The heartwarming story behind the giant tin knight on Fourth Street in Kuna
A drive down to Kuna will take you past the distinctive “castle house,” a residence on Meridian Road built to look like a medieval castle.
As you pass through downtown, you’ll go by the library, situated on the corner of Maple and Syrup.
Keep going down Fourth Street, and you may not know it, but one of the houses on the right, built in 1912, is an homage inside to the ill-fated ship the Titanic.
A little farther west on Fourth Street, you come across the latest quirk to grace Kuna’s streets: a 10-foot-tall knight’s armor made of tin.
This “Tin Man,” as dozens of foster kids affectionately call him, definitely has a heart.
Patty Hamm and her late husband, Earl, raised 26 children over the years in their home in the Desert View subdivision a couple of miles east of town. Two of the children were Patty’s by birth from a former marriage, and the rest were long-term therapeutic foster care boys. The foster boys were age 13 on average when they arrived at the Hamms’ estate.
The Hamms noticed that sometimes the boys would be frightened, especially coming to live in a new place.
On a trip to Lake Arrowhead in California in the early 1990s, the Hamms noticed the head of a knight’s armor sticking up over the fence of a junkyard. The Hamms inquired about it and were told it was a prop for a movie from the 1980s.
The Hamms thought it would be the perfect thing for foster boys coming to live with them. They bought it on the spot for a couple hundred dollars.
The boys who lived with them usually stayed in bedrooms facing the front yard, and the knight would be their protector, propped up on a mounded flower bed in the front yard.
“Some of the kids would come in pretty scared, coming into a new home, and they’d look out and see this big guy out front protecting them,” Patty Hamm told me when I went down to see the knight for myself. “A lot of people just thought it was cool yard decoration, but the kids said it really meant a lot to them.”
A rotating wheel of colored lights was added. Every Christmas, a sign that read “Silent Knight, Holy Knight” ushered in the holidays.
Billy Moyer, now a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army, came to live with the Hamms in 1993. Fifteen at the time, he said he wasn’t really scared and didn’t see the tin man as a protector, but it came to hold special meaning for him.
It became an identity.
“The tin man, for me, was like a mascot for the family, but being a foster kid, moving to a lot of different homes, not being able to associate one place as your home or as your family, it eventually became that symbol that I could tell people where my folks lived,” Moyer said. “When I described where my home was at, I would tell them, ‘That second house on the right, the one with the big tin man, that’s my home, that’s my family.’ It became a staple and like an anchor point for me as a child that didn’t have a place to call home. It became a home.”
Getting the tin man to Kuna was a story in itself. The Hamms had flown to California, and they couldn’t very well bring the armor on the plane with them, so they had to leave the knight at a gas station in San Bernardino and wait for a few months for a trucker who would be willing to at least drive it up to the Idaho-Nevada border. The Hamms took it from there.
Moyer said he also associates the tin man with Earl Hamm, himself a larger-than-life character who had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissue. He was an imposing figure, easily recognizable around town in his oversize overalls, but those who knew him knew he was a gentle giant.
Earl and Patty Hamm were longtime pillars of the community, distributing commodities and fresh produce for years. Earl could reportedly fix anything, and he was the water master for the Desert View subdivision. Earl died in 2015 after 27 years of marriage.
Patty Hamm later met “a quiet cowboy,” Jim Bemrose, and the two married in a ceremony in which 12 of her foster sons and two birth sons walked her down the aisle.
It was time for another chapter.
Which brings us to the house on Fourth Street, right next to Indian Creek Elementary School.
Patty said she’s had her eye on this house since 1990, although it had become a rental and derelict over the years. A tiny old farmhouse from the 1940s right next to Indian Creek, it easily could have been torn down and turned into a triplex. But Patty said she would write a letter to the landlord every year asking if she could buy it and turn it into her retirement home.
Her offer was finally accepted last year, and she and Jim have been working since September on fixing up the place. They finally got it into shape enough to move in in May.
“When we told people that we were moving, the first thing they would all ask is, ‘Is the Tin Man going with you?’ ‘You’re going to take the Tin Man aren’t you?’” Patty said. “And the kids said, ‘The Tin Man is part of our family. We have to find a way to take him into Kuna with us.’”
Her children and foster children came and helped install the knight on a rock that had been on the property.
The knight has been up for about a week, and Patty said hundreds of people have come by to say they love the addition. People who drive by honk and wave or give a thumbs up. On a recent Monday morning, several people walking by said it was great what they were doing with the house.
If the white iron fence looks familiar, it came from Dick and Ruthe Reed’s historic house on the corner of Deer Flat and Linder roads, where road work required removal of the fence.
So the next time you’re driving through Kuna, check out the newest landmark. Give a wave. And know that there’s a big heart inside the Tin Man of Kuna.
