STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Bill Thorpe has only lived in Idaho for five years. But that didn’t stop him from throwing his hat in the political ring when he heard Rep. Sally Toone was running unopposed for District 26’s House Seat B this fall.
“I may be a fool. I’ve never been involved in politics. But I’m a lifelong Republican—I put out Goldwater signs. Sally Toone is a great person, but I couldn’t let her run unopposed,” he said.
Bill Thorpe and his wife fled Southern California five years ago. They looked at several possible places to start over, including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington and Oregon. In the end, they couldn’t resist a 4,000-square-foot house on six acres overlooking the Snake River near Bliss.
“My brother-in-law, who lives in Hagerman, said it had been abandoned for eight years. When he said it was near a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed studio, we couldn’t pass it up,” said Thorpe. “We travel all over the country looking at Frank Lloyd Wright homes.”
Thorpe, who has five children and seven grandchildren, worked as a certified public accountant before coming to Idaho. Here, he buys fix-up houses to remodel and sell.
He champions Second Amendment rights, saying he is against “red flag” laws that allow judges to issue protection orders temporarily confiscating firearms from those determined to be a threat to themselves or others. Doing so is the first step to get rid of the Second Amendment, he says.
He decries the protests that have taken place in Portland and Seattle following the deaths of George Floyd and others at the hands of police.
“I don’t want to see that happen here. I like the freedoms we have here,” he says.
Thorpe is a firm believer in the Electoral College. If we didn’t have that, he says, four states—California, New York, Texas and Florida-- would decide presidential elections.
And he praises a controversial transgender-related law Idaho Gov. Brad little signed into law in March, banning transgender females from competing in girls and women’s sports.
A federal judge issued a motion for a preliminary injunction against the act, saying transgender women and girls cannot be banned from sports teams corresponding to their gender. And several organizations have warned that the law violates the U.S. Constitution and Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in any educational program that receives federal funding.
But, says Thorpe, “If we allowed women who were born men to participate in women’s sports, there wouldn’t be women in sports.”
After watching California and Oregon burn this summer, Thorpe said he has come to the belief that Idaho’s forests should be cleared of debris.
“We go to Stanley where they’ve had fires and we see slag lying on the ground,” he said. “When I grew up in California, they would clear fire breaks. There must be a way we could do that in Idaho. What if we could demonstrate we could do this? It would provide jobs for people.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Learn about Rep. Sally Toone in Eye on Sun Valley’s Oct. 20 story, “Sally Toone Sees Teaching, Farming Experience as Assets in Legislature.”