In the eye of the beholder

HAYDEN - There’s nothing like a character to give a nice neighborhood some of the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Roger Thom.

Thom is the 69-year-old retired farmer who has decorated the yard of his home, shall we say, uniquely.

Asked what the neighbors think of his artwork, Thom hesitates only a moment before replying, “I think they think I’m nuts.”

Are you?

“I don’t think so,” he says. “I just like things that are a little different.”

The yard Thom and his longtime girlfriend share — he and Heidi Thul have lived at 11926 Stinson Drive for more than three decades — is accented by a wide array of objects, about 75 percent of which Thom created himself. Passersby on Wyoming Avenue craning their necks might catch the waving metallic cowboy on the corner first. He’s welcoming them to a smorgasbord of Thom-isms.

Like most boys, Thom’s favorite pieces happen to be weapons: a cannon and a Gatling gun. That should be no surprise because the soda-chugging, cheap-cigarette smoking lifelong Idahoan managed the Coeur d’Alene Skeet & Trap Club through the 1980s and '90s, where his prowess with a shotgun was legend.

When he raises Old Glory in the back yard, he's doing so on a flagpole that's 4-inch irrigation pipe with a soccer ball on the top.

Many an objet d’art gracing Thom’s lawn, like the newly installed Wishing Well, came together with a bit of this and a little of that. Hovering above the Wishing Well now is a rainbow; tomorrow, Thom says, it might be something else. Sometimes, he says, he’ll only envision the final product when a bunch of pieces come together.

“I’m a pretty good scrounger,” he says. “Sometimes I pick up stuff and I have no idea what I’m going to use it for.”

Being cheap and proud of it, Thom boasts that his cannon — which he used to fire bottle rockets last Fourth of July — cost less to construct than an admirer might think.

“I’ve got $5, maybe $10 into it,” he says.

Did we say cheap? Thom drinks Dr. Thunder, a cream soda, because Pepsi is "too darn expensive." Asked what brand of cigarettes he’s smoking, Thom shrugs and says, “Cheapest brand I can get.”

In his garage, which is almost always open because he sits there watching the world from about 7 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m. most days year round, reside a '96 Chevy pickup and a '95 Geo Prizm. The truck has 37,000 miles on it. The car? Just 25,000.

No, Roger and Heidi don’t leave home often, and when they do, they don’t go far. He’s got his creations to create, and he’s also perfectly happy sitting there smoking and sipping sodas — “five or six a day,” he says, before adding with a grin, “maybe more.”

Like Christopher Robin of Pooh fame, Thom loves sitting out in the elements no matter the season. “That probably comes from working on farms all my life,” he figures.

There is one other hobby — or was, anyway.

“I really liked to shoot but about a year and a half ago I had a stroke,” says Thom, whose home is just a shotgun blast from the Skeet & Trap Club he managed. The stroke took away vision in his right eye, so the formerly expert shooter is now trying to shoot left-handed.

While that’s not going too well, he stays busy enough. For the holidays, he puts up about 3,000 Christmas lights. For gas money, he snowplows the driveways of neighbors who “are getting up there in years.” And to please those who just happen to drive by the nice home just east of the Coeur d’Alene Airport?

Why, he’s got a collection of stuff that’s just interesting enough to make some people think he’s crazy.

SIDEBAR

Roger Thom has a horseshoe problem.

“I like to build stuff from horseshoes but you can’t hardly find them anymore,” he said.

At the end of his newspaper interview the proud scrounger asked if we might pass along this request:

If you have horseshoes you’d like to sell, he’d like to talk to you. Thom asked that any horseshoe sellers stop by his home at 11926 Stinson Drive in Hayden, just off Wyoming Avenue east of Ramsey Road, and see him. He’s there unless he’s out looking for something like, you know, horseshoes.