Ken Walston, Author

He could appear on any given day during the warmer months.

From about March to sometime in late fall, Ken Walston, 90, makes the drive from Elk Grove, Calif. to Weiser where he first arrived back in 1949 as a freshman at old Weiser High School.

In its early years, it was known as the Intermountain Institute, which included boarding facilities for students and sat on a 15-acre campus.

The new high school was built across the road, at its current location, in the 1960s.

Though he has never been employed by the Signal American, Ken has spent hundreds of hours inside the newspaper’s office, tediously and methodically conducting research, aggregating information, compiling notes, and collecting photographs and images where he can.

It has all been in an effort to chronicle the  History of Weiser, which has resulted, so far, in a five-volume set of books entitled “The Golden Age of Weiser, Idaho.”

Book one is a 160-page work that covers 1879 through the end of 1883. He started the project in 2015 and is currently working on book six.

Weiser is said to have been named 200 years ago after Peter Weiser, an American soldier and member of the Corps of Discovery on the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early 1800s, though there is at least one other version of the city’s origins.

“Things were vastly different than nowadays,” Ken said in an interview at the Signal American office at 18 E. Idaho St. in Weiser, where the newspaper has been headquartered since at least the 1950s.

Its press went silent in 2006 after it was sold to a Wyoming-based company. The newspaper is now printed at a company in Homedale.

There were once two newspapers in Weiser, the “Signal” and the “American,” which eventually came under the control of one owner. In the 1980s, it was combined into one paper, the Weiser Signal American.

“Back then, if you really needed something, you went to Boise to find it,” he said of Weiser’s early years. “When telephones came about, they didn’t have the 10-digit numbering system they have today.” They had what was called the International System and 236-J was my parents’ phone number in Weiser.

He was born in Gooding in 1935. His father was a CPA and ran businesses in numerous locations in southern Idaho, including in Weiser.

The family left the area after Ken’s junior year. He graduated from Twin Falls High School before attending the University of Idaho in the fall of 1953 where he studied chemistry and participated in Navy ROTC.

“That got me started in the Navy,” he said. “I joined up after college and got out after almost 27 years, in 1984.”

Ken married his college sweetheart, Reiko, a Japanese exchange student, before enlisting.

Together since 1953, the two have seen the world and were stationed in places like the Philippines and Hawaii. He has worked on jobs in Indonesia, Jamaica, Texas, New Jersey, and numerous other locations.

In Hawaii, where he was last stationed when he retired from military service, natives are given priority when it comes to hiring, which made it hard for Ken to find a job.

“I wasn’t born in Hawaii, and I couldn’t live on my military retirement,” he explained. “But I had a friend I had served with while in the Philippines and he looked me up, asking if I wanted to work for Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco. I said, ‘Sounds good to me: when do I start?”

He spent the next 10 years at PG&E before going to work for another company where he designed communication systems for power utilities. He did that for 10 years and is proud of the fact that he made 19 trips to Thailand and once was assigned to a job in the Antarctic.

“I didn’t complain about going on trips,” he said. “Some people, you know, can’t leave their house, but I like to travel.”

During that time, his parents returned to Weiser. Ken, while working in California, would visit them, sometimes going on hunting and fishing trips with his father and brother.

His parents eventually passed away, Ken taking possession of their house where he now stays while visiting Weiser for about four to five months out of the year.

Most of his time in Weiser is spent working on his books or side projects for people who need help finding information about relatives.

A big part of Ken’s interest in history comes from trips he took with his father after his mother passed away.

“He had a motorhome and wasn’t well enough to operate it, so I would take a month off from work and we would just go, most of the time, to historical places, like the site of Custer’s battlefield, places like that.

“Following him around, doing the driving, got me interested in history, all the places that were famous in western lore, that’s where we went,” he said.

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

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