News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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When I was a kid growing up in Palouse, someone built a gym on Main Street. I was more interested then in what was scheduled in the gym than who built it. Lately have wondered who built the gym. My interest was in the events that were scheduled there. We had a town basketball team. All the towns had one, and they traveled around playing each other. I always thought that the members of our Palouse team financed the building of the gym so they could control how it was used. And most of them were farmers, so they could secure a loan for the...
I chose a week’s stopover in Taiwan because I had special arrangements set up with the government there. My congressman at the time was Lloyd Meeds. He had some influence there because his wife was Chinese and knew a lot of government officials. I was set up in a very Chinese hotel with a car and driver at my disposal. I didn’t know at the time that I would land there in the midst of the Chinese New Year celebration. It was The Year of the Horse and the capital was jammed with traffic. It apparently is the custom to pay your debts with “Fu...
The normal reply when the Seattle area is mentioned is that the person wouldn’t want to live there. I remember when my family learned we were going to move to the Seattle area. All we could think of was the things we could do in a large city. This was in 1964. We were so surprised that you could drive downtown and park right next to a movie house. We were in Bothell at the time. I fished off the dock in Edmonds, visited every art gallery in town and most of the museums. Our neighbors were friendly enough, and we largely kept to ourselves. A...
When I left for college 70 years ago a friend said that the best thing that I would get was what I got off the walls. Of course, he was talking about the experiences that I would have, meeting people from all over the world and people who were unlike me. He was only partially right. I had some good professors, ones that I still remember. I had two survey profs, one in Old Testament studies and the other in sociology, both under class subjects. My sociology prof had used the same notes for probably 30 years but he welcomed questions. I think he...
It has been said that once a kid, always a kid. I believe that, in a way. I remember growing up and some of the things I did way back then. I used to follow the railroad tracks. I always took a salt shaker because I often came across apple trees. I liked to salt up an apple; seems they taste better that way. I followed the rails in both directions. The W I and M went toward Potlatch. The Idaho line was but two miles away. The W I and M line was largely used in the early days as a logging operation. Going the other direction, I would go either...
I met this Japanese man through a program I belonged to at the University of Washington. The program was made up of families that sponsored students at UW. When it was learned that I was going to stop over in Tokyo, he said he would like me to meet his family members there and he would give them my itinerary and where I would be staying. I was staying at the Okra Hotel. Soon after my arrival the man’s sister and mother knocked on the door. They showed me the city even though neither spoke English. We did a lot of dictionary hunting. I was i...
Twice in my life I have been beaten by a door. The first time was in Houston while we were in Texas visiting my brother, some years ago. He was taking us to a fancy restaurant for dinner. We entered the restaurant through a revolving door. Just when I was in my small compartment in the door, the door jammed. Here I was trapped in my own little space. It took them some time before they could free the door and yours truly. Meanwhile, my brother was fuming because he was embarrassed. The next time, it was here in Electric City and the famous, or...
Tracing my wife’s father turned up a lot of mysteries. He was born in 1882 in Kentucky, near the Land Between the Lakes. His name was James Oscar Compton. When he was 16, he left home after some disagreement with his father and headed west. Next, I picked up that he settled in Missouri for a time, long enough to get married and have two children, Richard and Clara. Upon the death of his wife, he headed west again, leaving the children with their grandparents. He stopped in Twin Falls, Idaho, and four years later married my wife’s mom. The det...
I have always liked places where there wasn’t a lot of people. I think it is in our family DNA. I remember a few places where this showed up. We were in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. We were taking a few days R and R. My wife would be returning home in a couple of days and I would leave for Japan. The beaches were so crowded that you couldn’t enjoy them, so we rented a car and took off to find our own beach. Less than an hour’s drive later, we made our way through some palms and brush and we found our beach. It was a strip of sand about 30 fee...
We have had our first spit of snow. It was welcomed by some and dreaded by others. I am on the dreaded side. My record with snow is not good. I just don’t like it. Luckily, I am at that stage in life where I don’t have to go anywhere. So I can smile and say, “Let it snow.” I’ve had a number of mishaps or near mishaps in snow. Coming home to Palouse from southern Idaho when my father died, I slid off the road and had a difficult time getting one chain on as my wife held a flashlight so I could see. One chain did it that time. Another time, we...
The only grandparent I knew and remember was my mother’s mom. She immigrated from Norway in the 1880s. She settled in Minneapolis where my mom was born an only child. My grandmother, Mary Peterson, came west to Palouse with my parents and my three brothers and sister in 1929. I was born the next year in Palouse. My grandmother lived with us and never bothered to learn English. She held on to her old ways, so my memory of her is rather slim. It took me a very long time — and I had the help of my oldest daughter, Kathy — to help unlock some...
I learned on my first trip to Japan to go into the small shops if you want to find interesting things to purchase. I was in Tokyo and my hotel faced one of the large, wide city streets. I got a city map and decided to wander around on my own. Just off the large street was what looked like an alley. It was wide enough for a single car and was full of tiny shops. I started going from one to another and found that the small shops had a few very interesting items. I had heard that you can purchase things and have the merchant send them to you, for...
I was born at the beginning of the Great Depression and survived it. I often write about how I had a good childhood in Palouse where I was born and went to school. I was the fifth of five in our family, four boys and one girl. My next youngest was my brother Bob, who was nearly five years older than me. They were all born in Minneapolis. Our house had a partial basement, with a dirt floor. My Dad was a carpenter, among other skills, and built racks to hold the canning foods my mother prepared that lasted part way through the winter, such as...
I started fishing when I was in high school. A few of us would go up to places like Newman Lake, rent a rowboat, and try to troll for trout. Occasionally, we would catch something, but no real rewards. I have had only one successful fishing trip. On a couple of occasions, I caught a salmon on a charter boat, but I mean a real successful fishing trip. I had taken a job consulting for a newspaper owner who was getting her newspaper in Kodiak, Alaska ready to sell. Her receivables and payroll were both out of hand. She had hired some close...
We had a family gathering this past week and the topic became my wife’s recipe for chocolate frosting. Among scores of recipes my wife kept in a steel box was the frosting recipe that was on family’s minds. My oldest daughter, Kathy, took the recipe box to type up a number of recipes and see to it that the entire family got copies. It took her some time to do it because the recipes were handwritten. The chocolate frosting recipe was among them. When we had family gatherings my wife would always bake a chocolate cake and make the frosting. Som...
Having good neighbors makes me a very lucky person. Across the street I have the “Dahlia Lady,” Denise Anderson. While writing this I am looking at the prettiest bouquet of flowers you can imagine. Every few days Denise brings over a beautiful array of flowers. She is certainly the “Dahlia Queen” of the city. Well, make it the state. This has been going on for years. The flower’s pollen is a problem for her to keep the flowers in her own home. So, no problem here. She will walk the dahlias over a couple of times a week. I almost always ha...
I was in the Palouse Days parade last Saturday where I was invited to be in it by Janet, who was a St. John when I first knew her. Her dad, Don St. John, was one of my best friends while growing up in Palouse. He and I started in the first grade. Janet and her sister and brother stopped in to see me in Electric City a couple of weeks ago. I was able to tell them things about their parents that they didn’t know. Don invited me out to the farm many times during our early grades. His mom and dad always treated me in a kind way, so it was fun v...
The Palouse River used to ice up to a foot thick or better. It was so thick that people ran their cars out on the ice. Cars were a lot lighter back then. The locals would saw the ice to store in the icehouse for families that didn’t have refrigerators. Our icehouse was located across the bridge and adjacent to the river. My dad was in construction at the time and had a yearlong job in Moses Lake. He would come home for the weekends. We had an old-style ice box that was attached to the house and was accessed through a kitchen window. We would p...
As a kid it was fun to go to the barber shop for a haircut. The barber was Jack Sheets, and the kids all liked him. He had a long, hard bench against the wall, and sometimes, usually on Saturdays, it would fill up. But you never had to worry that someone would take your place in line. Jack always remembered where you stood in the lines, and if you were local he would call you by name. The price then was 25 cents. That was back in the 1930s. Next to the barber chair was Jack’s brass spittoon, usually streaked by near misses. He would let some to...
Gather your tin pails, load up on junk food and head for the hills. The huckleberries are waiting for you. I must confess I have never picked near here. As a kid growing up though, our family, my uncle’s family, and my aunt’s family would head for the hills about this time of year. We generally picked within an hour’s driving time from Palouse, north and east of Potlatch. Someone in the family would scout the hills so we knew where the good picking was, usually 0n the south slope of the mountains. My cousin Ruby always came. She had arthr...
It’s a beauty beyond imagination. Thailand’s golden Buddha is visible for all to see. It was scrubbed and revealed for the first time in the mid-1950’s after being hidden for over 200 years. The Thais hid the golden Buddha with a coat of stucco to hide its allure so it wouldn’t be stolen. The golden statue weighs over five tons and is approachable. I saw it when I was there a half century ago. Finally, officials decided to scrub the statue of its stucco-and-crushed-glass finish, and you could stand in front of it and see the gold sparkle...
I arrived in Saigon on the first of three trips and near the end of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong Tet offensive. The communists had targeted over 100 cities and hit pretty hard. Saigon was hit hard and there was still some limited fighting in the city when I arrived. I went to the Caravalle Hotel to get a room. That’s where most of the media stayed. They were full and directed me to an eight-story hotel nearby. One of the things I wanted to do was look up families of two UW students who were in the FIUTS program. We also were part of the p...
One of the first things I did when moving to Electric City in 1989 was to sign onto a fire crew for two seasons. The owners of the operation, OK Cascade, was the Keener family from Bothell. During the two-season stint we were involved in countless fires in Washington and Oregon. The Keeners had a meat market in downtown Bothell, run by Vern, the head of the family. People came from miles around to purchase their meat. The market featured the highest quality of cuts. The fire operation was run by John Keener, the oldest son. When John learned...
I was born on a farm. It was near Four Mile Creek, south and west of Palouse. My dad went to town to get Dr. Dart, everyone’s doctor since there was only one in Palouse. As it turned out, I was delivered by my Aunt Lorena, who was staying with us at the time. She later was my mentor, in a way. She dropped everything and went to the University of Washington. She was in her 40s at the time, and would go on for her master’s degree. She later taught at the UW School of Medicine. It seemed she was always in my life. I was invited numerous times to...
Working on the Northern Pacific Railroad was my first experience outside of Palouse. It was from Palouse to Tekoa, the rail line of some 50 miles. I had already run milk for the local Darigold dealer. We delivered milk on one side of town one day and on the other side the next. You got every other day delivery of milk, cream, cottage cheese and eggs. We still had glass bottles when I started and switched to cartons later . Early on, we had a lot of carton leakers. I worked at my dad’s butcher shop, at the local Piggly Wigley, and as a fry c...