Jack Wayne Chappell

Yesterday there was an article in Gannett’s Boise Statesman which proposed something along these lines: Since JR Simplot has now gone to a Heaven he didn’t believe in, we true blue Idahoans need a brand new Idaho icon, and the Statesman nominated you!

Carol, when I was a kid here in Idaho, the Statesman was locally owned. All the home town newspapers were. Now they are all owned by giant corporations from out of state. Most of the radio and television stations are too. Most of the journalists are imports from everywhere else but here. There are still a few Idaho originals left in the game, but they are outnumbered a jillion to one. Paul J. Schneider is an Idaho icon. You, my kooky cookie, are not. (Not yet. But you can be.)

Dearest Carol, even though we all love your music, and even though many Idahoans have come to accept the inevitable truth that Sun Valley Hollywood Idaho wants to own and control us, and will stoop to any type of political skullduggery to accomplish that goal . . . well, sweetness, as true as it is that I love you dearly, and have a burning desire to become your husband, Carol; the sad truth is that you’ll never become an Idaho icon unless you meet the criteria. Naturally, since this is Idaho, the criteria is rigged. Unless you marry a true blue Idaho boy like me, you’ll never get there, my angel cake.

You see, my love, in order to be a bona fide Idahoan, you have to have been born and raised here. Not only that, but your parents and grandparents have to have been born and raised here. Not only that, but your great grandparents have to have homesteaded here before or near the turn of the last century. You can’t qualify for the status of an Idaho icon UNLESS you actually, legally marry a man who’s great-grandparents did homestead here before or near the turn of the last century. If you’ll do that, then your husband can introduce you to the rituals and rites that are absolutely required to complete and consummate the marriage. Then you can establish yourself as the Queen of the Rockies, and you’ll forever be Mrs. Idaho. (I’ll explain about those rituals and rites very shortly).

Dear Carol, the poor uneducated reporter from the Statesman was applauding you for applauding the democrats and more Wilderness Areas. Sugar buns, that’s why you’ll never qualify or meet the criteria for the position of Idaho’s most noticeable icon all by yourself. You’re away too rich to be an Idaho Democrat, and you’re in a political bed with that doggone dentist from Potatoesville, Idaho . . . . and he’s a turncoat republican if there ever was one. To cap that off, it’s not the democrats who are sponsoring the new wilderness bills, it’s two turncoat republicans! Kid Crapo and the CIEDRA Kid! You should dump those bumpkins like a basket full of blister bugs, darling. You’re too good for them!

Look on the bright side though, Carolkins. Here I am, a genuine, bona fide Idaho man who is in the same business that you are, except on a much, much smaller scale. I too, would like to become an Idaho icon, and I would have been one long ago, except that the communists and quay-gays who run Hollywood have blackballed me and kept me broke all these years. Well, if you’ll marry me pumpkins, then I won’t be broke anymore, and together we will reeducate you, so that you will actually know what you are talking about on occasion.

Now Carol, there is such a thing as ‘tough love’ which is an Idaho standard. It’s one thing for me to be madly in love with you and on my knees, passionately begging you to marry me, right in front of God, and the press, and everybody; but it’s quite another for me to agree with your elitist environmentalist cronies who believe that fish don’t swim in the water, and that water doesn’t run downhill.

If you’ll marry me, on our wedding night, you’ll sing like a nightingale, Carolkins, because you will have reached the highest peak in the Rockies. You will then be an Idaho icon for ever and ever, amen. Together, we will prove to the world that the God that JR Simplot did not believe in does indeed exist. He dwells within all good souls, and there’s no doubt that He dwells in yours.

However, before you’ll ever be a true Idahoan, you have to marry a man like me. When you do, the next step is to partake of the rituals and rites. When that is done, then a miracle will happen, and you’ll bloom into the Idaho icon that you always believed you were destined to become. You’ll learn how to bake sourdough biscuits, but don’t worry, you won’t have to dig worms or fetch beer.

When you have been born again by partaking of the rituals and rites, you’ll never be the same old silly Carolkins who believes everything the Sierra Club tells her. If you accept my proposal, you’ll be my wife, and a good old Idaho girl.

The rituals are nice. You have to go to Chuckhole Creek to be baptized in the clear sweet water. The Reverend Chuckawalla Charlie must preside. Your fiancé (me) will place Syringas in your hair, Reverend Charlie will wade out into the swirling waters of the baptismal pool in Chuckhole Creek. You, dressed in cowboy cut Wranglers and a red & white checkered blouse with a pretty blue bandana around you lovely throat, will pull off your boots and wade out to meet the Reverend. Chuckawalla Charlie will say a prayer and baptize you, and when you walk out of the water and back to your new husband, you’ll be redeemed forever.

My gentle jennie Carol, the environmentalists and Hollywood celebrities who have come here from California — they don’t know how to get to Chuckhole Creek. I do. And, when you accept this marriage proposal, your true blue fiancé will guide you steadily all the way there. Friends and family are awaiting us.

Of course, Carol King, and any playful persons in the media who want to have a little fun with this piece of sincere chicanery . . . (it’s too long to publish as an open letter to any editor, but you radio guys can have fun with it if you want to, and you newspaper hounds can quote from and spin some shorts off of it if you please.)

. . . . . There actually is some sense and sensibility in this. For one thing, Carol King and I have a lot in common. We both love Idaho, and we both love music and the arts. Carol King, if she were better educated and more reality based, would not be in favor of anymore designated wilderness here. Look what happened to the beautiful forests that these fuzzy-face environmentalists ‘preserved’ for us. They all burned down, just like us Idaho boys told them. They cut back our grazing rights to ‘save the sage hens’ amongst other things, and now there’s all their ‘sage hen habitat’ lying out at Three Creek in a thousand square miles of black earth.

So Carol, if you’ll marry (or make friends with) a naturalist and true conservationist like myself, you’ll learn a lot of things you didn’t know. You’ll learn that your efforts are much better spent fighting the bureaucracies to help restore Idaho’s salmon runs than given in promoting more nonsensical wilderness bills that the vast majority of Idahoans don’t want. And you’ll come to the stark realization that other people live here besides the Hollywood crowd in Sun Valley.

You’ll learn how full of horse feathers your environmental cronies really are, and that the differences between you and JR are an ocean apart. Your environmental friends have cost the American taxpayers too many billions in tax dollars and lost natural resources to count. JR made money for everyone. He paid untold millions in taxes, and if you add in the taxes from employee wages, what his Company paid out to support our government ran into the billions.

If you’ll pony up with me, Carol, we’ll prove to the entire world that Angels Don’t Sleep. We’ll whip the bureaucracies soundly, and we’ll have our salmon runs back in the blink of an eye. I’ll show you how to get to Chuckhole Creek, and once you’ve been there, you’ll never be the same. Marry me, Carol. Nobody deserves me more than you. And, if you already have a husband, well, you’re rich enough that you can afford more than one.

After all these years of hard work, and having endured the outlandish persecutions and political subterfuge that I have, I deserve to marry a fabulously wealthy woman of the arts like you. Please Carol, pretty please darling, it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to retire!

Marry me Carol King. Chappell is such a much nicer name than ‘KING’. Kings seem to think that they are better than everybody else. JR wasn’t like that at all. He’d walk right into the cook shack and sit down and have bacon and beans with the cowboys. I could tell you a few stories about old JR. Hell, he took me off the highway and put me to work when I was cold, broke, and hungry and sixteen years old. None of your friends from Sun Valley ever did that.

Marry me, Carol, and rediscover Idaho! Forget about CIEDRA, my little nightingale, and I’ll teach you how to ride a cuttin’ hoss. Come away with me to Chuckhole Creek, and taste the perfect water sent from Heaven. Marry me, Carol! I wrote this poem especially for you!

Any scoundrel tries to steal this piece is subject to Idaho Common Law, which requires that the thief must be able to outrun a bullet.