Max Black, who was an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on November 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the Statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cell phone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out of the blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal he had.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield†Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime - and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,†into publication the next year, and from that year to this Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.†That too would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.