Bench returns

MOSCOW — Carl Swenson has his old bench back on Main Street, and his twinkling blue eyes show he’s a happy man.

Moscow city officials, in a gesture to show they have a heart at Christmas time, put Swenson’s favorite thickslabbed wooden bench back in Friendship Square Wednesday afternoon.

He had been working for two months, passing petitions and sitting in at the city council meetings, lobbying to get the old benches back.

When the city revitalized its downtown last summer and fall, the old heavy benches in Friendship Square were replaced by lighter, more modernistic benches.

“You want to sit down and get slivers?” is Swenson’s response to a question of what’s wrong with the new benches.

“They ain’t even finished. Even the little kids, if they sit down there, will get slivers and their mothers will have to take tweezers and take them out.”

On top of that, the new benches are too low. “You take old people and they can’t get down or up, One woman even got stranded on a new bench a few days ago, Swenson says, “and that ain’t no lie.”

Ladies in short dresses and nylon stockings and all can’t sit down on the benches without ripping ’em up.” And they leave creases on your legs, he says.

The new benches are made of cedar, and that kind of wood slivers is prone to cause infections, Swenson said. Cedar is something he knows about, since he spent many of his years working in the woods, and in cedar pole yards.

Swenson, 82, came to Idaho from Minnesota as a young boy, and spent years in just about every Latah County town. He lived at Bovill, Deary and Troy and for the last six years, at Moscow.

“I could tell this town more stuff than there is to know about.” And he spends time doing it.

“Every morning I go down to Johnnie’s (Cafe) then walk around, and go to the post office to see if I got any mail and stuff.

“I used to sit there on that bench and watch as the pretty girls go by.

“There’s lots of old people that do that. One of them goes down to the Nobby Inn and has a snort of beer or two, but I don’t take to any of that.

“My pasttime is sitting on the bench or walking around for my health.”

The past two months there’s been an extra lilt in his step. A man with a cause, Swenson has hit up most everyone who has passed through the downtown to sign a petition to get the bench back.

“I said I won’t unhook the horses in the middle of the stream.” He first gave the city council a petition with 322 signatures in November. When he didn’t see any action, he circulated another.

Two weeks ago, he gave a second petition bearing 1,021 signatures to the council. Mayor Don Mackin told him at the time that he’d demonstrated enough support for the old bench, and that once it was refurbished and the winter weather was over, the bench would be put back in place.

But the elderly Norwegian was persistent. He was back at the council meeting Monday, waving a copy of a newspaper letter to the editor which included his picture and plea for his cause. The council’s agenda was crowded, though, and he didn’t get a chance to talk.

“They didn’t have no time for me to say anything, but they saw my paper.”

But Wednesday, the mayor told him the city officials had decided to put the bench back that day. As he passed Mackin’s business, “he stuck his head out and said, ‘well, your bench is going to be back out by 5 o’clock.”

When Swenson saw his bench, it was strung with Christmas ribbons. A card was attached, but signed by no one in particular. “It don’t say. It’s just from everybody, it says.”

“The credit belongs to Santa Claus,” Mackin said.

This story was published in the Dec. 24, 1981, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.