News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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We all know the role music plays in our lives. Want to raise your spirits? Turn on some music. I have started to hold nightly concerts for my own benefit that can start by 9 p.m. and last until the early hours. I will come back to that in a minute. While living in Bothell years ago, I used to go down to Seattle to an old book and record store — Filippis, no longer in business. In looking through the old 78s, I found a couple of early-day Sons of the Pioneers music. You know, Tumbling Tumbleweeds and such. I bought them a...
My wife and I lived the first time in the coulee back in 1953-55. I was a lumber grader down at the mill located above the dam. A fellow by the name of Kirkpatick owned 90% of the operation, and a fellow who ran the logging part of the company the other 10%. Logs were floated down the Columbia River to the mill site. With winter coming on, Kirkpatick advised the workers that the mill would shut down until spring. Not wanting to sit idle all winter, I answered an ad in the Spokesman for a grading job in Livingston, Montana. I...
This is a continuation of earlier comments that education in America is not properly funded. I had pointed out that we need to rethink the value of teachers and the way we fund education, teachers included. I read a distressing article the other day that said many of our large cities in the U.S. will have to relocate by the end of the century because they will be unlivable due to climate change. The writer pointed out that regions will get so warm as to make them too hot for people to reside there. What makes this, if true,...
With covid numbers down, people have resumed long delayed travel interest. My family is no exception. It’s a test to balance caution and adventure. It started with my grandson, William, from Portland, closing out last year with a nine-week trip through Europe. How you can talk an employer into letting you go for nine weeks and still have your job waiting for you is beyond me. But he did. As a caution, William donned a mask when around large numbers of people and made the best of it. The overwhelming interest on the trip, w...
There is a national shortage of teachers, leaving some districts short of covering all their classrooms. While current events are creating problems in education, not the least of these problems are politics and financial resources. That teachers are underpaid is pretty well understood and agreed upon nationally. Teachers should be paid at least 25% more than they now receive. Something needs to happen nationally to shut down the vast exodus of teachers leaving. In order to provide new teaching recruits, we should provide...
I got my desire to take drives from my dad who used to take us for rides all the time. He had an old car from the mid 30’s. I remember when my dad got his first new car, it was in the early 40’s before all effort turned to making things for World War II. The local Ford dealer drove up with a new car, came to the door and handed Dad the keys. He told him to drive it and, if he liked it, to come down and they would make a deal on it. In my earlier days, everyone had a canvas water bag hanging from their front bumper. We oft...
I have always been taught to give something back to society. For years I tried to do so by volunteering or running for public office. I have held office in park boards, library boards and school boards. Most recently I served 17 years on the North Central Regional Library Board and 10 years on the local school board. But there comes a time when that isn’t possible, so I have been trying to find a couple of charities that cover things I can identify with. There are so many needs in our world that could use some help, and p...
I recently wrote a column on my Aunt Voe. I am writing this column on my Aunt Lorena, just to show how important family is to help younger members grow up. I was born in a farmhouse on Four Mile Creek, just out of Palouse. My parents and siblings had arrived just months before from Minneapolis. My Aunt Lorena, my dad’s youngest sister, just happened to be at the house when delivery was imminent. My father had gone to town to get Dr. Dart, the family doctor, but I guess I decided to enter this world without Dart. The fact that...
Jesse Owens is probably the country’s most famous Olympic athlete when you consider the setting where he won his four gold medals. Owens won the gold in the 4x100 relay, the 220-yard dash, the 220 low hurdles and the broad jump, in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He won more than the four medals, and he won the public relations tug with Adolph Hitler, who was trying to use the games as a way to show the world that the more traditional Aryan athlete was better than anyone else. Hitler had just come to power and was convinced b...
I have taken a lot of fishing tips over the years. Only one was successful. This was in Kodiak, Alaska. I was there to help the owner of the daily paper prepare her newspaper property for sale. It needed a lot of tweaking. I had been up there on several occasions, and on one of these trips the owner of the paper scheduled me to go out on a charter boat for halibut. The day of the trip, she showed up at the dock to introduce me to the skipper of the boat. They were obviously friends, and the skipper said he would look after...
One of the things my wife and I loved to do was walk in the sand dunes. To do that you have to have special places where the sand bunches up. Death Valley produced one such place, the mesquite dunes. Death Valley to some is the last place they would ever go. Gotta get off the freeway and you will see some special things. We have been there quite a few times, staying at Pantamont Springs, a motel across the road from some beautiful dunes. You have to remember one thing about Death Valley: it gets very hot there. We challenged...
When my wife and I used to hike, we thought in miles, the fewer the better. We would never have thought in the hundreds of miles. Jaci Gross and her 72-year-old mother, Jeanne, are underway on a 400-mile pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain. They left the states Tuesday for Lisbon, Portugal, from where they will walk the 400 miles to the Cathedral at Santiago, where the apostle St. James the Great, is buried. Jaci has been on feverish walks from her home in Coulee Dam to Steamboat Rock State Park several times a week, and also, for...
When an area suddenly becomes popular, it ruins it for people who already lived there. There’s a lot of examples of this. I don’t think it could happen here, but you never know if we will be discovered someday. While living in Boise, we often drove up to Silver City, an old mining town about 75 miles into the higher country. The roads were carved out of clay, so it wasn’t a good idea to drive there after a rain. There were a few old buildings still standing, a few in good repair. It wasn’t long before the area became popular...
My Aunt Voe used to put me up in an upstairs feather bed when I would visit. I don’t know what kind of feathers she used, but they made an extremely soft mattress and likewise the sleep. Voe was what you could correctly say “old fashioned.” Yet she was a counselor to many of the younger members of the family. She was the postmaster at the Palouse post office, knew everyone in town, and more about them than was necessary. Anyway, Voe had a foot in both worlds — one in the early 1900s and the other in what were then modern...
There are always a few who know what they want to do after graduating from high school. My great granddaughter, Kaylee Landeros, has already been accepted at Eastern Washington University and soon will go to the campus to plan her schedule of classes for fall. I had no idea what I would do when I went through the diploma process back in 1948. I wasn’t alone. Several in my class loaded up and went to Walla Walla to work in the cannery. I remember we had 11-and-a-half-hour shifts, seven days a week. Low pay, but lots of o...
Memorial Day can be a special occasion. It is meant to be a day of remembering family members and close friends who have passed on. It is a time when you can reflect on the good times enjoyed with those who have been closest to you. When I return home to Palouse, which I plan to do in a few weeks, the first place I always go is to the cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried. There are a number of others that were close to me buried there. How fortunate we are that our society sets apart a special day to do...
Summers in Palouse when I was a kid meant carnivals and the circus. They held the carnivals just off Main Street and next to the downtown gym. My brother Bob got kicked out of the carnival one summer. They had a monkey on a chain, and it was a popular attraction. Well Bob, who was always pushing the envelope, pushed a little too much. He was teasing the monkey, and the animal would make it out to the end of the chain. Bob didn’t calculate distance too well, and the monkey got on him, causing a stir. Every carny at the site t...
I have been tracing my Lucas family back as far as the mid 17th century in LaRochelle, France. I can’t seem to get past Jean Lucas, so for now he is the patriarch of the family. The family followed the teachings of John Calvin and finally left France for Germany and the long emigration to escape to the New World. Part of the family went to Ireland, but my branch went to England to pursue Queen Anne’s pledge to pay their passage to New York. The family took refuge in a fleet of 10 ships who were waiting out the winter for spr...
Why am I so lucky? I have a new great granddaughter, at least new to me. She was born the day that President Biden took office, Jan. 20, 2021. I saw Autumn once before, in Spokane at the hospital, but last weekend she was at the house, so I really got an opportunity to watch her closely. She is really mobile and walks all over. Her mother and father are Camille and Mark Fabian. No one can know the joy of seeing a new family generation arrive. As they say “out with the old and in with the new.” I wonder what circumstances awa...
I guess these places won’t be secret now. This weekend I visited one of our secret places, Hawk Creek campground. My wife and I used to prepare a picnic lunch and drive to Hawk Creek for one of our outings. I will miss this. There is a high waterfall there that you can walk to and let the roar and splash of the water wash away the cares of the world. This time I went with my oldest son Paul and his wife Cindy. I have had, and my wife and I together have had, many such places. After all, that’s the stuff memories are made of....
Why am I cold all the time? Doesn’t the weatherman know it’s supposed to be spring? But I’ve seen much colder days. I endured 46 below when working for Potlatch Forest shortly after I got out of high school. Work area layout was a cement slab with a tin roof and the sides all open. Three planer machines filled the interior of the huge shed. One person fed the boards into the machine, and two graders marked the planed boards according to their value. Two more pulled the boards off the chains and put them in appropriate piles...
In my column I have often mentioned what good neighbors I have. I particularly mention Dave and Dorothy Stiegelmeyer, who frequently are doing little things to make life easier for me. I received a postcard recently from an old friend asking if he was a good neighbor when living next to us in Nampa, Idaho when we were both attending college. That was in or about 1957. I assured him that he was. Earl Tromburg and his wife Velma lived right next to us in the Vetville apartment complex made up of about a dozen apartments for stu...
We have just celebrated Indigenous People’s Day. We have called this Columbus Day for far too long. We have been taught for centuries that Columbus discovered America. As a people, we developed a word ditty that helps us remember this untruth. When Columbus landed in the new world there were already over a million natives occupying the land. In their eyes, his appearance and the resulting occupation of the country by the white man created issues that we are still learning how to deal with. School boards are the most recent p...
Sometimes doing things only once is a good idea. This is particularly true for me when it involves heights. The top rung in an eight-foot ladder is enough for me. Flying into Kodiak, Alaska was a prime example of the kind of coward I’ve become. We were in an old plane, I should say a primitive plane, which held about 20 passengers — and our suitcases were loaded inside the passenger compartment. We were making our approach to the runway with 70 mph winds pushing the plane to the side. The pilot would rev the engines to bri...
You see, I have this dog, by accident I remind you. Ten years ago I stopped and bought a dog from someone selling pups from the trunk of their car. The plan was for the pup to go to my great granddaughter, Kaylee. That lasted about two or three days and to my dismay the pup landed at my house. Well, I should have known better because Kaylee was only 6 at the time. It was a she dog, and I made my second mistake; I had the dog spayed. I should have planned a batch of pups so I could get my money back. I can’t see me selling p...
