David Triguiero's Idaho

I'm Back for Awhile

   Well, here I am back at the blog after something like a year doing other things like gardening, reading and, yes, watching television. Actually the television is something of a misnomer. I chopped off the cable years ago and the thing on the roof that receives the television waves and whose name I can’t spell fell down soon after. I ordered Netfix and watch PBS via my computer.

 There just didn’t seem much interesting to say about Idaho and no one seemed to be much interested. In any case I am far from a typical Idahoan. I was one once, but after the Vietnam War, escaping to Canada and living in what were to me big cities (one million and up) my conservative roots began to detach.

I wouldn’t call myself a liberal in the classic sense. I endorse a market economy, but not necessarily capitalism. I value individual freedom, but it must be measured in relationship to the entire community.

 Because I consider myself a Christian (Episcopalian) I know I must consider the whole world my community, but that is very hard to do. It is always tempting to blame the poor for their “less developed” situation because it’s our fault and we are ashamed. We exploited them for hundreds of years in order to develop ourselves and now we want them to develop themselves and buy our development stuff. 

Canada is very different from the United States; at least it was when I arrived there in late 1969. Like most Americans, however, it took me a long time to figure this out. For one thing, they are not “just like us.” Most of them speak the same language, but they don’t say the same things. They speak rather disfondly of America and Americans once you get to know them. None of them has any interest in being part of the United States.

Canadians are not all socialists although many do belong to and vote for the mildly socialist New Democratic Party (currently HM official opposition), which was founded by a Methodist minister and a Baptist layman. They are intensely practical as needs must when only 30 million are cast about the second largest country in the world.

When Canada Bell telephone refused to install their instruments in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta deeming it too expensive, the provincial governments set up their own companies.

 In the depths of the Great Depression a group of people in Swift Current, Saskatchewan began working out a way to ensure everyone received needed medical care. Their agreement with local doctors soon spread throughout the province and eventually the country creating the best health care system in the world.

Canadians proudly supported their military when it was engaged in two world wars. Conscription was finally forced on the government in the final year of both wars, but conscripts (called Zombies) were not sent overseas to fight. They openly resent American’s tendency to claim full credit for victory.

There is a lot to miss about Canada and I sometimes miss it a great deal. Nonetheless I feel at home here in Weiser and in the United States. The things that can make my fellow Americans so exasperating to deal with also make them the most open and accepting people in the world.

 

 

 

Old Time Beatles

The other night I listened to a program on National Public Radio about the new digital release of The Beatles’s entire body of work that came to define the1960s and Rock ‘n’ Roll music. I found it tedious. Nostalgia is only interesting to people who didn’t live though the period or those keeners who never grew out of it – the sort who build shrines in their basement and communicate with Elvis or John Lennon through New Age mediums.

Sensible people who actually lived through the era lose interest when it becomes clear they are no longer the people who saw and did all those things. Looking back without rose-colored glasses just muddles all those memories you have spent so many years editing into what they should have been. It’s worse when moviemakers do their own editing as we have seen recently with the Woodstock retrospective. The nostalgists at Warner Bros. created a festival of Rock ‘N’ Roll, peace, harmony and free love. Participants who are honest recall rock ‘n’ roll, rain, traffic jams, open sewers and crabs. Beatles revisionists maintain the ‘60s cultural rebellion did not begin until late in the decade when the group started dressing like psychedelic South American dictators, hanging around with phony swamis, and singing about girls with kaleidoscope eyes.

That may have been the way things unfolded in places like Baltimore and San Francisco, but in Weiser, Idaho folks had more foresight. They knew at their first sighting of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 that trouble was coming. There was more to it than long hair and impudence; they had been through that with Elvis. The British rock group stirred a dormant mistrust of foreigners and people who mess with the natural order of things.

Less than a month after Ed Sullivan the rebellion began at Weiser High School. One day in the boy’s bathrom Tony Raymond combed his hair into long bangs nearly reaching his eyes in front and covering the tops of his ears on the sides. “It’s Paul, she loves you ya, ya, ya…” he sang out. Everyone else joined in. Tony decided he liked his hair that way and so did Ed Mowery, Jay Beeson and John Reed. They went to their next class – government – as The Beatles.

The girls didn’t exactly swoon, but they made it very clear that they liked the boy’s new image. For John this was a heady experience. He announced he was Ringo and beat his desk with pencils singing ya, ya, ya. The chronically conservative teacher, Mrs. Duclos dispatched them instantly to the principal’s office.

Had the boys combed their hair up off their foreheads and ears the matter would have ended there. But the
tried to argue their case. “Our hair is the same length,” insisted Ed Mowery, “just combed different.” Even at that, disaster could have been averted had Tony Raymond not pressed the case to the edge. When Principal Walt Kerfoot finished explaining stolidly how their hairstyle had disrupted civics class and no real men wear bangs, Tony calmly observed that their hair was no more a distraction than the stubble on Mrs. Duclos’s unshaven legs.

Kerfoot sat stunned; never had such sass been spoken in the principal’s office of Weiser High School. There was more going on here than funny hair and he was going to put a stop to it. All four were suspended. It didn’t work, of course, the Mrs. Duclos remark made Tony Raymond the first anti-hero at WHS and the tone was set for the decade.

 

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.

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.

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, Weiser Idaho

Downtown Weiser (click to enlarge)







Weiser houses