News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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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 the dunes early in...
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 a change, to Nespel...
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 with the Boise crow...
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 times. In additio...
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 overtime. Six of us r...
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 this. At my parents’ g...
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 thought Bob was h...
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 spring sailing. The...
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 await little Aut...
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. I had such places e...
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. The winter had b...
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 students attending sch...
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 place to show a...
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 bring us back in lin...
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 pups out of my t...
My wife and I liked the coulee so much that we moved here twice. The first time was in 1954 when I accepted a job grading lumber at the planing mill above the dam. I worked for Everett Kirkpatrick and a junior partner. Old timers will remember the mill and Kirkpatrick. I had come to the area to take a position as lumber grader at Lincoln Lumber Company, a few miles upstream. I’d had earlier training at Potlatch Lumber Company in Potlatch, Idaho. At that time, they floated logs down the Columbia River to the mill site. Sad to say that the o...
Two Gun Willie was a featured attraction at Silver City, Idaho. The old mining town had seen better days, and so had “two gun.” Willie was born William James Hawes in 1876, right in the town, that in its heyday had some 2,500 residents. Willie became the guardian of the ghost town after mining diminished and the houses wore out and slowly tumbled to the ground. Silver City is 75 miles from Boise, the final 23 miles from Murphy on a dirt-and-clay road that you want to stay away from when it’s been raining. Murphy is the county seat of Owyhe...
A few years ago, I found a small box in my mail from Bill Thompson, a classmate of mine from Palouse. Bill and I, along with 13 others, spent all 12 years together out of a class of 24. Needless to say, we were tight, and very close friends. I opened the box when I got home, and inside was a small agate marble, and a note. The note said, “As God is my witness, this is a marble that I got from you a long time ago when we were kids.” When we were young, we played marbles for keeps, and I had, over the years from about 1940-42, accumulated abo...
A fossilized leg bone of the Hagerman Horse will soon be on its way home. It has been in my possession for 60 years, and it will soon rest where it had been for thousands of years before I dug it up in 1958. The bone has been with me in Nampa, Boise, Othello, Lynnwood, Woodinville, Bothell and now Electric City. I am told that the Hagerman Horse (equus simplicidens) was killed off some 50,000 years ago, and I will be happy when the bone is finally returned to the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, at Hagerman, Idaho. I dug the bone out of...
In a few days the University of Washington Huskies will be in the Rose Bowl. It will be their 15th appearance in Pasadena and the Huskies will have the opportunity to tilt the record in their favor, currently having a 7-7 record. Washington’s first appearance was in 1924, and their last in 2001. But this column is about Washington’s sixth appearance, in 1960, when they defeated the University of Wisconsin, 44-8, and how I got there. I was working for the Idaho Statesman in Boise at the time. One day the owner of the paper, Jim Brown, came and...
I had my heroes, just like every kid. Mine really got started by getting to know the owner of one of the three active taverns in Palouse in the late 1930s. His name was Pop Brantner. I never did learn his first name. The unlikely friendship began from my bringing in empty beer bottles, for a penny a “stubby” and five cents for a quart bottle. Kids could go in the back door of the tavern, up to the pool tables with their retrieved bottles, and Pop would come back and pay us for them. For some reason, Pop took a liking to me and started tal...
Meet the late Will Chaussee. On the outside, he was a cedar lumber owner-dealer. On the inside, he was a mountain man, and he owned a sapphire mine between Hamilton and Philipsburg, Montana. He retired and annually invited me to his place up in the mountains, where we fished, explored a bit and told stories that were mostly true. He had returned to Bothell on business and looked in on me at the newspaper there where I worked, and said, “Look what I found at the mine, a sapphire fit for a king.” That started it, and for the next several mon...
I would like to make it clear: I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me who wrote that op-ed piece in the New York Times telling of the disarray at the White House. This is for the record. I do not know anyone that works for the Times, I have never been in their building, and I have not met with anyone from the Times at an alternate location. Now, I must admit that I do receive the Times’ Sunday edition, courtesy of my daughter, Kathy Beck. I receive it on Monday, but I do not have contact with a member of their staff. It comes in the mail. For insta...
The person who called it “the last great race on earth” was probably right. The Iditarod is run each year the first weekend in March, with the next one is kicking off March 2, 2019. It’s the sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, a distance of nearly 1,000 miles. There are actually two routes they use, one for even numbered years and another for odd numbered years, each just shy of the 1,000 miles. The race tests the endurance of man, beast, and equipment, with the elements usually taking their toll. It was in 1993 that I met Stan Smith...
The long, sleek train reeked of speed as it pulled into Tokyo station. I was finally going to ride Japan’s world-famous “bullet train” at speeds over 100 miles an hour. It was difficult to reference speeds on rails of such proportions. I was traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto, and later to Osaka, a total distance of some 375 miles. This was to be new to me of rail travel for a number of reasons — the speed, of course, but also for the absence of the constant clickety clack of the wheels of the train passing over the joints of the rails beneath...