Logophilia * The love of words and word games

Tags

Logophilia, Love of word games, Love of words, Salmon River, Shoup Idaho, The River of No Return

The Bend Public Library hosted our second meeting of Logophilia this afternoon and we few, we precious few, had a good time. Words, words, and more words were the subject of our conversation. We had made no effort to publicize our meeting as we are trying to figure out what we are up to, if anything. There was a high percentage of returning participants from our first meeting, and from that fact, it appears that we aren’t too boring, and we had a few new attendees who claimed they wanted to come to our next meetings.

One curious thing we discovered was that half of the people present had been to Shoup, Idaho (45.3769, -114.2769). It’s very remote and too small to even been called a townlet. If you don’t think that is weird, watch this YouTube video. I lived for a week or two in a tent about fifty yards up the road behind the gas pumps the summer of 1949 and swam in the Salmon River just across the road from the gas pumps with some other kids. One of the guys, Dick Linford, had been a Salmon River tour operator for forty-five years going right past Shoup, and past the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and on down The River of No Return. Watch that 1954 movie clip with Marylin Monroe and Robert Mitchum and see my uncle Forrest Earl Eidemiller doing the actual maneuvering of a barge down the river. He lived many miles downstream, (~ 45.5426 -115.2504) near the river in the most remote part of the lower forty-eight states, with no roads to his home, and he brought in his yearly supplies, of food and books, on a barge. There are some spectacular views in the video clip. Of course, Mitchum was the guy doing the amazing stuff in the close-ups, but Earl was the one doing the real thing in the distance shots. For the movie, they needed someone with real experience who could do the right stuff, and that was Earl.

Anyway, Dick Linford, author of Halfway To Halfway and Back was at our Logophilia meeting and had earned his living running adventure tourists down those same rapids many times.

Logophilia has a future and it will probably function best if we publish a theme for each meeting, like “Special words you know that you think we should know.”