The very first brand new car my Dad ever purchased was a 1965 Plymouth Fury II Station Wagon. The third seat in the Plymouth was unique, in that, the seat faced to the rear, instead of forward. In our family were five girls and three boys, not counting parents. The boys had to ride in the third seat. We got to see where we had been and we were always facing the people in the car behind us. Sometimes, this was uncomfortable at lights and such. But other times, we turned the tables and stared at them until they would look away.

One of the sidelines my Dad got himself into was serving as a board member for a college Gospel choir group that traveled in the summer. They had a bus. It was an older model, but at least it was diesel powered. Dad’s brand new car was less than a year old when the bus broke down in Lewiston, Idaho. It was going to save a chunk of money if my Dad picked up the parts in Seattle (we lived in Edmonds, WA at the time) and delivered them to the garage in Lewiston. And, even to this day, my Dad is game for any excuse to hit the road and travel. He invited me to come along – I dropped everything. I was twelve at the time.

The industrial area in Seattle was noisy but I loved it. It reminded me of my Grandpa’s shop at the Port of Tacoma. We picked up six new sleeves for that diesel motor, six new rods, pistons and other assorted parts. We put the back two seats down, which made a large, flat area and centered the parts in the car. It seemed to me, the front of the car was a foot higher than the back of the car. Those parts weighed a lot and a car is not built like a truck.

Leaving the parts house, we dead-headed to Lewiston. They needed the parts to the bus as fast as possible. After all, a couple dozen college students were stuck on a ranch and missing their singing engagements. Our trip took place before I-90 was ever completed – or started in most areas.

Nowadays, Highway 95 is pretty well cleaned up, although it is still a good drop down into the City of Lewiston. Back then, it was a major series of switchbacks and sharp curves. It was night before we came upon the city. When we came over the ridge and started our descent, it took my breath away. All I could see was lights, all over – spread out like a long, wide ribbon in the valley below. It was a most beautiful sight.

It seemed the trip down was a good twenty to thirty minutes – and with the nose of the car stuck up in the air, it didn’t really feel like we were going downhill at all.

The next morning, we delivered the parts and my Dad took care of some other business. Then we stayed at the ranch. At the ranch, there were a half dozen Honda 50s and 90s. I got to take turns riding on the back of each one. Being only twelve, I was a hit with the college group. That was fun.

A day or two later, my Dad and I hit the road again. This time, we were not in a hurry and I enjoyed the drive across the mostly barren land. It seemed Idaho was full of ranches and along the fence line to many of them were the famous Burma Shave signs. Do you remember them? There would be four or five signs to a set with lyrics to some jingle or joke and finally a Burma Shave pitch at the end. I loved them. After a while, I started writing them down.

S&H Green Stamps were popular then, too, and I was working on my second book.

We stopped at a few cowboy attractions along the way. It was fun. It was just me and my Dad. I thought that life could not be better.

When I was in my teen years, one of my friends, John Celestino, would work the summers for his brother-in-law, Wendle Little. Wendle was a builder in Coeur d’Alene who just passed away a couple years ago. Every year, John would come back with stories of working on fancy houses and running heavy equipment in Idaho – and I was always jealous. I wanted to go to Idaho and I wanted to work for Wendle.

Time has a way of rolling along – with or without us. I finished High School, did my time in the Army, started a business, got married and started raising a family. All the while, my mind was always on Idaho. I always wanted to live there, but contented myself with the thought that I would once again visit.

The constant cloudiness and the rain in Seattle was very depressing to me. Working out in the field, the clay mud would cling to my boots six inches thick. My family was fine with it – they stayed inside during the rain.

Sometimes, the conversation of moving had come up, partly because my wife, Robin, was born in Zanesville, Ohio and still has family there. However, those conversations always lead to a consensus that we were fine where we were. We lived in Monroe. But my desire to live in Idaho grew with age. I began praying about it. Then, one day I asked my family – almost out of the blue – if they would like to move to Idaho. It was unanimous – we all wanted to live in Idaho and time would prove it wasn’t just a passing feeling.

A few years before this decision, some friends of ours, Mitch and Machelle Wright, had moved from Snohomish to Coeur d’Alene. We set out for a trip to Lewiston and thought we would visit our friends on the way back. As we pulled off the Interstate in Coeur d’Alene and started heading south on Highway 95 I could tell something bad was going on in the transmission. But I continued south over the bridge and thought I would stop off at the next town after Coeur d’Alene. But Idaho is not like Washington with one town right after another and we had to turn back.

At the corner of Ironwood and Government Way we found a pay phone (needed the phone book) – not realizing we were a block away from our friend’s store, The Country Porch. Long story short – we never made it to Lewiston. We were stuck in CDA for a few days and fell in love with the place. God has a way of working things out.

On Monday, we dropped our minivan off at Lake City Transmission. I had to come back to town a week later to fetch it. By the way, the minivan was eight years old when the transmission went out. Lake City Transmission repaired it over ten years ago and it is still running very well. I would highly recommend them if you need transmission work.

It took another year to get our house sold, close down my business and get moved over. We have been here for ten years and no one in our family has ever looked back. In fact, my son, Andy, married a local girl, Nichelle Ross and they plan to stay local.

A couple years after we moved to North Idaho, I met Wendle Little. I was able to work for him for several years before he passed away. By that time, I had been building homes and doing dirt work for over twenty-five years. He didn’t have heavy equipment anymore, but we did – and we moved a lot of dirt for him. Over the years, we had both developed similar project strategies and we got along very well. I miss him but I am grateful for the few years we were able to work together.

It is interesting to listen to some of the natives and especially the Californians complain about the lack of sunshine and the cloudiness of North Idaho. When you come from Seattle, you have a different perspective on the weather – and this place is definitely sunny! Seattle has only two seasons – warm rain and cold rain. We really appreciate the four seasons in North Idaho. North Idaho is a wonderful place to live.

So we have the fulfillment of a little boy’s dream: to live in Idaho and work for Wendle Little. Our family is together and everyone is glad for the move here. We live in the land of sunshine (despite what the naysayers think). We operate the most fun store in North Idaho and we have met the most wonderful people who come to visit our store. What could be better than this? These are the best of times.

On the economic side, the trade bubble is still collapsing, meaning our debt to other nations is declining. The stock market has had six straight weeks of growth, meaning investor confidence in our economy is high. And, best of all – everyone made it past tax day!

There is good news all around us! Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear but be thankful for all God has given us!

These are the best of times.

In my earliest recollections of the man, he was driving a 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster. It was a four door model. To me, the Stylemaster and my dad were a natural pair – they even looked alike, as I saw it – through the eyes of a three year old boy.

When I was five, my dad brought home a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere four door sedan. It sported a fresh coat of mustard-gold colored paint. It was a real beauty and, it too, was five years old. The paint looked so good, I swore the car was brand new. My dad and his friend assured me it was not – but I was relentless. If a five-year old boy could see it, why didn’t my dad understand he had bought a brand new car and didn’t even know it!

One day while riding in the new Belvedere, mom made a note of the strange noise. Dad said it was the brakes. We had this car only a few months before this episode and it occurred to me, dad must have been right when he said the car was used. Even though I was a young man of five, I knew if the car was new, the brakes would not have been worn this quickly. It was at this point, the luster of the new paint did not thrill me anymore – and I also decided in the future, if my dad said a car was used, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

Both these cars were nearly new when my dad bought them and they cost him less than five hundred dollars. Ten years later, he would purchase a brand new car for more than five times that price.

During those used car years, we lived in a suburban World War Two block house, in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. To me, it was a palace but my parents often complained it was too small and crowded. What can be crowded about a nine-hundred square foot house with four kids? The garage was clear in the back of the house. If you drove to it, there would be no backyard. So my dad closed up the garage, fenced the backyard and parked the car in the front – he made a parking area on the side lawn. The yard seemed huge to me but a few years ago, I was standing in the front yard on the sidewalk and a man was washing his car on the concrete driveway, in what used to be the backyard, and I think if we both put our arms out, we could have touched.

A few years later, I was in the sixth grade. One day, my teacher, who was always a well-spring of not-so-positive ideas dropped a bomb on us. She told us she felt sorry for her class because most of us would never know the joy of home ownership. The reason was the median price of housing just went above the ten thousand dollar mark! That was depressing. But I decided I would buy myself a house no matter what the price had climbed to. Nine years later, I became a home builder.

Between the twenty years from my dad’s used cars and the first year I purchased a brand new truck, 1975, the cost of living – or what the dollar could purchase – had gone up sixty-one percent. That truck in 1975, cost me just over four thousand dollars. In 1980, I purchased another new truck which cost me over ten thousand dollars. That was unreal and I swore I would never pay ten thousand dollars for a new truck ever again. I was right – but not in the respect I had in mind. Fifteen years later, I would spend three and one-half times that price.

The decade of the 70s, we saw huge inflation. The dollar in 1980 bought less than half what it did in 1970 because the cost of living had gone up over one hundred twelve percent.

Between the 80s and the early years of the new millennium, I don’t remember much about the trucks and homes I bought and sold because I was raising my family – so everything is just a blurr. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even during years of rising prosperity, inflation held fast and our dollar did not deteriorate as it had in past decades. From 1980 to 1990, the cost of inflation was down from the previous decade to fifty-eight percent; from 1990 to 2000, it was thirty-one percent and for the nine years from 2000 to now, it is less than twenty-five percent. And the 2009 dollar actually buys more than the 2008 dollar!

Of course, only God knows the future and we don’t know what harm all the bailouts and money printing will do to our economy. But we can look back to the last three decades and see inflation – or the bite in the spendability of our dollar – has been softening. This is a positive trend.

Unemployment is up but at a slower rate than the month before and it is still lower than mid-1975 and most of 1982 and 1983. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current eight and one-half percent unemployment includes figures for illegal aliens and those who have stopped looking for work. This is a major change from computing the older statistics – and inflates the unemployment rates. Meanwhile, the average hourly earnings were up point three percent for the month of March.

The translation of this is that most of us still have our jobs. Most of us are seeing our dollar go further. We still have our cars and our homes, our clothes and our gadgets – and our families.

There is good news all around us! Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear but be thankful for all God has given us!