Dear Editor,

My horse veterinarian paid IDAHO magazine a big compliment today while we were freezing our butts off and looking out over a sea of rooftops which has become the new Star recently. We both wondered what people are going to do for farmland once the developers are done with us and have moved on. Where will we get food crops and hay for the horses?

He asked me if I had heard of IDAHO magazine. “They are the only ones paying attention to that kind of stuff,” he said. “The only ones who remember what Idaho was like a few years ago.”

I realized that most of the other publications around the valley are all about subdivisions and shopping. We should be paying attention to the reasons why we moved to Idaho and how to preserve what’s left, and get some of it back eventually.

—Candy Odiorne, Star

Candy Odiorne with her horse. Courtesy Candy Odiorne.

Dear Editor,

I was so pleased to receive a copy of the article about Dr. [Louis] Peck in IDAHO magazine from a relative in Boise (“Grassroots Tenderness,” December 2019).  He was such a wonderful part of my two years at Boise Junior College. I was a freshman there in the fall of 1956, hoping to major in art, as I’d always dreamed of learning to draw and paint, but had had very few opportunities to learn much about it. Suddenly I was in classes with students much more talented than I, and with a teacher who was the most patient and understanding person imaginable. I think I took every class he offered for the two years I was there. I look back at all the different media we worked with and how we thought nothing of jumping into any car we could find to join Dr. Peck in places near and far, to paint outside or in—just to have a new destination for our artistic attempts.  Like most, I had very little money and art supplies were expensive.  Dr. Peck was always so generous, and managed to find us whatever we desperately needed so we could finish our projects.  

I must confess that when I went on to Oregon State College (not a University yet!), I had to take some heavy class loads to graduate in two years because I had FAR too many art credits and not enough required ones from BJC.  But I was never sorry.  Then in August of 1985, my parents gave me the most wonderful gift imaginable—a week-long art workshop with Dr. Peck in Honolulu!  His wife, Lucille, and daughter, Carol, also came, as well as about eight others. We stayed in Honolulu and toured much of the island, painting on many beaches. We even got two graduate credits for going and it gave me a raise in my elementary school librarian’s salary when I returned to Oregon. Needless to say, we all had a wonderful time.

When we first started our classes in college, he encouraged us to have a unique signature on our work, and since my name was Kathie Link, I used “KLink.”  Some years later, when my sister Pam went to BJC and took classes from Dr. Peck, she used “PLink” for hers. During one of his last teaching years in Boise, my sister and I both happened to be in Boise at the same time and thought we’d take a chance and try to find him.  We spotted him in his office and as we walked in, he stood up with a big smile and said, “Well, if it isn’t Klink and Plink.”  

What a memory!  And what an influence on so many lives.  I can’t wait to visit Boise and be able to see his work on display yet again. 

—Kathie Link Olson, Redmond, Oregon