Huckleberries: 30 years later, still a good call

I became a Northwesterner 30 years ago today – Independence Day. I was 27 at the time and eager to start a new adventure in journalism and get away from California’s heat. I accepted a job as news editor of the Daily Inter Lake of Kalispell, Mont., almost sight unseen, and moved my wife to the viewtiful Flathead Valley. I recall that the neighbor who helped move us into our bright-yellow rental looked to the nearby Rockies wistfully and longed to get away from the “heat.” It was in the 80s. He also damned Californians for driving up housing prices and jamming the roads. Some things never change.

My wife and I were such greenhorns that first year that we felt like failures when we finally braved subzero temperatures to try to make a snowman from dry snow. My son was born in Kalispell and beat cancer there. I became managing editor of “The Daily Mistake,” survived five years, and got booted to the feisty Lewiston Tribune. I buried my second child in Lewiston. (My third was born in Coeur d’Alene.) I learned to love journalism again – and that you can’t smell the foul air after you’ve lived in Lewiston awhile. I struggled with the decision to quit my job as news editor and join the S-R as a reporter in fall 1984. Finally, I left it up to my wife, who’d followed me without question to central California, Montana and Idaho.

Lewiston or Coeur d’Alene? I asked.

Her response: “Let’s blow this place.” Good call.