I never thought I'd know anyone who actually knew Philo T. Farnsworth, the onetime Idahoan who invented television.

That was before I met Lloyd Hill.

Farnsworth was born a century ago and died 35 years ago. To me he seemed to belong to the hoary past — but not to Hill. He remembers the era of Farnsworth and other eastern Idaho pioneers as if it were last week. When he tells his stories, it's like stepping into a Willa Cather novel.

The frontier cabin with the sod roof and the horse-drawn buggy outside? That was Hill's childhood. He spent his first four school years in Rigby, in little more than a village. Farnsworth was one of the older students at the school there. Hill remembers looking across the hall into his classroom the day he covered the blackboard with peculiar looking drawings.

"Philo wanted to show his idea to Justin Tolman," he said. "He was the science teacher and the school principal. The drawings were of what became the first television tube. I remember looking at them, but at the time none of us thought they were important. We didn't know what they would become."

Tolman may have had an inkling. When the drawings were finished, he grabbed a piece of chalk and in large letters on the blackboard wrote, "Do not erase!"

Farnsworth was 15 at the time; Hill was six.

The future father of television "dated my older sister, so I knew him well," he said. "He picked her up in a horse and buggy. ... He was just a typical farm boy, except that in his way he seemed brighter. Everybody else would be doing typical things, and you'd look around and there he'd be, reading a science magazine."

When Hill was 10, his family moved to a ranch along the Snake River near what would become Palisades Reservoir. They lived in a sod-roofed, dirt-floored cabin. His first two years of school there were in a rented room of a rancher's log house — eight grades in one room. Then a new school was built "out of real lumber. Can you believe that?"

To get to the school, he walked two miles and rowed a boat across the river. This was before Palisades Dam was built, and the Snake was a serious river. The one-room school was named Whiskey Run, after a local bootlegger and his wife. Its teacher asked the students to bring carrots, potatoes, onions, soup bones and other ingredients, which she simmered all morning in a pot on the wood stove. He jokes that that was the beginning of the hot lunch program.

Hill just turned 91. Even so, it's hard to comprehend that the times could have changed so much in the span of a single lifetime. He and his family members bathed in a creek, using mud as soap. They slept on cloth bags filled with straw. The walls of their cabin were papered with pages from the Rigby Star.

"That way you had something to read instead of just bare walls. ... My mother missed the house where she was raised. She said the floor was the cleanest dirt she ever swept."

His uncle had the first car in Rigby, a "chain-drive Studebaker with a stick handle for a steering wheel. Idaho Falls had half a mile of pavement, and it was the only pavement around. We'd drive to Idaho Falls just so we could see how smooth the road was."

Seeing an airplane was the equivalent of a UFO sighting today.

"A guy in Idaho Falls had the first one. We'd hear it first. Then you'd see a speck, then wings, and finally the pilot. He'd land in a field about a mile away and we'd all run out to see it. It was like seeing something from another planet."

The highlight of the week during his teenage years was the Saturday night dance. He and his brothers and sisters rode seven miles on horseback and forded the river to get there. In winter, they made the same trip by bob sleigh. The river ice shifted during the night and could be dangerous. When they got home, usually around 5 a.m., their parents were sleeping peacefully.

"They never worried," he said.

The garage in Hill's and his wife's Boise home is a repository of ranch relics — horseshoes, a scythe, saddle cinch, singletree, hay knife, crosscut saw ... The wooden telephone from his parents' ranch house graces an office wall.

"We didn't have telephone numbers," he said, demonstrating the crank that was used instead of a dial. "Your number would be something like long, long, short. When you called somebody, every phone in the county would ring. Anyone could pick up their phone and listen to your conversation. ... When lightning struck, fire would shoot out of the mouthpiece."

The antique phone is about two steps from a television set. I asked Hill whether he thought we were better or worse off for having Farnsworth's brainchild.

"Both," he said. "It promotes downgrading practices in our society. On the other hand, we have a channel now that has concerts, ballet and orchestras 24 hours a day. It's like having Lincoln Center in your living room. So I'd have to say Philo did the world a service."

Think about that. This is a man living in our midst who was on a first-name basis with the inventor of television.

"We're blessed to have folks around whose memories span most of our statehood," historian Judy Austin said. "... They give us a very personal sense of where we've been and how we've gotten where we are."

For his part, Hill is modest about it.

"I never dreamed I'd be considered a pioneer," he said. "But of all those people who lived in that place and time, I'm about the only guy left."