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The Emmett Eliminator

Posted on by Brian D'Ambrosio / Leave a comment

Homer supposedly once said, “Art obtains the prize.” This doctrine has endured in boxing with some noteworthy exceptions, as in 1952, when Rocky Marciano slugged his way through the crafty Jersey Joe Walcott. Smart fighters typically find a way to win.

Yet a successful fighter sometimes emerges who doesn’t think the least bit in the ring. Such a fighter swears off the scientific approach, and simply hammers his opponent. He doesn’t consider himself a student of boxing, and makes no claims to boxing as an art form. For sixteen years, Emmett’s Kenny Keene was that type of fighter.

“I was no boxer,” Kenny told me during our lengthy phone conversations, which began when I was conducting research for a book about another boxing champion, Marvin Camel. “I was not skilled. I plowed ahead. I may not have been a great boxer or puncher, but I was a good, small-town guy who always plowed ahead.”

Plowing ahead is a bit of a euphemism. Kenny Keene fought with unprotected abandon. Inside the ropes, he was a workmanlike brawler, a straightforward machine who was often impervious to pain and virtually impossible to knock out. His bravery took the form of being able to resist blows that other men could not stand. Those traits contributed to his appeal among Idahoans and fans beyond the state. My grandfather and I were always ecstatic to see Kenny Keene and his crowd-pleasing punching on television’s now-defunct Tuesday Night Fights.

Boxing is a brutal, unforgiving sport. People “play” baseball and basketball, football, tennis, and golf. No one “plays” boxing. Fighting is not a pastime. It takes a certain aptitude, both physical and mental, to endure. Kenny had the fighter’s sense of endurance. Continue reading →

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Backyard Skiing

Posted on by Margaret Fuller / Leave a comment

My friend Betty and I crouched in the sagebrush taking pictures of the flowers up on the Midvale Hill. She said, “My neighbor used to ski up here.”

“What?” I replied. “Skied? You can’t be serious.”

“Yes. A rancher pulled skiers uphill in his logging sleds.”

She must have been mistaken. There wouldn’t have been enough snow for a ski area here. I snapped a few more photos, thinking only of focus and aperture, trying to capture the vast hillside of buckwheat and arrowleaf balsamroot in bloom, the gold and the cream flowers accented by purple evening shadows.

A few years later, when my oldest son Doug got a Christmas present of a book on Montana’s former ski areas, he said, “Mom, you should write a book on Idaho ski areas, all the lost areas. I bet Idaho has more than Montana.”

I told him no, I didn’t know enough about skiing. He should find someone in the ski business to do it, or write it himself. “You’re the one who knows about skiing,” I said. He had been head coach at a Wyoming ski area for seven years and for a Colorado area for another year before he got tired of the parents of the young racers and went to grad school. Doug kept after me for a year, until I agreed to write the book. I agreed only after he said he’d help me. Soon I was receiving long lists of ski areas from him by e-mail, and bits of information on famous skiers I had never heard of.

That’s how I found myself in the Weiser library, scrolling through microfilm of the Weiser Signal and Weiser American on an ancient reader that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. I had remembered what Betty said, and had asked her what year it was that her neighbor skied. She told me it was in the 1930s, and I started looking through the papers beginning after Sun Valley opened in December 1936. Continue reading →

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Find the Cost of Freedom

Posted on by Keith Knight / Leave a comment

I first met Anna Halsey, (no relation to Admiral Halsey of Navy fame) in Coeur d’Alene in the 1980s. During that brief encounter, she impressed me as a dignified and devout woman, but it wasn’t until many years later, when her name came up in a conversation with a friend, that the story of her remarkable family came to my attention. Continue reading →

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The Pioneer Diaries

Posted on by Jerry Eichhorst / Leave a comment

The author has researched and compiled more than 1,650 written accounts of early travelers along Idaho’s emigrant trails. As president of the Idaho chapter of the Oregon-California Trails Association, he has published excerpts in recent years from some of these diaries on the chapter’s website newsletter. Below is a sampling of what he has uncovered.

Soda Springs
A few days after entering what would later become Idaho, the emigrants came upon an unusual site of several natural hot springs and geysers. Known as Soda Springs because of the carbonated water, most diarists commented on the area. Many used the term “curiosity,” so I suspect that is how a guidebook must have described the springs. A small trading post was built in the area in later years. Today a timer-controlled geyser is the area’s curiosity. Lorenzo Sawyer writes the most detailed description of Soda Springs I have seen. The portion of his day reaching Soda Springs is related here.

June 17, 1850 — Last night was the most disagreeable one we have experienced on our journey. The weather was cold. About 7 o’clock p. m., it commenced raining. During the first watch, the rain continued to fall; about the second watch it changed to snow and sleet, and towards morning it snowed quite hard. The watch found it exceedingly disagreeable traveling about among the thick bushes loaded with water and sleet. The sun shone clear in the morning, however, and soon dispelled the snow in the valleys. We were on our march at six o’clock. Mr. Lake being still sick, we took him in our wagon again. Continue reading →

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Gunfight on Boise Ridge

Posted on by Jim Fazio / Leave a comment

In the early morning of July 31, 1940, the stillness of the hills above Boise was shattered by gunfire. Moments earlier, at 6 a.m. near a place called Mile High, there had been a knock at the cabin door of Pearl Royal Hendrickson. A brief conversation ended suddenly with two blasts from Hendrickson’s rifle. Deputy U. S. Marshal John Glenn staggered backwards and collapsed dead fifty feet from the cabin door. His partner, Captain George Haskin of the Boise Police Department, was standing around the corner of the cabin.

“First thing I knew—blewie! Right out of a clear sky, John was shot,” Haskin later told a reporter.

He fired two shots at the assailant and missed, and then fled up the hill through the brush and stumps. He ran back to the road where Nathan Smith was waiting in a taxi that had taken them up the winding dirt road at the end of North 8th Street. The two men raced back down the mountain to Boise and within hours, one of the largest posses in the history of Idaho began to assemble. As luck would have it, peace officers were holding a regional meeting in town, so lawmen from as far away as Moscow and Montana joined prison guards and a passel of volunteers, all armed to the teeth.

First to arrive back on the scene was my great uncle, U. S. Marshal George Meffan. From my earliest childhood in Pennsylvania, I had heard of Uncle George, but all I knew was that he lived in Nampa, was a U.S. Marshal, and was “killed by a squatter.” Continue reading →

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Artful Mountain Home

Posted on by Chris DeVore / Leave a comment

It’s not unusual for those looking down from Interstate 84 at seventy-nine m.p.h., or weekend visitors seeking a convenient bed-and-breakfast, or map-loving friends and family who only reach us by email, telephone, or text, to ask, “Why Mountain Home?”(1)

I recently realized that this simple question represents two distinct camps. One wants to know why anybody would move to Mountain Home on purpose, while the other is interested in how the town earned its name. One says, “I can understand if you were stationed there.” The other asks, “Is it maybe irony, like referring to your six-five, three-hundred-pound uncle as Tiny Trev?”

To the naysayers camp, the answer is that Mountain Home, at least to this man, is like the best kind of woman. Since this awkward simile has yet to achieve its demonstrative goal, even though I’ve tried it a minimum of three times, I’m taking the only logical next step. I’m doubling down, putting it in writing, where it can once and for all be justified, seen for the genius that it is, prove my wife wrong, and be redeemed—which will no doubt redeem me.

Mountain Home is not quite front-cover Seattle or Portland or Boise. Those cities force you to dream up all sorts of life-ever-after from across the room, only to disappoint you when they can’t live up to your impossible expectations. Similarly, the best kind of woman is subtle. You notice she’s attractive, but you can still breathe, speak in complete sentences, and use the logic you brought. You laugh at her slightly self-degrading jokes, share chips and salsa littered with cilantro, learn you have the same interests—the Snake River, the Dunes, Bruneau Canyon, religious experiences all. The more you are with her, the more beautiful she becomes; the more you laugh at yourself, rather than going home self-conscious. You love her blemishes, but you keep your head. You become less judgmental, better in general. She embraces you, defends you, calls you her own. She stops you when you’re going too far. She filters you from the world and the world from you. Mountain Home, like this best kind of woman, is redemption. Continue reading →

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