Editor’s Note: This column was originally published on Jan. 26, 1992.

Growth only recently has achieved buzzword status in Boise, but it was a buzzword at the Woodward residence more than 30 years ago.

Often, usually after reading a report in the morning paper of plans for a new building or housing development, my father would get a dreamy look in his eye and predict that “by the year 2000, there’ll be 250,000 people in this valley.”

We routinely dismissed this as belonging in the same category with some of his other predictions, like automated lawnmowers and the Atlanta Braves winning the World Series. Boise, 250,000 people? That was bigger than Spokane or Salt Lake City. Geeez, that was almost as big as Portland!

VINDICATED

Dad would have liked today’s Boise by the Numbers stories, which report a city-limits population projection of 168,000 by the year 2000. When you add the rest of the “valley,” his prediction was actually modest.

Boise’s growth in the last 10 years would have seemed unbelievable 30 years ago. The city-limits population then was 34,000 and seemed permanently stuck there. If the current predictions are correct, we’ll grow that much more in just the next eight or nine years.

For those of us who have grown up here and watched it happen, Boise’s transformation from a sleepy Idaho town to a booming metropolitan area has been a source of native pride, and native pain.

Some of my earliest memories of growing up here are of going to see relatives who lived way out in the country. To get there, we passed dairies and farmhouses. Their barn-like residence could have been a prop on “Green Acres.”

That home in the “country” was less than half a mile from Hillcrest Golf Course.

In grade school, my friends and I often rode our bicycles to Foothills tadpole ponds. We frequently pedaled to a lonely spot along the Boise River, eased into our tubes and spent entire days exploring the river without seeing another soul. As teenagers, we ventured farther upstream for nocturnal parties on a secluded beach.

Today, the tadpole ponds are memories, long since platted and filled. Tubing permits seem an eventual possibility for the crowded Boise River (our deserted put-in spot is now teeming Barber Park), and our secluded beach has been paved for a state highway.

Change can be annoying. I was surprised, for example, to learn that the number of traffic signals had increased only 61 percent in the last 10 years. It seems more like 161 percent. You feel it more if you remember the way it was. Driving used to be so simple here.

Crime and pollution have increased, but not oppressively so. Boise never has been the sort of place where people don’t lock their doors at night, at least not in my lifetime, and the real old-timers say smog simply replaced coal dust.

GOOD THINGS

Growth has brought good things, of course. Ten years ago, the chances of getting Baryshnikov, B.B. King or the Ben Hogan Open here would have been nil. Ten years ago, we didn’t have a performing arts center, a convention center, a downtown worth mentioning or even a shopping mall.

We also didn’t have 23,000 newcomers, who have brought new life and welcome new thinking.

And new problems. The trick is finding the right balance between the two.

Maybe we can do that. If the Braves could win a pennant, anything’s possible.

If you’ve got a favorite column Tim wrote that you’d like to see in print again, send headline or key words to Niki Forbing-Orr at nforbing-orr@idahostatesman.com.