As the Boise Airport celebrates 100 years, there are lots of stories and facts woven into a century of flight in Boise.
United Airlines started here. Jimmy Stewart was based at the attached Gowen Field. The rotunda whispers to you if you stand in the right spot (that’s another story for another day).
But a display honoring the airport’s anniversary has an attention-grabbing headline on it.
“MEN PEE FREE, WHY CAN’T WE?”
If it sounds like a political slogan, well. It was.
In 2020, BoiseDev reported on the passing of Marjorie Ewing, who died at age 98 after seven decades in the City of Trees. She served on the Boise City Council for three terms, from 1970 to 1982. She helped build the current Boise Public Library main branch location, helped establish the city’s branch libraries, helped make the Boise River Greenbelt a reality, worked on the plan to fix the city’s then-aging sewer system, and advocated for launching the city’s bus system.
And fixed the toilets at the airport.
The toilets were not broken, exactly, but for some reason, women had to pay a dime to use them. Not men, mind you, just ladies.
Men pee free. Dames pay a dime.
Ewing, seeking reelection, saw this as a problem – and an opportunity. She didn’t take outside campaign donations and found a rallying cry in “Men pee free, why can’t we?”
In 1971, the Idaho Statesman first covered the issue, noting that Ewing brought the issue up at a Boise City Council meeting. She was the only woman on the council at the time.
“It is a travesty that women need a dime to… go,” she said according to the Statesman.
In a “good-natured exchange,” fellow council member Elmo Orr said he worked as a janitor, and that the dimes helped pay for maintenance.
“If women were as clean as men,” Orr claimed, the dimes wouldn’t be needed to pay for someone to clean.
Marjorie Ewing as Boise City Council member in 1976. Courtesy City of Boise
Ewing raised seven daughters, and admitted that she didn’t have as much personal experience, but said “from what I hear about boys” the comparison wasn’t fair. She called herself, jokingly, a “women’s lib advocate” and said “if men don’t have to pay, neither should women.”
(Editor’s note: men’s restrooms often need quite a lot of cleaning, too.)
She said women don’t go “in there for the scenery.” She agreed to write a letter to the airport commission on the bathroom bounty.
The Airport Commission was unmoved, according to the Statesman, and didn’t support her letter.
So she borrowed a page from a similar campaign in Sacramento and wore a button with a simple message.
“F.L.U.S.H Pay Toilets”
FLUSH? That stood for “Free Latrines Unlimited for Suffering Humanity,” she explained.
A 1972 headline in the Idaho Statesman. Photo: Courtesy the Idaho Statesman.
The Boise Airport is part of the City of Boise and is managed as what is called an “enterprise fund,” meaning it is self-funded by things like service fees on airline tickets, rent to vendors, and parking. Ultimately, the Boise City Council approves its budget and any fees.
The next month, the city council approved enlarging the airport’s Kitty Hawk Lounge. The Statesman said she “never misses an opportunity to attack the pay toilets,” and she said the expanded lounge will “mean more business and more revenue. It should satisfy the (airport) commission so they can take the locks off the doors in the restroom.”
Ewing won reelection that fall. And the airport commission came around.
Finally, after months of the “attacks,” the airport commission in late 1971 summoned its vendor for the women’s restrooms to Boise to talk about the issue. That vendor, appropriately named Nik O Lok Co., had a five-year deal for the coin locks, which ran from 1968 to 1973.
In late January of 1972, some of the locks came off. The dime locks were taken off six stalls for six months in a “trial period.”
The Idaho Statesman ran a full-page spread on coin-operated gadgets around town, from pay phones to parking meters. (If Facebook were a thing then, readers would probably have commented, “Slow news day?”). At the bottom of the spread, Statesman staff writer Mindy Cameron was prophetic in the long-lasting impact of Ewing’s crusade against pay toilets.
“Marge Ewing, who has been an outspoken advocate of low-income housing, neighborhood parks, and other worthy causes in urban government, appears destined to be most remembered for her advocacy of removing the pay toilets in the women’s restrooms at the Boise Airport.”
