Monday, February 11, 2019

Three Beautiful Things 02/10/19: No Drive to CdA, Researching Em, Family Dinner

1. I'd just rather not go out when the temperatures are in the single digits and the wind chill is even lower. When I decided in January that I would drive to St. Luke's in CdA on Sunday mornings to worship, I also decided that if the weather was nasty and the driving conditions uncertain, I'd stay home. It's disappointing to me that it looks like snow is forecast for the rest of February. Next Sunday, I hope I'll feel more at ease about driving over the 4th of July Pass. I'll be giving it a trial run on Thursday when I drive to CdA for a CT scan and a visit with Dr. Scoggins. I missed being enveloped by the poetry of the liturgy this morning, missed being in tangible fellowship with other members of the mystical Body of Christ, praying together, singing together, listening together, passing the peace to one another, and ingesting together the elements and the mysteries of the Holy Communion.

2. Stu and I, for no real reason beyond curiosity, are trying to piece together the biography of our basketball coach from our senior year in high school, Bob Emehiser. A couple weeks ago, or so, a friend raised a question about Emehiser playing basketball collegiately and today I scoured digital copies of about four editions of the University of Idaho yearbook, The Gem of the Mountains. In the 1964 edition, Emehiser is pictured as a member of the U of I varsity basketball team and his picture says he is a junior. But, in the 1965 edition, a year later, Emehiser's portrait appears in the section of the yearbook devoted to juniors and, in 1966, the section devoted to seniors.

To review, Emehiser appears in three U of I yearbooks, as follows:

1964: pictured in the varsity basketball section as a junior (he played in 10 games and, according the previous and subsequent yearbooks, wasn't on any other Idaho Vandal basketball team, not the varsity or the freshman team)

1965: cited once again as a junior, this time in the section of pictures in the junior class section

1966: cited as a senior in the section of pictures in the senior class section

There is no mention of Emehiser in the 1963 yearbook. I think I'll take a peek at the 1962.

We are trying to figure out when he graduated from Coeur d'Alene High School. We have been scouring basketball box scores in the online archives of the two Spokane newspapers. The archives are incomplete and the newspapers didn't always publish box scores for high school games. But neither of us has found his name listed as having scored in the box scores we have found for CHS games when we thought he would have been on the Coeur d'Alene team.

We are also trying to figure out if he played at San Jose City College after high school since Jim Padgett coached SJCC and Emehiser was later an assistant coach with Padgett and Nevada Reno.

This is, of course, inconsequential. Nothing but the satisfaction of our curiosity is at stake here. We are trying to square things we thought we used to hear about our coach's playing, later coaching, days with what the documents tell us.

I am convinced if I went to a museum or a library that holds the archives of the Coeur d'Alene or Moscow daily newspapers or if I were to explore the archives of the U of I student newspaper, The Argonaut, I might get some answers. I haven't found the online archive of The Argonaut very helpful, but I think I'll return to it again and see if I just haven't been skilled in how to retrieve information from it.

If any of my friends reading this remember Bob Emehiser playing at CdA, know when he graduated, can direct me to online sources I haven't tapped, or to other places I might go to unearth other information, let me know.

My next move will be, one day, to leave the house and go to brick and mortar places in CdA (or maybe, one day, Moscow) to search archived newspapers. (I used to dive into the microfilmed archives of Oregon newspapers at the U of O looking for information about the past and it was a blast.)

3. Tonight Carol and Paul hosted family dinner. We all sat down at the table handsomely decorated in anticipation of Valentine's Day. Carol made hot drinks for cocktails using apple brandy and served the drinks with stuffed mushrooms. We then enjoyed a green salad, hot chicken wings, herbed drumsticks, and lemony broccoli. It was a perfect dinner: simple and satisfying. I must be getting old in that I had trouble sometimes tracking the sudden changes in topics of our table talk, but Christy and Carol helped me out, often providing background about people they mentioned, but whom I knew nothing about. We talked about girls' athletics in the 70s, the difficulties our family has had over the years navigating the streets of Pinehurst, plumbing, basketball coaches over the years at KHS, and the mind boggling subject of past Silver Valley marriages, who brought what children into the world, what children were imported into what new marriages, and what's going on with all these interconnected people now. I spent much of this conversation bewildered. I've been away from Kellogg too long to follow these threads without confusion and maybe even a slight headache!

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