BY KAREN BOSSICK

Will Caldwell has painted a couple of colorful commemorative Wagon Days posters in the big brushstrokes that denote his style. On Saturday, he will ride in the Wagon Days Parade that he helped promote.

Caldwell, an artist who also was responsible for creating the Ketch’em Alive and Jazz in the Park concerts, will be accompanied by his wife Julie Caldwell, who helped found The Advocates and the Women’s Resource Center.

“We’re honored,” said Will. “We’ve loved the parade all these years.”

Will grew up in Corvalis, Ore., where he used his budding art talent to illustrate the chemistry books that his father, a chemistry professor at Oregon State University, wrote.

He was attracted to the Latin drums when he and his sisters received a record player with a record by a Latin band inside for Christmas. Smitten by the bongo drums and congo drums, he immediately set about making his own out of tin cans and rabbit skins.

“I studied business administration at OSU, but I was an artist all along,” said Will, who learned to draw by copying the WWII airplanes on the back of bubblegum cards. “I finally switched to business and architecture because architecture allowed me to draw.”

Will served with the U.S. Air Force in the Philippines where, he said, he went native with a motorcycle and outrigger canoe. Transferred to Phoenix to man radar, he pointed his motorcycle straight to Ketchum the day he got out, bound for the mountains he had enjoyed as a skier.

Upon his arrival he immediately got a job as an architect and soon after a log cabin built in the mid-1960s on Board Ranch that he bought for $25,000.

Transitioning to graphic arts, he helped illustrate the first Sun Valley Magazine and soon he found himself making the leap to that of a fulltime artist, inspired by Ned Jacob, who painted Blackfoot Indians for a living.

He quit his job, rented out his cabin and moved to Hawaii to paint Hawaiian natives. Nine months later he moved to Taos, N.M., in search of “real artists” he could learn from. Eventually, though, he crammed his paintings into his VW Bug and returned to Ketchum, where he began selling his work at such festivals as the Sun Valley Arts and Crafts Festival.

Will was showing paintings of skiers schussing down Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain at Boise’s Art in the Park when he met Julie. She had grown up on a Washington cattle ranch near Priest Lake where she showed 4H animals at the county fair, reveled in winter sleigh rides and enjoyed a stint as a rodeo queen.

“So, I don’t need to practice my wave for the Wagon Days Parade!” she said.

After attending Eastern Washington University, she taught in the vo-tech school at Lewis-Clark State College in Coeur d’Alene before headed to Boise State University and Northwest Nazarene College where she was certified as a mediator.

The two went to dinner that night, hit it off and a few months later they headed to Kenya so Will could paint the natives there.

“Every seven years my father was allowed a sabbatical, and he took myself, my mother and three sisters around the world,” Will recounted. “We left Oregon, headed west and kept going until we came home. We spent a month or two in Kenya on safari and I really wanted to go back.”

After short stints in London and Amsterdam followed by Christmas Day skiing in the Alps, Will and Julie rented a cottage on the coast of Kenya. He sold his paintings at an art show in Nairobi, including some to the royal family and the national archives. And, since they couldn’t take the proceeds out of the country, they bought amber beads that they shipped home for jewelry making and headed to Israel just as the Camp David talks were being held.

After two years abroad, they returned home—Will to paint picture of Israel from the photos he’d taken and Julie to begin working with women’s groups. She was among those who answered the call when the sheriff asked if they could assist a woman who’d been the victim of domestic abuse.

“We helped her out, then the next, then the next. Finally, we said, ‘Hey, there’s a demand. We need to get more organized in the way we help women out so we founded The Advocates for the Survivors of Domestic Abuse,” said Julie.

Julie also helped found a Women’s Resource Center, which eventually morphed into St. Luke’s Center for Community Health.

Will, meanwhile, was tending to the cultural side of the Wood River Valley. Responding to complaints that Ketchum was boring, he and Sun Valley/Ketchum Chamber Director Carol Waller decided to try a weekly concert series in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park in 1999.

As the popularity of Ketch’em Alive grew, he began getting inquiries from agents representing country, reggae, bluegrass, world beat and electronic from across the country.

“Ketch’em Alive was never about the music but the gathering of the community, about connection,” he said. “It’s grown to be a dance party, which I love because I love dancing and I get to dance with my grandchildren, as it attracts all generations.”

Given Ketch’em Alive’s success, Waller suggested reviving the jazz series once held at Elkhorn.

“So we did, staging it first at Warm Springs, then moving it to Forest Service Park before settling on Rotary Park, which is perfect because it has the band gazebo,” Will said. “All these years later it’s still going strong—we got an audience of 500 this year—the biggest audience we’ve ever had. I don’t get paid for it, but I get to play with my bossa nova band.”

Will and Julie have had three children--Scarlet, Wyatt and Yancy—all of whom took their places on the podiums as national snowboard champions in 2001. Wyatt, who once beat the Olympic gold medalist in halfpipe to win a Chevy truck at age 19, became the first member of Sun Valley Snowboard team at a time you couldn’t even buy snowboards for children here, said his mother.

“He used to put his Sorrels into my Sorrels to fit them into the bindings,” Julie recalled. “It was nerve wracking watching them go off the big jumps and crashing. But they did well, and snowboard coach Andy Gilbert named us Sun Valley’s first family of snowboarding.”

All three children continue to live in the Wood River Valley, blessing Will and Julie with five grandchildren.

Wyatt and Yancy work in Stellar Media, making promotional videos for Sun Valley Resort, Rebecca’s Private Idaho, Red Bull mountain bike competitions, along with extreme skiing films videos in Alaska. Scarlet, a therapist, moved back from Bend, Ore., a month ago where she had worked in a hospital.

“The most important thing is that we haven’t seen Ketchum evolving into Aspen,” said Julie. “We have grandchildren and want them to enjoy the mountain, camping, the lifestyle here. We feel so lucky that our children have been able to find jobs here, homes and put down roots, and we feel blessed to live here all the seasons.”