Rick Just's Blog, page 186

The Famous Sinking Farm

Buhl doesn't get in the news much, which is probably the way the residents like it. In 1937, though, there was national attention on a farm near there. It was dubbed “the sinking farm” in newspaper headlines. Hundreds of tourists flocked to the area and Buhl residents began hiring themselves out as guides. They even started selling picture postcards of the event.

The farm was on the rim overlooking Salmon Falls Creek Canyon. Strictly speaking, the farm wasn’t so much sinking as it was falling into the canyon as erosion undercut the foundations of the canyon wall. The wall was breaking off in huge chunks like a glacier calving. Some rock would fall into the canyon and big chunks of it would sink and break and shift, making the land on top of it less than favorable for farming.

Paramount News was there to capture the event on film for newsreels. Geologists from local universities were also on hand to view the phenomenon and explain things to reporters.

Newspaper reports sometimes called it the H.A. Robertson farm. But other reports claimed it was Dr. C. C. Griffith who owned 320 acres on the canyon rim. He was away at his summer house in New York when all the excitement happened. According to a dispatch from the New York Herald-Tribune, which ran in the August 28, 1937, edition of the Idaho Statesman, he wasn’t worried about losing a few acres to the canyon. “What worries him most is the hazard the public is running invading his property.” His ranch manager, Emil Bordewick, was apoplectic about the crowds of people coming to the ranch. There was a deputy on site who wasn’t arresting anyone because wholesale arrests for trespassing might “cause a lot of trouble.” Bordewick had hired a guard. He had informed his employer it would cost $500 a month to “keep these people from getting killed.” And by the way, he wanted a raise.

Meanwhile, experts from the United States Geological Survey were not in a panic. They predicted the sinking would go on for a while. About five million years.

The grumpy ranch manager did see one potential silver lining. Well, a gold lining. He was hoping the new fissures in the earth might reveal a vein of gold. 

Howdy Pardner

​At a time when there are Twitter wars over fast food chicken sandwiches let us pause and remember a simpler time when distinguishing one burger joint from another was as simple as putting on staged productions on the roof of a drive-in.
 
Those simple times were in the 1950s, the go-to decade of simple times. The drive-in trying to sell you burgers was the Howdy Pardner Drive-In, located on Fairview Avenue, kind of kitty-corner from where KTVB is today. In the 50s a parking lot for the Western Idaho Fair was across the street from the drive-in, so advertising mentioned that the establishment was on Highway 30 across from the fairgrounds.
 
And, they did a lot of advertising, much of it aimed at letting people know what was going on up on the roof (cue the Drifters). That roof extended out over the cars pulled up to order from the curbside menu boards ready to serve drivers. It doubled as a stage for acrobatic artists, a tiny tots style show, 11-year old local TV and radio singer Gene Capps, spring follies, tap dancers, a ballet, the Twisters “teenage jazzmen,” ventriloquists, and the “Miss Howdy Pardner” contests in two divisions, one for those 3-5 years old and the other for girls 3-18.  One hundred and fifty students in costume from the Maysco school of dance in Nampa gave a recital on the roof in June, 1955.
 
The “stage in the air” was well used, mostly on Wednesday and Thursday evenings from 1952 into the late 50s when owner Al Travlestead sold out to Chuck Peterson. Peterson kept the rooftop stage performances going for a few years, but they stopped after Ed Pollard took over the operation in 1962, bringing to an end the “roof shows.”
 
Totally gratuitous sidebar: Delene Strawn, 17, Boise, drove into the Howdy Pardner, 5250 Fairview, and knocked her sister, Mrs. Elaine Doris, 18, a curb girl taking a break and seated on a chair, through a plate glass window. Strawn’s brakes apparently failed. Mrs. Doris was treated for cuts and bruises. That the two were sisters was apparently just one of those serendipitous tricks the universe plays on car hops from time to time.
 


George Ogden shakes hands with “Miss Kay-Gem” in front of the drive-in in 1956. She regularly broadcast from the booth atop the roof. A decade later “Miss Kay-Gem” would be identified as Bernice Beckwith in the Statesman. Comparing the pictures, it seems this was lady was an earlier “Miss Kay-Gem.” Photo courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society digital collection. ​ This poor scan of a Howdy Partner ad shows what might be four bikini clad dancers on the roof of the drive-in. If they were wearing bikinis it would have been out of character for the establishment, which tended more toward family floor, I mean, roof shows.

Shoshone Falls

​Shoshone Falls is a thing of beauty for us today, whenever there’s enough water going over them to help us remember their spectacular historical flow. To migrating fish, though, it’s a wall. Or, it was a wall for eons, because it was as far upstream as salmon could go to spawn. Installation of Hells Canyon Dam and other manmade obstacles kicked the salmon downstream even further.
 
The falls are sometimes called the Niagara of the West, and you often see the tagline, “higher than Niagara.” True, but Niagara is more notable for its width and volume than its height. Water drops over the edge at Shoshone Falls and crashes into itself 212 feet below. The falls are nearly 1,000 feet across.
 
This Magic Valley wonder was Idaho’s second state park, named such in 1909. It didn’t stay a state park for long. The City of Twin Falls took over management of the scenic attraction in 1933 and has managed it ever since.
 
The famous painting of the falls, below, was done by Thomas Moran in about 1900.

Burning the Beatles

​An Associated Press story that ran in the August 4, 1966 Idaho Statesman, began, “A campaign to ‘ban the Beatles,’ the mop-haired quartet that harnessed the screams and cheers of teen-agers to make millions, spread rapidly from its Southern base across the nation, Wednesday.”
 
It’s a good bet that KGEM radio personality Marty Martin read that story. The very next day the Statesman had an article headlined “Bonfire Set For Beatles Near Boise.” They probably used that “Near Boise” line because “in Garden City” wouldn’t fit in the space they had for the headline.
 
But let’s back up. Why was anyone burning records by the Beatles? It was because John Lennon had been quoted in a British magazine interview as saying the group was “more popular than Jesus.” The quote didn’t raise a stir in the UK, but the Beatles were headed to the US for a nationwide tour. A Birmingham radio station started the “burn the Beatles” movement and it quickly caught on, even in Boise. Um, Garden City.
 
Marty Martin’s record-burning session was to take place during a remote broadcast at Mica Trailer Sales in Garden City. Free hotdogs were more common at remotes than record burnings, but one changes with the times.
 
Fifty Boise teens showed up to pitch their records into Martin’s fire. The first to do so was Billy Cutshaw. She received a replacement LP from Martin who had offered less controversial vinyl in exchange for every Beatles record thrown onto the fire. They were probably country western records, as KGEM wasn’t playing music by the Beatles in the first place.
 
So, what happened next? Well, as everyone knows the Beatles went down in flames never to be heard from again. Oh, wait. That wasn’t in this dimension. Here on earth the Beatles sold several more records and changed the course of rock and roll history.
 
What also happened, many years later, is that John Lennon was murdered by a crazed gunman reportedly in part because of that 1966 remark.
 
Marty Martin went on to have a highly successful recording career of his own under his stage name, Boxcar Willie.

Aiding the Quake Victims

​Idaho history often includes events that took place out of state, but which impacted Idaho residents. One such event was the earthquake that hit San Francisco on April 18, 1906. Just five days later the Idaho Daily Statesman compiled a list of what communities where doing and the funds they had already raised for San Francisco relief.
 
Boise had raised $8,258.50. Caldwell, Paris, Genessee, and Lewiston had each shipped a car of flour. Payette was arranging for “a large amount of food (to be) cooked and shipped no later than tomorrow evening. It is the plan to buy out the remaining stock of canned goods of the cannery and ship it.”
 
The Commercial Club in Mountain Home had raise $100 and the city had matched it. The Commercial Club in Hailey raise $321.75 in an hour and a half. Blackfoot had raised $100 so far. Cambridge was ready to contribute $71.50. Sugar City had raised $250. Montpelier contributed $180.
 
Lewiston had already raised $2,000 with a goal of $3,000. Sandpoint was planning a ball to raise money. Coeur d’Alene had raised $300 and was putting on a benefit minstrel show. Moscow had sent a car of supplies and was planning to send more.
 
The CPI inflation calculator goes back only to 1913. Using that year as a base, $100 in 1906 was about the equivalent of $2500 today. Just the dollars reported on that fifth day after the earthquake would be nearly $300,000 in today’s dollars. Idaho at that time had about 165,000 residents.
 
The generosity of Idahoans is laudable. It’s worth noting that the earthquake brought something special to the state. For a few weeks Riverside Park in Boise hosted the San Francisco Opera Company. How special was it? The Idaho Statesman reported that “Never until the earthquake in April could the old Tivoli company be induced to leave San Francisco. But after that catastrophe, it was recognized that there would be no room for amusements in the stricken city for many months, and the members of the company, some of whom had been playing at the historic old playhouse for many years, left the California metropolis with many fears and misgivings, all hoping that the time of their banishment might be short.”
 
Riverside Park paid the company $2,000 a week while they were in town. Perhaps they made some money from the engagement. There was no shortage of efforts to make a buck off the disaster. Dozens of advertisements looking for agents to sell copies of competing books about the disaster began appearing on April 27 and continued for weeks. One local ad in Boise offered six carloads of pianos that had been enroute to San Francisco that were to be “sacrificed” for $187 to $327. “Suffice it to say that no combination of circumstances has ever brought piano prices so low as appear on our price tags now.” What good luck!

The Boise Songs

​There is, perhaps, no quicker way to set a long-time resident of Boise’s teeth to grinding than to call the town “Boy-zee.” If you don’t pronounce it “Boy-see,” slap yourself in the face with your iPad right now.
 
Even so, audiences usually overlook the faux pas when the star on stage panders out to the audience, “Hello, Boy-zee!” Unless, of course, they happen to be on stage in Pocatello at the time.
 
In the summer of 2010, Jewel played at Outlaw Field in Boise and endeared herself to the audience, in spite of a couple of false starts, by singing a newly penned title, The Boise Song . The lyrics list letters you can find in the names of certain cities, i.e., an A in Atlanta, a Y in Kansas City, etc., but ending each verse with “But there is no Z in Boise.”
 
You can easily find it with Google, but if you missed that concert, you might never hear her perform it live, unless she comes back to Idaho. According to setlist.com, which covers concert statistics, Jewel has performed it just that one time in public.
 
If you do a search for Boise in the lyrics of songs you’ll come up with about 50 occurrences. Many are versions of the same song brought out on different albums. Most are obscure.
 
What’s Your Name by Lynyrd Skynyrd made a big splash with the opening line, “It’s 8 o’clock in Boy-zee, Idaho,” released in 1977. According to songfacts.com the original line to that song was “It’s 8 o’clock and boys it’s time to go.” Ronnie Van Zant’s brother, Don Van Zant was opening the national tour of his band .38 Special in Boise. Ronnie, who wrote the song, changed the line to fit the venue. Three days after the album containing the song was released, three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd, including Ronnie Van Zant, were killed in a plane crash. What’s Your Name, peaked on the Billboard chart at number 13 in March, 1978, probably making it the most popular song containing a reference to the state. It appeared on nine Lynyrd Skynyrd albums.
 
Boise popped up in the lyrics to a Harry Chapin song, WOLD.” Those were the call letters of the Boise radio station where the singer/DJ had hit rock bottom. As a former Boise DJ, I probably resent the implication. Chapin ignored the fact that all radio station call letters west of the Mississippi begin with a K. In the east, you’ll find W call letters, with the exception of KDKA in Pittsburgh. But I digress. Oh, the song made it to number 34 on the Hot One Hundred.
 
Drake (featuring Lil Wayne and Andre 3000) mentioned Boise, obliquely, in the 2011 song, The Real Her . It was a little hat-tip to the Blue Turf. The word was a little on the fence Z-S-wise but would probably make a native smile.  Lynyrd Skynyrd ​publicity photo.

The Redmen

​Sometimes it helps to know the history of a thing. Such is the case with the Improved Order of Red Men. The July 7, 1906 edition of the Idaho Daily Statesman featured a two-column article headlined, “Red Men of Gem State Gather in Capital City.” The subhead was, “First Great Council in Idaho to be Formed by Delegates of Tribes Today.”
 
Well, that piqued my interest. Could this be an actual meeting of Native American Tribes calling themselves Red Men? I thought not, particularly when I noticed the photos of two of the attendees not in native regalia, but in formal wear.
 
The article began, “Boise is now in the hands of Red Men. The braves have come from every direction, pouring into the city until it was no use to longer resist them. But unlike the red men of old, they came announced and Boise gracefully surrenders to them.”
 
The piece went on to call out “tribes” whose names I had never heard associated with Idaho, Incohonnee, How-Lish-Whampa, and Tillicum. The Great Chief of Records was expected to attend.
 
Okay, I had to find out more about what was clearly a fraternal organization with some—no, many, elements that are cringe-worthy to ears more attuned to what would likely offend Native Americans today. Witness: Local units are called Tribes, local meeting sites are Wigwams, the state level of the organization is called the Reservation, presided over by a board of Chiefs. Their youth auxiliary for males is the Degree of Hiawatha, and the female auxiliary is the Degree of Pocahontas.
 
Note that I used present tense in the above paragraph. That’s because the Improved Order of Red Men still exists. Today there are about 15,000 members nationwide. When the 1906 article about their convention in Boise came out, it was noted that 435,000 “braves” were expected at the national convention of the group.
 
They have a history, of course, and you know some of it. The group’s roots go back to the Boston Tea Party. Remember that? Men unhappy with taxes dressed up as Indians to toss tea into the harbor. There were name changes and consolidations over the years, but that was the beginning of the group. And, you’ve probably heard of something else in history that you had no idea (at least I had no idea) that a fraternal organization was responsible for. This group organized the famous, and ultimately infamous, political machine known as Tammany Hall in New York City.
 
The Wikipedia entry on the Red Men includes a picture of Red Men’s Hall in Jacksonville, Oregon, established in 1884.
 
The image accompanying this post is from the aforementioned Statesman article from 1906. As a side note, I was researching Idaho’s reaction to the San Francisco earthquake of that year for a couple of future posts when I came across what to me was an interesting oddity. So, my distraction is now your distraction. You’re welcome.

An Embarrassing Crash

​Imagine the embarrassment of being the state aeronautics director and crashing your plane into a building in the capital city. Now, imagine the added awkwardness of doing the same thing with a federal flying inspector on board. Okay, now imagine that you’d been introduced to Boise a week earlier in the local paper as the new state aeronautics director who, by the way, had taught Charles Lindberg to fly. 
 
That’s what happened to W.H. “Pete” Hill on July 13, 1939. Hill, with inspector Robert Gardner in the back seat of a new open biplane, was attempting a spiral landing at the old Boise Airport where BSU is now located. A spiral or corkscrew landing is often performed when a pilot is hoping to avoid anti-aircraft fire coming into an airport. It became SOP, for instance, when landing at the Baghdad International after a cargo plane was struck by a surface-to-air missile a few years ago.
 
Why was Hill performing this particular type of landing? News accounts don’t say. They do say that he essentially ran out of sky toward the end, coming in too low over one of the buildings on Broadway near the airport. Hill gunned the plane to get some altitude, but the landing gear hit the top of the front wall of the Broadway Commission building, sheared off an airport warning light, somersaulted into a row of mailboxes, and landed upside down in the street.
 
Both men had some injuries, Hill’s the worst. He had a fractured pelvis and a hurt shoulder. The inspector had a broken toe along with scrapes and bruises.
 
Whether or not the crash was an early blight on Hill’s record as the state director of aeronautics is open to speculation. He lasted in the position a couple of years.

This Fleet two-seat biplane made the front page of the Statesman on July 14, 1939. Miraculously both of the men aboard the plane when it crashed survived. Courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society digital collection. ​

Pocatello, the Name

​To say that the city of Pocatello is named after Chief Pocatello is correct. Yet, those two words, chief and Pocatello, are themselves subject to much disagreement.
 
The concept of “chief” was often one introduced to Native American tribes by white settlers and soldiers. Soldiers, especially, liked the supposed certainty of dealing with a single person who could speak for a tribe. The tribes themselves often held several members—often elders—in high esteem because of their various skills or wisdom. The fact that a certain chief would sign a treaty did not always mean he spoke for his tribe in doing so.
 
Pocatello was certainly a trusted leader of his band of Shoshonis. Most such leaders, according to historian Merle Wells, considered themselves equals. Circumstances brought on by the influx of settlers into traditional Shoshoni lands, however, made Pocatello “more equal among equals.”
 
There is more confusion about his name than about his rank. The name has been given several meanings over the years. Brigham D. Madsen, in his book Chief Pocatello points to the first mention of the man in the 1857 writings of an Indian agent who called him “Koctallo.” Two years later an army officer who had never met him, but had often heard his name, wrote it as “Pocataro.” Some insist that the meaning of the name is something like “he who does not take the trail” or “in the middle of the road.” Others say it may have come from the town in Georgia called Pocataligo, which may be a Yamasee or Cherokee Indian word, the meaning of which is also in dispute. Note that residents of Pocatligo often call the place “Pokey” for short, just as the residents of Pocatello do. In any case, the Georgia connection seems far-fetched.
 
So the whites are confused. What about his own people? Again according to Madsen, the Hukandeka Shoshoni called him Tonaioza, meaning “Buffalo Robe,” or sometimes Kanah, which is apparently a reference to the gift of an army coat given to him by Gen. Patrick E. Connor during the signing of the Treaty of Box Elder. According to his daughter, Jeanette Pocatello Lewis, Pocatello never used that name at all and always went by Tonaioza or Tondzaosha.
 
One popular explanation for the name still heard is that the man was well known for his love of pork and tallow. Get it? Porkantallow? One must—if one is me, at least—call BS on that one. Under what circumstances would one particularly desire those two items to the extent that he would be named for them? It seems an obvious backformation meant to belittle a man who in no way deserved it.
 
There is much more to tell about this historical figure. We will leave that for future posts.
 
The photo is a depiction of Chief Pocatello, a travertine statue installed in 2008 at the Pocatello visitor center, and sculpted by J.D. Adcox.
 

Do be Square

Our state’s claim to the “Hokey Pokey” aside, the dance was snubbed when in 1989 the Legislature declared the square dance Idaho’s official state dance. It came out of the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee with a “Do Pass—with enthusiasm!” recommendation.
 
The National Folk Dance Committee tried to make the square dance the official national dance in 1988, without success. As often happens when something fails on the national level, the group aimed their sites at the states. Idaho couldn’t resist the lobbyists from Big Dance. It became one of 19 states to decide, suddenly, that it just had to have a state dance.
 
I dance only in the shower, so have not participated in this particular passion. I am told that the name comes from the beginning placement of couples. Two face each other, let’s say, north and south, and two east and west. In the American version of the dance, a caller calls out instructions to the dancers while the music plays. Apparently without revulsion the couples, for instance, do si do on command.
 
The square dance has its roots in 16th-century England, though it has become associated most strongly with Western—as in cowboy Western—culture. When the bill to make it the state dance was introduce, Idaho Senator Claire Wetherell, (d for Democrat and Dance) said, “Square dancing is typical of Idaho’s lifestyle.” Well, okay. I’m not sure I can get seven other people in the shower, though. Square dancing, though not in Idaho. This image from North Carolina has the advantage of being in the public domain. If you'd like your favorite square dancing picture used next time this post runs, send it to me and give me permission.