Bob Potter looks like somebody's energetic grandpa, one of those young-at-heart retirees you'll find running the show at the local Rotary or chamber of commerce. You know the type: late 60s, lots of energy, has the time to do volunteer work now -- and his wife is glad to have him out from underfoot.

It's not till you get to talking to Potter about his life since he left Ma Bell that the numbers start to add up. If he retired from the phone company in the early '80s, well, that's 20-plus years ago, so he's got to be ... 80-something. Yet, he's active in the community, still gets together with buddies for golf, and enjoys a martini with the boys at happy hour.

So that itself is impressive. You don't often meet octogenarians this active. To call him spry would be an insult.

And then you look at his résumé. Since 1987, when he embarked on his second career as a business recruiter, Bob Potter has lured more than 70 companies employing more than 3,900 people in high-wage jobs out of southern California and into northern Idaho. This guy is a wizard.

Instead of magic, though, Potter says he's got a simple formula: Identify small to midsize privately held manufacturers; ask them if they've ever considered leaving the L.A. rat race; then lay out the business case for Idaho, with its cheap land, low-cost utilities and thin red tape -- and the fact that most traffic jams are caused by meandering moose.

Four years ago, a nascent two-state economic development group called the Inland Northwest Economic Alliance approached Potter with a new idea. Instead of recruiting just for Idaho, would he be willing to take over recruiting for eastern Washington as well? And -- just as important -- would he be willing to train a new generation of recruiters, people who could take his lessons back to Pullman and Colville, Lewiston and Ponderay?

Potter agreed, and at the tender age of, well, 80-something, the wizard has taken on apprentices.

"He has the energy of a 21-year-old. Holy cow," says Kathy Parker, the executive director of the Palouse Economic Development Council, who counts Potter as a mentor. "He's really got it down to a science."

Potter spent his first career working throughout California. He came to the Inland Northwest only because his daughter enrolled at Whitworth in Spokane -- then a college, now a university. To their surprise, he and his wife liked it. So when Potter retired, they moved to Hayden, Idaho. "It had a country club right on the water," he says, "and I could afford it."

And all was well -- at first. "I love playing golf. I had a sailboat. But [bleep], I didn't want to sit in the Men's Lounge at the Hayden Grill with all the old farts."

Potter may have been desperately bored. His new neighbors were just desperate.

It was a scary time in the Idaho Panhandle. The regional economy was based on timber, mining and agriculture, which provided solid family-wage jobs for high school graduates willing to work hard. Each industry was subject to booms and busts, but typically, weakness in one was offset by strength in the others. But in the mid-'80s, all three collapsed at once. Double-digit unemployment became the norm. Grim jokes circulated about free government food. (Why's it so hard to be an Idaho photographer? You tell 'em to "smile and say cheese," and everybody runs to get in line.)

"We thought, man, we've got to do something to jump-start this economy here," says Paul Anderson, a retired regional utility company executive. "We're really in the toilet."