Ken Walston, Author

Golden Age of Weiser Idaho

“Town had seven saloons, opera house, saddle shop, cigar factory in early days”

There was also a Chinese laundry, opera house/meeting hall, bicycle repair shop, bakery, blacksmith, cigar factory, and more.

Sheep ranching was big, which necessitated a wool warehouse, and there was a stagecoach line between Weiser and Huntington, Ore., which briefly competed with the Oregon Short Line railroad for customers.

There were two newspapers in town, the Weiser Record and the Weiser Signal, which in 1897 published a story about an epic battle between a mother cat and a rattler.

It’s all chronicled in a set of books published by Idaho native and part-time Weiser resident Ken Walston.

Dubbed “The Golden Age of Weiser, Idaho,” the first book covered five years, but the succeeding ones span a four-year chunk of early Weiser history. Each book includes a fold-out map of early Weiser for context.

Book one was published in 2015 by Cambridge Litho, Inc., and covers the years 1879 to the end of 1883. Book five was published in 2023 and is the largest of the series at 379 pages.

“I’m working on book six now,” Ken recently told the Signal American.

Over the years, he has spent hundreds of hours at the Signal American office, pouring over articles, researching, and collecting information about Weiser.

The result is a series of books that make it hard to put down once you start reading them. Ken has subsequently become a local expert on early Weiser history. But it was never his intention to write a book, much less six.

“I started giving lectures on how to date photographs,” he explained. “People would come and I would tell them about all these things you can use to date them.”

On old photos, there are any number of small symbols or numbers that serve as codes. They all have a meaning, revealing information about the film manufacturer and other details concerning the photo.

“Somebody said, ‘You ought to write a book’ and I said, ‘Naw, I don’t want to write a book. It’s too much work.’”

People kept suggesting that he do it and, just to “get them off my back,” he finally said that he would.

“Well, I promised I would write a book, so I thought, “I have to do it; I made a promise, so I need to follow through.’”

Around that time, he began using the newspaper as a historical resource while attempting to find information about some of his relatives who lived in Weiser around the turn of the century.

“It was a period in my life when I was interested in genealogy,” Ken said. “But then, I got interested in the broader scope of history as I had never had access to old newspapers before and it was fascinating to me.”

Soon, the Weiser book project was underway.

Ken’s bio:

Born in Gooding, Idaho, in 1935, Ken, 87, attended Weiser High School from 1949 to 1952, when his family moved to Twin Falls. Back then, WHS was located in what is known as the Intermountain Institute. The Institute began in the early 1900s and is located near the current high school, which was erected in the 1960s.

Ken graduated from Twin Falls High School, but said that he is a “Weiser guy.”

“Things were vastly different than nowadays,” he said. “If you really needed something, you went to Boise to find it. The population there was 35,000.”

Ken studied chemistry at the University of Idaho where he graduated in 1958 and married his college sweetheart, Reiko, that same year.

He joined the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps at the university, was later commissioned an Ensign, and served for almost 27 years before retiring and moving from his last duty station in Honolulu to Hilo on the Big Island. 

Ken was an avid hunter and it wasn’t long before he met Lou Ishino and they hunted wild hogs together in the giant fern forests of the Big Island. 

The hunting was grand. They bagged 44 pigs the first year, but he needed more income and later accepted a job at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in San Francisco. After 10 years, he took another job, this time with Utility Consulting International where he designed communications systems for power utilities.

Between military service and employment, Ken has been all over the world, including 19 trips to Thailand and one thirteen-month stint in Antarctica while in the military. He has worked in places like Indonesia, Jamaica, the Philippines, Hawaii, Texas, and New Jersey.

“I didn’t complain about the trips,” he said. “Some people can’t leave their home, but I like to travel.”

Ken’s parents, Edna and Russel, left Twin Falls and eventually moved to Wendell, Idaho. Ken would come to visit them and go on hunting trips with his father and brother, Jim, who lived in Fruitland.

When his mother passed on, Ken would go on long trips in the summers with his father in a motorhome. 

“Dad loved visiting the actual sites of Western History, such as the Custer Battlefield in Montana,” he said. “Following him around, doing the driving, got me interested in history. All the places that were famous in western lore, we went there. I don’t know when the bug bit me, but that might have something to do with it.”

His dad passed away in 2004, and Ken was given possession of his father’s house.

During the winters, he lives with Reiko at their house in Elk Grove, Calif.

In the warmer months, however, Ken occupies his father’s house in Fruitland and spends much of his time in Weiser, doing research and writing his books.

His books are available for sale at the Signal American newspaper office at 18 E. Idaho St. in Weiser, as well as the Weiser Public Library, Literary Paws bookstore, at 322 State St., and Second Chance home décor, located on the corner of Highway 95 and Crystal Lane.  

The books are also available at the Weiser Museum. They are currently not available online.

From Philip A. Janquart – Weiser Signal-American – May 11, 2023

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