And Train-Spotting

By Al Kozak

When I was a young boy in the 1950s, raising food was the practice in almost every Boise household. We had a garden and a couple of fruit trees on our small lot in South Boise. Almost every yard in our neighborhood had fruit trees, many of whose limbs hung out over fences near the alleys that ran through the middle of every city block.

In summer I loved to visit my boyhood friend Mert Lawwill at his parents’ farm roughly two miles south of the Boise Depot. The Lawwills had several acres and a variety of animals to maintain. I only had a few chores to do and Mert had many.

All different kinds of fruits and vegetables grew on the Lawwill Farm in summer. There were apple trees, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, cherries, plum trees, you name it. I ate so much fruit one summer I contracted a case of the hives and had to go to the doctor and get a penicillin shot. I remember that summer well because the green apples were the best I’ve ever eaten to this day, and that summer we ate a lot of them.

Another thing I loved about the Lawwills’ place was the train. Their property was elevated three or four feet above the level of the tracks and the property line was a barbed wire fence about forty feet from the center of the tracks. In the Fifties, the railroad was still using huge black coal-burning locomotives to pull the trains.

Whether coming or going, the trains were either slowing down or speeding up as they went by. Most of the them carried freight although an occasional passenger train would come along.