Joe Simunich, March 15, 2014

Joe Simunich, son of Eastern European immigrants. His father (Mike Simunich) worked for Boise-Payette lumber company and bought many acres of land in the Central Bench. Joe went to Franklin School from the first grade through his junior year, then transferred to St. Teresa’s his senior year. Joe’s father owned a 15-acre farm near Franklin and Garden and moved several homes there from Barber after the sawmill closed around 1935 or 1938. Joe talks about his father and mother, their personalities and how they made their living running a farm, milking cows, and selling homes in the neighborhood in the 1930s and 1940s. He tells a story of his father gathering men to build a railroad at Gowen Field in 1941 at the request of the U.S. Army and visiting his father in the summer of 1938 while he was working near McCall at the same time Northwest Passage was being filmed. He remembers playing in a grass pasture on Franklin and Garden as a child, and when Franklin Road was paved in 1938. Joe describes what downtown Boise, and the Bench were like in the 1940s and 1950s, the different businesses that were around and how it has changed. He talks about his siblings, relatives, and his work on highways and forest roads.