My dad was born in November of 1903. Fourteen yeas later, in March of 1917, my mother was born. 

Dad spent his early teens in Atlanta, Idaho, an isolated mountain mining town. He chopped wood and carried water to keep his family’s laundry with the scalding water his mother needed to get the grime of the miner’s clothes. And he picked up a life-long love of music from a young schoolmarm he appreciated for the rest of his life. The family moved to what is now Old Horseshoe Bend Road, one lot south of Hill Road, when he was fourteen. 

Mother’a early school years were spent in the isolation of Idaho’s central desert on the last farm irrigated by the King Hill canal. Thanks to wooden flues that burned whenever a brush fire swept through the sagebrush the irrigation water was unreliable. Combined with potatoes that had not yet been bread for the summer heat and the never-ending stones coming up in the fields, the family lost the farm and moved to Boise when she was thirteen. 

Dad’s mother was a Bible-banging Christian who insisted he go to a Nazarene high school in Nampa. He commuted on the electric Interurban Rail Way for a few days before he came home and declared if he had to keep doing all that praying he wasn’t going to go to school at all. She relented and he got on the Interurban going the other way to Boise High. Because the family had moved so much in his childhood, dad graduated from Boise High twelve years before mother did, at age twenty.

Dad’s mother used her religion to keep two of her five children home so they would be there in her old age. Dad became resentful of this manipulation and, later, of how religion kept his sister impoverished with worries of damnation for the rest of her life. Long before I arrived my father had given up on religious institutions.

My mom was raised a believing Lutheran but not holier-than-anyone. She took we three kids to church while dad was glad to stay home and enjoy the Sunday peace and quiet.

While my mother was getting through twelve years of school my dad got married and — gasp, — divorced. He also played trombone in a band in bars, smoked cigarettes, and was apparently a rather randy young man about town. 

From Boise High my mother graduated into the Great Depression. With her father very ill and unable to work she went to work as a secretary to support the family. She also made sure her younger sisters had the prom dresses and year books that make teen years memorable and which she had missed out on.

In early 1938 the Boise Light Opera company  staged a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s grand romp The Macado.  Both my parents got singing parts and were soon dating — she, the hard working young lady from a good home and he the free-ranging older man it took to charm her with a different life. They married in 1940. 

My mom’s folks fretted over the history of divorce, drinking, smoking and trombone playing. Dad’s mom squirmed over his marrying outside the Only True Religion. There is no doubt the old folks were talking.

Indeed, when my dad died in 1977 my mother’s mother was still alive. Grandma had never driven so I picked her up and took her to dinner at my mother’s house. Afterward, when we got in the car to take Grandmother home, she immediately folded her hands in her lap, gave a resolved sigh, and observed, “Well. That marriage didn’t last long.” 

“No, Grandmother,” I replied. “Only until death did them part after thirty-seven years.”

She was still convinced it would never work out.