News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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Palouse Pottery Company, founded in 1904, produced a ton of crock pots during the short time it was in operation. Currently, I am looking for my fourth Palouse Pottery piece so I can give it away. I don’t remember when or where I got my first piece, a gallon crock. Since I am from Palouse, I decided to try to find pieces of Palouse Pottery for each of our four children. I gave my first piece away, and while visiting Palouse a couple of years ago found my second piece. This one was a 10-gallon crock, and I bought it at a secondhand store on P...
This is about places I’ve been that would make my bucket list if I hadn’t. 1 - First would have to be my favorite vacation spot, Grand Teton National Park. Place to stay: Jackson Lake Lodge, on Jackson Lake. It has always been the top spot for moose watching, but it also is a hiker’s paradise. We took a boat across the lake and it dropped us off at a trailhead that wound its way between two of the mountain peaks. We had walked about a mile and when turning a corner in the path we ran into two bull moose that cautiously eyed us as if we shouldn...
I well remember the feeling when I heard the clang of the prison door at Walla Walla closing behind me. This needs some explanation. When I was with the newspaper in Bothell, I heard of some of the reforms at the state prison at Walla Walla. A call to the prison eventually led to a visit with warden Bobby Rhay. I told him I was interested in pursuing the reforms with a story, particularly the elected prison inmate council. He said if I wanted to come over, I could visit with him about the reforms and also meet with the prisoner council members....
We have had great luck with neighbors. Thinking back to our earliest days together, and up to the present time, we have always had good neighbors. Just recently, and after our latest snowfall, is a good example of good neighbors. I heard noise from outside and went to the door to look out, and there was Gasry Norris plowing out the end of my driveway. Gary is former owner of H&H Grocery and has a blade on the front of his pickup. Not only was Gary cleaning up our driveway but proceeded to go down the street and do other driveways. At the...
Long periods of open time have allowed me to get back to my stamp collection. I had a small collection as a child and then put it all behind me until later in life. My collection had been collecting dust until about six months ago when I pulled my albums out and took over the dining room table. The urge came on as I talked with our oldest son, Paul, who has a substantial collection. He was lucky enough to be able to purchase a large collection from a former postmaster. Stamps can be much more than something to lick and drop off at the post offi...
Our longest fire camp experience was near Prairie City, Oregon, a 21-day ordeal where our kitchen unit served 1,500 firefighters and support personnel. My wife and I worked a couple of seasons for OK Cascade, a Bothell company owned by the Keener family well known to us. The hourly pay was small, but we often got 50-60 hours of overtime a week. We would get a call from the company and immediately leave for our camp location. The workday started usually at 5 a.m. and ended between 10 and 12 p.m. Our rest break was brief, and we often had to...
As a kid, I loved the snow. In Palouse we got a lot of it. When it came down, I knew it was time to get out my Flexible Flier sled. The Fliers were the sleds of all sleds. When there was a good base, we would gather on North Hill and clear the side streets for the best sledding you could ever find. We would station someone, usually a parent, on each side street to divert traffic away from our hill run. The run from the top of North Hill was about 10 blocks, with the end being in the city’s main street. By the time the snow was packed, the r...
I have driven north and south and east and west in Kansas. I have searched over the two trips through there to see if I could remember one redeeming quality about the state. My first trip through the state was enroute to Kansas City, Missouri. It was in January and there was snow and black ice. It was a risky trip. The next time I ran through Kansas, it was summer, and I entered in the south and drove to the north on my way back home after a trip to the east coast. I have never met anyone who admitted being from Kansas. My two trips through...
I never could understand why a person in good health would choose not to work. Several times, as early as high school, I had more than one job at a time.There was a period in my junior and senior years in high school in Palouse when I had three jobs at the same time. It started by being fast at peeling potatoes at the Oasis Restaurant. A week later, the evening fry cook didn’t show up and I was made the fry cook. I already had a job six days a week running Darigold milk products to the door. Shorty Ransom was my boss, and we delivered to S...
When I lived in Bothell, I used to fly a lot in small planes. One of my friends, Phil Strathy, had a land plane, kept in Monroe. Another friend had a seaplane, kept on Lake Washington at Kenmore. About every month I would get a call from Phil wanting to know if I wanted to fly with him to someplace for lunch. The answer was always yes. Phil was the Darigold distributor for our area, and he was always interested in getting some flying time in. Usually, lunch meant about a three- or four-hour break. You can do this if you are the boss. One day...
I have only moved once in the past 55 years. When younger, we moved several times chasing college and job opportunities. We lived in Grand Coulee for a couple of years before moving on to Idaho where we spent seven years. When I told friends in Bothell that I was moving to Electric City, they asked why, as if I had done something wrong and was trying to avoid the consequences. We lived in Bothell for 25 years, all in the same house, and only a half mile from my work. It was an ideal situation, and then something happened. The roads got jammed...
A recent story of several elk being killed by motorists in Grand Teton National Park reminded me of the plight of our wild animals. I have visited the Teton area several times and recall the time that a herd of elk crossed the road in front of us, stopping traffic for a while. There were probably 100 elk, and it was a treat watching them. That motorists were careless to the point of killing several raises questions about drivers being alert when they are around our wild animals. I recall one time I was looking for moose droppings that I...
My sister Dorothy was the oldest in our family. After graduating from high school, she just stayed around home until WWII broke out. She lived to be 96 and never learned to drive. She went to Wapato to live with our aunt and worked in some related war effort job there. She met her husband, Wes, while there. They later married and, being in the army, he was reassigned to Jackson, Mississippi. He was there until the war ended and they moved on to New Jersey to live. A few years later, my sis talked her husband into driving west to see the...
We soon will celebrate Veteran’s Day. On the calendar it’s just for a day, but we celebrate our veterans 365 days a year. There’s hardly a family in the country that doesn’t have some ties to our military forces. My immediate family has ties to three military branches, army, navy, and air corps. My father was in the army during World War I, getting in as soon as he was old enough, rather late in the war. He spent most of his army time in Minneapolis, where he met and married my mother. My three brothers all served overseas in World War II. My...
Things are changing there also. Currently this restaurant in downtown Atlanta is closed to change its decor to get away from its Civil War decorations. The first thing a friend told me when he learned I was going to Atlanta for a weeklong conference: “Be sure to go to Pittypat’s Porch Restaurant.” Then, Atlanta was like stepping back into what is an era of unpleasant history. That’s why the restaurant is changing its theme and decor, going the way of most Confederate monuments. We were seated on the balcony overlooking the dining area while wai...
My brother David turned Texan on me. Of my three brothers, I was closest to Dave. He and I were both red headed when young and seemed to be more like our Norwegian mother than like our father. Shortly after he returned from serving in the air force in World War II, he moved to Texas. I visited him in Houston a number of times, but not just recently. He passed on a number of years ago. When I visited Texas it was always a relief when I left the state and entered into New Mexico. New Mexico never looked so good. I’ve heard it said that the U...
While in Thailand, I was lucky enough to pick up 3 that sell rubbings. One features two Thai women dressed in ancient Thai costumes. The other is a Thai warrior on an elephant. The two rubbings are about 17 inches square. Dennis King did the framing, his usual outstanding work. I didn’t get to see the actual rubbing, although you can catch it on the internet. My rubbings were done on rice paper, which is very flexible, but strong, and accepts ink well. They folded well and placed in my suitcase and when opened up were good as new. In Chiang Mai...
These airline incidents threaten the lives of everyone aboard. The other day a plane two hours out from a flight from Honolulu to Seattle had to turn around and go back because a passenger acted up and interfered with a flight attendant. They need to put a stop to this before there is a disaster. These people need to be on a no-fly list for all airlines, suffer a stiff fine, and look at a mandatory jail sentence. It has been a few years since I’ve been flying, but it would have been unheard of back then. It isn’t just airline passengers who bec...
Never been a crop failure in the Palouse, I think, never! The area abounds in deep, rich soil and an abundance of rain at the critical time in the spring. Not this year. Of course, the soil hasn’t changed. But the rains didn’t come. One farmer I know reported only about 60% of normal yields. The only good news about the harvest is that the wheat prices were up. When I was a student in high school there, in one class we were sent out to measure the rich, black topsoil. We took our augurs and were surprised to find that where we measured the top...
Myanmar (Burma) has its own way of storing gold. The Shwedagon Pagoda is one of the premier Buddhist temples in the world and dates back some 2,500 years. Here in the U.S. we think of things 200-300 years old as really old. Not there, nor in most of the world. This huge monument wears thousands of tons of gold, like a coat in cold weather. As if this isn’t rich enough, it has thousands of diamonds on its top, including one of over 70 carats. I like to think of myself as a contributor to the country’s wealth. While there, I patiently wat...
I’ve seen a mountain of big attractions. But little things do matter, and sometimes they are embedded in your memory. A few years ago, I took on a consulting job in Kodiak, Alaska. The owner wanted to clean up some of her business practices so she could sell her newspaper. I made several trips there and twice my wife accompanied me. On one trip, I had the weekend free and decided to fly to Anchorage and see a healthcare practitioner who lived just up the block from us in Bothell. She showed us around and we made a drive to Denali National P...
Our daughter Kim is in the thick of Louisiana storms again. Five years ago, their home in Denham Springs was flooded, with up to four feet of water in the lower floor. They had experienced 30 inches of rain in a couple day’s time. That’s about three years of rain around here. She and her husband, Bruce, had to strip wallboard and insulation from the lower floor and replace the floor, appliances and furniture. It was a three-month long project. Kim and Bruce live on the river, and with that amount of rain the river overflowed its banks and the...
Life is full of changes, and they hit at an early age. I was born on a farm outside Palouse, and we didn’t have indoor plumbing. Our facility was located about 25 yards from the house and alongside our parking area. It was a two-hole outdoor toilet. I could never figure out why we had a two-hole toilet? I guess I never felt like I knew anyone well enough to sit there with another person beside me. We didn’t have toilet paper, only a Sears Roebuck catalog. You get the picture? One of my greatest fears is that I would fall in. Now nighttime and...
It’s time to play the blame game. Who exactly is at fault for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan? There are those who can’t see the similarities between this collapse and the one we saw in South Vietnam. I think it is a carbon copy! I know of a local serviceman who was on one of the last helicopters out. The French failed in Vietnam So we went in, and with 55,000 dead later, we barely got our people out before the full collapse. On my three trips to Vietnam I was shocked to see the streets full of fighting-age men and women who were content to...
The Olympic Games are over. I watched about enough of the competition that I was interested in — mainly track and field, basketball and volleyball. While the games register winners and losers, it is my opinion that there are no losers. It is no small feat to represent your country in the games. It takes thousands of hours of practice, dedication, and sometimes luck to get on the Olympic team. I don’t recall ever personally meeting an Olympic competitor from any country. A shirttail relative of mine was determined that their young daughter wou...
