sun Hailey
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Carey
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s t a n l e y • F a i r f i e l d • S h o sh o n e • P i c a b o Gallery Walk is this Friday, July 1
the weekly
read about it on PaGes 10 & 11 Left: Nancy Mee’s Peisinoe, Theori Halioli (Sea Goddess) sculpture will be at Friesen Sun Valley Gallery
Now Playing: Company of Fools’ Circle Mirror Transformation Page 20
Five Free Concerts in the Valley this Week Page 6
Scholarship Recipient Plans to Pay it Forward Page 22
J u n e 2 9 , 2 0 1 1 • Vo l . 4 • N o . 2 6 • w w w.T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Erwin Kett as Uncle Sam in previous Fourth of July parades.
Kett Says Uncle Sam IS America Photo and Story By KAREN BOSSICK
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rwin Kett and his wife Marlis are known as the “Kraut” Ketts most off the year. But come July 4th, this German-born retiree struts down the streets of Hailey as Uncle Sam waving a tiny American flag and shouting “Happy Birthday!” “Happy Fourth!” “I don’t know how it started,” said Kett, who dons pinstriped pants, and a blue jacket, topping off his white bushy beard of 40 years with Uncle Sam’s famous stovepipe hat. “But you know how it is. Once you start, you can’t stop.” The Ketts first became acquainted with Hailey on the Fourth when they visited the town in 1997 while visiting friends in California. They fell in love with the town and in 2000 built a home near Wood River High School. “We love the weather here –it’s so much better than the weather in Germany where it’s 90 degrees with high humidity right now. We love the scenery, too. But mostly we love the people,” he said. “Germany is very crowded with 82 million people in a place that’s a little bigger than Idaho. Kett, who owned a small business building sliding walls and partitions on the north end of the Black Forest, says he’s tried to explain to my German friends how patriotic Americans are. That’s discouraged in Germany, he says, in part because of the Nazi history. “It’s a little unusual, isn’t it, him being German and being Uncle Sam. But he’s got the beard and loves to do it,” said Marlis. Hailey celebrates 130 years of history with this year’s 4th of July Parade. The Black Jack Shootout Gang will take to the streets between 11 a.m. and noon near The Mint on Main Street. The parade will follow at noon. The entire day’s events will culminate in fireworks that will be accompanied by a performance of the 25th Army Band at the Fox Acres Park on Fox Acres Drive. The Hailey Rotary Foundation will hold its popular Road Apple Roulette during the parade. Main Street will be sectioned off into 10,000 squares with each designated a number. If a horse drops a road apple on a bettor’s square, their name goes into a drum for the prize drawing at the end of the parade. Prizes include a trip to Mexico, a Spa package donated by Aqua Pro Pool and Spas, a gas barbecue donated by Fisher Appliance, a season ski pass from Sun Valley, ski equipment from Scott USA, a golf package donated by Coeur d’Alene Resort, and a $500 gift certificate donated by Christopher and Company. Money from the sales of $5 tickets
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A Sharing Garden in Picabo
Left to Right (1-4): 1) Vicki Riedel created a potting shed out of the old Picabo train station. 2) While her husband Mike tinkers in his workshop, Vicki pours herself a cup of coffee and strolls amongst a jungle of poppies, dahlias and honeysuckle, offering up early morning greetings to the hummingbirds waiting their turn at the nectar station; 3) This dahlia is one of a plethora of picture-perfect flowers growing in Vicki’s yard; 4) Vicki never goes on a trip without bringing back a birdhouse, many of which resemble churches reflecting her own work in pastoral care. PHOTOS & STORY By KAREN BOSSICK
icki Riedel’s garden is the “sharing garden.” She can point to practically every plant in her one-and-a-half-acre oasis in Idaho’s high desert surrounding Picabo and tell you who gave her that first start. Then she turns around and gives away starts of those same plants to others, along with seeds that she collects and alphabetizes. She takes cut flowers with her to a myriad of events. And, as the fruits and vegetables ripen, friends flock to her garden to pick raspberries, apples and plums. “I love to share, and this is for everybody,” she said. “Most of this garden came from friends, anyway. I got the lilacs from a darling lady in Carey who’s now in a nursing home. And a former physical therapy client gave me one yellow buttercup plant. She warned me that it would soon be everywhere and it is. But I love them. And I think of her every time I see those flowers.” Riedel, church secretary at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hailey, did not come to gardening naturally. Her family had no garden in Minnesota where she grew up. But shortly after moving to New Zealand’s North Island to teach, she answered a knock on the door from the man who had owned the home she was renting. “He said he couldn’t stand to stay there after his wife had died. But he wondered if he might come garden with me,” Riedel recalled. The New Zealander showed Riedel the tricks of the trade and soon her thumb was as green as the Jolly Green Giant’s. When she moved to Ketchum, she planted a garden so spectacular it was included
“Most of this garden came from friends…” –Vicki Riedel Gardener
on one of the Sawtooth Botanical Garden’s first garden tours. When her husband Mike sold “Sun Valley Magazine,” Vicki didn’t hesitate to start all over again in Picabo. The couple remodeled a “tumble-down wreck” of a farmhouse, partitioned the garage so Mike would have a furniture repair workshop and converted part of the old Picabo train station that was slated for demolition into a potting shed. Then Vicki spread a 20-year pile of sheep and horse manure across the parched ground and soon she had a cornucopia of hollyhocks, globe thistle, golden glow, dahlias and yellow iris atop ground that didn’t even have grass on it when she moved there. “It was as dead as dead gets. Even the trees were pretty much gone,” Riedel recalled. Her bountiful garden includes crookneck, Hubbard and other squashes tucked under “hothouses” made from milk cartons her fellow church members saved for her. When neighbor Nick Purdy asked her what she did to grow Texas-sized vegetables, she replied, “I’m just loving them.” “I like how she’s organized things,” said Hailey resident Judy Harrison. “She didn’t, for instance, put the vegetable garden in one corner of the yard and the flower garden in the other. She built her vegetable garden and then surrounded it with flowers so it’s just beautiful.”
Vicki Riedel, at home in her garden.
Recent back surgery, which Riedel attributes in part to gardening from sunup to sundown, has forced Riedel to seek help from friends and hired help this year. But she still gets out every day, pulling the occasional stray stalk of grass she spots peeking up above the orange poppies and reveling in the buzzing of the hummingbirds. “It’s like they’re telling me: This is my garden, not yours,” she said. “I couldn’t not garden. It gives me a wonderful sense of peace. And it’s a wonderful place for prayer, as well.” tws