Since Boise City kept my folks from opening a trailer rental business within city limits, they looked five blocks south of our tiny one-bedroom home on 30th Street. 

Those five blocks meant they were looking for property in Ada County. Where the streets were dirt. Crime prevention was handled by the sheriff. Septic was in individual tanks. And fires were put out by the Collister Fire District, a county entity that was “really very good.” 

My folks found a block of pasture and garden land surrounded by 28th, Jordan, 29th and Gooding Streets owned by a Mr. Quirbridge (spelling?). It seems Mr. Quirbridge was ready to slow down. He took my folks up on an offer to buy the western half of his farmland.

Mr. Quirbridge kept the eastern half of the block. He kept his cow that mostly stayed in the pasture on the south side of his half-block. He continued to plant a thick garden that threatened to outgrow it’s northern quarter of the block. And he kept his chickens that didn’t seem much interested in wandering further than the rickety fence that surrounded his entire half-block. 

And that, my friends, is how I spent fifteen years growing twenty-one blocks from the Capital Building of the State of Idaho. On roads that were dirt until after I graduated from Boise High School in 1964.