For those keeping score at home, Dave Boling, author of “Guernica” and one of a dozen 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers picks, cut his teeth in journalism as a CDA Press sports writer. Doug Clark, then the Press editor and now the S-R’s zany columnist, hired Boling 25 or so years ago because he was intrigued how an ex-college footballer could write so well without journalistic training. Boling walked into the Press office sick from drinking bad water while logging and desperate for a job, as my buddy Clark tells the story. He’d worked the steel mills in Chicago and then the forests in the Northwest after starting as center for the University of Louisville. Clark liked him right away – and he had an opening for Boling assisting then sports editor Dale Grummert. At the Press, Boling strutted his stuff as a writer and joined Clark in bedeviling former publisher Roy Wellman by, among other things, turning off the light when Wellman was in the men’s room and turning up the newsroom thermostat when he was on a energy conservation kick. Later, Boling joined Grummert on the Lewiston Tribune sports desk, before joining the S-R for a while and ultimately moving on to the Tacoma News-Tribune. “Guernica” is a top seller in Spain and on its way to becoming an international hit. In it, Boling fictionalizes about the infamous bombing of a Basque village that inspired one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous paintings. In it, you’ll also read the “gritty, in-your-face Chicago style” that Clark discovered after taking a chance on Boling. An Idaho vandal?
