News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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With the basketball season coming to a close, we will be into baseball. It will be a strange season; I can’t name a single player, on any team. I remember that when I was covering baseball, I kept track of several big league players, many of them from the Boise Valley where I worked for the Idaho Statesman newspaper. Baseball was big in the valley, partially because we had a Milwaukee farm club locally. The Boise Braves were part of the Pioneer League, a class C franchise. But baseball was big for another reason. We had several players from t...
The Colville Tribes have reason to be proud of Michelle Stanger. Michelle just returned from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she competed along with 26 other Indian national representatives for national honors and the opportunity to represent Indian tribes, teaching diversity, throughout the world. Michelle was selected as Miss Colville Confederated Tribes last July and has been representing the 12 tribes since then. She won local recognition through competition on the reservation. Michelle and her mother Lucy drove to New Mexico in late April,...
I have been to the nation’s capital city. My efforts have been to see as many famous places as a day there will allow. My first visit was a real disappointment. We had hired a tour guide to shepherd us around, believing that we would see more if we didn’t have to worry about the traffic, a wise decision. I recalled these visits when I went out to cut several tulips for the house. We were driving around, and our driver stopped and said, “I’m going to get those tulip bulbs.” There was a large flower bed where someone had dug up the tulips. T...
Hearing the deadly dust storm on Monday caused me some alarm. The storm was reported to be in Indiana, where I have a close friend. So I called Warner Bartleson, who is well known in the coulee. Warner was hospital administrator here for four years in the early 1990s, during the struggle to save the hospital. Warner said they had the wind, but no dust. However, the area was visited by four tornadoes recently. Warner’s wife, Sara, had recently suffered a bad fall and is still recovering from that. He remarked that the years he was here were r...
I think there’s a song about that. In a few days it will be 75 years since I graduated from Palouse High School. Palouse will always be where I am from, and my home away from home. We had 24 in our graduation class, 15 of us attending all 12 grades together. We didn’t have kindergarten back then. Palouse is at the center of a rich farming area — never a crop failure, farmers like to say. So, the kids don’t move around much. In addition to the 15 who stuck it out together, another two left after their junior year. Among my classmates, one bec...
Our youngest son, Nathan is visiting the 37 courthouses in Oregon with the intent to create a book. He received his bachelor and master degrees from the University of Oregon. For the past 25 years he has been teaching at a private school in Portland. He proposed getting a sabbatical from teaching to do the book and was granted a leave. Nathan got the idea after stopping by and taking photos of the courthouse in Davenport. All of his active life as far back as high school, he has had something to do with photography. When I was involved with a...
All work and no play…. You know the rest. While in college in 1955-59, I occasionally took some needed time off to go fishing, despite two jobs, a full college load of classes and being a husband and father. I was located in Nampa, Idaho, and had found a good bass fishing spot, about 15 miles away, along the Boise River. I kept my fishing gear in my car, so in an instant I was on the 20-minute drive to fish. On one occasion I went by a house that had piled up some boxes with a “free” sign on them. I turned back, looked in the boxes and, along...
[Editor’s note: We mistakenly ran only a part of this column last week; here’s the full piece.] I’ve visited both the spectacular and the simplest of places where the faithful gather. A visit to Angkor Wat near Siem Reap in Cambodia is probably the place I will always remember. The complex is huge and the construction history reminds me of the pyramids in Egypt. Angkor Wat was completed in 1110, and has many Hindu carvings in the complex. Sometime along the way it was taken over by the Buddhists. The quarry where the stone came from is 50 mi...
I’ve visited both the spectacular and the simplest of places where the faithful gather. A visit to Angkor Wat near Siem Reap in Cambodia is probably the place I will always remember. The complex is huge and the construction history reminds me of the pyramids in Egypt. Completed in 1110 A.D., the complex has many Hindu carvings in it, but sometime along the way it was taken over by the Buddhists. The quarry where the stone came from is 50 miles away. The earliest person to visit the site stated that it was more spectacular than anything in R...
I held the last “coffee hour” that Sen. Warren Magnuson ever held. The senator had assisted me with some of my arrangements when I made my trips to the Far East. So when one of his aides called and asked if I would hold a coffee hour during his reelection campaign, I said yes. I explained to the aide that I didn’t want to advertise the event because I was a reporter and tried to stay as far away from that kind of thing that I could. So his office promoted the evening coffee hour and said that the public could come in and meet the senat...
Jimmy Carter is in the news. At 98, Carter has entered hospice care. He has been counted out many times only to resurface with a hammer in his hand, building houses for other people. While having a lackluster one-term presidential record, he has distinguished himself in many other ways. If you wonder where all the true leaders and men of virtue have gone, Mr. Carter has been here all the time. I first met Jimmy Carter while in Atlanta for a Suburban Newspapers of America conference. Carter was keynote speaker and helped kick the conference...
There is nothing like learning about betting on the ponies at the top. I was introduced to betting on race horses at Santa Anita Park, one of the premium race parks in America. I was in Los Angeles covering the Rose Bowl for my paper, the Idaho Statesman in Boise. The paper had a liberal policy for sending reporters out to cover major stories. It was the game between UW and Wisconsin, which the Huskies won, 44-8. My boss JimBrown had a habit of going to LA for a month or two each year. I later learned to bet on the horses at Santa Anita race...
We were in Baltimore visiting our daughter Kathy, who lived there at the time, and did the town. One of the highlights was touring the USS Constellation, a three-mast sailing man-of-war. It was the last ship in the fleet commissioned by the United States that moved under sail power. Named after two other ships by the same name, the ship was commissioned in the mid 1850s, was 181 feet long, and had a crew of about 350. The Constellation had several decks, with 16 large cannon and four smaller guns, all on the same deck. In the hull, where the fo...
While on the newspaper staff at the Idaho Free Press, they always gave me the assignment to cover the local rodeos. The two big ones were the Caldwell Night Rodeo and the Snake River Stampede. They both lasted the better part of a week, and the rest of the staff shied away from getting involved. I was the youngest reporter, so it always fell to me. The Snake River Stampede was the worst of the two. It involved covering a parade through the streets in downtown Nampa each of the days of the event. I had to write a parade story four different...
While at the Statesman in Boise, I often covered Idaho Vandal football games. My boss, Jim Brown, was a large contributor to Idaho’s football program. Vandal coach Skip Stahley came by the newspaper on a number of occasions, probably to keep the support going. I was scheduled to fly to Logan, Utah to cover the Vandal-Utah State game at Logan, Utah, a flight of about an hour. Also scheduled the same day, but later in the day, a pro exhibition football game in Salt Lake City. I had a close friend at the Salt Lake Tribune, Dick Martin. I had w...
It was 1962, and the baseball season was over. During the off season, Larry Jackson, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, joined our sports staff at the Idaho Statesman in Boise. As a baseball player, Larry was not yet a household name, but he soon would be. Larry was born in Nampa, and he still called the Valley his home. In the offseason, Larry would write for the Statesman. Technically, he worked for me, but I knew that my boss liked to talk baseball, so Larry was put on staff. Larry told me that his friend Stan Musial was coming to Boise...
When I was a kid, I sold the Saturday Evening Post. Post officials would come to town and round up a bunch of us kids, and we would go door to door to sell the post. It sold for a nickel. I think it was a national effort to raise the circulation so they could charge more for advertising. Think of it, kids all across America selling the Post. Representatives of the Post would come into town and round up willing kids, provide them with newspaper bags, a little instruction and turn them loose. I remember doing this twice, and was the top...
On a family vacation several years ago, I learned what claustrophobia was all about. We arrived at Lewis and Clark Cavern State Park in Montana and all of the family made it into the opening for the then self-guided tour. That’s when our youngest daughter, Kim, said she wouldn’t go through the underground cavern. She said that she couldn’t handle being in cramped spaces. So she got back out of the entrance to the cavern. I showed her where we would come out, and she went there to wait for us to do the cavern route. I had tried to persu...
When I was in grade school, my best friend was Jon Skovlin. His father ran the local Penny’s store, and sometimes I worked with Jon and put together trikes, bikes, and wagons. The store sold a lot of these. Jon’s dad would pay us for assembling the toys. That’s when I decided that I didn’t want to do that kind of work later in life. That was kind of funny because my dad could do just about anything. Raising a family during the Depression, you didn’t just hire people to do tasks you didn’t know how to do. My dad learned how to do things by n...
We were on one of our vacation trips to Montana, Wyoming and Yellowstone Park and stopped for a time in Cody, Wyoming. We were looking for a place to stay because we wanted to take in the museum there and go to the night rodeo. We saw the sign for the Irma Hotel and decided to try our luck there for a bed for the night. When we asked if there was an available room, the clerk said the Buffalo Bill suite was available. It would afford two beds since our son Paul was along. We immediately took the suite. It was really two rooms along with a...
I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Ruby Mountain isn’t some rugged granite peak. Rather, it is a round-topped mountain in Nevada with a beautiful trail to the top. While it is over 10,000 feet in elevation, you can drive your car up to about 7,000 feet. I was looking in Sunset Magazine and came across a short item on a bed and breakfast located in the Ruby Mountains in Nevada. Looking it up, I saw it was close to Elko, where my wife and I were married. I had been wondering where we should go on a short vacation, so I called and made res...
We shouldn’t need a date on the calendar to remind us to be thankful. I am thankful all year long for my family. While they are scattered from Louisiana to north of Everett, it is like they are with me all year long. On Thanksgiving there were a dozen who made it home to have a great dinner and report on a lot of the things they did since we were last together. They brave the weather to come, and make the long and sometimes tedious drives so we can be together. It isn’t often that we are all together at the same time, but frequent calls kee...
While I was at the Citizen Newspaper in Bothell we were purchased by the Persis Corporation. They owned a number of newspapers and we were placed under the daily paper they owned in Bellevue. It was 1987. It created a lot of problems and opportunities. Instead of printing on our own small press, we started printing our paper in Bellevue. That’s where the opportunities came in. One of the Persis executives, Phil Gialanella, who was headquartered in Hawaii, would come over about once a month and hold a big show and tell time. He was instrumental...
A recent column on my motorcycle days put me in touch with one of the sons of my old friend Joe Emerson. Someone had sent him a copy of my comments about his dad and of our friendship while we were both living in Palouse. He said that his dad was in the Air Force, not the army, and that Joe was not a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. I had misunderstood when Joe told me of his family’s property along the Columbia River when the dam backed up the water submerging the family home. Joe had said that his family was given land higher up f...
Lloyd Meeds represented Washington’s 2nd District in Congress for a number of years and was a frequent visitor to our newspaper in Bothell. He spent a lot of time in the district and would come by the paper for interviews and to report on what he was doing back in Washington. Quite often, his wife, Mary, would accompany him. I told the two, on one occasion, of my plan to travel to the far east, and they quickly suggested that I include Taiwan as one of the countries to visit. Mary Meeds was Chinese and a personal friend of Madame Chiang K...