Linden Bateman was animated by an enduring love for Idaho | Opinion
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- Linden Bateman served in the Idaho House and established Idaho Day.
- Promoted cursive so students could read founding documents.
- Champion of local history, helped grow Museum of Idaho, encouraged reporters.
The first time I met Linden Bateman, I was covering a debate in the run-up to the 2014 general election at the local senior center.
I had been hired as the legislative reporter for the Post Register in Bateman’s hometown of Idaho Falls a few months prior, and this election was my first major exposure to local lawmakers.
Near the end of the fairly sedate and sparsely attended forum, the moderator asked the candidates to make their big pitch to voters. Bateman’s answer was not what I had expected.
“I — love — Idaho!” he cried out, his arms rising over his head dramatically and tears welling up in his eyes.
It was like a volcano had erupted out of nowhere. It reminded me vaguely of the infamous scream that suddenly derailed Howard Dean’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
Covering a fair bit of politics in West Virginia before my move to Idaho had made me pretty jaded about expressions of feeling when they came from someone seeking votes. I reflexively considered this sort of thing pandering.
The next day I related the story to my more-jaded editor with a laugh.
“No,” I remember my editor replying. “That’s just who Linden Bateman actually is. He really does love Idaho that much.”
I learned that he did.
Idaho lost a true statesman last week when Bateman died Jan. 22 at the age of 85. He served in the Idaho House first from 1977 to 1986, and then again from 2010 to 2016. He established Idaho Day and helped celebrate it at the Legislature year after year. He fought passionately for an unlikely subject: ensuring that schoolchildren would learn cursive.
Idaho also lost something of a poet-laureate, a man who never tired of telling the world how wondrous his home state was.
“We love Idaho,” he wrote in his 2021 Idaho Day column for the Statesman. “Her name evokes images of wide open spaces, lovely winding rivers and mountain skies fading into sunset. Romance lies in her name. Freedom lies in her name.”
But more than that, Idaho has lost a very decent person. The thing I and many others remember most about Bateman was his personal graciousness.
If Bateman liked a story you wrote, he didn’t give you a call. He wrote you a personal letter in intricate cursive calligraphy, usually accompanied by a hand-sketched depiction of something central to Idaho’s identity, often the mountain bluebird. Picture a cross between the Declaration of Independence and a medieval illuminated manuscript.
Every reporter who covered the Idaho Capitol or worked in Idaho Falls in the 2010s probably has one or two of these letters squirreled away in their desk, following them from job to job, maybe even framed. So do many of the elected officials he served with. I’m sure countless other people do, as well.
In the years I covered the Legislature, Bateman encouraged me to avoid the interstates when I traveled to Boise, to stop in the smallest towns — places he lamented were slowly disappearing. It was great advice, and I still follow it.
The major policy campaigns Bateman chose to make the center of his career were driven by his enduring passion for history. If kids lost their ability to write — and, more importantly, read — cursive, how could they connect with the nation’s founding documents?
He chose May 4 for Idaho Day (rather than the more obvious July 3, the day Idaho attained statehood), partly because of its close connection with President Abraham Lincoln, who designated the Idaho Territory on that day.
After he left office, if I got a call from Bateman, I knew it was going to be about some new piece of local history he had unearthed or become infatuated with.
Way back in 1978, he announced that the Bonneville County Historical Society would open a small museum in the basement of the county courthouse. Today, the Museum of Idaho has grown into one that rivals any in the state, and one he didn’t tire of attending himself.
“Bateman has been integral to our museum’s development at every stage, including bursting beyond that room, the courthouse, and the county itself,” the museum wrote in a 2021 post.
Once, after having left office, Bateman called me up to pitch me the idea of writing about the history of a stained-glass window in the local Presbyterian church that listed all of the locals who died in World War I.
He invited me to meet him at his modest but impeccably decorated home, where he showed me old family photos and history before giving me a lift to the church — fittingly, in a working Ford Model T. (Or was it a Model A? I’m not positive.)
Either way, I remember that he piloted the ancient thing with astonishing ease.
Bateman was a man who valued Idaho and its history deeply. He should always have a place in it.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.