“At Home in Idaho City” chapter 2

(I have 600 dpi scans of the physical objects – old photos and a pamphlet, etc. -  which I’ll also include in the folder for each chapter, in case you care to scan them yourself.)
 

Idaho City was still a rough-edged mining town when I settled in. Small enough that you didn’t disappear, and familiar enough that you soon stopped being a stranger.

It was the 1970s, and the town stood on a cultural fault line: loggers and miners on one side, long-haired back-to-the-landers on the other. But I don’t think either group was eager to befriend a bartender wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap. That was fine by me. A good bartender occupies the middle ground.

2 digital images of Idaho City

I poured drinks for the old guard at O’Leary’s Saloon but kept one foot in Miners’ Exchange Saloon, where some of Boise’s best garage bands, like Tarwater and Live Wire Choir, held court. Even the renowned bluegrass master Doc Watson once played there.

 At O’Leary’s we had “Big John.” He had no shortage of country tunes until the night he keeled over mid-set. I never learned what toppled the big man. I just knew it was the end of his musical career at O’Leary’s Saloon.

Scan of O’Learys saloon here. Unfortunately, the building was torn down many years ago. Photo by Linda Belmer Bass.

My girlfriend Jenny Laper liked to remind me that when we first met, I told her I had come to Idaho City to write the Great American Novel. Certainly not the smoothest of pick-up lines and probably not even true. But I have always believed in talking myself into things. And I was certain the old mining town held enough raw material for at least a magazine article.

Scan of Bruce and Jenny at function

As a bartender at O’Leary’s Saloon, I began to appreciate the authenticity of people who weren’t especially interested in adjusting to Idaho’s increasingly urban tilt. One of my favorite people was Placer miner Hank Bertram.

Hank showed up weekly at the saloon with a tiny vial of gold dust, eager to display it to any woman who showed even mild interest. I figured it was his opening line to a possible long-term relationship. He had a habit of passing around a small vial of gold to the ladies. One evening, however, his gold did not return. I’m not sure he ever got over that someone was mean enough to steal his earnings.

Scan of Hank Bertram. Unfortunately not of my photo. That’s long gone, but what was hanging in Trudy’s Kitchen is a B&W image of my photo. And that’s what was scanned.

 

One afternoon Jenny and I visited Hank at his one-room cabin along Little Muddy Creek, which flows into Grimes Creek. George Grimes and his men discovered gold near there in August of 1862, igniting one of the West’s great rushes and jump-starting a state. Not far from Hank’s place was the spot where Grimes was murdered, some say by a group of Shoshones. Many in Idaho City figured it was more likely that his mining buddies killed him for his share of the gold. 

Within a year of moving to town, I was writing my first article for the fledgling Idaho Heritage Magazine. It was as much an introduction for me to the Boise Basin as for the few hundred readers who might see it. Hank agreed to an interview, on the condition that we talk creek-side. He would even sweeten the deal with his homemade raccoon stew.

 

The stew was sweeter than I preferred, but I cleaned my bowl and, at his insistence, accepted seconds. I snapped a photograph of Hank in front of his cabin. It ran in the magazine, though I doubt many saw it until I gave a copy to Trudy Jackson. She framed it and hung it in her “World Famous Trudy’s Kitchen,” in Idaho City, along Highway 21. It remained on the wall for more than forty years, a miner immortalized in a place better known for its delicious pies.

Digital image of the article I wrote in the 1970s for Idaho Heritage Magazine

 

Driving back to town, Jenny reflected on Hank’s theology. Her father had been a minister, and she appreciated Hank’s summary of his former calling. “I used to be a religious fanatic,” he told us. “But there’s no future in it.”

Another regular was Earl Bream, who worked diggings above Idaho City. Earl looked mean enough to stop a fight before it started—thick build, bald head, black patch over one eye. In truth, he was a gentle soul.

One Sunday afternoon my parents stopped by O’Leary’s Saloon, no doubt to see how thoroughly I was squandering my college education. They had brought my nephew Wes with them into the bar. I thought I would be sociable and introduce Wes to the locals. Earl ambled over and bent down to eye level with the five-year-old. Trying to be funny, he growled, “I’ve got an eye out for you.” Wes did what most sensible people would do. He burst into tears. To this day, Wes has steered clear of Idaho City bars.

On weekends, it seemed half of Boise made the forty-mile pilgrimage up Highway 21. In those days you could walk from bar to bar with a drink in hand. It was the kind of town that treated rules as suggestions.

One particularly rowdy night, someone hurled a chair through the stained-glass window my friend Kenn Smith and I had built for Pat O’Leary. The big window had spelled SALOON in Irish colors. It was meant to be read from inside. Tourists staring from the street saw “NOOLAS.” We didn’t care. We were appealing to the locals. The others were what I learned to call “flatlanders.”    

A scan of Bruce with hair and a cat    (should this be moved closer to the front of this chapter? Should this be in the first chapter? Perhaps it should be right where it is. A B&W scan of a photo I think I developed in a darkroom I had set up in my bathroom.)        
                                                                                             
One of my first encounters with Idaho City's non-drinking crowd came at the Fourth of July parade, a festive occasion where townspeople lined both sides of Main Street to admire what Idaho City valued most: fire trucks.

The theme never varied. Given the town's proximity to the Boise National Forest, it probably never will. Fire engines arrived from throughout Boise County, some lovingly restored antiques, but most looking factory-fresh and costing what seemed like a fortune in 1970s dollars. Had a fire broken out on July 4th, at least every firefighter in the county was gathered in one place and ready to roll.

By then I had become the part-time librarian of the Boise Basin Public Library, a tiny 16-by-20-foot cinder-block building beside the post office on Montgomery Street. It wasn't the most impressive structure in town; in fact, it was downright ugly until we got a $25,000 state library grant to add a second floor, a back room, and enough wood bat and board to hide the white cinderblock exterior, giving it that 1860’s look.  

If it did burn, it likely would have been in mid-May. The two major fires that consumed 300 buildings were May 18 of 1865 and May 17 of 1867.

A scan of the Boise Basin library.

The library did possess one distinction: more stained-glass windows than any library in the state. Several artistic friends had agreed to create stained-glass windows if I supplied the dimensions. I contributed one myself for the front door, an extravagant arrangement of cascading blue and white flowers that turned out to be heavier than the wood door and pretty much made the door impossible to properly close.

When the Fourth of July parade approached, I decided the Boise Basin deserved a float. My contribution to civic culture was the Tree of Knowledge: a scraggly dead ponderosa pine lashed to my battered 1966 Chevy pickup. Books dangled from its branches, while several grade-school children sat beneath it, pretending to read.

As we headed up Montgomery Street toward Main, it became obvious that I had overlooked a minor engineering detail. The Tree of Knowledge was about two feet taller than the power lines.

The float stopped abruptly. The truck continued forward. I slammed on the brakes. For a moment it appeared the tree, the wires, or both were about to come crashing down. The children wisely scattered. Up ahead, the parade had ground to a halt. The shiny fire trucks stood motionless as spectators waited to see whether the library float would become the most exciting event of the day.

Digital Image of fire truck

Fortunately, I managed to tip the unlucky pine just enough to squeeze beneath the wires, and the parade resumed. Clutching their books, the children had wandered off in search of the firemen who were tossing candy to the crowd. Apparently, the kids had absorbed enough knowledge for one day.

It was a short and embarrassing trip for the Tree of Knowledge, as it limped down Main Street toward Highway 21, with no children, fewer branches, and considerably less dignity. I suspect more than a few adults lining the street were also wondering why their property taxes were supporting such a questionable enterprise. To the best of my knowledge, the Boise Basin Public Library never again entered a float in the Idaho City Fourth of July parade.                                                     

 

Several digital images of my cabin sprinkled throughout. Outside and then several inside. (Cabin will also appear in ‘The Muse and Angel Trixie.’)

I began building my cabin above Idaho City in my third year in the Basin. My plan was to use materials I gathered myself.

When I was a kid my folks gave me a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas. I spent countless hours building exotic log cabins, but the structures were horizontal. I wanted something different: vertical logs, that felt like they grew straight out of the ground. One spring a tornado-like wind blew down several acres of ten-inch-diameter lodgepole pines near the abandoned town of Graham at the edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. A dozen visits with my old 1960 pickup truck gave me the walls for my cabin.

If my walls didn’t impress, the floor of my cabin certainly did. A logger had felled a massive dead ponderosa pine in the Trinity Mountains. We made a deal: boards for stain-glass windows. I assisted him by being on the other end of his Alaskan chain saw. The boards we cut were 32-feet long, 30-inches wide and 4-inches thick. That would be the floor. It would sit on massive 32-foot long beams, each 10x12-inches wide, which sat on 3-foot diameter pressure treated poles buried 4-feet underground and resting on a pad of concrete. As the building inspector commented when he came up to view my handiwork, “your cabin will burn for a week.”

I just knew I wanted to build something unique to the world, and do it on a shoestring. I also wanted to heat the entire cabin with a single wood stove, something to keep both my plants and my pipes alive through winters that occasionally dipped to twenty below. The plants did fine. The pipes not so much. It took one frozen winter—and a complete replumbing—to teach me how fast water in copper pipes can turn to ice.

I soon came to think of my cabin as a child, demanding more attention over the next decade than any teenager ever could. Another difference is that children eventually leave home. Cabins stay put, waiting for the next repair or crisis. Even so, it has become a place of comfort and refuge, something most teenagers never seem to provide.
                                                                

In high school I read Our Town, and it left a mark. I even dreamed of acting in it one day. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize play is “the record of a tiny New Hampshire village as created by the lives of its most humble inhabitants.” Idaho City had humble inhabitants. It also had characters. What if we gathered some of them during the long winter, handed them scripts, and asked them to become the citizens of Grover’s Corners?

With two seasoned theater veterans in town—Ed Lonsdale and Barbara McClain—willing to co-direct, we ordered scripts and began reading lines in my cabin. The clear plastic on the windows had finally been replaced with stained glass, but, as someone observed, it was still as cold as a well-digger’s ass in January.

What began as a way to fight cabin fever stayed modest in intent until the snowdrifts crippled traffic and completely blocked the sunlight in my bay windows. We were beginning to warm to the idea of an April 1 performance. The date felt right.

“We moved rehearsals to the drafty Masonic Hall, stacking tables for a stage and crowding into narrow hallways as makeshift wings,” remembers director Barbara McClain. “Bruce was always our bandleader for fun things. He was the part-time librarian and got the idea to have the library provide seed money. He convinced the library board that we’d pay it back with the ten-dollar tickets we’d charge for admission. He said it was entirely legal. We were happy to believe him.”

The library did receive its money back, with interest. From then on, the little library became something of a civic bank and cultural engine for the town. It helped fund the annual Arts & Crafts Festival, which drew artists from across the state and crowds from Boise and nearby communities. The summer weekend event continued for more than 20 years before it finally outgrew its charm—and, eventually, the patience of everyone involved. By then, most of the town seemed quietly relieved. The extra money for the merchants was no longer worth the effort.

Scan of ICU logo. Also a digital Image of t-shirt

The library also underwrote the fictional Idaho City University. ICU, as we called it, specialized less in academics than in raising money and spirits. Friend Jake Hoffman and I served as “Administrative Assistants to the President,” whose identity was, conveniently, unknown.

At our inaugural event, historian Dick d’Easum praised our official seal and its Latin motto: “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi.” Always Wear Under Wear. The learned Mr. d’Easum had written books on Idaho history, including Sawtooth Tales and Fragments of Villainy. We assumed he would fit right in with the spirit of the evening—and he did.

Dick spoke glowingly of ICU to the hundred people packed into the bar, where the larger concern was whether the dance floor would hold the crowd. He went so far as to suggest that ICU deserved a place in Idaho’s university system, perhaps more than some institutions, because it made no pretense about itself and required no public funding.

The dress code was Idaho City black tie: tuxedos with caulk boots, sequined gowns with fur hats. By the time we held ICU Prom Night, half the town had somehow become faculty. For twenty dollars, you could receive a calligraphed diploma. Mine still hangs in the bathroom.

Not all of our humor landed. At one event, I made fun of the State Board of Education in my prepared remarks. My point was that the Board would never accept ICU into the state system, even though we were clearly learning things and not charging anyone tuition.

That same evening, Jake and I appointed Idaho Public Television general manager Peter Morrill the ICU Dean of Censorship. The station had recently been caught up in a fight with members of the Idaho Legislature over airing a program about parents dealing with their gay children in the classroom. Some legislators wanted Peter’s scalp. Personally, I found the program dull and notably short on mountain scenery.

I discovered too late that several attendees at the dance worked for the State Board of Education. That Monday, Jake and I made a hurried trip to Boise to apologize in person to the executive director of the State Board. Fortunately, he wasn’t in. Someone said he was at the Legislature arguing for more money. We apologized to his secretary and headed back to the mountains, chastened but intact.

On opening night of Our Town, the hall was packed. The old Masonic Temple, built in 1865, was perfect for the occasion: a wood stove, gas lights, wooden benches, even frogs croaking in the nearby pond. It felt less like a set than a continuation of the play itself. Our Town was coming to life in our town.

Everyone who wanted a role had gotten one. Instead of a single narrator, we had two women who looked remarkably alike. We decided one person shouldn’t be asked to memorize that many lines, so we simply split the job in half and called it a feature. They stood on opposite sides of the stage, dressed alike.

Digital Image taken of Our Town poster. I have physical object also.

My role was Doc Gibbs, one of the central characters in the three-act play. Boise attorney Byron Johnson also joined the cast. The soon-to-be Idaho Supreme Court justice had no lines, but his assignment was crucial. During intermission between Acts Two and Three, he would head down to the bar and retrieve musician Johnny Thomsen, who was often playing music at the O’Leary’s Saloon. Johnny was the town drunk in Act Three. He had no speaking part, but no one questioned his qualifications.

My girlfriend Jenny played Emily. The emotional peak of the play comes in Act Three, when young Emily dies and enters the afterlife. Still new to being dead, she longs to return to her old life. The other spirits caution her, but she insists.

Soon, however, she sees what the living cannot. They are too absorbed in themselves and their small concerns to notice the beauty of ordinary days. Her excitement turns to disillusionment. She returns to her grave with the realization that life, once lived, cannot be reclaimed—that it is fleeting, and therefore precious.

And through her tears Emily delivers the play’s powerful line: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” The answer comes back quietly from one of our onstage narrators: “No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”

Act Three is a real tear-jerker. Through a slit in the curtain I could see men who had faced wildfires and bar fights quietly wiping their eyes. It was that kind of night.

“It was a spectacular endeavor,” said co-director Barbara McClain. “Everyone in town attended and raved. Of course, some may have been unduly influenced by the heavily spiked punch provided free by Mayor John Brogan and his friend Bud McDonald. And the cast party afterwards—what I remember of it—lasted several days. At least it felt that way.”

My own memory of the cast party is that Byron Johnson led a group of us through town in the early morning hours, serenading residents who were still asleep and no doubt wondering what on earth was happening outside their bedroom windows at 5:00 am. Looking back, it seems downright ridiculous. At the time, however, it made perfect sense.

The following week's headline in The Idaho World proclaimed the play a success. Perhaps that was a bit self-serving, but as editor of the oldest continuously published newspaper in the state, I felt entirely justified. We had pulled off something few rural towns ever get the chance to experience. For a brief time Idaho City had become a theater town.

The reporter from the Idaho Statesman, the state’s largest newspaper, agreed and gave it a favorable review. Even a reporter from Boise could sense what had happened in that old Masonic hall.

Digital Image of key to Idaho City. I have physical object.

Afterward, Mayor John Brogan presented me with the key to Idaho City: a twenty-inch wooden key that opened absolutely nothing. It still sits on my cabin mantle. There was no question, however, that everyone in the play deserved that key.

After Our Town, our Idaho City theater group decided to stay together. We moved to the community hall, which doubled the size of the audience. Our forte seemed to be melo-dramas, and I did my share of playing the villain. Occasionally we would branch out. One play, Frankenstein allowed us to use my friend Jerry Lansing as the “creature.” We enticed him by telling him he didn’t have many lines to memorize. In fact, when he would forget a line, he fell back on his favorite: “What happiness can there be in my life?” That usually happened several times in each performance, and it always elicited stifled laughter backstage. I enjoyed telling Jerry that the real reason we cast him as the monster was because we could save money on makeup. He never knew how to take that.

Digital Image of poster of Frankenstein. I have the poster.

The Pioneer Cemetery is a mile outside of town. It reminds visitors that Idaho City has always lived close to the bone. Bar fights fueled by alcohol and Civil War disagreements, cholera and tuberculosis, mining accidents and murders—all took their toll. Apparently, few early residents died gently. On one headstone are the words Dum Tacet Clamat: “Though silent, he speaks.”

After Our Town, we decided to mount a melodrama to capture another side of town: The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch was proof that high art and low comedy could share the same drafty stage. Our Town had won a Pulitzer Prize. There were no such awards for Sneaky Fitch.

Digital Image of poster of Sneaky Fitch. I have the physical object.

 

In the little town of Gopher Gulch, Sneaky Fitch is the obnoxious town drunk. No one sheds a tear when he falls ill and is presumed dead after a dose of suspicious medicine. But when Sneaky returns from the grave, the townsfolk are horrified—and he quickly becomes sheriff, mayor, and town banker. In other words, he becomes insufferable.

Digital Image of program of Sneaky Fitch. I have physical object.

 

After Doc Burch returns from his travels and assures everyone that Sneaky was never actually dead, it’s curtains for the town drunk. It’s a comic play with a happy ending, a crowd-pleaser in the simplest sense of the word.

I had invited Idaho Statesman columnist Tim Woodward to the performance. My friend drove up from Boise to experience “culture” in one of his favorite towns. I was surprised when he devoted his next column to an evening with Sneaky Fitch.

“The thing that made it special, to my way of thinking, was the town spirit that went into it,” Tim wrote. “Roughly a fourth of Idaho City was involved, in the cast or behind the scenes, and the other three-fourths was in the audience. It wasn’t Broadway, but it was contagious. Whatever might have been lacking in professional expertise was made up in enthusiasm and community pride.”

 

Tim attended the Saturday night performance, when afterward everyone was brought onstage—especially those behind the scenes. The directors, set designers, and volunteers received flowers. No one was getting paid, so flowers seemed entirely appropriate.

“I’ll be hanged with Sneaky’s rope if there weren’t tears in the crowd as well as on the stage,” Tim wrote. “It was something to see, a whole town pulling together like that. You can always travel to see ‘sophisticated’ productions, but the other part is hard to come by. I’ve never enjoyed a play more.”

Digital image of Tim Woodward’s column. I have physical object.

 

He was right. It seems what we were building in Idaho City wasn’t just theater, or a tongue-in-cheek university with diplomas and ICU sweatshirts, which, incidentally, are still available for purchase. We were learning how to shape a community moment, how to tell stories together, how to frame experiences so people might recognize themselves in them.

And I was learning skills that were quietly preparing me for a very different stage: how to gather people around an idea, how to find stories worth telling, and how to convince others that they mattered. I just didn't know yet that those lessons would soon carry me far beyond the Boise Basin.