Boise Mayor To Attend USS Boise COC

As the keeper of "Idaho's first and foremost submarine blog", I would be greatly remiss if I did not mention the upcoming visit of the mayor of Boise, David Bieter, to Norfolk to attend the Change of Command for USS Boise (SSN 764) later this week. The mayor's expenses are being paid for by the "USS Boise Committee", which apparently is what is left of the city's original commissioning committee; they don't seem very active, though, since they don't even have a website, and doing a Google search yields meager results. (The one mention that comes up is a good article from the Idaho Statesman on the one Boise crewmember from Boise, MMC(SS) Eric Lowe.)

This seems like a little downgrade from the Boise's last Change of Command, when the Governor attended. It's still nice to have at least a little support from the namesake, though.

I actually interacted with the Boise Commissioning Committee when I was a JO; they came down to San Diego for a "VIP familiarization" trip, and we gave them an in-and-out ride on the USS Topeka back in the early 90s. Among the committee members was one very old man that I talked to for a while; since I got to Boise, I found out that this man, J. R. Simplot, is actually one of the richest men in the country -- if you've ever eaten potatoes, they probably came from him.