 years ago. Certainly that was the case in Weiser.

I was about a sophomore in Weiser High School when the ruling came down. I had gone to first grade in Stockton, Calif. and began the second grade in East Side School in Weiser. To my certain memory I had never heard a prayer said or a Bible read in that entire time.

I guess you could say that subjects were taught from a Christian perspective because we all considered ourselves Christians, even though not that many went to church. There was a small community of Jews, who made up the core of Weiser’s business community. But they generally kept their heads down, which probably says more about the Christianity of local Christians than any amount of reading the Bible or saying prayers.

Let’s face it, we weren’t a very Christian community. A chief commandment in Christianity is to love one another, and in Weiser, the different churches were barely tolerant of each other. The Mormons disapproved of the Protestants, the Protestants disliked the Mormons and no one liked the Catholics very much. Prayer and the Bible was the farthest thing from our minds in school. What religious discussion there was consisted of whether popular Mormons and Catholics were dating Protestants in order to ensnare them in their church.

Then the Supreme Court came down on the Bible and prayer. The National Honor Society began reading Bible passages over the intercom every morning at Weiser High School. Nobody is going to tell us not to read the Bible declared NHS President Jack Beyer, a Methodist and leading anti-Mormon. Susan Millbrook, a tall and beautiful blonde who dated only Catholics, volunteered to organize the readings.

In an unprecedented wave of cooperation, it was decided that Catholic and Protestant Bibles would be read on alternating days. The Latter-day Saints, who made up a significant proportion of the student body, did not request equal time for the Book of Mormon.

I suppose it could be said that the Supreme Court decision lit the fire of ecumenism under Weiser’s Christians. Well, not quite all of them. Goldie Bostrum, the chief cook and an ardent Catholic, reached up and snapped off the intercom in the kitchen when the Protestant Bible was read. “Next thing you know, they’ll be askin’ for meat on Fridays,” she grumbled.

And she was right. If  Friday lunches had been something other than fish sticks, tuna-noodle bake and macaroni and cheese, no one would have complained. As it was, even the Catholic students hated Friday lunches.

Matters came to a head when Goldie was stuck with several pounds of brisket at the end of the week. It wouldn’t last until Monday and there was not enough to feed the whole student body anyway. But, throwing it out was not an option. On Goldie’s personal list of deadly sins wasting food was on an equal basis with eating meat on Friday.

She resolved the dilemma by grinding up the leftover brisket and making sandwiches. She stationed herself behind a table at the head of the lunch line, right behind the cashiers. As the students approached she demanded, “Are you Catholic?
”
If you said no, you got a chopped beef sandwich. If you said yes, you were waved passed the sandwiches to the fish sticks. This created a serious dilemma for Catholics and Goldie knew it. Even non-observant Catholics knew full well that eating fish on Friday was a relatively minor sin. However, publicly denying you were Catholic was a one-way ticket to Hell.

Normally Goldie held that anyone, Protestant or Catholic, who ate meat on Friday was committing a sin and she would be equally sinful by serving it to them. On this occasion, however, she reasoned that it was okay since all non-Catholics were going to Hell anyway; eating some extra meat wasn’t going to damn them any more.

The Bible readings crackled and popped over the intercom system for a couple of months until a fight flared up over whether the Song of Solomon was appropriate for teenage ears. There was also a scuffle when Catholics wanted to read parts of the Apocrypha. The Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists sided with the Catholics against the Disciples of Christ, Nazarenes, Assembly of God and the Four Square Gospel.

To my knowledge the Bible has never been read in Weiser High School since.

Sweet Addie

There were many sweet old ladies in Payette back in the 1950s when I was a boy. My grandmother, a kind but demanding social climber was not among them. Neither was Hasty Woodward, the doyen of one of Payette’s leading families with a razor sharp tongue and no patience for children or fiddle-faddle.

The sweetest was Addie Pence, whom we called Aunt Addie. Our families were not blood related, but, in those days, marriage was an equally strong tie. My uncle Bob Thurston had married Addie’s daughter, Jean, and that made her my aunt and all Pence children my cousins, which they remain to this day.

It also made Senator Herman Welker, who was married to a Pence, my uncle, which came in handy until he was defeated by Frank Church in 1956. I guess you could say Payette was an inbred town in those days, but little different than other small towns.

Little of the old inbred society remains as generation after generation went off to college to become professionals and settle in big cities. Nonetheless, newcomers are still well advised to be careful what they say about people at public gatherings. You could be talking to their second cousin once removed or an even closer relative.

All of Aunt Addie's brothers were also our relatives under this system, of course, and that was not something that made my grandmother in particular uncomfortable. Addie Cram had been co-valedictorian of the Payette High School class of 1900, but the men of her family were better known for drinking than studying. One brother was born mentally retarded and didn’t work, the other operated the town dump.

Looking after the dump didn’t take much time in those days and Robert Cram spent most of his days propping up the bar at one of Payette’s few watering holes. Unlike Weiser, which had two bars for every church, Payette had very few drinking establishments. It was a Christian town, affirmed my grandfather, who went to his grave without a drop of liquor ever touching his Methodist lips.

Aunt Addie looked after her brothers as best she could. Several times a week she would package up a lunch of meat, boiled potatoes and vegetables in tinfoil and take it to him at the bar. If we kids happened to be at her house for lunch, we went with her.

I only went once when I was about five years old. It was the first time I had been near a bar and it was utterly fascinating. Bars were fully lit in those days; you had to be able to see to shoot pool and play cards. Dimly lit cocktail lounges were for amateurs sipping sissy drinks like brandy Alexanders and slo-gin fizzes. There was only one of those at the Bankcroft Hotel.

We must have made quite a site going into the bar. Aunt Addie in a calico print dress, hat and gloves leading a group of five and six year olds into the Town Tavern. There were only three or four men in the bar and they greeted us warmly. While Aunt Addie unwrapped and served her brother his lunch, they prodded and kidded us. One magically pulled nickels from behind our ears and gave them to us.

To me, they seemed a lot more fun and friendly than the Methodist elders and Masons who regularly dropped by to consult with my grandfather. None of them so much as said hello to us as we where herded from the room and told to go play outside. Somehow, I knew instinctively not to tell my grandparents this.