News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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The Chinese New Year kicked off Saturday, Jan. 25. It’s the year of the rat, which I could suggest was named for a number of people I could name! The lunar year is divided into 13 categories, all named for an animal. While traveling to the Far East once, I was caught up in the Chinese New Year by chance. I had landed in Taipei, Taiwan from Osaka, Japan, on my way to Saigon. I had a booking at the Grand Hotel, referred by Mary Yang Meeds, wife of Rep. Lloyd Meeds at the time. Lloyd represented Washington’s 2nd District. The Grand Hotel was owned...
An abandoned reinforced-concrete bunker, built partially underground, sits atop an isolated granite mountain knob approximately a mile south of the Grand Coulee Dam; approximately 330 feet above the western shoreline of Lake Roosevelt. From September 1941 to August 1942 the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey would construct a recording seismographic station. The bunker would house a seismograph and associated instruments installed to detect possible earthquakes caused or initiated by the...
What makes good government? Many of us would probably contend that we have taken a recess from good government. Sometimes we learn more during recess than we do in the classroom. Polls indicate that our confidence in the way our federal government operates has been declining for several decades. Money has become the governing factor enabling a political candidate to get on stage. At that point, it becomes a personality contest with all manner of pundits rating every syllable, move, garment, and hair style while photographers spot every...
When we look around Central Washington, it is hard to miss the thousands of acres of wine grapes that cascade across our rolling hills and valleys. In fact, there were more than 59,000 acres and nearly 70 varieties of wine grapes planted last year. As the co-chair of the Congressional Wine Caucus – and the first co-chair from outside California – I could not be prouder to represent the Washington wine industry. With an annual economic impact of $7 billion, Washington’s wine industry is second in size only to California’s, and our communi...
As you all know by now, I like to profile certain seniors at Lake Roosevelt High School. It gives you all a chance to learn a little bit about the adults that the Raiders are producing and get a glimpse of where they have been and where they are going. Living in a small community, they become all of our kids, and Nick Baker is one of those students we all enjoy. So here is a little bit of my chat with “Big Nick.” Before we even got started, that big smile that Nick carries with him was pla...
At first when the Colville Reservation was formed in 1872, there was a paranoia from the lawmakers in the east that an attack would come from across the Columbia River by Seaton's Landing. To keep an eye on things, the U.S. Government sent out two decorated Indian War veterans, Len and Sam Dillman. When they arrived in the Grand Coulee, they set up base close to Rattlesnake Canyon, but pretty soon purchased the orchard at the bottom of the canyon. When it became apparent the attack would never...
A year ago, much of America’s heartland was inundated by Missouri River flood waters. At least 1 million acres of U.S. farmland in nine major grain-producing states were under water. More than 14 million people were impacted. Damage exceeded $1 billion. With 11 dams on the Missouri, why was the flooding so severe? Why didn’t the dams absorb the excess waters? Its dams are above the flooded areas. The last impoundment is at Gavins Point Dams in South Dakota, and heavy rainfall and snow melts wer...
Happy New Year to each of you, and welcome to the new Roaring Twenties! I’ll start off by gazing into the crystal ball of long-range weather prediction. The dedicated public servants with the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) at the National Weather Service have done well with the prediction for these past months. We’ve seen higher-than-average temperatures and less-than-average precipitation. So, what are their predictions for the next three months — January, February and March 2020? For the n...
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...
Anyone that follows any sport at all knows how special it is when your team finally makes it to the championship game. It does not matter if it is in Little League sports, high school, college or professional, it is a cherished moment when your team colors take the field in the biggest moment of their career. That happened to me this past weekend. I had waited 46 years for this moment, and it was surreal. I cannot pinpoint the time I first became a Kansas City Chiefs fan, but I do know I have...
The Washington State Legislature once again is attempting to make government records more obscure, this time by trying to shield public employee birthdates from disclosure with the introduction of HB 1888. Rep. Zack Hudgins, of the 11th Legislative District and Javier Valdez from the 46th Legislative district, both Democrats, are the sponsors. While proponents say they are most concerned with privacy rights and identity theft, this bill is really about a fight between public employee unions and the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank...
By proclamation of the governor, January is School Board Recognition Month. It’s a great time to recognize our elected community members who selflessly give their time and energy in support of high-quality public schooling for our youth. School board members in Nespelem School District are entrusted by this community with responsibility to develop the school district’s educational program and set the course for the school district. All of this is done within the context or racial, ethnic and religious diversity and with a commitment to edu...
This is a view of track laying along the upper Grand Coulee in the late months of 1934. Note iconic Pinnacle Rock in the distance. The contractor who built the line, David H. Ryan, had already completed some earth-moving contracts at the dam and had his equipment at the ready when he won the job of building the tracks from Coulee City to the dam site. Mr. Ryan was known to do things on the cheap. He used mule power when he could, and only had a few machines to build the line. The picture is take...
Here’s a basic truth about people who make decisions about public policy: they rarely have all the facts they want. Yet policy has to get made anyway. No one is confronted more often with this conundrum than the President of the United States, though members of Congress can come close. The challenge is that purported facts are dynamic — they keep changing. Additional facts come to light. Others are found to be wrong. Some are clearly reliable, others more dubious. And regardless, they come at high-level policy makers quickly, relentlessly, fro...
In 1869, the Daily Cleveland Herald quoted lawyer John Godfrey Saxe as saying, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” That saying, or variants of it, have been repeated so often that it has become accepted knowledge. The fact is, though, the more we know about the origin and development of laws, the better off we are. Bad laws get created in back rooms, through undisclosed emails, riding on golf carts and over drinks at the country club bar. Good laws are created in the open and under the...
My earliest and most vivid memories take me back to when I was 6 years old. That was the year I started the first grade, and also when I started to get store-bought haircuts. My father, who could do most anything, cut my hair until he took construction jobs away from home. It was about midway through the Great Depression, and jobs were opening up. I went to Ray Sheets’ barber shop on Main Street in Palouse. Sheets was a favorite of all the kids because he always had treats for us. And he had some other things going for him. His teeth were cappe...
Every year, as I look back at the lists of the famous people who passed away, there are always a few that shock me. I had not heard, or I just plain missed, that one, and I am flooded with memories of how we knew each other. In the sporting arena, on the big screen or on the radio, sometimes famous people become our friends, even though we never meet. Here are some that I will miss who died in 2019. Beth Chapman. A lot of you just said who? She was the beloved and fierce wife of Dog the Bounty...
The annual Trees of Sharing project began Nov. 1 and culminated with the delivery of wrapped Christmas gifts to 115 children in 48 families Saturday, Dec. 14. Thank you to every person who enthusiastically supported this project by purchasing gifts for children in the Coulee area who might now have otherwise received a gift this Christmas. Trees of Sharing extends special appreciation to Coulee Dam Federal Credit Union, Coulee Family Medicine, Harvest Foods, North Cascades Bank, and Safeway Pharmacy for help with collecting children’s names a...
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...
Cement for the building of Grand Coulee Dam was hauled in by the boxcar full. Thousands of loads were needed for the project. When it was done, the North Dam was built, along with Dry Falls Dam, and what we know as Banks Lake was filled with water. This inundated most of the old railroad grade. When time came to build the Third Powerhouse, how was all this cement going to get to the dam? By rail, most of the way. Now cement was no longer hauled in boxcars. Now there were dedicated cars where cem...
As we launch into 2020 and the ensuing decade, Boeing faces very strong head winds which are major concerns for those of us living in the Pacific Northwest. Things are vastly different now. In my first column of 2019, I wrote that Boeing was poised to have its best year ever. It had strong tail winds propelling it. It would build upon a very successful 2018. Its 737 Max was selling like hot cakes to hungry airlines, and plans were in the works to expand production at the Renton assembly plant....
Don Brunell, who wrote a column on this page, doesn’t know the local Portch family, but he might as well have used them as an example in his column on local business owners who do good for their communities. Like his parents before him, Loepp Furniture and Appliance owner Kevin Portch doesn’t miss much in the way of opportunities to make life a little better in his hometown, and it’s an ethic his employees embrace, as well. Which led to the story on the front page about rescuing frozen turkeys to maximize the good to come from another local...
At Christmas, millions watch the 1946 movie classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” While it is labeled “fantasy drama,” the show gives us a glimpse of reality and reminds us of the importance of caring local business owners. The setting is mythical Bedford Falls, New York, on Christmas Eve. George Bailey, a family man with a wife and four children, was dogged by a greedy banker, Henry Potter, who wanted to shut Bailey Building and Loan Association down. (George inherited the struggling business...
It was so long ago that carbon paper was at the center of the controversy around my first big scoop. As a junior in a high school journalism class, I’d turned in a story about a very popular teacher who would be resigning at the end of the year, a tip I got by ferreting through a wastepaper basket outside the admin office and coming up with a sheet of crumpled carbon paper that contained the details. The story wasn’t published because the publisher, which was the school, felt it would be inappropriate and too disruptive, or some such reasoning....
In 1964, the United States and Canada ratified the Columbia River Treaty to increase coordination between our countries on power generation and flood control issues, along with critical support of irrigation, navigation, and ecosystem habitat needs. While the treaty has provided a useful framework for these needs, there are severe distortions that have greatly — and unfairly — burdened Americans living in the greater Northwest region. With a 60-year term, the earliest the treaty could have been terminated was 2024. In anticipation of the end...