News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
Sorted by date Results 126 - 150 of 366
If you really want to know when the Bureau of Reclamation fire station will be completed, keep track of the sani-cans outside. Star reporter Jacob Wagner gave a good rundown of the history of the project in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago. I would like to fill in the story a bit. The estimated cost of the project was $13.6 million. It is now estimated that the fire station will be completed in 2021. The project was started in 2016, with the awarding of the construction contract. Total cost is a number that would be embarrassing even for any...
A few years ago my wife and I worked two fire seasons for OK Cascade, a firm that under contract provided food, shower and laundry services during major wildfires. The firm then was owned by John and JoAnn Keener, both now deceased, John having passed away just a few days ago. The Keeners were from Bothell, and their rolling stock was housed in Twisp. We signed on with them just after moving here. We had known the Keeners during our 25 years in Bothell. We were told that during fire season we needed to be packed and ready to leave at a phone...
Sometimes it is strange the things that draw you back to your childhood. While driving the other day, I looked down at my left hand that was grasping the steering wheel. My hand looked exactly like my father’s. I often think of my parents, even though they have been gone for a very long time. My dad was a lifelong Democrat. The New Deal worked for our family, and making a negative comment about FDR would put you in peril around our house. There were many arguments around the house between my dad and two of his brothers. But one stern look f...
When we think of bravery, we have a tendency to think big. Actually, acts of bravery are all around us, some more apparent than others. While in Vietnam a number of years ago I met a medical doctor who was captured by the Viet Cong and held captive four years. It wasn’t unusual at the time for people to turn up missing. The doctor was held in a jungle field hospital where he worked on soldiers who were wounded or people who came down with jungle diseases. He was somewhat philosophical about it all. He reasoned that he was trained for this k...
Sometimes you discover history after it is past. I have visited a lot of cemeteries and memorials, but probably the most moving is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. I’ve been there twice, the second time after I had learned that a cousin had been killed in the war and that his name was etched on the marble wall. I had a natural interest in the wall because I had made three trips to Vietnam while the war was still going on. Visiting the wall is a moving experience. It is one of the most popular memorials in D.C. On my visits it was crowded...
The English language is the best friend while traveling in most countries. In all my travels in Asia, the one most constant thing was that English was spoken and understood in every country. Part of the reason was the influence of English colonialism, and the fact that most people study English as a second language. While English is prevalent in both Japan and Hong Kong, Sometimes natives seek out touring English-speaking people so they can practice their English. This happened to me in both Japan and Hong Kong. In Osaka, Japan, I had walked...
I once moved twice on the same day. We have moved 14 times, but only once in the past 56 years. Our first move was to Palouse from southern Idaho. We were so recently married that it only took a couple of boxes, and those fit neatly in the trunk of our 1946 Ford. We spent the winter there. Trained as a lumber grader, I answered an ad in the Spokesman Review for a position at Lincoln Lumber Company. We interviewed, got the position and found an apartment in Wilbur. The apartment belonged to the school district there, and we got it with the...
A drive through the Hartline area the other day showed piles of wheat forming outside granaries, an indication of an abundant harvest. I was born on a farm about four miles south of Palouse, delivered by my aunt while my dad went to town to get Dr. Dart, the area medical czar. I was on the farm until age 5, when the family moved to town so I could start school the next year. There was a custom, a sort of a rite of passage, that young kids could ride the harvest trucks during harvest. We would go down to the warehouse, and when the trucks would...
It’s almost unimaginable. Music, whether we realize it or not, plays an important part in all our lives. My earliest recollection of music was when I was very young and my father sang to me. My father had an ocean of Irish ditties that he would sing while I was sitting on his lap. What I wouldn’t give to remember all of them. But I do remember one “Froggy went a courtin.” I don’t remember why this one stuck to me. I don’t even remember if my dad had a good singing voice, but it was magical to me. We can be depressed, lonely, sick, but music is...
Ever wonder why some of our elected officials have it in for immigrants? All of us could easily trace our citizenship back to the time that our forebears arrived on our shores. In a sense we are all immigrants, some more mindful of it than others. I have always wondered what my first immigrant families might have uttered when they first saw the USA. My Lucas family came by sailing vessel to America in 1710. They had escaped religious persecution in France and escaped to Germany in what would be a hardship journey. The family was in Germany for...
A person can be defined by the little things he remembers and his favorite places. My parents liked to take drives, and on one of them they would stop at a roadside springs to get a drink of ice cold water. They had a collapsible tin cup that was kept in the glove box for such an occasion, along with a camera that folded up. The adventure of those trips probably accounts for developing the same habit. One such place was Grizzly Camp, a few miles up from Potlatch, Princeton and Harvard in Idaho. It was a mountain location and a popular picnic...
You don’t know how important your freedoms are until you start to lose them. That’s what is behind the protests going on in Hong Kong. In April the government in Mainland China passed an extradition bill that would allow officials to take persons suspected of crimes to court under Chinese government rules. The former British colony has been operating under “one China, two systems,” allowing a great deal more freedom than residents of Mainland China are allowed. When Britain turned over the Hong Kong colony to China in 1997, it was with the und...
Earlier this week the nation took pause to honor our veterans. The debt we owe to veterans goes well beyond Nov. 11. I didn’t come from a military family; however, my father and three of my brothers were in the military: my father in World War I, and my brothers in World War ll. I am sorry now that I know so little of their service times and experiences. They, like so many, didn’t talk a lot about their experiences, it brought back unpleasant memories. My father didn’t serve overseas, but my three brothers did, in the thick of it. My brothers,...
It was a scene that would have made Clint Eastwood laugh. I had learned that Burma was allowing travelers in on 72-hour visas, and since I would be traveling in the Far East I booked a flight out of Thailand to Rangoon. The country hadn’t allowed people to travel there and placed a lot of restrictions on those who did. I stayed at the Strand Hotel. It had been a resting place for the likes of Oliver Stone, David Rockefeller, Mick Jagger, Peter Ustinov, Lord Mountbatten, and Rudyard Kipling, but not while I was there. It had been one of the jewe...
Young people today, when you make up your bucket list, be sure to put in a train ride. Transportation by train is a rarity today, and only on occasion do you stumble on a coal-fired engine. I was a “gandy dancer” for the Northern Pacific Railroad during my high school career, working from 7-4 on Saturdays as part of their section crew. My fascination with steam locomotives didn’t start then. I remember that, as a kid, whenever a train went through Palouse we would be down by the tracks to watch it. Sometimes the engineer would wave at us, m...
I am a lousy fisherman, getting boxed out, except one time. That was out of Kodiak, Alaska, fishing for halibut. I was on a charter boat that had twin engines and a lot of speed. We were 50 miles out, where the skipper said that the area had a good halibut bed. I was in Alaska to assist the owner of the Kodiak newspaper in preparing her property for sale, and every weekend she set me up with a new experience. The skipper of this experience had a boatload of people and had prepared all the poles for each of us. He explained that landing a...
The Major League Baseball season is upon us. The game is looking less like the “National Pastime” each year. I remember when every little town or city had its own baseball team. There was no talk then of major changes to the game’s rules. The truth is that the sport has lost a lot of its fan base. Rule changes proposed and made won’t bring them back. Sports fans have changed, and I fear they have left baseball behind. Fans now like tougher sport action, the kind that leaves a targeted quarterback or receiver on the field and hauled off on a st...
As a kid growing up in Palouse, I loved the snow. Snow meant sledding, and we had a couple of great runs, one in town and the other on the outskirts. The one in town was from the top of North Hill that wound its way through the residential section and ended up on Main Street. It was probably a quarter mile long, and in places steep. Our parents or some of the kids would post themselves at intersections to make sure that traffic wouldn’t interfere with sledding. There was always someone who would furnish hot chocolate and a treat during the e...
Gail Morin, of Elmer City, is on her 62nd book. Are they western adventure, romance, war stories, children books? No, nothing like that. Gail writes geneology-type books, getting all her information from public records. Her books, many of them available on Amazon, have titles such as: “Manitoba Scrip” “Stignace Parish of Willow Bunch, Saskatchewan 1882 - 1910 Baptisms, Marriages and Burials” “Chippewa Half-Breeds of Lake Superior - Concerning the applicants for Half-Breed Scrip” and “St. Joachim, Fort Auguste (Fort Edmonton) 1858-1890”. T...
Boise, Idaho, was a great baseball town — home to the Boise Braves, a Milwaukee Class C farm club in the Pioneer League. But it was the large number of big-league players that set the tone in the valley. Larry Jackson, Harmon Killebrew and Vernon Law made their home in the city and in nearby towns. Jackson was from Boise, Law from Meridian and Killebrew from Emmett. It was Jackson, a teammate of Stan Musial, who helped me get a long interview with Musial. Jackson, a right-handed pitcher, played with Musial with the St. Louis Cardinals for a n...
Yes, the fireworks off Grand Coulee Dam will be on July 4 this year. Doing the show will be Rocketman Pyro, out of Spokane. It is the third straight year for the Spokane firm to light up the top of Grand Coulee Dam. Speaking for Rocketman Pyro, Dan VerHuel said the firm is planning about a 20-minute display. Workers will start setting up the show, using some 40 cases of explosives, about 9 a.m. July 4. “Once we gain access to the top of the dam, we are not allowed outside the gates until the show is over,” VerHuel stated. The show starts right...
There’s a rooster in Electric City. And it is a direct violation of the city’s chicken ordinance, which allows a handful of hens, but no roosters. A clear violation of equal treatment under the law. The city council, who started this farce by refusing to allow people to have roosters, got the challenge at a recent meeting when a woman told the council of a dog problem she had and then reported that she heard a rooster crowing. That should have prompted an exodus from the meeting by city council members, fanning throughout the city to find the...
Police arrested and jailed a 41-year-old Grand Coulee man after he was identified by separate people as the person entering a house at 208 Banks Avenue after another local house had been broken into and guns taken. Jonathan J. Anderson was booked into Grant County jail by police Sunday evening after he allegedly had kicked in a door to enter a residence at 100 Banks Avenue in Grand Coulee, then left with three rifles and a handgun. Witnesses told police that a man had been chased away from another person’s property and that he was seen entering...
There's a new handicapped-accessible parking and viewing area at the Ridge Riders Rodeo Grounds, just in time for this year's Colorama Pro-West Rodeo. Workers prepared the site last week and concrete was poured Thursday morning. Inspiration for the project was attributed to Ann Elliot, who had used the handicapped seating area, described by one Ridge Riders official as "poorly designed," and offered a good report on what she could see of the 2017 rodeo event, which wasn't much. The Ridge Riders...
The fish-raising program that keeps Banks Lake supplied with trout is in danger of ending. Carl Russell, who ran POWER (Promoters of Wildlife and Environmental Resources) for a number of years and is still active in the organization, said this week that volunteers are sorely needed to keep the program operating. POWER releases some 150,000 fish twice a year into Banks Lake, making it one of the most popular and productive fisheries in Central Washington. All that could come to an end. The group released some 150,000 fish into the lake in March...