Inlander 05/02/2024

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Growing up, my siblings and I heard stories of Expo ’74. When my mom’s family moved from Billings to Spokane in 1969, downtown’s riverfront was infamously blighted and grimy. Then Expo came around and changed everything. My mom, who was 19 that summer, had a season pass, and when she wasn’t taking her two littlest brothers, 5 and 6 years old, to the fair for a fun day out, she and her friends frequently met up at Expo to hang out.

“There wasn’t much else for young people to do in Spokane at the time — it was great,” she tells me today. Besides photos, including this one of her with her brothers, one permanent relic of Expo remained ever-present in our house: a 12-inch plastic souvenir ruler with images of the Skyride and Pavilion, always handy in a kitchen drawer for geometry homework or crafts.

Until diving deep into the history of Spokane’s World’s Fair for this week’s EXPO 50th ANNIVERSARY, however, it hadn’t fully hit me just how pivotal Expo was for the city I’ve always called home. But I get it now, why so many people — including my mom — look back on Expo ’74 as one of the greatest things that has happened to our lovely Lilac City.

— CHEY SCOTT, Editor

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF ENTERTAINMENT

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IF SPOKANE HELD ANOTHER WORLD’S FAIR, WHAT SHOULD THE THEME BE?

DAVE HAMMER

It should still be the environment. I mean, I’m watching the sea surface temperature spike and everything, and it’s scary. I mean, we’re not doing anything about it. It is only going to get worse. Terrifying.

MIKHAIL HAMMER

Yeah, I agree [with Dave].

Would there be a country you’d be especially interested to learn from?

I think China. They’re leading in terms of advancements, especially in environmentalism. They planted more trees in the past decade.

COURTNEY DONALDSON

Canadian themed!

What would that entail?

A poutine week. That’s what we’re doing in our little hometown [near Nelson] right now.

FAITH STEFIUK

(Canadian theme, continued)

Like hockey and stuff. An outdoor rink, maybe, and a hockey jersey theme. You could have moose walking around and moose steaks on the grill. It’s crazy because Canadians always come down to the States, but nobody ever goes to Canada.

NATHAN MALOY

I think it should be climate change, to keep with the same theme as the last one here. It’s still very relevant to this day. Maybe the ways other countries are helping slow climate change.

INTERVIEWS BY ELIZA BILLINGHAM 4/26/24, RIVERFRONT PARK

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A Legacy Under Fire

Viewing Spokane’s world’s fair — and the year of 1974 — through the lens of President Richard Nixon’s record on the environment

BY JOHN HAGNEY

It was a shimmering spring day with wisps of cirrus clouds against azure Maxfield Parrish skies. Spokane was basking in its Salish name: Sp’q’n’i, “Children of the Sun.” On May 4, 1974, provincial Spokane joined Seattle and Montreal, cities that hosted world’s fairs.

In “Spokane Motel Blues,” Tom T. Hall laments in 1973: “I don’t know what I’m doing here, I could be someplace else.” With the fair and new “Near Nature” branding, Spokane morphed from blue highway anonymity into a vacation destination. Sure, Spokane remained more Kansas than Oz, yet for seven months in 1974 the fair and the falls glistened like an Emerald City.

President Richard Nixon opened the fair from a floating stage in the Spokane River. “There were boos mixed with the cheers, but generally he was warmly, if not tumultuously received in this conservative, usually Republican city in eastern Washington,” the New York Times reported on May 5, 1974.

From the stage that day, Nixon gave no hint of the cancer metastasizing on his presidency. Responding to a congressional subpoena one week earlier, Nixon released redacted transcripts of audiotapes of his White House conversations of his Committee to Re-Elect the President’s (CREEP) clandestine funding of the 1972 botched burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

Hunter S. Thompson, godfather of gonzo journalism, said of Nixon, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” With apologies to Dickens, it was the weirdest of times. That is, until Donald Trump parlayed his impulse-control challenged, bamboozling reality TV bully into a political cult. After all, in The Selling of the President (1968), Joe McGinniss observed that politics are about marketing; his iconic book jacket imposed Nixon’s face on a pack of cigarettes. To wit, Nixon’s press secretary was a PR guy from Disney.

Thompson on Nixon: “He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.” Trump administration refugees know this m.o. Apostate Republican political consultant Rick Wilson once said, “Richard Nixon is the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.” A tale of two tyrants. Congress again subpoenaed all tapes; Nixon countered that they were protected by executive

President Richard Nixon speaks at Expo’s opening ceremonies. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

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privilege. On July 24 in unanimous decision in Nixon v. U.S. the Supreme Court ruled that the president did not have executive privilege of immunity from congressional subpoenas, thus Nixon was enjoined to relinquish the tapes to Congress. In 1977 Nixon maintained, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” In 2022 citing Nixon, the conservative Supreme Court rejected Trump’s claim that his records were protected by executive privilege from the Jan. 6 Committee’s scrutiny.

Four days after Nixon’s Expo address, hearings for his impeachment commenced; with the high court’s Nixon decision, the House approved articles of impeachment on July 27. Nixon was never impeached. He resigned on Aug. 9, the only president to do so. (Suggested reading: Theodore White’s Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon.)

Other sources of fear and loathing in 1974: intensifying race rancor, the Vietnam fire on the lake and a polarized body politic. While Nixon was extricating U.S. ground troops from Vietnam, he assaulted Cambodia with 2.8 million tons of bombs, a policy manufactured by his Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger. This was Nixon’s “Peace with Honor” strategy. (How did Nixon reconcile his Quaker faith with the violence he unleashed on Indochina? Today as perplexing, why do some Christians venerate an unrepentant, serial sinner with a messiah complex?) And Nixon played the “China card” normalizing U.S.-Sino relations, compelling the Soviet Union to pursue detente with the U.S. thus inducing the Soviets to exhibit at Expo.

Expo’s Iranian exhibition was an ostentatious temple revering the Shah of Iran. In 1953, the CIA instigated a coup to overthrow the first democratically elected government in the Middle East because the newly elected prime minister nationalized foreign-controlled oil in Iran. The shah terrorized Iranian civilians and restored U.S. oil interests. And in response to U.S. support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, OPEC embargoed oil, quadrupling prices, crippling domestic manufacturing and causing supply shortages with mile-long gas lines.

Reacting to surging public discontent and armed with a 1972 landslide election mandate based on a “law and order” platform that resonated with the White, suburban Silent Majority, Nixon exacted vengeance on his enemies — Black “radicals” and anti-war activists. And in the first War on Drugs barrage, Nixon concocted Operation Intercept to interdict marijuana at the Mexican border, spraying crops with the herbicide paraquat (linked to Parkinson’s disease) and even enlisting Elvis as the poster child for the battle.

Nixon is justly vilified for his sins against the republic, yet at Expo he extolled his administration’s enactment of the first clean air and water quality standards “that this magnificent Expo will leave as a legacy.” He was the first president to enact substantive environmental legislation: creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), passing the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, reducing auto emissions, eliminating lead and asbestos from products, targeting polluted sites, protecting wetlands, and eliminating many pesticides. How far we have strayed from moderation and compromise that Republicans like Nixon seem liberal compared to today’s Republican extremists.

The assault on Nixon’s environmental achievements began when Ronald Reagan slashed EPA budgets, reduced enforcement, and opened public lands to mining, oil exploration and grazing. For three decades, regulation-averse congressional Republicans have sought to eliminate the EPA. Today the radically conservative Supreme Court majority has seriously circumscribed environmental regulations. Trump rolled back nearly 100 clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemical policies. Using executive orders, Biden restored many of those policies, but a second Trump administration would undoubtedly reverse Nixon’s — and Expo’s — environmental legacies.

During the reign of President George H.W. Bush, Hunter Thompson despaired: “Where is Nixon now that we need him?” n

John Hagney taught high school and college history for 45 years. He was a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher. His oral history of Gorbachev’s reforms was the first work on the subject and has been translated into six languages.

Rent’s Due

Spokane will require four to six months of advanced notice for rent increases — but many landlords haven’t complied with the city’s other rental rules

BY NATE SANFORD

On Monday, the Spokane City Council passed a consequential — and hotly debated — city ordinance that aims to give tenants additional time to prepare for rent increases.

The law, which passed 5-2, requires landlords to give 180 days notice before rent increases of more than 3% and 120 days notice for increases under 3%. The rule applies to longer-term and month-to-month leases and takes effect June 1.

Washington state requires 60 days notice for rent increases. But City Council member Paul Dillon, who sponsored the new law, says that isn’t nearly enough time for tenants to budget for rent increases and, if necessary, find a new place to live.

“We know the data on evictions in Spokane County, and we know they’re corollary to rent increases,” Dillon says. “If we are talking about ways to prevent homelessness, this is a way to do that, I firmly believe that.”

Many landlords were strongly opposed to the new law — arguing that it will be too difficult to predict what inflation, property taxes and market conditions will look

like six months in the future.

They also argued that a package of tenant protections that the council passed in February 2023 has already squeezed many small local landlords to the breaking point and forced some to sell their properties to corporations that raise rents.

“You have a good asset with the small mom-and-pop landlords that are left. Why drive the rest of them out of business?” Steve Wareham, a member of the Landlord Association of the Inland Northwest, told City Council members last week. “Some of them are on the verge of saying ‘I just need one more reason to sell my properties and go.’”

Other landlords gave similar warnings. But claims about new regulations forcing small landlords to sell are hard to verify — partially because many landlords have yet to comply with a year-old requirement to register all of their rental units with a new city-run rental registry. As part of the registration process, landlords need to obtain an annual $127 business license (which was already required, but not enforced) and pay an annual $15-per-unit fee.

On the night of last year’s rental reforms vote, City

Council member Zack Zappone said the registry would help settle the debate over whether or not regulations actually prompt small landlords to sell.

“A lot of the fear that’s around these ordinances will actually be clear once we have the registry in effect,” Zappone said. “We’ll be able to see if there’s any movement on or off the market.”

The deadline for landlords to register their properties was Jan. 1 this year.

But as of late April, it appears that less than half of all estimated rental units in Spokane have complied.

Mayor Lisa Brown says she’s directed her team to update her on what needs to happen to ensure people comply with the registry law. The recent debate over Dillon’s six-month notice law underscores why the registry is important, she says.

“There are a lot of anecdotes, I’m sure some of them are true,” Brown says. “But I also think that we lack bigger picture information that would be helpful for us to make good policy.”

‘PEOPLE ARE CONFUSED’

Nobody knows exactly how many rental units exist in Spokane — that’s partly why the registry was created in the first place. But in 2023, the Census Bureau estimated that there were 102,102 housing units in the city of Spokane, 57% of which were owner-occupied. That leaves about 43,900 possible rental units in the city.

Steve Corker, the president of the Landlord Association of the Inland Northwest, says he partnered with Avista and the city on a study four years ago that estimated there were 42,000 rental units.

So far, property owners and managers have registered 18,151 units with the city.

Although cities can’t control rent, Dave Blisland speaks at Spokane City Hall in favor of increased notification times. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

For 31 years now at the Inlander, it’s been our mission to share stories about this place we call home. And the improbable one about the time a world’s fair came to town is perhaps the very best. We’d like to dedicate this issue to King Cole and his army of dreamers who left an incredible legacy that, 50 years later, continues to inspire us all.

And to all who read and support the Inlander, thank you!

The McGreg Kids on Expo’s Opening Day — May 4, 1974

From left: Ted (Publisher), Piper (our sister!) and Jer (General Manager)

NEWS | HOUSING

Corker thinks many landlords haven’t yet registered because they don’t know how or aren’t even aware it’s required.

“People are confused about how to do it,” Corker says. “Our membership meetings usually have about 90 people out of our 800 members, and most of the older ones don’t have online accessibility. … Just educating our membership has been a challenge.”

Rollout of the online registry in December was also complicated by minor technical problems. But in a Jan. 2 blog post, the city’s Code Enforcement department said the bugs had been addressed, and encouraged people who missed the deadline to register as soon as possible.

The department also warned that landlords who don’t comply with the registration requirement by “early 2024” could be issued a Class 1 civil infraction, which comes with a $261 fee.

But no infractions have been issued so far, says Brian Walker, a spokesperson for the city.

“This is a new program with an intent of getting contact information from all owners of rental property. Without the registry, we would not have the ability to contact the owners on the registration requirement,” Walker says. “Because of this, we are being lenient this first year.”

Walker says people who haven’t registered their rental properties yet should do so by going to the code enforcement page on the city’s website.

“While we are happy with the registration to this point, we are now working at identifying remaining rentals and notifying the owners or managers,” Walker says.

UP TO CODE

In addition to counting the exact number of units, the registry was also created to help the city be more proactive about regularly inspecting rentals for subpar living conditions — regardless of whether or not a tenant has recently made a complaint.

Terri Anderson, the director of the Spokane office of the Tenants Union of Washington State, says she’s had several tenants call her because they’re concerned about the fact that their units aren’t on the registry. (Tenants can check if their rental is registered by searching aca.spokanepermits.org.)

“We are a city full of rental homes that are not in good condition, but there’s no way the city can get a handle on it until they have a rental registry,” Anderson says.

The money from the business license and registration fee is intended to be used for inspection-related expenses and three new code enforcement staff dedicated to rental inspections. Walker, with the city, says Code Enforcement will be filling those positions this year.

Corker says the Landlord Association was never opposed to the idea of a rental registry itself — just the fact that the City Council attached fees to its registry.

“They’re asking the landlords and the tenants to basically pay for the system,” Corker says.

Anderson thinks it’s a small price to pay. The evictions ordered by landlords can lead to homelessness and put significant financial strain on the city, she says.

“It seems to me that $15 is a pretty good deal for them,” Anderson says.

The registry law says “landlords may charge tenants the actual cost of the business registration fee.” During a meeting earlier this month, Code Enforcement Director Luis Garcia told council members that the $15 registration fee is a cost that’s “assumed to be passed on” to the tenant. Landlords that offer below-market rent can also get the $15 fee waived.

If there are indeed 26,289 unregistered units in Spokane, that means the inspection fund is still waiting on nearly $400,000 in uncollected fees from the $15 registry charge. The amount of uncollected money from the $127 business license fees could add even more to the fund.

FALLING SKIES

Dillon says the lack of compliance with the rental registry program is part of why he wanted to “add some teeth” to the new rent

increase notice requirements that passed Monday.

The law has a “private right to action” clause, which means tenants who believe their landlord violated the notice period can sue in Superior Court. If they win, tenants have the right to terminate their lease, and the ability to recoup legal costs.

Dillon says the new law was inspired by state House Bill 2114, a sweeping rent stabilization bill that failed to pass this year.

In addition to increasing the notice period to 180 days statewide for rent increases of more than 3%, the HB 2114 would have prohibited landlords from raising tenants’ rent by more than 7% per year and restricted late fees to no more than 1.5% of monthly rent.

Dillon, who testified in favor of the bill, thinks it would have had a better shot if it was only focused on the 180-day notice period.

“Everyone was very focused on the rent stabilization component, and that’s why the bill died,” Dillon says. “It didn’t die because of the notification period.”

State law prohibits cities from passing rent control laws, but cities are allowed to increase the required notice period. Ten Washington cities, including Seattle and Tacoma, have passed laws that go beyond the 60-day statewide requirement.

“We’re not the first city to do this,” Dillon says. “The sky is not going to fall.”

Last week, Liz Vandenberg, the executive director of Spokane’s Building Owners and Managers Association, told City Council members that the law will decrease the supply of housing units.

“Not all small mom-and-pop landlords know the process, they don’t know how to engage, they don’t know the rules,” Vandenberg said. “And when we continue to do really tough legislation like this, that’s really confusing and tough to understand, that’s when you start losing these units.”

Anderson says she hasn’t seen any evidence to support the idea that regulations force small landlords to sell.

“I’ve heard that for the entire 10 years I’ve been at the Tenants Union,” Anderson says. “We know landlords are also real estate investors, so they sell their property when the price is right.”

On Monday, dozens of landlords and tenants packed the City Council chamber to speak for and against Dillon’s proposed notice law.

Lisa Biggs described receiving a 42% rent increase notice in February this year. She said she sat down on the couch and cried after opening the letter.

Sixty days wasn’t enough time to find a new place, she said. Vacancy rates are low. Paperwork, applications, packing and moving all take time. Moving fees, security deposits, and first and last month rent are too expensive.

“I’m 65 years old. I’m single. I live alone on Social Security. Now I can add rent burden as a descriptor,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs told council members that she’s looking for ways to reduce expenses — perhaps by cutting back on insulin or by taking blood pressure medication every other day instead of daily.

“Maybe I won’t be buying my grandkids birthday presents anymore,” Gibbs said.

Many tenants shared similar stories of life-changing rent increases. Landlords expressed sympathy but argued that Dillon’s proposed law would unintentionally make the problem worse. One landlord told tenants in the audience that they should simply talk to their landlord and ask for leniency if they’re worried about being priced out.

The ordinance eventually passed, with Council members Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle in opposition. They argued that the six-month period could result in landlords budgeting rent increases with the worst-case scenario in mind, and unintentionally harm tenants.

Council President Betsy Wilkerson promised to keep an eye on the rental supply and prices and to reevaluate the law if it doesn’t seem to be working.

“We can get data in a year or two,” Wilkerson said. “[If] you come back with data that says this is not working… I think I’ll still be around then. I will entertain the idea of sponsoring that ordinance to review this and roll it back.” n nates@inlander.com

Underserved: The Importance of Serving All Communities

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

8-10 a.m. | Doors open at 7:30 Davenport Grand Hotel 200 N Washington St., Spokane, WA 99201

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Chris Pilkerton has extensive experience in government, law and compliance. Chris previously served as acting administrator and general counsel of the US Small Business Administration, senior policy advisor at the White House and executive director of the Opportunity Now Initiative.

Ja’Ron Smith is a policy expert specializing in advocacy, legislating and policy strategy and negotiation. He’s served as the deputy assistant to the US President for domestic policy and as deputy director of the White House Office of American Innovation.

Through a collaborative effort with business owners, leaders, and community members, Hello for Good strives to create fullspectrum solutions that address addiction recovery, housing, education, job training, and employment to create real and lasting change.

Gamifying ADHD

How

a former Spokanite’s app is turning ADHD

self-care and productivity into a whimsical fantasy adventure

BY COLTON RASANEN

When Ryan Arneson was diagnosed with ADHD four years ago, he was inundated with a world of self-help books claiming they could assist him in his day-today life. However, after a while, Arneson noticed he was just ruminating on his diagnosis, not taking tangible steps toward treatment.

So, he jumped into the virtual world of selfhelp and productivity apps to find something that might work for him. He was looking for a tool that would gamify his daily productivity and self-care needs. In other words, he wanted a self-care tool that featured reward-based incentives similar to those of a video or board game.

But again, nothing seemed to help. Some apps didn’t include that gamified element he was looking for, while those that did weren’t engaging enough to keep his attention.

One of the app’s most impactful features for people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder are the AI-generated breakdowns for each task, Arneson says.

For example, when you select “do the dishes” it breaks the chore down into seven separate subtasks, starting with “Rinse the dishes before placing them in the sink” and “Wash dishes with soap and water.” It ends with “Put dishes away” and “Wipe down the sink.”

However, the app isn’t able to break down some more complicated tasks. When you input “Write a news article about the app ModernSam,” it prompts you to simplify the task. But you can create a task list yourself.

“It came to a point where I realized that no apps worked for me,” Arneson says. “I just got so frustrated that there were no apps that gamify selfcare in the way I was looking for.”

So, the Spokane-raised web designer, who now lives near the Tri-Cities, set out to create an app that would actually help him and hopefully others, too. Thus, ModernSam was birthed into the virtual world at the end of 2023.

Based upon the world of fantasy that Arneson has always been drawn to, his app takes users through a fantastical story about three fae sisters in the world of Centrum. Players complete quests — individually chosen productivity tasks, such as doing the laundry or brushing their teeth — as they progress through the story.

“I didn’t want just a self-care app,” he explains. “I wanted a balanced approach of helping people trying to reach their goals.”

The app then rewards each user for completing their quests by allowing them to fight monsters (think gremlins, goblins and ghosts) and collect their corresponding cards.

As it is now, Arneson says ModernSam is still in the early stages of development. For instance, while users can collect these virtual playing cards, there’s no way to use them to battle with other monsters yet.

“The hardest thing is just being patient with the process, because I know [players] want these updates right now,” he says. “There are moments that I think I’m crazy for taking this on, but I have never regretted it for an instant.”

Arneson anticipates that the app’s next update will occur sometime in May.

Creating ModernSam hasn’t been an easy job. Arneson has had to rely on the generosity of people who were invested in the idea of creating an app to help those with ADHD be productive.

During its inception, he raised nearly $30,000 from a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. Other than those funds, he’s on the line for the rest of the app’s costs, since it’s free to download. An optional premium membership that costs players about $4 per month — or $36 for an annual plan — removes ads and allows unlimited use of the AI task breakdown feature.

“We don’t have the budget from investors to advertise the app or hire additional help,” he says. “I have to eat the cost of things like advertising right now.”

He also found key help in a talented Florida-based app developer, Justin Martin. Arneson is responsible for all the ideas, while Martin makes them come to fruition in the app.

They were also helped by Spokane-based artist Kenneth Alquin, who’s creating the app’s artwork, and a handful of others who voiced characters and came up with social media strategies.

Arneson says he has talked to therapists to validate that his ideas will help folks living with ADHD, but he doesn’t make any claims that the app can serve as an actual treatment.

“A lot of it is really based on the psychology of gamification, and finding what self-care techniques work for you” he says. The app also includes other themes like cognitive behavioral therapy.

Those diagnosed with ADHD often struggle to complete basic tasks because they have trouble maintaining focus.

While an app that gamifies self-care can certainly help people with ADHD, it’s not considered the most effective treatment, says Michael McDonell, a professor in Washington State University’s College of Medicine, who is also trained as a child psychologist.

“ADHD is really a biological brain disorder that can be treated with stimulant medication,” McDonell explains. “There’s over 70 years of history to support that as the most effective treatment.”

For people who either don’t want to take stimulants or have had negative side effects in the past, McDonell says that reward-based interventions (like gamification) can be useful as a tool to maintain focus.

While it may not be as effective as medication, McDonell does think that apps like ModernSam can make self-care more accessible.

Because such apps can reach more people, he says it’s important that they actually be based on the science behind ADHD treatment. This also means that people need to understand what they’re looking for in an app, he says, whether that’s actual treatment or just assistance with mental wellness.

Both McDonell and Arneson would classify ModernSam in the mental wellness category.

McDonell says it’s important to give apps like these about a month before deciding if they actually work for you, because changing behaviors takes time.

That won’t be a problem though, Arneson says, because ModernSam rewards the player as they continue to traverse the app’s story and complete quests over time. n

coltonr@inlander.com

Creator Ryan Arneson shows off his ModernSam app.

DRINK LOCAL

Setting the Standard in Retirement Living

In or Out?

Spokane County’s regional 911 dispatch center wants Spokane to either fully commit or provide its own dispatch

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Similar to many on-again, off-again relationships, the board of the Spokane Regional Emergency Communications center has apparently hit a breaking point and wants the city of Spokane to commit: Are you in this relationship, or out of it?

Specifically, the center’s governing board wants to know if Spokane wants to answer all of its own 911 calls as a “primary Public Safety Answering Point” or to become a “member agency” of the regional dispatch center, which was created in 2018 to handle all fire and law enforcement calls in the county.

On April 18, the board voted to send a letter to Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown asking for a “final decision no later than the close of business on May 24.” If the city decides to go its own way, the letter says that the board wants the city to take over its own 911 calls by January 2025.

Between fire, medical, law enforcement and Crime Check (nonemergency crime) calls, incidents in the city account for a little more than half of all 911 calls in the county.

But right now, the city has also only halfway committed.

The center, which city and county staff refer to as SREC (pronounced “shrek”), has taken calls and handled dispatch for the Spokane Fire Department since 2022. That same year, the Spokane Police Department opted to maintain its own cityemployed call takers/dispatchers, who work out of the same building as SREC staff.

$0.95 per month on their phone bills (mobile or landline) to help upgrade and maintain the 911 phone system, as well as pay for staff. That tax brought in about $5.3 million last year.

The third source of funding comes from user fees that SREC charges to all agencies based on their call volume. That brought in about $7.3 million last year.

In June 2019, about a year after SREC was started, the Spokane City Council voted to get out of the joint 911 center and instead use cityemployed dispatchers to answer the city’s fire and police calls.

In 2021, state lawmakers required large counties that levy the 911 sales and use tax to create an interlocal agreement to share that revenue. If they didn’t come to an agreement within a year, the city or county could seek “equitable apportionment” of that revenue, retroactive to the effective date of the 2021 law.

Spokane and Spokane County have not reached an agreement on how to share the money.

Another bill that failed to pass this year would’ve similarly tasked cities and counties with divvying up the 911 excise tax revenue.

“As we look at moves to apportion the [taxes], it creates uncertainty around SREC’s future for planning,” Rohrbach says. “Certainly we’re willing to support apportioning those tax dollars if the city wants to go their own way.”

Currently, SREC is helping fire and police agencies update to the same computer-aided dispatch system, and planning to build a new facility for its operations.

Finalizing those plans requires an answer one way or the other from the city, says Cody Rohrbach, the SREC board chair and fire chief for Spokane County Fire District 3.

“We have some big decisions in front of us as a board,” Rohrbach says. “Whether the city is in or out affects how we approach those decisions for the future.”

SREC was created as a public development authority and was intended to bring all the county’s 911 call takers and dispatchers under one roof.

In 2018 Spokane County voters approved a 0.01% sales and use tax (10 cents per $100 purchase) to help fund the new integrated 911 center and upgrade countywide communications systems. In 2023, that tax brought in $15.7 million, according to the most recent SREC annual report.

It’s estimated that the computer-aided dispatch upgrades will cost $5 million, but it’s still unclear whether Spokane will fully join in that project or contribute to the cost.

Meanwhile, SREC also receives funding from a 911 excise tax — Spokane County residents pay

Meanwhile, SREC has been building up reserves in anticipation of constructing a new facility. Kelly Conley, SREC’s communications manager, says that the operational and building reserve fund has about $24.7 million in it. The center’s ending cash and investments reported to the city for 2023 was about $33.7 million.

Spokane City Council member Michael Cathcart, the previous chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, says that he hasn’t seen the letter, but this conversation has been ongoing for about two years. He notes with frustration that it took months to get SREC staff to come speak with the council about call times and how effective the joint service is.

“I continue to hear frustrations with 911. … At this point in time, I’m not overly impressed with the service,” Cathcart says. “I’d say we should go our own way.”

In an emailed statement, Mayor Brown expressed concerns about the tax revenue currently all going to SREC, which also charges user fees and is keeping millions in reserves.

“My responsibility is to the people across the City of Spokane. Accordingly, I need to ensure the governance is structured properly, the service levels are appropriate, and that dollars are being spent wisely,” Brown says. “My team is evaluating every avenue as we craft our response.” n

samanthaw@inlander.com

Public Safety Supersedes Parks

Spokane mayor says a public safety levy is needed to prevent layoffs. Plus, Washington schools get local food; and City Council will consider another Latah Valley moratorium

BY INLANDER STAFF

In a memo to Spokane City Council members last week, Mayor Lisa Brown warned that the city could be forced to lay off 50 police officers, 30 fire fighters and an additional 70 employees across departments if the massive public safety tax levy she is proposing fails. On Monday, council members voted to put the levy on the August ballot. To boost its chances of passing, they also voted to postpone a parks levy that had originally been scheduled for that month. “It’s frustrating that we need to pass this,” said Council member Kitty Klitzke. “This is a really awful situation, and nobody wants to be here.” If passed, the public safety levy would generate $37.5 million annually at a cost of roughly $377 per year for the median Spokane homeowner. The tax is necessary to ad dress “financial shortcomings left by prior leadership over the last three years,” Brown wrote in the memo. Roughly two-thirds of the money raised would fill budget gaps and maintain existing police and fire service levels. The rest would cover new citywide and neighborhood investments, the mayor’s staff said. Council member Michael Cathcart is sharply opposed. “We actually need to buckle down and look at real cuts,” he said Monday, adding that the proposed levy is vague, lacks accountability and is something that he personally would struggle to afford. (NATE SANFORD)

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Live Lounge Entertainment

Every weekend, you’ll find free, live music at the Nighthawk Lounge with local bands playing past midnight. For a more relaxed vibe earlier in the evening, choose the option of live acoustic music in the Chinook Lounge.

Thanks to a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant program, many of Washing ton’s students are eating fresh, local foods in their school meals. In 2022, the USDA announced that Washington would receive $3.6 million as part of the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. With that funding, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction estimates that nearly 850,000 of Washington’s 1.1 million students benefited from these meals this school year. “When our students get nutritious local foods in their school meals, they’re learning healthy eating habits at the same time they’re learning about the food chain,” state Superintendent Chris Reykdal says in a news release about the program. The USDA grant program distributed funding to many other state education departments, including $2 million to Oregon, $700,000 to Montana and $4.3 million to Arizona.

(COLTON RASANEN)

A PAUSE FOR LATAH

Spokane’s Latah Valley neighborhood has seen an influx of new development in recent years, but infrastructure hasn’t kept up. The neighborhood sits on the outskirts of the city next to highly flammable wooded areas, but it still lacks a permanent fire station. Traffic on U.S. Route 195 has also increased to unsafe levels, according to the state Department of Transportation. After years of sounding the alarm bell, it appears that Latah Valley residents may soon get the new development moratorium they’ve been requesting. On May 6, Spokane City Council member Paul Dillon is planning to propose a one-year moratorium on new development applications in the Latah/Hangman and adjacent Grandview/Thorpe neighborhoods. During the one-year moratorium, the city would perform an assessment of wildfire risks, establish emergency response procedures, plan the construction of a permanent fire station and potentially modify sections of the municipal code to “protect the health and safety of residents.” The idea of a moratorium was widely debated during last year’s elections, and some people have expressed concern about restricting housing supply. “We have a housing crisis,” Council member Michael Cathcart said Monday. “We should not be talking about moratoriums.” Dillon says the moratorium is necessary to address safety issues. (NATE SANFORD)

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Out With a Bang

The Spokane Symphony sends off three percussionists retiring after more than four decades each with the orchestra

BY AZARIA PODPLESKY

At the end of the Spokane Symphony’s current 78th season, three musicians will put away their music stands for the final time, taking a combined 142 years of symphony percussion experience with them.

Paul Raymond, Bryan Bogue and Rick Westrick joined the symphony in 1974, 1975 and 1981, respectively. They don’t recall much about their auditions, though they all remember feeling a bit naive for thinking they even had a chance. They also all have then-principal timpanist Martin Zyskowski to thank for encouraging them to audition.

“I was elated when I got in,” Bogue says. “I called home and said ‘Mom, you’re not going to believe this. I auditioned. I got in the symphony. I’m going to get paid for doing what I love.’”

The three have played under the baton of every Spokane Symphony conductor except for its first, Harold Whelan, who left in 1961.

Bogue, Raymond and Westrick praise conductor Don Thulean’s ability to put on educational programs for kids that gave them the opportunity to tour around the region. Gunther Schuller, they say, loved that the orchestra was open to new ideas and was a master historian, like “one of the old composers come out of the past,” Westrick says.

The trio say music director James Lowe was a perfect match for the symphony when he joined in 2019.

To rebuild the percussion section, the symphony hosted auditions for principal and section percussion and principal timpani on April 15 and 16. Thirty candidates performed for the audition committee, which included Lowe, Bogue, Raymond and Westrick.

Personnel manager and third horn Andrew Angelos monitored the auditions, acting as a voice for those auditioning, who performed behind a screen, and ensuring auditions followed contract rules. Angelos says the auditioners performed marimba solos before moving on to excerpts of the committee’s choosing.

Speaking before the auditions, Lowe says the new percussionists will have big shoes to fill.

SPOKANE SYMPHONY SEASON 79

“What’s really impressive to me about our three musicians that are leaving is their sheer range,” he says. “We don’t just play the big symphonic works — Brahms, Mahler, Beethoven — we play Pops shows as well, so it’s really important that the percussion have an unbelievable range of styles and skills that you can play with and they have to be extremely adaptable. Our crew at the moment did that really spectacularly.”

For details and highlights about the orchestra’s 2024-25 season lineup, visit Inlander.com.

“I hope he stays a long time because it’s just what the orchestra needs,” Westrick says. “We’ve been very, very fortunate to have worked with a lot of great conductors. We’ve taken things from every one of them. It’s been a fascinating journey, and they’ve all been pushing forward and making the group better.”

The four musicians selected through the audition process — timpanist Hamza Able, principal percussionist Leigh Wilson and section percussionists William Howald and Andrew Repsold — will begin performing with the symphony during its next season, starting in fall 2024. More than musicianship and learning each other’s areas of expertise, the new musi-

cians will have to learn how to move with each other onstage, ensuring everyone gets to the right instrument at the right time, the departing trio say.

“It happens remarkably quickly, I think, because you’re working toward a common goal,” Raymond says. “We’ve seen so many people come and go in the orchestra; most of the time they bop in and it fits and they really work.”

sk the trio about standout moments from their time with the symphony, and they’ll ask you how much time you have. Performances with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan (the trio agrees her performance of “Send in the Clowns” was the best they’ve seen), Ray Charles and Lionel Hampton, however, quickly come to mind.

Moving from the Spokane Opera House, now the First Interstate Center for the Arts, to the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox is also a highlight, because while the Opera House provided more space, the acoustics at the Fox allowed them to use the hall

They’ve also appreciated how their time with the symphony has opened the doors for other projects, including a tour with Johnny Mathis (for Bogue), a place performing with Best of Broadway (primarily Raymond) and teaching opportunities (all

There have been countless highs and a few lows. Financial issues have plagued the symphony in the past, and COVID ground everything to a halt. One low, however, still makes the trio laugh.

“When the symphony first bought (the Fox), before they renovated it, they decided we should have a concert or two here,” Raymond says. “It was a kids concert for Halloween. Someone had the bright idea to put us in skeleton suits in blacklight. We never rehearsed it so they didn’t stop to think ‘If you turn the lights off and hit us with blacklight, we can’t see the bars on the marimba or the music.’”

Though the fond memories far outweigh any sour ones, the trio say the time is right to step away from the symphony. Bogue thought about making the 2022-23 season his last, until Raymond convinced him to stay for another year so Raymond could end his tenure at an even 50 years. Westrick, hitting full retirement age this year, also decided this would be his last season.

“We grew up with this orchestra,” Bogue says. “Our frontal lobes were not completely developed when we got into this.”

“The funny thing is we were the youngest section in the orchestra at one point,” Raymond adds. “Now we’re the oldest.”

On the symphony’s end, Lowe calls losing the percussion section bittersweet.

“They are such a fantastic group of musicians, and they’ve played together for such a long time,” he says. “There is an instinct and a camaraderie between the three of them that I’m really going to miss.”

The trio’s final Masterworks concert is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Expo ’74. Raymond’s time with the symphony will truly come full circle then, as the two concerts feature pieces he performed in his very first season.

They’ll all miss the relationships they’ve formed with other musicians, agreeing it’s been a privilege to perform with them. The opportunity to play — and experience — such major classical works onstage is going to be another big loss.

But looking ahead to retirement, the trio are excited about not having to check the symphony schedule when planning time with family. They all want to travel, with Raymond also looking forward to watching live sports and Westrick preparing to complete several home projects.

Ultimately, they’re optimistic about the new percussion section and hope the musicians love and cherish their time with the symphony as much as they did.

“We’ve had the greatest life,” Westrick says. “We played the best music with the greatest musicians in the greatest hall, and we’re good friends and really, it doesn’t get a whole lot better.” n

Spokane Symphony Masterworks 9: Expo ’74 • Sat, May 11 at 7:30 pm and Sun, May 12 at 3 pm • $19-$68 • The Fox Theater • 1001 W. Riverside Ave. • spokanesymphony.org

The Reel Deal

A decade after its founding, Spokane Women on the Fly continues to educate and empower women to enjoy the sport of fly-fishing

BY JACLYN BRANDT

The nature of Eastern Washington and North Idaho is one of the top reasons many live in the Inland Northwest. Countless recreation groups and clubs take advantage of that beauty to create likeminded communities, like Spokane Women on the Fly.

The women-focused fly-fishing group was founded a decade ago this spring by Heather Hodson, a nurse at Sacred Heart. While learning to fly-fish, Hodson (who’s still somewhat involved with the group) “realized that she wanted to connect with other women in the area to go fly-fishing for that connection and camaraderie, and then for safety reasons,” says current member Lindy Orozco.

“So she started a Facebook group, and slowly people

began to find it,” she adds.

Orozco also serves as chapter vice president of Spokane Falls Trout Unlimited, a conservation nonprofit working to preserve rivers where native trout and salmon swim. Spokane Women on the Fly has been the diversity initiative of the local Trout Unlimited chapter since 2015.

Women on the Fly continued to grow, and despite a stall during the pandemic, membership is again at an all-time high. Women turn to its Facebook group to meet up with

fellow female anglers to organize outings all around the region.

Spokane Women on the Fly also hosts monthly education and fly-fishing events, plus community fishing trips. In April alone, the group hosted casting practice at a couple parks, a fly tying seminar at Lumberbeard Brewing, and Fly Fishing 101, a class for women who want to get into fly-fishing but don’t know where to start.

All of the nearly 1,000 members of Women on the Fly’s Facebook group have unique stories about how and why they found fly-fishing.

“My dad fly-fished for years and years and years, and then after he passed, I really wanted to get involved with fly-fishing as well,” says member Jeannette Procunier. “So I found the group on Facebook. I went to [an event] and I just had a really basic intro, and I just fell in love with it from there.”

Orozco, meanwhile, had been fly-fishing for five or six years when she found the group.

SPOKANE WOMEN ON THE FLY

spokanefallstu.org/swotf

Facebook: facebook.com/groups/ spokanewomenonthefly

Instagram: @spokanewomenonthefly

“I did not know that other women even fly-fish,” she says, recalling the first Women on the Fly event she showed up to. “I was like, ‘Well, I guess I want to go meet total strangers in the woods.’ So I got up at 4 am and I drove to Spokane Valley, and I met the girls, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

Members of Spokane Women On The Fly practice their casting in Kendall Yards.

ERICK DOXEY PHOTOS

Women on the Fly educates all levels of fly-fishers, from beginners to well-seasoned anglers.

Because there’s a long learning curve, “it’s a lifelong pursuit,” Orozco says. “Even if you’ve been fishing for 20 years, your new techniques are evolving, and you’re always learning and improving.”

Women who join the group may have different passions and careers, but fishing is what brings them together. And although they organize group fishing trips, Women on the Fly’s main focus is education, whether it’s how to cast or how to tie a fly, and anything in between.

“Our goal is really to empower them to do things on their own to become independent anglers,” Orozco says. “In our Facebook group, we also post a lot of resources like, what gear do you need as a beginner, and where can you find good deals that don’t cost an arm and a leg.”

Women on the Fly has built a community that’s helped women of all ages try something new, as well as teaching them that it doesn’t always have to be scary to venture outside your comfort zone.

“The idea to be a beginner when you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s is very scary,” says member Elizabeth Simpson, also Spokane Falls Trout Unlimited’s diversity chair.

“We have had people say, ‘Well, I never attended because I was afraid that I was going to hold everyone back, and then when I finally showed up, I realized you’re really fun and it was not as bad as I thought.’ We are trying to impress upon people to take that leap, and I can’t do it for you. I’m here. I’m going to catch you, and we’re all going to catch you.”

In addition to its typical education-focused events, Women on the Fly also hosts an annual fishing event every June on the north fork of the Coeur d’Alene River called Summer Suds. Partners, kids, and dogs are all welcome. The weekend also includes mentoring opportunities for new fly-fishers to welcome them into the group.

Women on the Fly’s members are passionate about empowering others to find their community, to learn how to fly-fish on their own, and teaching the next generation of fly-fishers. It’s up to each member what they want to get out of it.

“It goes back to empowering women in a sport that is traditionally male, and it goes back to creating that independence, whether you’re 25, or whether you’re 65,” Simpson says. “We have similarities, we have similar intensities, we have similar drives and visions of how we want our lives to be. We meet outside, we text each other, we hang on each other’s shoulders when life is falling apart, we cheer each other up, and we celebrate each other’s wins. They have become my family.” n

Women on the Fly offers camraderie and fly fishing education.

RUNNING TOWN

A Gonzaga track athlete reflects on Bloomsday and Spokane’s reputation as a great place for runners

BY LUCY KLEBECK

I’ve spent a fair amount of time running around Spokane. This spring, I’m finishing up my fifth year running cross country and track at Gonzaga University. In collegiate running there’s never really an “off” season — we train pretty much every day, 365 days a year. This means I’ve gotten to know the city pretty well on foot. Through the easy runs, hard workouts and races around Spokane, I’ve come to regard it as a great place for distance running, just as plenty of resident runners long have. Here’s why.

COMMUNITY

One of the best things about running is getting to do it with other people. I’m lucky because my teammates are built-in running buddies, although it wouldn’t be hard to find a running group if I didn’t have them. There are numerous run clubs in the area including the Bloomsday Road Runners Club, Spokane Valley Running Club, the all-women Spokane Swifts Running Team and many others. I’ve seen these groups out for practice and competing at the region’s biggest road races such as the famous Bloomsday and new Boulevard Race. As a Bloomsday supporter myself, I’ve experienced firsthand that palpable energy of the community as we battle Doomsday Hill together and race by the courthouse on the way to the finish.

TRAILS

If there’s one place I’ve run the most during my Gonzaga career, it’s the Centennial Trail, the 64-mile trail stretching from Nine Mile Falls to Coeur d’Alene. The majority of the mostly flat paved trail parallels the Spokane River, offering impressive views that might just take your breath away — if the running hasn’t already. Eventually, the Centennial Trail will connect with the Children of the Sun Trail paralleling the North Spokane Corridor; it currently goes from the Little Spokane River to Hillyard. The lack of traffic interruptions allows for long, continuous runs while admiring the city’s different neighborhoods.

NATURE

Drive 10 minutes in any direction from downtown Spokane and you have access to nature, or to what I refer to as “country roads.” Essentially long stretches of road or trail with few cars surrounded by fields, trees, cliffs or brush. Many of these routes are unpaved, providing a soft surface of gravel or dirt for longer runs. Personal

favorites include the James T. Slavin Conservation Area, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge and Fish Lake Trail.

FACILITIES

In December 2021 the new downtown multisport venue, The Podium, opened, featuring a 200-meter, six-lane hydraulically banked track. The Podium hosts a series of indoor track meets in winter, including the 2022 USATF Indoor Championships, which brought some of the best athletes in the nation to Spokane. In terms of cross country, a Spokane Valley cross course complex is set to be completed in August 2025. A project of the City of Spokane Valley and Spokane Sports commission, the course will sit on a 46-acre site along the north side of the Spokane River off of Flora Road. In addition to a running course, the facility is set to have a clubhouse, restrooms and expansive parking, making it a world-class facility capable of hosting high-level events such as NCAA cross-country meets.

BLOOMSDAY 2024

It’s not too late to register for the 48th running of Bloomsday, on Sunday, May 5! Late registration is $50, and can be done online at bloomsdayrun.org or in person at the Bloomsday Trade Show at the Spokane Convention Center on Fri, May 3 (11 am-7 pm) or Sat, May 4 (9 am-4 pm).

LEGENDS

Pat Tyson, Don Kardong, Gerry Lindgren, Mead High School, North Central High School and Ferris High School are a few of the names synonymous with distance running in Spokane. A 2022 report on Washington state high school cross country history regards the Mead and North Central programs as the two greatest boy’s cross-country programs in the state, with Ferris as the fifth. Tyson, a former University of Oregon teammate of Steve Prefontaine, coached Mead to 12 state championships during his 20-year stint there, and is now Gonzaga’s head men’s cross country and track coach. The former Olympic marathoner Kardong famously founded Bloomsday in 1977, creating an ongoing legacy of distance racing in Spokane. Lindgren, a Rogers High School graduate and WSU runner, set 57 American records, landing him in numerous halls of fame, including WSU, USA Track & Field, and Washington Sports. Clearly, Spokane is a place for distance-running success. n

Bloomsday No. 48 returns Sunday, May 5. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

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The Spokane Story

In 1974, Spokane stuck the landing on one of the most audacious urban renewal schemes in American history

The story of Expo ’74 is packed with dramatic chapters, narrative rabbit holes, heroes like the guy who went by “King,” odd icons like the Garbage Goat and gifts that keep on giving like the U.S. Pavilion and Spokane Opera House. It’s so sprawling, it can feel more like a dream than actual history. We’ve collected a bunch of those tales here as we mark 50 years since the biggest thing Spokane ever did.

Before you jump in, consider a little context. The unvarnished truth is that in the 1960s Spokane was at a crossroads. The early years of the settlement saw spectacular growth, with the population nearly tripling between 1900 and 1910. Eventually, however, Spokane started to stagnate. By 1970, 11,000 fewer people lived in Spokane than in 1960. It was a civic gut check, with profound, existential questions confronting citizens. Could Spokane keep up with the Portlands and Seattles of the world? Would downtown become a hollow shell of its once-lively self? Would all the children have to move somewhere else?

Spokane’s civic brain trust, driven more or less by panic, had to do something. What’s special about our city and its downtown, they started wondering, that could secure its future? Nobody had a great answer.

City leaders started asking experts for advice; then they hired King Cole to be their guide. But there were more heroes, including businessmen like Jim Cowles, John Hieber, Rod Lindsay, Phil Stanton, Luke Williams and many others who made miracles happen (while holding full-time jobs); elected officials like U.S. senators Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson, future Speaker of the House Tom Foley along with mayors past (Neal Fosseen), present (David Rodgers) and future (Jim Chase, Vicki McNeill, Jack Geraghty) also got behind celebrating and protecting the Spokane River Falls, the sacred place where local tribes going back thousands of years gathered.

The moon shot that was Expo ’74 is a masterclass in civic inspiration and activation.

Read on and you’ll see a direct line between those crazy Expo dreamers and the quality of life we enjoy today. Of course the need to tend to a better future didn’t end in 1974 — that responsibility lands on every generation’s doorstep. So when we meet our own difficult crossroads, let’s learn from their example: be bold, use our imagination, pitch in and meet the moment.

— TED S. McGREGOR JR.

ON THE COVER

The beautiful watercolor of the Expo ’74 fairgrounds you see on the front cover of this commemorative edition is by Spokane artist KEITH OKA (1916-2006). A Japanese-American who was interned during World War II at Camp Minidoka near Pocatello, Idaho, Oka settled in Spokane after his release and began his career in art and advertising. One of his friends — and a fellow prisoner — was Ed Tsutakawa, who would go on to become one of Spokane’s leading citizens. Tsutakawa told the Inlander in 2001 that he only decided to settle in Spokane after attending Oka’s wedding here. Tsutakawa pushed hard to have his own dream project open just in time for the world’s fair. And Manito Park’s Nishinomiya Tsutakawa Japanese Garden opened to the public in May of 1974. You’ll see more of Oka’s work throughout these pages, including on the bottom of this page, courtesy of the Spokane Public Library’s Northwest Room. Special thanks to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture; their Expo Collection is on display throughout these pages, including the image below of the fairgrounds at night.

Some things from 1974 have aged better than others.

Leisure suits? Not so much. Riverfront Park? Now we’re talkin’. Congratulations, Spokane. You’ve never looked better. stcu.org | Here for good.TM

DARE TO DREAM

King Cole: Tenacious‘ASoul’

The Expo mastermind’s work to renew Spokane’s urban core took him all over the world; the city wouldn’t be the same without King Cole’s vision

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Those who’ve heard of King Cole likely know that he and his family moved to Spokane in the mid1960s to help with business-led efforts to reinvigorate the city’s downtown. Cole, after all, was an urban planner who’d worked to revitalize the waterfront in San Leandro near Oakland in the Bay Area, and the business community in Spokane wanted his expertise to help fix up Spokane’s own riverfront.

Cole was brought on board after Spokane voters

rejected two bond pitches in 1962 that would have built a new City Hall and paid for upgrades in downtown’s polluted and run-down industrial areas. Later on, he was key in suggesting the city host a World’s Fair Exposition.

Cole knew that Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair had brought futuristic buildings (such as the Space Needle), new ideas and plenty of investment into the largest city in the state. He dared to believe that Spokane, which was coming up on its centennial and only had about 180,000

residents at the time, could pull off something similar.

But interestingly, those planning years weren’t when Cole first fell in love with Spokane.

In the early 1940s, during World War II, Cole was trained at the Farragut Naval Training Station — now Farragut State Park — on Lake Pend Oreille. While on leave, he went to a USO dance in Spokane and met a girl who took him on the trolley up to her parents’ home on the South Hill, says Nancy Cole, one of Cole’s eight children.

Friends in high places: King Cole (at the billboard), future Speaker of the House Tom Foley (lower right), Mayor David Rodgers and powerful U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson (lower left).

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTOS

King and Jan Cole

The family of King Cole will be the honorary grand marshals of the 2024 Lilac Parade at 7:30 pm, Saturday, May 18, in downtown Spokane. Fittingly, the theme of this year’s Lilac Festival is “Dare to Dream.”

“It was snowing by Manito Park, and he thought, ‘This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, I’m going to come back and live here,’” Nancy says.

She notes that, luckily for her and her siblings, things didn’t work out with that girl, and their dad later met their mom, Jan, who became his biggest supporter.

Mary Cole, another of the Cole daughters who still lives in Spokane, says that while her dad was traveling to pitch urban renewal ideas and ensure Spokane could host Expo ’74, Jan held things together, raising the kids and helping him stay organized, even when he was on the other side of the world.

“She kept him going,” Mary says. “He couldn’t find anything. He’d be in Europe and he’d call my mom and say, ‘Jan, where did you put my such-and-such?’”

Nancy agrees, noting that while their dad was an extrovert, traveling for weeks at a time to promote Spokane and the fair, their mom was an introvert. She didn’t like to dance in front of other people, but that didn’t stop her from hosting many lively dinner parties once Expo was underway.

“What I saw her do was connect people,” Nancy says. “She’d always go for the person who had no one talking to them, find out something about them, and connect them with somebody else.”

One of the parties that Mary remembers best was during opening weekend, after a symphony performance conducted by Zubin Mehta of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. Among the entourage that ended up at the Cole family home for a “midnight breakfast” were Mehta and actor Danny Kaye, who’d starred in White Christmas alongside the Spokane-raised Bing Crosby.

Six of the Cole children were still at home by the time of the fair, including Mary, who was 20 years old. She was shy, like their mom, and as the kids were introduced one after the other, she says she was nervous to meet Kaye. But when she told him her name was “just Mary,” the handsome actor replied, “Mary, a common name for an uncommon girl.”

Photos from that night were featured in the 12thever issue of People magazine, which had just launched in March 1974. In the May 20 edition, the magazine included a spread titled “King Cole is a Tenacious Soul.”

The article described Cole as an “indefatigable optimist” and noted that he “lives up to the nursery rhyme,” though “being a merry soul wasn’t… enough to get the fair underway.” That took determination and “four rough years” of planning.

THE FALLS AT THE HEART OF IT ALL

As local historian Bill Youngs would later write in The Fair and the Falls, Cole knew that Spokane Falls was one of the city’s most undercelebrated assets, and something that could bring people back to engage with the city’s core. Youngs interviewed Cole on numerous occasions in the early 1990s while working on the book.

Getting people to the core would require removing old railroad infrastructure, industrial sites and more. Youngs writes that the city started working with the railroads and other property owners to condemn or buy the land along the river in 1969 and 1970.

At the same time, Cole knew it would also take more than just some cleanup to revitalize the city. He pitched building a National Monument near the falls, but that plan didn’t get enough support when Cole and city leaders visited the other Washington. But they did win some influence with some of the supporters who would be key to bringing together the fair, including U.S. Rep. Tom Foley, who later became speaker of the House, and Sen. Warren Magnuson. Cole and business leaders figured a fair in 1974, while ambitious, could also mark the city’s 100th

birthday.

Cole traveled to France repeatedly to ensure that the international committee would approve the fair in Spokane, and elsewhere to get other countries on board.

Nancy and Mary say their dad was a polyglot — in addition to English he spoke Italian, French, Spanish, Latin and a little bit of Russian. As a devout Catholic, he’d studied to become a priest in his late teen years, which the women say likely helped with his skills in the Romantic languages.

At one point in the early ’70s, before the fair, he and Jan were invited to visit the Shah and queen of Iran, Mary says. Iran was one of many countries to participate in Expo, during a time when the U.S. was closely allied with the monarch. (The Iran hostage situation wouldn’t happen until 1979.)

One of the things that stood out about Cole’s personality was his ability to keep track of the names on a seemingly endless list of people who worked to pull Expo together. Not only could he remember the name of every single person he saw working at the fair, but he could ask specific questions about their wives and kids, Mary says.

“He would treat the maintenance worker like he would a celebrity,” she says. “He was gregarious, thoughtful and had a lot of passion and perseverance.”

LASTING LEGACY

When the time finally came for the first day of the fair, which hosted events from May to November, the 52-year-old Cole was like a giddy little kid, Mary says.

“He got about four hours of sleep, we all did,” she says. “That morning of the opening it was just gorgeous, beautiful.”

While organizers hoped they’d simply break even by the time the fair opened, it was ultimately wildly successful, with more than 5 million visitors making their way to Spokane.

Though Cole was something of a local celebrity during that time and spoke often at events throughout the fair — something Nancy says she got to admire on many occasions as a Lilac Princess that year — he never wanted to take quick credit for all the work that was done, Mary says.

“He was very, very adamant that others were part of it as well,” she says. “He didn’t want to be the main guy, but he had to be.”

It was a magical time to be a part of all of that, Mary adds: “You just don’t know what an impact it would make until you look at things after the fact.”

Cole was a naturalist, and spiritual, and he was interested in making sure his children and grandchildren could live in a world free from a lot of the toxic things that were out there, Mary says. Not only did the preparation for the fair transform the area around those beautiful falls and along the Spokane River, but it left Riverfront Park as a clean and striking way to interact with the heart of the city.

While Jan died in 2017, King passed in 2010. At King Cole’s funeral, one speaker drew a comparison to It’s a Wonderful Life, asking, “What would Spokane be like if King wasn’t here?”

“That kind of blew us all away,” Mary says. “That’s what everybody wants. They want to be able to leave this world and have some sort of a lasting legacy. … [My dad] had the smarts, he just knew what to do, and how to get it done, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

NATIONS, STATES AND PROVINCES EXHIBITING AT EXPO ’74

THE WORLD — AND THE REGION — SET UP SHOP FOR THE SEASON

Australia

Canada

Federal Republic of Germany

Iran

Japan

Republic of China

Republic of Korea

Republic of the Philippines

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

United States of America

Alberta

British Columbia

Idaho

Montana

Nevada

Oregon

Washington

OPENING DAY: MAY 4, 1974

A crowd equalling half the population of Spokane gathered for the big day.

‘A Fantastic Achievement’

On May 4, 1974, the team behind bringing the World’s Fair to Spokane turned the impossible into a triumph

BY BILL YOUNGS

EWU history professor and author of the definitive history of Expo ’74, The Fair and the Falls

Numbers on the Great Northern Clock Tower high above Havermale Island counted down relentlessly to single digits, heralding the approach of Opening Day for Spokane’s Expo ’74. The numbers were unstoppable — they had been recording the passage of days for more than a year.

But for the Expo workers on the ground, the approach of Opening Day on May 4, 1974, was a time of frantic activity — and persistent anxiety. Spokane was about to become the smallest city ever to host a World’s Fair — if they could do it!

Perhaps Expo President King Cole described the enormous task of building the Exposition best: “We not only had some impossible tasks, but we had some impossible timetables.”

Line up approval in Washington, D.C., and Olympia? Check. Gain international approval in Paris? Check. Attract foreign and domestic exhibitors? Check. Raise funds in Spokane for the event? No check at first, but eventually, check. Persuade President Richard Nixon to open the Fair. Check. Construct the fairgrounds — that was a real nail-biter in the blur of those last days.

The pressures registered on everyone involved. Expo planner and later-to-be-Mayor Jack Geraghty had nightmares in which the fair never opened — or worse, as he recalled: “I actually had a dream that it opened and there were two or three portable hot-dog stands, and that’s all there was for the people to see!”

Workers on the fairgrounds lived through an actual nightmare — having to lay sod on bare ground through the early morning hours of May 4.

Then Opening Day arrived, and it was a triumph. Eightyfive thousand people flocked to the fairgrounds. On a floating stage in front of the new Washington State Pavilion (aka, the Opera House), dignitaries assembled. Beloved entertainer Danny Kaye read the environmentally themed “Expo Credo.” King Cole, the president of the Fair and its chief visionary, was introduced — the crowd gave him the one standing ovation of the day. President Nixon praised Spokane for its “spirit of individual enterprise.” Then he declared that Expo ’74 was “officially open to all the citizens of the world.”

Hot air balloons rose above the fairgrounds, 1,000 carrier pigeons exploded from cages and flew past the site; hundreds of trout were released into the Spokane River; barges with foreign dignitaries floated downstream and tied up to the stage. Bureau of International Expositions President Max Troendle, in Spokane for Opening Day, took his impressions back to Paris. “This Exposition,” he reported, “is a fantastic achievement.”

He was right — and Opening Day was just the beginning!

Join the City of Spokane as we celebrate the vibrant spirit of Expo ’74 during the Expo 50th Celebration. Led by Kelly Brown and Matt Santangelo, businesses, organizations, and community members have come together to organize an exciting calendar of events, with each event falling into one of the five categories mirroring the original key pillars: the Expo Legacy, Environmental Stewardship, Tribal Culture, Recreation & Sport, and Arts & Culture.

EXPO LEGACY In 1974, Spokane broke records by becoming the smallest city in history to host the World’s Fair. The spotlight was turned not only to the Northwest, but on the environment, as Expo ’74 was also the first environmentally focused World’s Fair. The World’s Fair changed the trajectory of this place and has allowed it to flourish. Millions visited Spokane and sparked its rise into the catalyst for the region’s sustainable growth.

There is much to learn from Expo ’74 and 50 years on, we see the impacts left on the city. Some physical, like a butterfly or a hungry goat, others you can feel when you walk through a place like Riverfront Park.

As we look into the future, this celebration aims to reignite the nostalgia of this international milestone in Spokane’s history. This event meant many things to different people and celebrating this anniversary allows for a reflection into the past and a showcase of what has changed since. It also invites new generations to carry on the mantle of creating a cleaner and brighter tomorrow and to show how important this event was to this area. The legacy of Expo ’74 is worth celebrating and is a powerful reminder to what this community is capable of.

COMMITTEE CHAIRS: Kerry Lynch, Ben Stuckart

more on The Five Pillars, next page

Expo Merch, 2024-Style

The 1974 World’s Fair was known for its amazing souvenirs, many of which you can still find in homes across the region. The 50th anniversary will be no different, with some of our best local makers offering all kinds of memorabilia; shirts and hoodies from the Great PNW; custom cookies from Breauxdoo; candy bars from Spokandy; Dry Fly Whiskey in a Chris Bovey-designed bottle (available at Dry Fly only); custom wine from Townshend Cellars; coffee from Indaba and Lilac City Coffee; and Expo logo-themed water bottles, pint glasses and stuffed animals. Find them at the Carrousel Gift Shop and at the Official Expo Merchandise Tent during some Expo 50 events.

Small City, Giant Dreams

Welcome to the Expo 50 celebration!

BY SPOKANE MAYOR LISA BROWN

Fifty years ago, Spokane dared to dream big.

The Expo ’74 celebration marked a defining moment in our city’s history, drawing more than 5 million visitors and etching our name as the smallest city to host a World’s Fair.

Now, half a century later, Spokane is again opening its arms to people from both near and far to join us in commemorating the remarkable strides made since that historic celebration.

Spokane has undergone significant transformations since 1974. Our city has seen new infrastructure, economic growth and a renewed focus on sustainability. One of the most notable changes is the revitalization of Riverfront Park, which was the site of Expo ’74 and will once again be a focal point throughout this summer.

The 50th anniversary celebration echoes Expo ’74’s theme of environmental stewardship, while also putting a spotlight on Spokane’s commitment to four additional pillars: Expo legacy, tribal culture, recreation and sport, and arts and culture.

These pillars embody the essence of Spokane’s rich tapestry of values. They are reflective of our commitment to preserving our natural heritage and fostering sustainable practices, honoring the diverse traditions and contributions of tribal communities, and showcasing our pride in the impact of Expo ’74 on our community.

Whether you are here to reminisce or explore for the first time, I hope you will join me in acknowledging how far we have come and looking forward to the possibilities that lie ahead. Spokane extends its warmest welcome to all who come to celebrate. Let the festivities begin!

THANK YOU TO OUR SIGNATURE SPONSORS!

Visitors to the U.S. Pavilion were asked to think differently about the environment. NW MAC PHOTO

Spokane’s Message to the World

Expo ’74 was a bit ahead of its time with a theme of environmental awareness and stewardship. Earth Day had only started in 1970, and, surprising as it might sound today, the idea of the need for nations to limit their consumption was just beginning to enter mainstream thinking. Inside the U.S. Pavilion, the words “The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth” dominated the entrance.

But Expo also presented its credo — a statement of purpose declaring that, along with all the fun, there was a serious message, delivered by a city that had to reclaim its much-abused waterfront to even host the World’s Fair.

Entitled “This We Believe,” it was proclaimed to the 85,000 who came to witness opening day on May 4, 1974. Just before President Richard Nixon officially opened the Fair, beloved entertainer Danny Kaye read our manifesto:

“This we believe: That the universe is a grand design in which man and nature are one.

“That planet earth, a small part of the universe, is the residence of mortal man whose needs and aspirations are limited by the finite resources of planet earth and man’s own finite existence.

“That man is the custodian of his environment, as the environment is the custodian of man.

“That man, in his growing wisdom, will renounce the age-old boast of conquering nature lest nature conquer man.

“That the skies and the seas and the bountiful earth from which man draws his sustenance are the preserves of all mankind, and that in the brotherhood they derive from nature, the nations of the earth will join together in the preservation of the fragile heritage of our planet.

“We believe in the restoration of the reverence of nature, which once filled our own land where the American Indian roamed in respectful concert with his environment.

“We believe that the human spirit itself must set its own limitations to achieve a beauty and order and diversity that will fill the hearts of the children of the world with a new and happier vision of their destiny.

“We believe that from this city of Spokane there goes forth today to the world the message that the time of great environmental awakening is at hand.

“All this, we believe.”

THE FIVE PILLARS

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

Expo ’74 was the first ever environmentally themed World’s Fair. The questions and conversations Expo ’74 popularized — about sustainability and international environmental issues — continue today.

Celebrating the central theme of Expo ’74 allows us the opportunity to reflect on where we have been, while maintaining the goal of being careful stewards of the land we call home into the future. Together, we can continue exploring new ways to ground ourselves in better practices, and new opportunities to protect and care for the land we inhabit.

Spokane sits within a beautiful region, teeming with life. Our nearby lakes, rivers, mountains, forests and fields are both gorgeous and packed with wildlife, each native species vital to the region and its ecosystem. 50 years in the future, the lessons from Expo ’74 still ripple through the community and continue to inspire generations to protect this place we call home.

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Amanda Parrish

Join the Club!

By supporting the free programs throughout the Expo 50 celebration, your membership gives you access to exclusive benefits through July 4, including a commemorative coin and discounts at popular spots like Riverfront Spokane, The MAC and other local shops, restaurants and bars. Also check out Corporate Club ’74. One donation gets 25 individual memberships for your company, each with all the same discounts — and access to a special bonus event! Scan either QR code to learn more about the benefits. Join the celebration today!

THE FIVE PILLARS

TRIBAL CULTURE Spokane, sp’q’n’I in Salish, means “Children of the Sun.” Many aspects of this beautiful land are rooted in Native American history, telling the stories of original inhabitants and new generations crafting their own narratives. It is a responsibility to ensure that these stories can be shared.

As a centerpiece of Spokane, the magnificent Spokane Falls has been a focal point for Expo ’74 and for our downtown urban park, but its history is rooted as a tribal gathering place. The Spokane Tribe of Indians hosted large communal gatherings while chinook salmon ran the river. Their legacy, both past and present, continues to be a vital piece of Spokane’s future.

Each of the five pillars exemplify a piece of Spokane that truly makes this place unique; tribal culture sits as a focal point between them. Aspects of tribal culture are woven within each of the pillars, similar to how the legacy of Native American history is woven into the region. This pillar allows for the continued celebration and appreciation of the tribes in the area.

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Margo Hill

THE FIVE PILLARS

RECREATION & SPORT

The energy and excitement that put Spokane on a world stage in 1974 are very much alive and well in our city. We are active and passionate, pursuing connection, with a healthy dose of friendly competition. Our city continues to make a mark on the global stage with some incredible flagship events that bring the entire city together to compete and recreate multiple times a year. With Expo ’74 as a spark, Spokane has continued to build upon its outdoor events since 1974. Bloomsday was run for the first time, the Centennial Trail was established, and Hoopfest began in the 16 years following the fair. These events are staples of Spokane and have helped bring the community together through activity.

As intrepid explorers and outdoor adventurers, we push beyond the boundaries of what is known. From the court to the campground, the track to the trails, we thrive upon resiliency and dynamism.

And it is not just large-scale events, the effect of outdoor activity on a smaller scale is something equally special. It can be as simple as a stroll through the park. There are spaces here in Spokane for activity, and a community around them that supports each other. This area’s beautiful landscape is the ultimate playground that is enjoyed by thousands every day. Whenever we come together to do big things, this community reminds us all that we live in an amazing place.

COMMITTEE CHAIRS: Ashley Blake, Jennifer Papich

THE FIVE PILLARS

ARTS & CULTURE

Spokane is a place where warmth, pride and kindness collide with ambition, creativity and community. It is these aspects that make Spokane stand out in the greater picture of not just the state, but the country and the world. There is a long history in Spokane of combining creative thinking with ingenuity that unlocks innovation. Spokane is home to artists who craft, weave, write, sculpt, paint, dance, perform, sing, play, cook and more. A fusion of ideas and formats can be found here, and we love it.

Our culture is vibrant, eclectic, expressive and interwoven with neighborly help and communal care. Around every corner in the region is support for not only local creators, but our community members in a way that is uniquely Spokane. The legacy of creativity and innovation that shone at Expo ’74 continues to push us forward into new ways of thinking, being and doing. This celebration allows us an opportunity to come together to appreciate each other’s craft and to showcase, yet again, what Spokane can do when its people converge together. Everyone gets the chance to be supported here and all contribute to the ever-expanding tapestry of Spokane’s history and culture.

COMMITTEE CHAIRS: Karen Boone, Marguerite Di Mauro, Yvonne Montoya Zamora

MARKING 50 YEARS Every week in the Inlander through the end of June, look for these Expo 50 pages, where Bill Youngs will guide you through the improbable story of the 1974 World’s Fair.

EXPO 50 EVENTS

50TH ANNIVERSARY OPENING CELEBRATION

May 4, 2024 | 3 PM - 9 PM | Pavilion at Riverfront Expo ’74 included informational exhibits about the environment, cultural performances and much more, so it’s only fitting that the 50th anniversary celebration is kicked off in the same fashion. Gather under Riverfront Park’s Pavilion and watch live performances from arts, cultural, tribal and community organizations. There will also be speakers, lots of international cuisine to try, and plenty of hands-on activities for attendees of all ages.

SPOKANE INDIANS EXPO NIGHT

May 4 | 5 PM | Avista Stadium Spokane’s favorite baseball team is getting into the Expo ’74 spirit with four nights playing in throwback uniforms. The first, vs. Eugene, marks the anniversary of the fair’s opening day and concludes with fireworks. Commemorative jerseys and hats are available to wear with pride all summer long.

For the full schedule of Expo 50th events, head to Expo50Spokane.com

FOUNDING PARTNERS

Avista

City of Spokane City of Spokane Parks & Recreation

Spokane Partnership Gonzaga University Greater Spokane Inc.

PILLAR SPONSORS

Coeur d’Alene Tribe

Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation

Kalispel Tribe of Indians & Northern Quest Resort and Casino

Spokane Tribe & Spokane Tribe Resort & Casino

EVENT SPONSORS

Amazon

Avista

Empire Health Foundation

Inland Northwest AGC

Innovia Foundation

Integrus Architecture

Itron

Celebrating Yesterday’s Fresh New Environment, Today

Expo ’74’s big environmental legacy continues to inspire conservation of the region’s natural assets

BY LUCY KLEBECK

The “butterfly effect” describes the phenomenon that even small actions can have vast consequences. The effect was first described in 1972 by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered a minuscule alteration could drastically change the results of his weather simulation. He used the metaphor of a butterfly’s gently fluttering wings having the power to spur a distant tornado.

The idea that small things can have lasting impacts is not unfamiliar in Spokane. In 1974, Spokane was the smallest city to host a world’s fair and had a major turnout, with more than 5 million visitors that year.

Yet what would the city be like if Expo ’74, that metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings, never happened?

The obvious answer is that Riverfront Park wouldn’t exist as we know it. A collection of industrial railyards may still be partitioning downtown and preventing people from accessing and enjoying the Spokane River’s roaring heart. Before Expo, the riverfront was also home to a burneddown warehouse, a laundry service and other industrial uses that left its shores and waters polluted with chemicals and debris. All of this was cleaned up before the fair and sparked the first work to address chemical pollution in the river, which continues today.

“We wouldn’t have this central place for the people of Spokane to come build their own personal relationship with the river,” says Amanda Parrish, executive director at The Lands Council, an Inland Northwest environmental nonprofit aimed at preserving and revitalizing forests, waters and wildlife.

Parrish is also the chair of the environmental pillar committee for Expo’s 50th anniversary celebration. Community leaders were selected to help plan events for five pillars of the anniversary event, which tie to the fair’s original themes and also include Expo’s legacy, tribal culture, recreation and sport, and arts and culture.

Parrish says the event’s 50th anniversary, just like its original run, is also a catalyst for environmental teamwork in the region.

“I’ve been working for 15 years in this field here in Spokane, and I do feel like right now there is a level of camaraderie and collaboration in the conservation community that’s the highest I’ve ever seen,” she says.

Many of the environmental issues still facing Spokane a half-century after Expo ’74 — adaptability to climate change, protecting the river and species within it, reducing the amount of food and organic waste going into the region’s waste-to-energy incinerator — involve solutions that are collaboratively driven, which is why working together is so important, Parrish says.

This modern collaboration harkens back to the teamwork that resulted in Expo ’74 being so successful in the first place.

“I think we underestimate ourselves as a community sometimes in Spokane,” says Brian Henning, director of Gonzaga University’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment. “Expo shows that we can do things that are bold and ambitious if we work hard enough at it and work together as a community, and that gives me a lot of hope.”

Henning also speaks of Spokane’s potential to be a national and global leader in environmental efforts. He says local work to eliminate phosphorus from laundry detergents resulted in a voluntary nationwide ban in 2010.

“There’s this saying, where we’re trying to create a movement, not a moment. I think of Expo in that way. There’s some elements that are just a moment, a celebration,” Henning says. “How do we also use it as an opportunity to support and nurture the local movement to do better in our relationship to the environment?”

Expo’s 50th anniversary environmental stewardship pillar is working on just that. Part of the nine-week celebration’s kickoff is the planting of 100 trees each day from May 7 to 11 as a tribute to the now-mature trees in Riverfront Park, first planted

...continued on page 14

In December 1973, Spokane held a massive recycling drive and featured the cans collected in a Christmas tree. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

Dear Expo ‘74,

Doug Toone established Jewelry Design Center in 1977, but the seeds of inspiration were sown in 1974. His journey took a fortunate turn when he received an offer for a booth at your esteemed World’s Fair (Expo ‘74). At that time, Doug was involved in crafting and repairing jewelry for a local trade shop. Armed with his workbench, tools, and a modest amount of silver, he meticulously carved and fashioned pieces from raw silver. Much to his delight, each piece he created sold that day, showcasing not just his exceptional craftsmanship but also his natural talent for building enduring connections with his customers. This realization became the foundation for the establishment of Jewelry Design Center just three years later.

Since then, JDC has evolved from a modest office in the North Town building to our current, awardwinning 17,000 square foot, state-of-the-art facility in Spokane. Additionally, we've expanded to our 6,000 square foot, Columbia gem in the Tri-Cities, and now operate a 6,600 square foot store in Missoula, Montana.

As we remember and celebrate the anniversary of Expo ‘74, we express our gratitude for all you have brought us and taught us. Here's to the next 50 years of success and growth!

With the highest gratitude,

Jewelry Design Center

MILESTONES THIS ALL HAPPENED IN 1974

Erno Rubik invented his famous time-waster, the Rubik’s Cube

A media frenzy erupted when heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped

People magazine debuted; Expo was featured in an early edition

President Richard Nixon resigned just three months after opening Expo

Thanks to a new federal law, American women could get a credit card in their own name — really!

Evel Knievel almost jumped the Snake River in a rocket-powered motorcycle — almost!

Philippe Petit walked a tightrope spanning the Twin Towers in NYC

In Zaire, Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman; KO in the 8th

Dungeons & Dragons was invented; basements were never the same

Skittles were invented; the candy aisle was never the same again

“CELEBRATING YESTERDAY’S FRESH NEW ENVIRONMENT, TODAY,” CONTINUED...

in 1974. The new saplings, tagged as a part of the new “Expo Forest,” will be planted in areas where tree coverage is low as a part of a citywide goal to in crease canopy coverage. The SpoCanopy program, led by The Lands Council and Spokane’s Urban Forestry department, aims for every neighborhood to have at least 40% tree canopy coverage by 2030 and works to increase access to green spaces throughout the city.

Another sustainability-focused local group, Zero Waste Spokane, is working to make the 50th anniversary celebration as environmentally conscious — if not more so — as the original fair. Zero Waste Spokane is helping vendors and visitors to reduce waste during the opening ceremony (and during Bloomsday) by separating waste into bins for recyclable, compostable and burnable materials with the help of trained volunteers known as waste ambassadors.

Spokane Transit Authority is also offering free weekend fares for the duration of the celebration to encourage people to use public transit, with the hope that they’ll continue to ride the bus after experiencing its ease and accessibility.

There are many other environmental events planned for Expo ’74’s 50th commemoration.

On Saturday, June 1, regional environmental organizations are taking over Riverfront Park’s Vendor Village to present about regional conservation efforts. Groups for land preservation, trail building, public health, community outreach, endangered species and more will share how to get involved with their missions.

A legislative summit, free and open to the public, is also slated for June 21. The goal is to foster conversation between elected officials and community members and hopefully develop legislation that can go to Olympia in 2025. Organizers hope they’ll be more effective than similar discussions

hosted during the original fair. (Keep up with all events at Expo50Spokane.com.)

“In Expo ’74 there were nice speeches and discussions, but in terms of launching novel, creative legislation, not so much,” says Henning, adding that the event will be a “launching pad to do expanded environmental and climate work.”

The 50th celebration serves as a reminder that while humanity still has a long journey ahead to make positive, lasting environmental change, we’ve also come a long way from using the Spokane River as a municipal dumping ground as recently as six decades ago.

While only one of the fair’s five soaring butterfly sculptures remains today, overlooking Riverfront Park’s northern entrance with its lilac wings frozen mid-flutter, it continues to symbolize everything Expo ’74 accomplished and, with a barely perceptible sway in the wind, everything that is still to come.

Embracing the Theme

The slogan for Expo ’74 was “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh Environment.” It’s perhaps now hard to read without cringing a bit, viewed from the vantage of half-a-century. But that idealism did permeate much of the planning and execution of the fair. And the fair’s legacy, while imperfect, produced significant ecological progress.

Concern about the environment was certainly brewing long before Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, inspired by the massive 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara. In Spokane, the most obvious environmental blight was the state of the Spokane River, its islands and riverbanks.

So how bad was it? In his book The Fair and the Falls, Bill Youngs shares the firsthand account related by Spokanite Mike Green, who fished in the river in the 1950s. “It’s hard to believe that a city could have treated a river as badly as Spokane did that stream,” Green says. “I mean, it was an open sewer. There’s no other way to describe it… The willows along the bank would be festooned with all sorts of unmentionables.’ He went on to say that when he fished, he would have to stop and clear the human hair that clumped onto his fishing line. There was certainly room for

improvement.

Even when choosing Expo ’74’s official theme “Preserve the Environment,” organizers acknowledged that although they hoped for significant progress, they wouldn’t be able to achieve all their goals in the years leading up to the fair. “But the theme of a world’s fair dedicated to ecology added urgency to ecological discussions,” Youngs writes. “A broad-based consensus for change had emerged; it involved Spokane citizens, Expo board members and government officials, all of whom agreed that a city hosting a fair on the environment should set a good example in ecological matters.”

In a report conducted after the fair, the city of Spokane was judged as falling short in actually “depolluting” the Spokane River’s water; outlying areas, however, were found to have improved their water treatment systems, spurred by the emphasis of Expo ’74. The fair’s theme also spurred conversations among business and government stakeholders on how to improve. In the years since, often prompted by federal goals, major efforts involving all levels of government have prioritized cleaning up the river.

There were more tangible efforts that showed off the city’s heightened environmental awareness. Promoting the new concept

of recycling, Spokane’s “environmental Christmas tree,” composed of 40,000 recovered beverage cans collected by Spokane students, was dedicated in December 1973.

An environmental task force composed of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls planned for 10,000 people to fan out for a citywide litter cleanup before the fair. “Spokanites also removed several hundred abandoned vehicles from public places,” Youngs notes.

But the biggest improvement came from the removal of mills, railroad trestles, roads, parking lots and an industrial laundry that had obscured the natural beauty of the Spokane River.

On opening day, with 85,000 gathered in the reclaimed fairgrounds, actor Danny Kaye read the Expo credo, emphasizing the hope that “man, in his growing wisdom will renounce the age-old boast of conquering nature, lest nature conquer man.”

And, as Youngs writes, those words meant something to the hometown members of that crowd: “The Expo credo marked a dramatic change in self-understanding among the citizens of the city beside the falls.”

— ANNE McGREGOR

Many exhibitors showed off new technologies that could propel the world into a greener future. General Motors even shared its “experimental electric-powered car.” Neat idea! MAC PHOTO

MAY 4, 2024-JANUARY 26, 2025

Expo ‘74 Memory Share

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‘The Entertainment Capital of the United States’

In 1974, promoter Mike Kobluk and architect Bruce Walker launched the Spokane Opera House as the centerpiece of the world’s fair

BY TED S. McGREGOR JR.

If you loved live entertainment and you lived in Spokane in 1974, well… Lucky you! Not only did you get to enjoy the brand-new Spokane Opera House — aka, the Washington State Pavilion — but for six months, Spokane was, as Mike Kobluk confidently predicted a few months before the start of the world’s fair, “the entertainment capital of the United States.”

Recently retired from the Chad Mitchell Trio, with hit records and gigs on The Ed Sullivan Show, Kobluk was hired as one of the first dozen employees of the fair to fill the new building with shows. He also booked the Spokane Coliseum.

To start, Kobluk sent handwritten letters to mayors in

cities across America, asking them to lend their entertainers. That’s just how it was done in 1974.

“One day,” he says, “we got a letter back from the mayor of Los Angeles. They wanted to be a part of it — in fact, they wanted to bring the LA Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta. And they wanted to open the fair!”

When word got out about the LA Phil, the engagements started flowing. One letter carried the looping, florid signature of Liberace, who committed to six shows around the Fourth of July. It became a jam-packed showcase of pure 1970s pop culture — the Carpenters, Olga Korbut, the Amazing Kreskin.

A few memories stand out for Kobluk even now. John

Denver, who had been his bandmate in the Trio, came to play at the Coliseum and wanted to get a quick tour of the fair from his old friend. Unfortunately, Denver was at the peak of his popularity. After a quick visit to the USSR Pavilion, a growing mob of fans cut the tour short.

Speaking of the Russians, Kobluk requested the famed Red Army Choir. But they were not allowed to come, as the State Department objected because of the word “Army.”

“The Cold War,” Kobluk says, “you know, it was still underway at the time.”

Another old friend, Harry Belafonte performed two nights; he had championed the Trio’s music in the New

Mike Kobluk booked the first season at the Opera House — and many more.

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ABOVE: Architect Bruce Walker’s name still lives backstage. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO KEITH OKA ART

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York folk music scene years before. The Trio joined him in Selma, Alabama, for the second march for civil rights, where they performed the night before the march.

“That was a very emotional performance,” Kobluk recalls. “So when he came to the fair, it was like a homecoming.”

Bing Crosby even dropped by. While he was not able to schedule a performance, he was in town before it opened and sauntered up on stage to give his expert opinion.

“‘Oh, this is a beautiful place,’” Kobluk recalls Crosby remarking. “Then he sang out a few lines — Too-la-roo-la-rooral. Then he said, ‘Geez, the acoustics are pretty nice on this stage!’”

His lifelong friend and comedic foil in the On The Road movies, Bob Hope, was coming to perform at Expo. Crosby couldn’t resist one more dig.

“He got to asking about Bob Hope’s visit,” Kobluks recalls, “and they told him he was playing the larger Coliseum, not the Opera House, to which Bing answered, ‘Thank heavens, this is much too nice a place for Bob!’”

Kobluk’s reward for such an epic lineup? A full-time job, as somebody was going to have to fill this new building with entertainment after that magical year. He stayed on for nearly three decades, retiring in 2001. In a hallway backstage at what is now the First Interstate Center for the Arts, there’s a plaque that reads: “The House That Mike Kobluk Built.”

The triumph of that summer’s schedule of entertainment is even more surprising when you hear how tentative the whole enterprise really was. As Kobluk puts it: “For a while, it was not certain the Opera House would even get built.”

Once Expo was on, Spokane’s planners beat a path to Olympia to remind legislators of the $10 million that was given to Seattle for their 1962 world’s fair, and, well, fair’s fair. Ultimately, they secured $7.5 million, with $2.9 million funded later to allow the addition of convention space. Another $1 million was raised locally under the leadership of future Mayor Vicki McNeill.

According to historian Bill Youngs, the foremost authority on all things Expo ’74, “it’s the most important architectural residual of the world’s fair.” And it’s hard to argue with that, as it has continued attracting shows like Hamilton, Les Mis and Cats in the years since. In fact, the Best of Broadway series alone has brought in 1,843 performances with 3.3 million seats filled over its 36 years.

Perhaps the biggest break came when local architectural phenom Bruce Walker and his partner John McGough won the contract to build it. As a Spokane kid at the University of Washington, Walker was sad to find out they did not offer a cartooning degree, so he chose architecture. Then he took a break from college to defend democracy in places like Iwo Jima and the Philippines. Upon his return, he finished his degree, then went to Harvard to study under the legendary Walter Gropius. He later designed five buildings on the UW campus, along with Red Square plaza; Walker, who died in 2005, was a founder of the local architectural firm Integrus.

Yes, Walker was a rock star of his profession — but having never designed a theater, he was intimidated. “It’s like designing a kitchen for a cook you don’t know,” he commented.

An early innovation was to make it bigger, going from a planned 1,300 seats to 2,600. Acoustics were another challenge, so they brought in top experts from Los Angeles to consult; the wooden slats you see in the ceiling today are a part of their novel acoustic design.

“The interesting thing about an opera house,” Walker told Bill Youngs for his 1996 book, The Fair and the Falls, “is that you have to tune it. It’s like a musical instrument in the sense that it has a sound to produce.”

The final tests and tweaks, Walker said, were conducted when somebody brought in a bunch of cassette tapes they’d blast out to test the sound from different seats. Somebody loved Neil Diamond, and it was his voice that tuned up the space. The overall result is a timeless structure of concrete and glass — modern and enduring, connecting the Spokane River and the urban core. You can still see Walker and McGough’s names on a beam backstage.

For its opening weekend back in 1974, the Washington State Pavilion welcomed the LA Phil on the evening of opening day — Saturday, May 4. On Friday night, May 3, it was the Spokane Symphony that got to officially christen the space, under the direction of Donald Thulean.

Scaffolding fills what would become the future Opera House stage; no roof yet, as you can see the Parkade in the distance.

LA Phil, Zubin Mehta conducting The Pointer Sisters

Mime Marcel Marceau

Bob Hope

Liberace

Bachman Turner Overdrive coming to Northern Quest, 7/24/24

John Denver

Merle Haggard

Olivia Newton-John Spokane Symphony feat. Ella Fitzgerald, Donald Thulean conducting

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‘A Fascinating, Improbable Shape’

“continuity of life” and emphasize environmental themes such as “live in harmony… maintaining our fresh air” and “finding solutions to our industrial pollution problems.” Since a Möbius strip is never-ending and symbolizes reuse, this seemed to him a perfect fit. Carlson chose white to express the purity of air. Blue stands for the water of lakes and streams. Green represents the unspoiled, natural beauty of growing plants and trees. As soon as he had the idea, he completed the finished logo in a matter of hours. The next day, he submitted it to the design committee. The committee notified Carlson that he had won, and asked him for the art master. Carlson pointed out “the first contest was the freebie, and if they wanted the Möbius strip, they’d have to pay,” says Steven. They did. Steven recalls they paid about $5,000 — he wasn’t exactly sure — but they made it worth his father’s time. Carlson went on to create a flag design for the city [which was in use until 2021], as well as designs for some of Spokane’s most iconic brands. In 1986 he moved to Portland to be closer to his family; he passed away in 2009 at the age of 90. “When I visit Spokane,” Steven says, “I see examples of logos he did half a century ago still in use — not a bad legacy.”

This story was first published in the Inlander on May 1, 2014

BELOW: Lloyd Carslon on the fairgrounds under the iconic logo he designed for Expo ’74. COURTESY OF STEVEN CARLSON

ABOVE: The brand standards he developed to guide future use. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE EXPO COLLECTION

LEFT: One of Riblet’s original Expo gondolas.

ABOVE: Fairgoers could take a break from all the walking and take in some great views on the Sky Float.

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Expo Time Capsules

A photograph of this art piece is part of the MAC’s Expo Collection.

Mystery Medallion

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture has plenty of oddities and mysterious relics in its Expo Collection. One is of a cast medallion that was perhaps entered in the competition to be the commemorative medallion of the world’s fair. If you look closely at the beautiful image of a young family in nature, with wildlife and even a salmon, it has the names “M. Sheets” and “J. Svenson” on it. MILLARD SHEETS AND JOHN EDWARD SVENSON were, in fact, a working art team; both served in World War II and studied at the Scripps colleges in California’s Pomona Valley.

You can see Svenson’s public art sculptures all over Southern California; this image for Expo is evocative of his “Ranchero” wood panel sculpture that still sits at the Millard Sheets Art Center in Los Angeles. Sheets created the “Touchdown Jesus” mural at the University of Notre Dame and the iconic facade of the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki Beach. The medallion that was sold at Expo (and that you can find in some vintage shops) was designed by George Tsutakawa, the beloved Seattle artist and brother of Ed Tsutakawa, who helped bring the Japanese Garden that now bears his name to Spokane. Like the fair, the Japanese Garden opened in May of 1974.

Marching In

BY TED S. McGREGOR JR.

Several religious groups were on hand for Expo ’74, including the Moody Bible Institute and Seventh Day Adventists. But one religion went big: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — aka the Mormons. Sitting on pilings out over the south channel of the Spokane River, THE MORMON PAVILION was built as a replica of the golden tablets the Book of Mormon was said to have been translated from. Volunteers staffed the pavilion throughout the fair, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir even appeared for two shows on July 18-19.

The Mormon Church traces its history in the Inland Northwest to 1947. In 1974, the Spokane Washington Temple had four stakes; today that has quadrupled to 16 spread across Eastern Wash ington, North Idaho and northwestern Montana.

Flying Over the Fair

There were three ways to get a view from above Expo ’74. First, to experience the power of the Spokane Falls you could cross two brand-new suspension bridges over the the wildest parts of the river. Those spans continue to serve as a pedestrian connection — and a bit of a thrill ride during the highest spring runoffs, when you can feel the spray.

Then there were options for getting your feet off the ground. The A&W Sky Float (clever corporate tie-in!) was a double chairlift that moved you across the park and over the south channel of the Spokane River. Another beloved feature was the Skyride — a gondola that took visitors down into the spectacular Spokane River Gorge. Lucky for Spokane, a world leader in the ski lift industry was located right in town. RIBLET TRAMWAY built both the Sky Float and the Skyride attractions.

Riblet was established in 1896 by Byron Riblet, who was jack of all engineering trades. On one project, he helped solve a problem for a silver mine outside of Nelson, B.C., by installing a tram to move ore across rugged terrain. Fast forward four or five decades, and Riblet was building chairlifts out of its Spokane headquarters as fast as they could for the growing sport of skiing. By 2003, there were more than 500 resorts in North America with Riblets. The family history is alive in the Arbor Crest Cliff House, the mansion Byron’s younger brother Royal built that looms high above Spokane Valley. Riblet Tramway closed up for good in 2003.

After the fair closed in November, the Sky Float was quickly dismantled; some of the lift equipment went to Schweitzer, the rest to Vail. After nearly 30 years of service, the Riblet gondolas were replaced in 2003 by a new set of European Doppelmayrs. You can still see some of the old gondolas around town, including in the lobby of No-Li Brewhouse.

EXPO‘74

BE A PART OF HISTORY

Come early on Saturday Night to be a part of a new historical moment. We will open the Fox Theater Time Capsule from 1996, and guests are welcome to bring their own things to put in a brand-new time capsule that will be opened on our 100th anniversary. Then, take part in a commemorative group photo at both our Saturday and Sunday performances that will go into the time capsule.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Exsultate, jubilate, K.165

RICCARDO DRIGO Pas de Deux from Le Corsaire

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36 SATURDAY MAY 11 7:30 PM SUNDAY MAY 12 3:00 PM

“Thank you, Sun. Thank you for your light. Come again tomorrow. Have mercy on us human beings.”

— CHIEF DAN GEORGE IN MAN BELONGS TO THE EARTH

When we gaze at the skeletal Spokane Pavilion these days, we see instantly recognizable local iconography — a city landmark set amid a thriving downtown park that’s truly Expo ’74’s gift that keeps on giving.

When those attending Expo ’74 first saw the towering, covered tent that housed the U.S. Pavilion, most probably had a completely different thought: I’m about to see the biggest movie screen in the world!

Spokane to the ’MAX

Expo ’74’s featured the biggest movie screen on the planet — IMAX

BY SETH SOMMERFELD

See, the U.S. Pavilion’s main attraction — which many cited as the draw of the fair — was a completely novel technological innovation at the time: an IMAX theater.

While Spokane didn’t host IMAX’s debut, it was certainly the massive movie technology’s introduction to many Americans and worldly attendees. IMAX actually debuted at Expo ’70 in Japan, but the 70mm large-screen format was still a rarity. The only other permanent IMAX screens on the planet at the time Spokane hosted its world’s fair were located at Ontario Place in Toronto, the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego and the Circus World theme park in Florida.

But the IMAX screen at Expo ’74? It dwarfed them all.

At the time it was the biggest movie screen in the world — a towering six-story behemoth that was 65 feet tall and 90 feet wide. For comparison, the IMAX screen at the AMC River Park Square 20 is a mere 27 feet high and 53 feet wide.

The screen was BIG

Keeping with Expo ’74’s environmental theme, the film that played on the ginormous screen was Man Belongs to the Earth, a 22-minute experiential nature documentary by Canadian filmmaker and IMAX co-founder Graeme Ferguson. The film combines immersive, sweeping shots

LEFT: Yes, that’s a person standing in front of Expo ’74’s IMAX screen, which was 27 feet high by 53 feet wide.

RIGHT: Every day, one group of 850 filmgoers after another would file into the IMAX; the screen was behind the wall that split the U.S. Pavilion floor.

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of American wonders like the Grand Canyon and whitewater river rafting with critical scenes of the negative impact humankind has had on the land, paired with stirring narration by Oscar-nominated actor Chief Dan George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. (If you’re interested in a taste of the film on a much smaller screen, a low-def transfer of Man Belongs to Earth can be viewed for free on PublicResourceOrg’s YouTube page.)

For those who’ve grown up with IMAX as a given in the pop culture space, it’s hard to emphasize how brain-breaking the immersion of Man Belongs to the Earth was for those Expo patrons — especially the opening sequence. After zooming in on an image of the Earth floating in space, viewers were suddenly soaring above the Grand Canyon via footage shot by a camera attached to the front of a twin-engine Piper Aztec plane.

“When you see that stuff for the first time… my God, you thought you were falling!” recalls Jim Oliver, who worked at the fair as the assistant to the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion. “It did not matter where you sat in the theater — you got the feeling that you were flying. Part of the introductory thing was [a warning] if you’ve got heart issues [or] if you throw up easy.”

In the book Spokane’s Expo ’74: Images of Modern America, world’s fair expert Bill Cotter writes: “The film amazed audiences with its size and clarity… that is so realistic some guests needed airsickness bags.”

Cotter also notes that it wasn’t only the viewers who felt queasy, as the film was a bit of an anomaly for a host country’s centerpiece, in that its environmental message was quite self-critical, writing, “Two major problems it explores are smog and strip-mining; a scene of heavy smog inundating Denver, Colorado, prompted complaints from civic leaders and an apology from the Expo staff.”

The New York Times’ John van der Zee was very critical of what he saw as Expo ’74’s largely hollow and performative environmental messaging, but did credit Man Belongs to the Earth with being blunt about the situation, writing, “The film… is honest enough to include interviews with at least one genuinely angry American, a disgruntled lettuce grower seen plowing under his smog-ruined crop; also, with a young farmer who is skeptical of any meaningful action being taken in behalf of the American environment, ever.”

It’s a message that stuck with those who saw the film — which was thousands upon thousands of people. Multiple screenings occurred every hour throughout the entire duration of the fair in the 850-seat theater.

The power of Chief Dan George’s narration comes up often when talking to those who saw the film at Expo. There was no formal script for the movie, rather an Indigenous staffer spent days with George recording their discussions about the environment and picked out powerful ideas that the actor could recount as the cameras were rolling.

It’s hard not to be moved by his final monologue in the film: “Thank you, Sun. Thank you for your light. Come again tomorrow. Have mercy on us human beings.”

While the centerpiece Expo ’74 screen was torn down after the fair, IMAX’s legacy continued in Spokane. A dedicated IMAX theater was built not far from the original in Riverfront Park, opening in

BIG SCREEN GREAT 1974 FILMS

Man Belongs to the Earth (played at Expo ’74’s IMAX)

The Godfather Part II

Chinatown

The Towering Inferno

Young Frankenstein

Blazing Saddles

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Longest Yard

Anchorman (set in 1974)

1978 and operating until its demolition in 2018. Now only the smaller IMAX screen at River Park Square remains.

Fifty years since its Expo showcase, IMAX is reaching new heights befitting its giant film and screens. It helps that one of cinema’s greatest directors, Christopher Nolan, happens to be an IMAX fanboy. Earlier this year, Oppenheimer became the first movie shot on IMAX to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. IMAX’s Chief Quality Guru David Keighley, who’s been working for IMAX since 1972, emphasizes how crucial Expo ’74’s IMAX presentation was to the company’s future.

“I think it was everything. I think if those world’s fairs hadn’t been happening, I don’t know whether IMAX really would have been able to flourish. It was only because people saw them at the expos. It was instrumental,” says Keighley, adding, “The cameras that shot Man Belongs to Earth — the same format and pretty well the same cameras — are used today by Christopher Nolan.”

And while IMAX’s enduring legacy continues to be a boon for moviegoers, the impact for those who attended and worked at Expo ’74 hints at something more emotionally resonant. As Oliver points out, America was in turmoil at the time, between the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s Watergate scandal (even just three months from his resignation, the POTUS headlined Expo ’74’s opening day ceremonies). Getting to show off a wonder like Man Belongs to the Earth on the world’s biggest screen strangely provided a sense of hope for a brighter future.

“People were a little disconcerted about life in America. But the Expo was America’s best foot forward,” Oliver says. “You had these spectacular things like the IMAX. And you just felt, ‘My God, a lot of people have put in a lot of work, and now I’m here to represent our country to the world.’ It probably sounds corny, but at the time, that’s how we all felt. It was an extreme honor to be at the U.S. Pavilion. It wasn’t a summer job. It was making memories.”

U.S. Pavilion

During the world’s fair, the U.S. PAVILION delivered a plea for the environment. With the Spokane River flowing on either side, the displays challenged civic complacency by showing how much people consumed — and the resulting mountains of waste. This kind of messaging is commonplace today, but this was the early stages of the environmental movement, with Earth Day only having been established in 1970. Behind a massive wall you could watch the IMAX film Man Belongs to the Earth with its message of treading lightly on the planet.

After Expo, a variety of new initiatives kept the party going. A new IMAX theater was built just west of the Pavilion; an ice skating rink was added; and a Disney-level attraction called “The Spokane

UPPER LEFT: The renovated U.S. Pavilion now features a concert venue, an elevated catwalk, open spaces and innovative light blades that make it a central lantern viewable from all over downtown Spokane.

Story” drew tourists and locals alike. But it got more difficult; after a few winters, the Pavilion’s canvas covering started to fail and had to be removed.

By 2013, Riverfront Park — and the Pavilion — seemed to be backsliding. So newly elected Mayor David Condon kicked off plans to ask citizens to fund a major, parkwide renovation. Voters greenlighted $64 million, which paid for, among other improvements, a new Skate Ribbon, a proper home for the Looff Carrousel and an innovative makeover for the U.S. Pavilion. Today the Pavilion functions as a unique greenspace for all to enjoy, but it can also be activated for events, like Hoopfest Center Court and big-name concerts. — TED S. MCGREGOR JR.

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PAGE: The U.S. Pavilion was designed by Seattle’s acclaimed NBBJ architecture firm and built on Havermale Island. The federal government provided $11.5 million, with an assist from then-Congressman Tom Foley and U.S. Sens. Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

Silhouette Man

From a childhood spent at Lakeland Village, Gordon Vales debuted his art at Expo ’74

BY ELIZA BILLINGHAM

Amid hot air balloons, giant metal sculptures, flashy sailboats and a flashing Ferris wheel, a handmade sign with black lettering leaned against a small easel.

“I can tear your silhouette or anything you describe for $1.05,” it read. Then, a sign-off from the artist. “... Gordon.”

The man next to the poster was thin and neatly dressed, with glasses and a soft smile. His name was Gordon Vales, and this was his debut into the professional art world.

Vales was a Black man with intellectual disabilities whose knack for tearing paper earned him a spot at Spokane’s Expo ’74 — and eventually took him all over the world. Known by locals as “the silhouette man,” Vales tore sheets of black paper into simple but accurate copies of faces, animals, superheroes or any idea a customer requested. In a minute or two he could replicate anything he saw or imagined, using only his hands.

Thanks to his initial success at Expo, Vales kept working at Riverfront Park for the rest of the decade, then moved to a park bench in Manito Park. He won an award in Japan for his unique creations and traveled to New York City to showcase his work.

In a time when people with intellectual disabilities didn’t live outside institutions, Vales defied expectations, living in his own apartment, creating his own routines and becoming a recognized figure of the Spokane community. When he died in 2015, Vales was remembered not only as an artist, but as a pioneer for Spokanites with disabilities.

In 1939, Vales was surrendered to Lakeland Village in Medical Lake, an institution for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He was 4 years old. As far as who brought him to Lakeland, “I don’t remember ever seeing them,” Vales said in a 1971 interview with the Spokesman-Review

Vales learned to tear silhouettes at age 6, thanks to a volunteer art teacher at Lakeland Village. Although elementary school teachers said Vales didn’t retain information from semester to semester, others who later saw his artwork claimed he had a photographic memory. He was able to reproduce faces and complex shapes with only a few precise tears of paper.

“I have trouble with words, but I do alright if I take my time,” Vales said in a 1980 documentary directed by local filmmaker Robin DuCrest. “I tear silhouettes by feeling. My hands know what to do.”

When Vales was 20, he was released from Lakeland Village to live with his art teacher, Rhoda Williams, and her family.

“I felt very strongly that if Gordon had an opportunity to develop and use his artistic talent, then he could go a long way,” Williams said in DuCrest’s film.

Williams lived on a farm in Edwall, Washington. The small, conservative community petitioned to not let her family bring a Black man into their home. But the Williamses disregarded the petition, and Vales eventually won over the community by always showing up to Sunday school and tearing silhouettes of the church

kids.

“Gordon arrives at the essence of what you are,” said Fran Polek, a professor at Gonzaga University who was involved in DuCrest’s film and interviewed by the Spokesman-Review in 1980. “He sees you as perhaps who you are instead of how you see yourself.”

After living with the Williamses for a decade, Vales decided to be a vendor at Expo, another huge step of personal growth. He delighted fairgoers every day with profiles of them, their families, favorite animals and superheroes. Expo was an opportunity to earn money and showcase what he could do to a broader audience. He had dreams of going on a cruise and paying for trips with his art.

In 1980, Vales was able to move out of the Williamses’ home and into a solo apartment on Boone Avenue. He paid some of his bills with income from the art he sold at Riverfront Park and the Spokane Interstate Fair. After some aggressive teenagers started bothering Vales at Riverfront Park, he would walk 4 miles from north Spokane to Manito Park every day to do his art next to the Park Bench Cafe.

“I think about good things when I’m walking,” Vales said in the documentary. “The birds and how beautiful the world is.”

Dana Hunter worked at the Park Bench as a teenager in the early 2000s. Her parents owned the popular neighborhood cafe and were affectionately told when they purchased it that Vales came with the cafe, too. They were thrilled.

“The only way to describe him is a gentle soul,” Hunter says. “His work was amazing, and people really enjoyed seeing all the work that he would do. It was perfect every time. I think he just had a knack for seeing things in a different way than most people see it.”

To watch Robin DuCrest’s documentary The Silhouettes of Gordon Vales, ask an archivist at the Inland Northwest Special Collections at Spokane Public Library’s Central location.

Celebrating 50 Years

RIVER PARK SQUARE NORDSTROM EXPO ‘74

Limited-edition River Park Square 50-Year keychain with same-day purchases of $250 or more, while supplies last. Visit the concierge desk for details. MAY 3JULY 4

Special exhibit of archival images and firsthand storytelling by key figures in River Park Square’s history, curated by Katie McCutcheon.

Collaborations and performances with local community organizations including EXPO ’74, Gonzaga Readers Theatre, Spokane United We Stand, and the Filipino American Association of the Inland Empire.

On-site enter-to-win featuring 50 sought-after items from River Park Square merchants!

Community collection effort in support of Project BeautyShare. Donate new or gently used beauty and hygiene items for women and families in need and receive a keepsake River Park Square water bottle decal.

THROUGH THE YEARS

MAY 1

THE FOUNDATION ERA

In the 1970s, River Park Square and Nordstrom opened their doors, setting the foundation just days before Spokane hosted EXPO ’74. The new shopping center was a beacon of modernity, reflecting the optimism and growth spurred by the international exposition.

EXPANSION & CHALLENGE

The 1980s were a time of growth and challenge for River Park Square. The early part of the decade saw the expansion of the shopping center, including new skywalks connecting to major department stores, increasing its allure as a premier shopping destination.

However, the latter part witnessed economic shifts and retail challenges. Despite these hurdles, the shopping center remained a central fixture in Spokane.

REVITALIZATION & REBIRTH

The 1990s heralded a major revitalization for River Park Square, sparked by the renewal of Nordstrom’s lease, JCPenney’s relocation in 1991 and the desire to rejuvenate Downtown Spokane.

On February 12, 1998, Nordstrom resigned its lease, this time for a new location at River Park Square. Construction on Nordstrom and the shopping center as a whole, began in April 1998, culminating in the grand reopening on August 20, 1999, to a crowd of thousands.

NEW MILLENIUM

Entering the new millennium, River Park Square experienced a surge of energy. The successful redevelopment brought a mix of local shops, national brands, and dining establishments, revitalizing the downtown vibe. The 80-foot glass atrium became a beloved gathering place, especially during the holiday season with its spectacular 50’ Christmas tree.

‘15

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

The 2010s saw continued growth and an even deeper connection with the Spokane community. The acquisition and conversion of nearby buildings expanded the shopping center’s footprint, including notable additions like Urban Outfitters.

The shopping center not only enhanced its retail offerings but also strengthened its role as a community gathering place, hosting events and embracing new trends in consumer experience. River Park Square solidified its position as a central landmark in Spokane, fostering a vibrant urban life that attracted both locals and visitors alike.

ADAPT & THRIVE

The 2020s brought unprecedented challenges with the pandemic, yet River Park Square adapted and continued to thrive. The shopping center navigated the complexities of health guidelines while keeping community spirit alive.

As of 2024, River Park Square boasts a diverse range of tenants, catering to various consumer needs and preferences. Nordstrom continues to be the anchor tenant, a testament to its enduring appeal and quality. The shopping center also features an AMC 20 Theatres with IMAX, providing a state-ofthe-art cinematic experience. New tenants and innovative concepts like Indigenous Eats, From Here and The Small Biz Shoppe reflect the shopping center’s ongoing commitment to local entrepreneurship. Other notable tenants include Apple, fashion-forward stores like Free People and Anthropologie, and specialty retailers like the LEGO Store

From Russia with Food

Spokane helped bridge Cold War tensions by welcoming a massive Soviet delegation during Expo ’74 — including chefs

BY NATE SANFORD

Today, Spokane is a hub of Russian and Slavic culture. The city has more than a dozen Russianlanguage churches and several Slavic grocery stores. Russian is the third most-commonly spoken language, behind English and Spanish.

“It’s very common,” says Vinson Eberly, who recently retired after spending years as a Russian translator in Spokane. “You go someplace, you hear someone speaking Russian, and you don’t even bother turning your head anymore.”

That wasn’t always the case.

In the early 1970s, Russian-speaking people were few and far between in Spokane. At the time, Eberly was

20 years old and studying Russian language at Eastern Washington University. Decades of Cold War tensions had created an air of mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union. Like most Americans, he had never actually spoken to a native Russian speaker before.

That all changed in 1974, when the Soviet Union sent a delegation of about 200 people to Spokane to host a massive pavilion in the Expo ’74 World’s Fair. That summer, there were more Soviets working in Spokane than in any other American city.

The USSR was one of the first countries to commit to staging an exhibition at the fair. The country hadn’t participated in an American world’s fair since 1939, but

UPPER RIGHT: The USSR souvenir Expo pin.

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Soviet officials were excited about the Spokane fair’s environmental theme. President Richard Nixon had signed an environmental accord with the Soviet Union a few years earlier as part of a larger move toward Cold War “détente” — or easing of tensions — in the 1970s.

The Soviet Union’s early commitment gave momentum to the organizers of the fair. In The Fair and the Falls, a mammoth history of Expo ’74, historian Bill Youngs writes that the Soviets’ presence in Spokane “was one of the most remarkable features of the environmental world’s fair.

“More than any other exhibitor, foreign or domestic, the Soviet Union had put Expo ’74 on the map,” Youngs writes. “The USSR signed up for the fair early, did not vac-

...continued on next page

UPPER LEFT: The Soviet Pavilion on opening day; the map of USSR was made of aluminum and weighed two-and-a-half tons.

LOWER RIGHT: Visitors to the biggest pavilion at Expo ’74 were greeted by an enormous bust of the founder of communism, Vladimir Lenin.

MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTOS

“FROM

illate about attending, and built one of the largest pavilions ever to grace an American world’s fair.”

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

In the runup to the event, the vice president of the USSR Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter to King Cole, the leader of the fair effort, saying the Soviets’ early decision to commit to Expo gave “priority to the Soviet Union in choosing the location for the USSR section, which might amount to some 30,000 to 35,000 square feet.”

The size of the Soviet pavilion was later doubled — making it by far the largest exhibition at Expo. It featured a 4,500-pound aluminum map of the USSR, artificial trees, dioramas about nuclear physics and forestry, three movie theaters, and a massive towering bust of Vladimir Lenin’s head, which terrified at least one small child.

The Soviet delegation also operated a restaurant that was staffed by a number of Russian chefs brought over from Moscow. It served chicken kiev, beef stroganoff and other Slavic dishes.

Eberly, the Russian language college student, was hired to work in the kitchen as a translator. The regular kitchen helpers were making $1.75 an hour, but because he was working as a translator, Eberly says he made a “whopping” $2.25.

Eberly remembers some Spokanites being apprehensive about the Soviets’ presence. The arms race and Vietnam War were fresh in people’s minds, and many expressed concern about hosting America’s geopolitical adversary.

“They were wary, because this was the unknown,” Eberly says. “We as Americans had been fed that ‘This is our enemy.’”

In The Fair and the Falls, Youngs describes an incident in which a man stuck his head out of a passing pickup truck and yelled, “Why don’t you damn Russians go home?!” at several members of the Soviet delegation walking near the Spokane Club. The Jewish League protested Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration from the USSR by passing out Expo maps that urged people to reflect on the value of free movement as they walked through the fairgrounds.

fireworks he had bought in Montana, which they promptly set off in the hallway.

“I learned a lot of swear words that year,” Eberly says.

Eberly says friends and family would sometimes ask him what the Soviets were really like. He would reply that they are “just like you and me.

“They have family, they have loved ones, they miss their pets,” Eberly says. “It’s not that they’re here to spy on us, it’s not that they’re here to do anything nefarious, they’re just doing their job. It’s a temporary assignment, and they got homesick, too.”

Cole, the “father of Expo,” spoke a little bit of Russian and would have the delegation over to his family home for dinners.

At first, the dinners were very formal, says Mary Cole, one of Cole’s eight children. The Soviets would eat, have a little dessert and then leave. But she says that her parents made the Russians feel welcomed and that they seemed to warm up over time.

Nancy Cole, another of Cole’s daughters, recalls her father taking some Soviets fishing.

“These Russian people that came, they all became good friends,” Nancy Cole says.

The Soviet delegation was almost always accompanied by KGB agents — including during the fishing trip, when Nancy Cole says the agents sat on the shore and watched.

“The KGB agents, they came here with ’em, because they wanted to make sure they weren’t going to defect,” Mary Cole says.

“I learned a lot of swear words that year.”

— VINSON EBERLY

Eberly says the KGB agents were a regular presence in the restaurants. The agents were very concerned about people defecting and seeking asylum in the U.S., he says, and they would often pop in the kitchen unexpectedly while the chefs were working.

“You could see the chefs all kind of stiffen up and get very quiet,” Eberly says.

MODERN CONNECTIONS

The suspicions and cultural differences cut both ways. Some visitors described the Soviets as cold and standoffish.

When executives from Ford Motor Company visited the Soviet Pavilion, they received a lecture from the Soviets about how the American car manufacturer was oppressing its workers. When U.S. bomber planes’ standard flight path from Fairchild Air Force Base took them over the Soviet pavilion, the delegation’s security chief grew suspicious and complained about it to a police captain assigned to the fair.

But over the course of the fair, the Americans and Soviets were largely able to put aside the political tensions and cultural differences and find common ground. Eberly was able to bond with the Soviet chefs working in the kitchen. He recalls one rowdy night when he gave the Soviet chefs

Expo ’74 didn’t end the Cold War. But it did offer citizens of two rival superpowers a rare glimpse into one another’s lives — and shared humanity. The Soviets left town after the world’s fair ended, but that wasn’t the end of Russian culture in Spokane.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a large number of immigrants from former Soviet republics began moving to Spokane — many of them seeking asylum from religious persecution. After graduating with a bachelor’s in Russian language and linguistics, Eberly started working as an interpreter helping the new arrivals navigate the social benefits available. He later worked at Central Valley School District teaching English to Russian-speaking immigrants.

Spokane’s climate is similar to that of Eastern Europe, and after the first wave of immigrants established themselves, others followed, and the city became a hub for Russian-speaking people seeking community.

IRAN BEFORE THE FALL

Along with the Soviets, there was another nation soon to experience major political upheaval that became a big attraction at Expo ’74. Then a staunch ally of the United States, but today a geopolitical foe, Iran brought a contingent to host its lavish pavilion in Spokane.

King Cole, the leader of the Expo effort, and his wife, Jan, were invited to visit the shah and queen in Iran and made the trip to Tehran. After a long tour of their historic sites, they met Queen Farah, a champion of Iranian culture, who wondered why they had not brought their eight children along! Nonetheless, the relationship was cemented, and Iran shared its culture throughout the fair.

In just four short years, however, Iranians rose up against the monarchy; in January 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza and Queen Farah fled Iran for good — along with many of their countrymen and women who were suddenly displaced. Soon the Islamic Republic of Iran was in control; later that year, 53 American hostages were taken by revolutionaries, a saga that dominated American media as they were held for more than a year. Today the Islamic Republic of Iran is among the United States’ most difficult adversaries. Iran’s season in Spokane perhaps remains the high point of the relationship over the past 50 years.

—TED S. McGREGOR JR.

MAKING HISTORY

CONNECTING COMMUNITY AT THE CENTER OF THE CELEBRATION EXPO 74

Developed around the YMCA

“We have churches, we have stores, we have auto body shops, we have people that can help find jobs — it just kind of grew this community,” Eberly says.

Spokane’s Slavic and Russianspeaking community has continued to grow in recent years. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, at least 2,200 Ukrainian refugees have come to Spokane. A number of Russian refugees have also sought asylum in Spokane.

Eberly still has fond memories of Expo and his time with the Soviets. He was vegetarian at the time and recalls the chefs going out of their way to make omelets and other vegetarianfriendly food for him.

“It was a great time, definitely one of the highlights of that part of my life,” Eberly says. “It’s one thing to study a language in a classroom… it’s another thing to take that language actually into a workplace and be able to use that language and be able to communicate.”

Additional reporting by Samantha Wohlfeil

SPORTS

COMPETITIONS AT EXPO ’74

(AT THE COLISEUM AND JOE ALBI STADIUM)

Championship Skaters of the USSR

Championship Gymnastics of the Soviet Union with Olga Korbut

Expo ’74

Rodeo & Wild West Show

Japanese Ancient Martial Arts

Denver Broncos v. New England Patriots

preseason NFL

Soviet National Basketball v. U.S. College All Stars

WSU Cougars v. Kansas Jayhawks football

Seattle Supersonics NBA exhibition

Republic of China (Taiwan)

Acrobatic Spectacular

WSU Cougars v. USC Trojans football

The YMCA made a significant decision in 1957, selecting Havermale Island as the site for their new building. This strategic choice would later intersect with the iconic EXPO '74 grounds.

Today, the YMCA proudly stands as a beacon of community and wellness, embodying a rich connection to Spokane’s vibrant history.

CAUSE CONNECTION COMMUNITY

Docents at the Iranian Pavilion showing off the kind of Persian artifacts visitors could see. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

ABOVE LEFT: Looking at the serene south channel of the Spokane River today, it’s hard to imagine the tangle of railroad and industrial uses that once dominated the scene.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

ABOVE: The tame, elegant Theme Stream is one element of Expo’s landscape design by Thomas Adkison that is still in place today. Also, to better connect visitors to the wildest part of the Spokane River — and the fair’s environmental theme — two pedestrian bridges were built.

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTOS

LOWER LEFT: An even more immersive view of Spokane Falls could be had on a trip down into the gorge on the gondola Skyride, which remains a top attraction at Riverfront Park.

KEITH OKA ART

Spokane River

T he SPOKANE RIVER has been drawing people to its power for millennia. A fishery and gathering place for native tribes, the Spokane Falls were also what attracted James Glover to start a settlement here. Falling water was a key element to any successful Western outpost, as it could power mills and generate electricity.

Early city leaders hired the Olmsted Brothers to advise them on how to create a world-class parks system. In their 1913 report, the legendary landscape architects saw beauty where settlers saw utility, writing that “nothing is so firmly impressed on the mind of the visitor to Spokane … as the great gorge into which the river falls.”

While the report did result in a lot of great parks, when it came to the river, Spokane pretty much ignored the Olmsteds’ advice. In the decades to come, a tangle of railroads and industrial uses grew up unabated along its banks; the river more or less an open sewer. The blight was impossible to ignore.

When the efforts at urban renewal that would turn into a world’s fair started in the 1960s, those old ideas started making sense again. So the overriding goal of the entire Expo effort — the linchpin that created consensus and gave it momentum — was to reveal the Spokane River and its spectacular falls.

— TED S. McGREGOR JR.

The Great Northern Depot (left) and the Union Pacific Rail Depot had the Spokane River hemmed in for decades before they were demolished when the railyards were relocated for Expo. MAC PHOTO

Goat City

Riverfront Park’s famous metal goat has made discarding trash an exciting pastime for five decades now

BY COLTON RASANEN

For half a century now, one corner of Riverfront Park has been slightly cleaner than the rest. This can likely be attributed to the quirky metal billy goat with a vacuum in its mouth feeding a trash bin.

But where did it come from?

Former Inlander staffer Daniel Walters once surmised that the garbage-eating goat was created by ancient Greek gods when the world was born. And while Walters may have had the timeline off by a few millennia, he was on the right track in assuming the goat’s existence had something to do with divine intervention.

That’s because the goat was crafted by Spokane’s welding nun, Sister Paula Mary Turnbull. Originally from Seattle, Turnbull called the Spokane’s Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary convent home for much of her life.

Besides being a valued member of Spokane’s religious community, Turnbull was also a celebrated sculptor. Her works can be found throughout the region, like the sasquatch statue at Spokane Community College or the

sculpture in Browne’s Addition of 19th-century Spokanite Anna Stratton Browne and her daughter.

“I am an artist because I can’t not do art,” Turnbull told the Spokesman-Review in 2002. “It is a gift from God to be developed and shared.”

However, the Garbage Goat remains one of Turnbull’s most famous artworks. It was created in conjunction with Expo ’74, when she was appointed to the event’s Visual Advisory Committee. Since the worldwide event was environmentally themed, Turnbull thought the Garbage Goat would be a fun way to encourage kids to keep the land clear of garbage and teach them a lesson in cleanliness, as noted in local historian Bill Youngs’ book, The Fair and the Falls

“Any child who grew up in Spokane since 1974 probably knows the goat,” Turnbull told the Spokesman-Review in 2007. “When I meet children now, and they learn I was the one who made the goat, well, I suddenly get to be 10 feet tall in their eyes.”

Today, the garbage-sucking sculpture can still be

found in its original spot on the south side of Riverfront Park. Find the rust-colored landmark east of the Looff Carrousel, tucked inside a basalt structure called Goat Grotto.

The Garbage Goat’s mere existence brings unusual joy to the everyday act of discarding trash, but it was initially met with opposition from goat farmers nationwide. Namely because dairy goats don’t actually eat garbage, even though Turnbull clarified that the Garbage Goat is a billy goat.

During Expo’s leadup, Kent Leach, editor of Scottsdale, Arizona’s Dairy Goat Journal, wrote that the garbage goat was “degrading, debasing, and grossly misleading” because dairy goats “are most fastidious in their eating habits.” The goat even drew criticism from a 7-year-old Spokanite who claimed that even he knew that dairy goats didn’t actually eat garbage, according to The Fair and the Falls

Regardless, the sculpture/garbage receptacle has been a stalwart figure in the last 50 years of Spokane’s storied history — and other parts of Washington, too. In 2002, Kennewick added its own sculpture “Billy the Garbage Goat” at the city’s Columbia Park.

Turnbull’s influence, or more so the Garbage Goat’s influence, in the Inland Northwest is pervasive. It’s the namesake of Iron Goat Brewing, which was co-founded in 2012 by Paul Edminster and Greg and Heather Brandt. At the time, they got Turnbull’s blessing for the brewery’s name, Greg Brandt says.

“It might seem like an odd choice, but the goat is an amazing piece of art, and it shows Spokane’s unique nature and appreciation for art,” the brewery’s website says of its namesake.

In 2014, Spokane held a 40th birthday party for the Garbage Goat. At the festivities, it was revealed that the goat had eaten almost 15,000 cubic yards of trash since its installation. All in attendance gleefully sang “Happy Birthday,” and afterward Turnbull fed her creation a piece of cake.

Turnbull died in 2018 at age 97, but her legacy lives on through her art.

While you can’t spot the Garbage Goat from vantage points around the city like the Pavilion or Clock Tower, it continues to serve as a steady reminder of Expo ’74’s focus on protecting our environment for future generations. So pick up that small piece of trash at your feet and go give that brassy billy goat a snack.

Kids have been approaching the Garbage Goat with a mix of fear and delight ever since 1974.

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

Family-owned and operated small business…

…Now in our third generation.

LastingMemories

Many Expo ’74 souvenirs are still easy to find; collectors have White Elephant founder John Conley Sr. to thank for that

BY CHEY SCOTT

For happening in the smallest city to ever host a world’s fair, Spokane’s Expo ’74 sure had a lot of commemorative stuff.

Lapel pins, postcards, pennants, miniature spoons, decorative tea cups and saucers galore. Colorful plastic wallets, commemorative coins, salt and pepper shaker sets, flags, and ashtrays aplenty. Over 900 unique souvenir items were sold at a dozen stands across the fairgrounds, according to world’s fair historian Bill Cotter.

Stop at any local antique or vintage store or hop online to eBay and you, too, can become the proud owner of a ceramic Jim Beam whiskey bottle in the shape of the Great Northern Clock Tower (its contents long gone) along with many other pieces of kitschy Expo ’74-branded merchandise.

While some of the 50-year-old knickknacks are more easily found than others, collectors can thank one Spokane man for making sure plenty of the fair’s souvenirs remain accessible decades later.

John R. Conley Sr., founder of Spokane’s now-closed the White Elephant surplus stores, purchased the whole lot of leftover merchandise — more than 280,000 unsold units in total — for $28,000 in November 1974. There were enough boxes to fill a massive warehouse, plus a semi trailer. Considering the fair’s environmental focus, it’s fitting that none of this bulk ended up in the trash.

For decades after, those who attended the fair and maybe regretted not picking up a memento then, or folks simply seeking a piece of Spokane history for super cheap, the White Elephant’s Expo ’74 memorabilia corner was a reliable and affordable trove. Conley, who died in 2017, kept his prices low, too, with most items marked at a fraction of the original cost.

In her South Hill home, Mary Conley displays some of the Expo ’74 memorabilia her late husband acquired alongside framed portraits of their large family. Behind a mauve velvet sofa in the living room is

an especially rare lacquered wood wall hanging of Expo ’74’s Möbius strip logo by renowned artist John Pitre. This piece and a couple others like it were never sold as fair souvenirs, according to her daughters Maureen Smith and Therese O’Rourk, but the lot John Conley bought also came with some leftovers used for display or promotional purposes.

Mary recently celebrated her 95th birthday and says she’s looking forward to visiting the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s retrospective Expo ’74 exhibit (learn more on page 52 of this Expo section), and the 50th Celebration kickoff at Riverfront Park on May 4.

“It means a lot,” she says, to have helped preserve pieces of Expo’s physical legacy. “I was born and raised in Spokane, and so was my dad. So it all means a great deal that we had a part of it.”

“I know our dad talked about the worry he had after he made that investment, but he never saw it all as stuff,”

Mary Conley with the mounds of memorabilia that has marked her family history since November 1974.

YOUNG KWAK PHOTOS

The official Expo Medallion, featuring the Mobius logo; on the other side is an original design by the late George Tsutakawa, a revered Seattle artist and brother to Spokane’s own Ed Tsutakawa.

THINGS COST IN 1974

The economy was pretty rocky in 1974, with the OPEC oil embargo on, pushing inflation to 11%; unemployment was at 7.2% and rising. Still, prices 50 years ago are a little shocking — but keep in mind the average annual income was about $11,000 per year, with the minimum wage at $2 per hour.

A home: $38,000

A month of rent: $150

A gallon of gas: 53¢ (up from 36¢ in 1972)

A loaf of bread: 28¢

A postage stamp: 10¢ A McDonald’s Big Mac: 65¢ A one-day ticket to Disneyland: $7.30 An Elton John concert ticket: $8.50 A Schwinn Varsity 10-speed bike: $108.95 A Chevy Corvette: $6,000

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“LASTING

MEMORIES,” CONTINUED...

adds O’Rourk, the youngest of the Conley’s 11 children.

“Some of our employees or our siblings would open boxes and be like, ‘Oh, why do we have all this stuff?’ He never saw it as a burden, he always just had so much joy and so much fun selling that stuff, and having it and finding new treasures, because even then you’d open a box and find something that you’ve never seen before,” she continues. “And I know for me, because I was not even 3 during Expo, so all I knew growing up was all this stuff — it was just a part of our DNA.”

The Conleys themselves spent many afternoons exploring the world’s fair as season pass holders.

“I picked up the children after school, and we’d go over there,” Mary says. “Probably every night for the fun of it.”

Although the White Elephant, too, is now a relic of Spokane’s past, the legacy of its Expo stash lives on.

After closing their two stores (on North Division Street and East Sprague Avenue in Spokane Valley) in 2020, the Conleys liquidated the meager remains of their once-massive Expo souvenir haul, passing it on to another local with an appreciation for regional history and kitsch.

Josh Morrisey has been collecting Expo ’74 memorabilia and historical “old Spokane” ephemera for about a decade now. He met the Conleys while working on a project through his job as Spokane Parks & Recre ation’s marketing coordinator to place one of the White Elephant’s mechanical elephant rides inside the Looff Carrousel’s new building.

Many of Morrisey’s Expo artifacts are displayed throughout his cubicle on the sixth floor of City Hall. A prized and hard-to-find piece of the collection is a plastic piggy bank shaped like the Clock Tower. He’s also got a couple of small rectangular pieces of the Pavilion’s origi nal white roof with the Expo logo and “Authentic Piece of the U.S. Pavilion Roof” printed on the front.

“I get surprised all the time how much stuff there is, stuff that’s like, ‘Why did people want that?’ Like a mini rake and shovel set that’s like [6 inches] big,” he says. “Or the hot dog holder. It’s amazing the amount of stuff.”

But Morrisey’s not hoarding all that old White Elephant Expo swag for himself — he’s also a vendor at Boo Radley’s gift shop downtown where he stocks a small “Expo Zone” with glass trinket trays, flags, decals and more.

“If people have been to White Elephant in the last 10 years, they’re probably familiar with it,” he says of the stock he bought from the Conleys. “I’d say it’s more quantity than variety, and some stuff I have thousands of, like the maps and official programs. I have hundreds of ashtrays. I have hundreds of the teacup-and-saucer sets. But I’m always keeping my eye out for stuff, whether it’s on Craigslist or word of mouth or eBay, and I’m always putting one-off stuff in there just to keep it fresh.”

The Conleys didn’t liquidate their entire stash, though. A limited selection of Expo ’74 goods are also still listed for sale via an online White Elephant storefront, whiteelephantstores.com, including that aforementioned Clock Tower-shaped whiskey decanter for $40.

“There’s a lot of people who will say they got the last of it, but in the end no one will ever get the last of it,” says O’Rourk, the youngest Conley daughter. “Dad would always say that to people to make them feel special.”

“I wish dad was here. He’d be 97,” her sister Smith adds. “He would be loving this, and as we were pulling stuff out — too much stuff — we thought, ‘Well, this is what dad would do.’”

This one was popular, seeing how it was full of Jim Beam.

Also hard to find: actual Expo-branded clothing from 1974.

TREEHOUSE

‘River, Do You Remember?’

BY E.J. IANNELLI

Tribes from across the region — and even farther afield — came to Spokane in 1974 to share their culture and turn the page on a dark chapter for the environment

The region’s Native American community came out in force during Expo ’74, resulting in one of the event’s most popular attractions. However, according to Spokane tribal member Margo Hill, their official involvement was largely an “afterthought,” a sentiment that was captured in The Fair and the Falls, Bill Youngs’ historical account of the world’s fair in Spokane. Hill was just 6 years old when Expo ’74 took place. Now interim director of American Indian Studies and associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Eastern Washington University, she recalls the way that the indigenous community viewed the event, the activities they hosted and a few of the less-talked-about aspects of the fair — including some run-ins with nearby loggers.

INLANDER: When the Indigenous community was finally invited to participate, was that offer viewed with skepticism, or was there a sense that this would be an opportunity to increase tribal visibility and authentically share your culture with others?

MARGO HILL: On our part, it was genuine. Once our tribes were involved, we took it really seriously that we could educate our neighbors and return to the city. Originally, you know, from the time I was growing up and even as far back as [the days of] horse and buggy, there was very much a dusk-till-dawn expectation that people of color — Natives — couldn’t be in the city. I can remember being little and going to restaurants and White people staring at us. It was almost like a spectacle to see Brown people in the city. We just weren’t welcome.

So the Spokane Tribe was very, very interested in coming back into the city and not only sharing our culture but doing our ceremonies in our homelands. To be on our riverbanks and to sing our songs and to do our dances and perform our ceremonies — to have that again was really important.

So participating in Expo ’74 was a bit like a reclamation or a homecoming?

Yes, very much so. All the tribes felt that. It was an

opportunity for us to come back into the city and educate non-Indians and share our culture. There were times that the Coeur d’Alene came in and danced. There were Makah that came over from the coast. At the opening ceremonies, there were two Quinault dugout canoes there. And then also Joe Washington and his family came and sang some of the coastal [tribal] songs. We had excellent representation at the world’s fair. And people loved coming to watch the tribal dances and songs and ceremonies. We even had a mock wedding. Gib[son] Eli, one of our medicine man spiritual leaders, did a symbolic wedding between Carol Evans and Mike Seyler. We were one of the most well-attended attractions.

Clearly, many local and regional tribes participated, and you could say there was a shared experience among the Indigenous community. What are some of your personal memories from that time?

For me as a 6-year-old, it was the unity of the local

...continued on page 44

Totem poles brought from coastal tribes greeted visitors to the U.S. Pavilion during Expo.

OF ARTS

CULTURE PHOTO

Expo ’74 was the first World’s Fair to focus on environmental issues. During its 50th anniversary, you can participate in our community conversations discussing how individuals, neighborhoods, and municipalities can take action to prepare for the impacts of the climate crisis. Share your concerns, ask questions, and exchange ideas.

Discussion presented in partnership with the League of Women Voters Spokane Area.

VARIOUS LIBRARIES

May 8–June 27

Find locations, days & times at www.scld.org/expo-74-events

“RIVER, DO YOU REMEMBER?,” CONTINUED...

tribes and a belonging for our people as we joined the circle. My family was very involved. My great-grandmother, Sadie Boyd, told the history. And then my grandmother was interpreting from the Salish language. Of course, my great-grandmother could speak English, but when it came to some historical things, she wanted to speak in her native language and have my grandmother interpret for her. My great grandmother also said that she was very glad that President Nixon visited the opening of Expo. She helped line up the dancers and really helped get folks ready for the war dance and ceremony.

But every day we had our powwow pavilion where we had different aspects of our culture. And we had another grandmother, Etta Adams, who was the whip woman. The family called her “Big Mom,” and she had a stick with a horse tail on the front of it. She made sure that we children didn’t horse around on the dance floor [and] that we weren’t running around or chewing bubble gum.

In a recent update to The Fair and the Falls, you shared the frustrating experience of being stationed right next to the loggers during Expo ’74.

Yeah, unfortunately, somebody thought it was a good idea to put the loggers right next to us. My great-

grandmother or somebody would be telling our history or praying, and they would fire up their chainsaws. And so there was lots of confrontation. We’d have to scream at them [over the noise] to shut it down. I don’t know that they were doing it intentionally, but if you have a tribal elder that’s telling a history or a story, you need to be respectful of that.

A few months back, when Bill Youngs contacted me, I e-mailed him that story. He’s included it in the new foreword to his book. Because there’s a lot of aspects of the fair that people don’t talk about, right?

What are some of those other unspoken aspects?

Well, if you look at social justice issues [around Expo ’74], the other thing is that we wiped out Chinatown. There was a significant Asian population, and we just moved them out to make room for construction projects. So, you know, here they are, trying to maybe redress some of these historical injustices by reaching out to the Indigenous community, even though it was kind of an afterthought, and yet here you have Chinatown [known as Trent Alley] eradicated for Expo.

The environmental theme of Expo ’74 seems like it would tie into Indigenous culture and priorities. Was there excitement around that?

Each of our [Spokane tribal] bands are named in relationship to the river: the Upper, Sntʔtʔúlix , the Middle, Snx me nʔey, and the Lower, Scqesciłni. The Spokane River was Nx Wl Wl tsuten, which is like our way of life. For thousands of years, we had gathered on its banks to fish. A hundred natives would swell to 300. Fifteen thousand pounds of salmon would be drying on the banks of the Spokane River. Our salmon got to the size of 80 pounds. My grandmother would talk about when a salmon would hang from a saddle horn of a horse. It would almost touch the ground.

sewage going right into the water.

So to hear the non-native say, “Oh, it’s going to be an environmentally themed expo, and we’re going to clean up the river,” we were ecstatic to hear that because it had been a long time coming. You know, there’s a famous quote [in The Fair and the Falls] from [Spokane tribal Chief] Alex Sherwood, who said, “River Spirit, you fed our people. You answered our call. I walk your banks and I shout, ‘River, do you remember?’” He was essentially asking the spirit to remember the way things used to be. And so, for Expo ’74 to finally to clean up the city and the riverbanks and stop polluting, that was all really important. And given the timing, with the passage of NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act] and the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, the world’s fair was seen as the culmination of a lot of things.

Fifty years on, issues of environmental and social justice persist, but one area of progress is that the tribal pillar has been integral to the event planning. What are some of the ways that tribes are participating in these anniversary celebrations?

But the hydropower projects had been devastating to our communities. And then we saw this constant contamination. For decades, our tribal people watched the degradation of the Spokane River. We saw the pollution — you know, municipal waste and

On our committee, we have all the different tribes: Spokane, Colville, Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai, but also Blackfeet, Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Gros Ventre. And we’re all working together behind the scenes to make this happen. We have a whole range of events. Warren Seyler, who is a former Spokane tribal chairman, is going to be sharing some of the history. We’ll have traditional songs with a hand drum. There’s spoken word events where we’re going to be having indigenous poetry and native authors. We’re going to be bringing over a theater company from Seattle called Red Eagle Soaring. We’re even going to have a Native American music festival and a fashion show. And what this does is it gives tribal people an opportunity to showcase our talents, which is just super exciting. There’s so much talent in Indian country that you don’t see in Spokane. We want our neighbors to come and learn and really experience tribal culture. It’s a great opportunity for tribal members as well as city residents here in Spokane.

Learn more about all Expo 50 events, which run through July 4, at Expo50Spokane.com

Through the entire run of Expo, the NATIVE AMERICAN’S EARTH exhibit introduced visitors to the regional tribes that have, for millennia, called the lands around the fairgrounds home. But it went way farther than that, as representatives from at least 100 different tribes from all over North America came to meet up and/or perform — even Aztecs from central Mexico made the trip. (Though they got lost and arrived a week late, they quickly became one of the fair’s can’t-miss attractions.)

Located as part of the Folklife Festival, which was affiliated with the Smithsonian, local tribes were tasked with creating the programming. The call went out, and as Expo historian Bill Youngs put it, the tribal exhibits and shows quickly became “the most popular events at the world’s fair.”

Russian gold-medal gymnast Olga Korbut famously stopped by and joined in a tribal dance. Squamish tribal elder Moses Antone of British Columbia came to share the nearly lost art of longhouse construction. Born while Spokane Garry was still alive, Antone recruited his kids, his grandchildren and local Spokane tribal members to create a spiritual centerpiece for Native American’s Earth. The longhouse is visible on the poster promoting the exhibit now in the MAC’s Expo Collection. And if you look a little closer, you’ll see the artist’s name on the poster, too — a man who would go on to become one of the most celebrated local Native American artists: “George Flett, Spokane.”

— TED S. McGREGOR JR.

Turn That Frown Upside Down!

Mention UP WITH PEOPLE and those of a certain era may immediately begin singing the group’s ear-worm of a theme song: “Up, up with people! You meet ’em wherever you go!”

A cast of the squeaky clean and relentlessly cheerful touring group was in residence at Expo ’74 from May to October, sponsored by General Electric. A promotional video, preserved on YouTube, shows the cast dancing and singing its way across the fairgrounds.

The women sashay in hot pink baby doll dresses (complete with suntan pantyhose), while the dudes frolic in maroon polyester pants with matching vests. (To see it for yourself, search YouTube for “Up with People Expo Spokane.”)

Reacting to a show preview in March 1974, Spokane Daily Chronicle writer Harriet J. Connor was impressed. “The show is bright, light and full of plenty of zing and zap.”

Up with People casts went on to perform in 771 cities in all 50 states on their Bicentennial Tour from September 1975 to July 1976. Super Bowl halftime shows have featured Up with People five times. Those appearances were parodied on The Simpsons when, to Homer’s delight, “Hooray for Everything” performs a halftime “salute to the greatest hemisphere on earth: The Western Hemisphere! The dancingest hemisphere of all!”

Nearly 60 years after it was founded, Up with People is still around — and still cheerful — as they state on LinkedIn: “Intentional community, creativity & the arts, and determined optimism are at the heart of UWP. Young people can do incredible things when we act together, get creative and remain unapologetically hopeful.”

— ANNE McGREGOR

The 1970s sensation Up With People took up residence in Spokane for the run of the world’s fair. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTOS

Expo Time Capsules

Expo ’74 brought a lot of great flavors to Spokane. There was a Bavarian bier and brats hall, authentic Russian and Slavic food and a real French restaurant run by an actual native of Tours, France. Located on the Spokane River overlooking the clock tower. Frenchman Pierre Parker’s dad was killed in World War II, and he relocated to California with his mom, who taught him to cook. He ran a restaurant in Laguna Beach and was then somehow bitten by the world’s fair bug.

Dorothy Powers documented his journey in a January 1974 article for the Spokesman-Review: He ran French restaurants at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962; at New York’s in 1964; at Montreal in ’67; and at the HemisFair in San Antonio in 1968. In Spokane, he opened PIERRE’S INTERLUDE. His secret? “Since everything is cooked only with butter, wine and cheese, all dishes are good,” he told Powers.

One night during Expo, as related in The Fair and the Falls, King Cole and his wife, Jan, were walking back from a show, all dressed up, passing Pierre’s Interlude.

“The fairgrounds were closed,” Cole recalled. “It was a beautiful moon that night, warm.” Pierre came out and said, “Come here, I want to give you something.”

He guided them to a table by the water, disappeared for a bit and returned — with two French desserts. “Now just sit…” Parker told the man who had not stopped running, year after year, to transform the very landscape he could now marvel at.

“And relax.”

— TED S. McGREGOR

JR.

Real Idaho miners showed kids how to pan for gold; every now and then someone would find a real nugget.

Living History

Next door to Native American’s Earth (see page 44), visitors could connect with other facets of living Pacific Northwest culture and history. Loosely affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, the FOLKLIFE FESTIVAL was a massive project to track down examples of regional folklife that could be transported to the fair. Manhattanbased art teacher and filmmaker Bob Glatzer took the job to lead the effort. Upon arriving, he immersed himself in the setting, moving into a house on the Spokane River in Peaceful Valley.

“We had about 30 groups in all,” Glatzer told the Inlander in 1999. “Basques from Boise, the Doukhobors [from British Columbia] and a group of Russian Old Believers from Oregon. We were an odd appendage to the world’s fair. Nobody in the Expo Corporation had any idea what we we did or why we were there. All they knew was that we were a great draw. It changed every day, sometimes every hour.”

Glatzer never left Spokane and became a mainstay of the local arts scene until his death in 2010.

— TED S. McGREGOR JR.

The Soundtrack of ’74

In promoting the world’s fair, organizers saw music as a way to entice people to “meet… by

the river” at Expo ’74

subject of love, but ultimately the winning submission focused intently on Spokane’s sense of place.

“Meet Me by the River” by local organist and composer Jean Anthony Greif, a lively marching tune, portrayed the site of the fair as organizers hoped it would be seen with a call to action hard to refuse.

Meet me by the river,

At the International Exposition, Meet me at the Spokane Falls, Expo Seventy-Four!

BY WILL MAUPIN

Music was one of many attractions at Expo ’74, with big-name artists including Gordon Lightfoot, Helen Reddy and Buck Owens, among countless others entertaining visitors throughout its six-month run. While those performers and their work remain popular to this day, the songs written for Expo ’74, and the people behind them, have largely fallen into obscurity.

To help promote the fair — a fair which many outside of the region felt too ambitious for a city of Spokane’s modest size — organizers turned to music to get the word out.

Promotional records were pressed and a contest for an official theme song was launched. Bob Bellows and Dale Miller, who recorded the promotional records, and Jean Anthony Greif, who composed the contest-winning theme song, were some of the musicians behind the sound of Expo ’74.

Their work set the sonic scene for Spokane’s moment on the world’s stage.

RAINBOWS PLAY IN SILVER SPRAY

The contest to find an official theme song for Expo ’74 garnered two-dozen submissions, with entries touching on everything from topics of the day like Vietnam to the timeless

With imagery of rainbows in the spray of the falls under open skies of clean Western air, Greif’s composition tied the locale together with the environmental purpose of Expo ’74. Local high school marching bands and choirs performed the tune during the opening ceremony, just after President Richard Nixon declared the fair “officially open to all the citizens of the world” from the floating dock next to the then-brand-new Opera House.

Born in 1898, Greif grew up around the Inland Northwest, from Walla Walla to Uniontown and Missoula, before heading east to study the organ in Chicago. By the time he settled in Spokane, Greif was an established organist who would play during the silent film era at the Liberty and Fox theaters downtown.

After the silent era, Greif became a composer and publisher of religious music through his Vernacular Hymns Publishing Company on Northwest Boulevard. His 1966 composition, “We are the Light of the World,” became popular in churches around the country and is still sung and covered to this day. Greif died in Spokane in 1981.

THE CITY WHERE YOU CAN

In Santa Fe, they’ll “get nervous and run away,” while around San Francisco Bay they’ll consider it but ultimately “flit away.” In “old St. Lou” you’ll be met with a frown while up in Duluth it’s “more or less considered couth.”

“But you can, yes you can, in Spokane.”

Even though his rhyming of “can” with “Spokane” isn’t exactly clever, it was certainly helpful for visitors unsure of the proper pronunciation.

An ad in the Spokane Chronicle promoted an appearance by the “national recording artist” at the fair, where spectators could hear Bellows perform his two “hits” about Expo ’74, “Stranger at the Fair” and “Yes, You Can in Spokane” and pick up a signed copy of the record.

The songs were pressed onto a souvenir vinyl 45 with a sleeve featuring a portrait of Bellows, an image of the skyline, and a box to write “to” and “from” for those who wanted to spread the word about Expo. Fifty thousand copies were produced, but fewer than 2,000 had sold by fair’s end.

MUSIC HIT SONGS FROM 1974

“The Way We Were” by Barbra Streisand

“When Will I Be Loved” by Linda Ronstadt

“Annie’s Song” by John Denver

“Lady Marmalade” by LaBelle

“Midnight at the Oasis” by Maria Muldaur

“Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede

“Let Me Be There” by Olivia Newton John

“Rock the Boat” by Hues Corporation

“Waterloo” by ABBA

“Can’t Get It Out of My Head” by Electric Light Orchestra

Bob Bellows was born Robert Brusen in Menomonie, Wisconsin, in 1926. A veteran of World War II, he found mild success as a touring vocalist in the decades that followed before having his life transformed by the Baha’i faith in 1970. Bellows continued recording music, including his pair of songs for Expo ’74, after his conversion. He died in 2020 at the age of 93.

TEACHING ABOUT ECOLOGY

While not the official theme song nor as promoted as the Bellows’ record, guitarist Dale Miller’s pair of songs about Expo ’74 captured the environmental impetus behind the fair better than any other.

The $2 souvenir record Dale Sings Songs of the Fair City was packaged in a sleek, modern sleeve in the colors of the fair — green for plants, blue for water and white for air. Its two tracks, in a classic country-western style with acoustic guitar melodies and steel guitar accompaniment, laid out Expo’s promise of “teaching the world about ecology.”

Born in 1935, Miller grew up in Priest River before moving to the nearby town of Clark Fork in his early adult years. It was there that the small record label Alpine pressed his promotional record for Expo. Miller died in 2011 at the age of 75.

In “Expo ’74,” Miller sings of how “Spokane will show the world how we’re clearing up the land.” His music may have faded into relative obscurity — a video on YouTube misidentifies a different song for his Expo record — but his subject matter certainly has not.

That land Miller sang of, now Riverfront Park, remains to this day closer to nature and cleaner than it was during its industrial past life, all thanks to the work of Expo ’74.

Search YouTube for “EXPO 74 Theme Song - by Dale Miller (Spokane World’s Fair 1974).”

LEGACY

is downtown

In 1974, downtown Spokane was transformed forever when a former railyard hosted the World’s Fair, giving rise to the iconic Riverfront Park. This landmark event not only fueled economic growth but also ignited a spirit of unity and dedication to urban preservation.

Fifty years later, the Downtown Spokane Partnership takes pride in carrying forward the enduring legacy of Expo ‘74.

because spokane is downtown

explore downtown at downtownspokane.org

Expo Time Capsules Basket Case

Expo’s Friendly Fossil

“There are not many artifacts of Expo left,” a local man told the Spokesman-Review back in 2014. “We want to make sure they stay around. To me, THE DINOSAUR BONE should be on the list to consider.”

Expo brought in a ton of renowned artists to help create a fresh, new environment around downtown Spokane and the fairgrounds. One was Charles W. Smith, who created a sculpture for the world’s fair that became known as the Dinosaur Bone. Smith was a fine artist and also founded the industrial design program at the University of Washington, where he taught for more than 40 years.

Kids — including me as a 9-year-old — loved to play on the Bone. You could slip down its sides, jump off it — epic kid stuff. But in the years after Expo, some grown-ups got to feeling that it was too dangerous. Some serious injuries were reported. In 2011, it was removed from the playground outside the YMCA (before that building was torn down to create more parkland) and banished to a Parks & Recreation storage yard.

Fast-forward to 2014, and Spokane voted to spend $64 million to renovate Riverfront Park, the public space left behind by the world’s fair effort. I volunteered as the chairman of the Park Board’s Riverfront Park Committee, and I was that local man getting grilled by the Review’s reporter.

A lot of impressive work was done by some of the best in the business to get our park back up to snuff, and one of those firms was the Berger Partnership, which was responsible for the landscape design of the award-winning renovation. Guy Michaelson was the lead landscape architect — and a fan of the Dinosaur Bone. I’m not sure how, but without much fanfare Michaelson managed to free it from captivity. It just appeared near the new Ice Age Floods Playground around the time it opened on the north bank in 2021. As it should be: an original feature of the fairgrounds, back where it belongs.

— TED S. McGREGOR JR.

Just a few days before Expo ’74’s opening ceremonies, another lasting local landmark made its debut when NORDSTROM SPOKANE and RIVER PARK SQUARE shopping mall both opened their doors to the public on May 1, 1974.

One of the items sold at Nordstrom Spokane in those early days was this folk art-inspired wooden basket purse by the popular Caro Nan brand, featuring colorful row house-style buildings with Spokane, Expo and Northwestcentric signage hand painted on it. Decoupage strips of international travel destinations and other collaged paper cutouts on the lid — along with a penny minted in 1973, for good luck and to show the year the basket was created — evoke the allure of travel.

Caro Nan’s sturdy purses were the creative output of two Jackson, Mississippi-based best friends, Carolyn McDaniel and Nancy Steele — the company’s name combines their first names. They became coveted accessories after launching in the mid-1960s. For each city the purses were made for, artists (the company employed women who hand painted the baskets in their homes) customized the building’s storefront signs to evoke a sense of place. Likewise, the name of the store where these region-specific baskets were sold was painted on the inside lid.

This particular Caro Nan purse designed for Spokane and Expo was not only sold at Nordstrom Spokane sometime after its 1974 debut, but it was originally owned by Norma Lindsay, wife of Expo ’74 Chairman Rod Lindsay.

— CHEY SCOTT

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

The Cosmic Jumper

Expo ’74 was the subject of an actual U.S. Postal Service stamp — then just 10¢. Even better, PETER MAX did the artwork. Max was born in Berlin in 1937, but his Jewish family fled the Nazis and settled in Brooklyn. In the years since, he’s done album covers, a mural on a chunk of the Berlin Wall and even painted the hull of a cruise ship. His character “Cosmic Jumper” is the subject of the Expo stamp; The New York Times wrote that, Max’s “DayGlo-inflected posters became wallpaper for the turn on, tune in, drop out generation.”

— TED S. MCGREGOR JR.

Expo ’74’s commemorative stamp got the full 1970s treatment, with day-glo colors and a groovy, cosmic vibe.

A rare 1974 artifact: the Caro Nan Expo purse.

LESLIE DOUGLAS PHOTO

Exhibiting Expo

Along with the MAC’s new exhibit, there are plenty of ways to reminisce about Expo ’74 this summer

EBY MADISON PEARSON

xpo ’74 came and went in just nine months, but it left an enduring legacy on the landscape and history of Spokane. The city skyline boasts two major reminders of Expo: the Clocktower and the Pavilion. Both represent a significant time in regional history, but where did all the other remnants of Expo go after the fair ended?

Beginning on Saturday, May 4, and running through January 2025, museumgoers can explore the world of 1974 Spokane through the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture’s new exhibit, “It Happened Here: Expo ’74 Fifty Years Later,” which features hundreds of items and archival materials that mostly sat in storage for nearly 50 years.

Anna Harbine, the MAC’s Johnston-Fix Curator of Archives and Special Collections, was tasked with going through the museum’s Expo archives starting in 2021 when 50th-anniversary exhibit planning kicked into high gear.

“This project has been a long time coming,” Harbine says. “We applied for grants during COVID so that we could begin to process everything we had.”

She says that after the fair ended, boxes and boxes of employee records, architectural plans and memorabilia were given to the Cheney Cowles Museum (which became the MAC in 2001). Other objects were left behind in the Pavilion until it was remodeled in 2019.

“There are about 300 boxes of archival materials,” Harbine says. “A good amount of that, about 240 boxes, contain corporate records, and another 40 are full of film from KXLY and other sources.”

In addition to “It Happened Here,” the MAC is also showing selections of archival film from Expo ’74 in a side gallery. “Films from the Vault” has been showing since January, but will include newly discovered films in celebration of the 50th anniversary exhibition.

Along with receipts from various corporations and historic photos, the exhibit features a few pieces that Harbine says are particularly special.

1970s Vibes

“There is, of course, hate mail surrounding Nixon speaking at the opening ceremonies,” she says. “There’s also a bowl made by Harold Balazs that looks unlike anything he’s known for — it’s so not his typical style. We found so many amazing connections when going through the archives.”

The 1970s were all about the vibes. Peace, love and great music were all it took to have a good time. Experience a slice of the ’70s at this pop-up speakeasy where guests are invited to imbibe and have an absolutely groovy time. Hosted at Riverfront Park’s newest piece of public art, Stepwell, the unique event will have vibrant lighting, video projection, a dance floor, a host of Spokane DJs and, of course, local wine, beer and specialty cocktails. All proceeds benefit the Spokane Parks Foundation and Riverfront Park to keep the grounds of Expo ’74 looking beautiful, even 50 years later. The speakeasy will only be open for select Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in May, so make advance reservations if you’re looking to boogie on a specific night.

Club ’74 Speakeasy • May 3-19; Fri-Sun from 6-11 pm • 21+; May 19 is all ages • $10; free with a Club ’74 membership • Riverfront Park • 507 N. Howard St. • expo50spokane.com • Reservations: visitspokane.com/ events/club-74-speakeasy/

The exhibit also showcases several friendship quilts made of squares that were each quilted by different people, a project done especially for the fair. There’s also an early model of Sister Paula Mary Turnbull’s Garbage Goat and other remnants that the public has never seen before.

“Our goal with the exhibit is to give a broad overview of Expo for those who may not be as familiar with it,” she says. “But also to showcase hidden threads we found while going through the material, satisfying those who live and breathe Expo ’74.”

It Happened Here: Expo ’74 Fifty Years Later • May 4-Jan. 25, 2025; Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm • $7-$12 • Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture • 2316 W. First Ave. • northwestmuseum.org • 509-456-3931

Inland Northwest Rail Museum Expo ’74

50th Anniversary Celebration

May 2-June 2, Thu-Sun 10 from am-5 pm, Inland Northwest Rail Museum, $14

Expo efforts began with the cooperation of regional railroads that agreed to remove tracks from downtown and donated the land for the fair. Visit the Inland Rail Museum to learn about Spokane’s rich history of railroads in regard to Expo ’74.

Echoes of Expo

May 4-July 7, Riverfront Park

An audio storytelling experience exploring the evolution of Spokane through the lens of Expo ’74. Each episode reveals different personal and historical stories through seven scannable QR codes found on the Wayfinding Signs in Riverfront Park.

Expo ’74 50th Anniversary Opening Celebration

Sat, May 4 from 3-9 pm, Pavilion at Riverfront, free

Beginning May 4, the city kicks off nine weeks of celebration with an opening ceremony where it all started 50 years ago. The event begins at 3 pm with cultural performances on the Pavilion stage, a reading from Spokane’s Poet Laureate Mery Smith, a reprise of 1974’s Mormon Expo Choir and recreational activities. At 6 pm, the opening ceremony begins with a procession featuring representatives from each Expo pillar, and voices from Expo’s past, present and future. Festivities continue with a performance from Kalimba Band and a drone show displaying images celebrating the legacy of Expo ’74.

Expo ’74 Historic Timeline Outdoor Exhibit

May 4-July 4, Pavilion at Riverfront

Presented by the Spokesman-Review, this open-air exhibit shows an expansive timeline of the 1974 World’s Fair from beginning, middle, to end, all underneath the original Expo ’74 U.S. Pavilion.

Searching for Trent Alley: Asian American Footprints in Downtown Spokane

May 4-June 2; Mon-Thu 9 am-7 pm, Fri-Sat 10 am-5 pm, Sun 12-4 pm, Central Library, free

The beautification efforts of Expo ’74 destroyed the last surviving remnants of Trent Alley, once a hub of Spokane’s Asian community. This exhibit showcases areas of downtown that Spokane’s Asian residents called home despite racist laws that limited the development of Asian neighborhoods. A companion exhibit, “We Are Made of Stories,” features contemporary artworks by local youth and residents.

Spokane County Library District Expo ’74 Memorabilia

July 1-31, free

Various Expo memorabilia is displayed at several SCLD branches, and online throughout the month. Learn more at scld.org.

Expo ’74 Historic Walking Tours

May 11 and 25 and June 1, 8, 15 and 22 at 10 am

Step back in time on a two-hour walking tour of Riverfront Park. Guided by local historian Chet Caskey, tours depart from the Visit Spokane Visitor Information Center.

NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

Spokane Royalty

This article was first published in the Inlander on Dec. 30, 2010

How do you say enough in praise of King Cole? More than any other person during the past halfcentury, he made Spokane the place it is today. Our beautiful Riverfront Park, vibrant downtown, exciting sporting events and excellent restaurants — all of these attractions and more grew either directly or indirectly from King Cole’s influence.

When he came to town in 1963, this was a rather dingy city beset by urban blight. But when Cole died a few days ago, on Dec. 19, 2010, Spokane had become the sort of city that could attract one of the premier sporting events in America, the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, twice in four years.

By any measure, Spokane in the 21st century has a lot of mojo for a city its size. But would the city be where it is today if a young urban planner from San Leandro, California, had not accepted a job offer from a group of local citizens in 1963? These boosters’ hearts were in the right place: They wanted to rescue Spokane Falls from decades of exploitation.

At one time, the “conquest” of the falls made sense. To the city’s 19th-century founders, the rapids were there to run sawmills and grist mills and, later on, to generate electricity. The falls area also provided a dandy spot for railroad terminals, parking lots and an industrial laundry. Cole became the catalyst in Spokane for those with a new vision for the city and its falls.

A few years ago, while working on a book about Spokane and Expo ’74, I had the privilege of interviewing Cole many times, reliving with him the story of Spokane’s transformation.

On the role of an urban planner, he told me: “Everybody wants to do something, and everybody gets excited and discouraged and upset, but in the last analysis, at the end of the day, you find out that nothing gets done unless there’s one person who lives and breathes and eats the problem day and night… so you have to hire your worrier.”

Cole was hired to be the “worrier” for Spokane. And worry he did, month after month, year after year. He gave talks to scores of civic groups, traveled to Olympia, and Washington, D.C., and eventually around the world on behalf of Spokane’s renaissance. Those who remembered Cole during the fair-building praised his persistence. “He wouldn’t let it die,” I was told. He led Spokane in building Expo ’74, which made possible the urban renewal sought by him and others. His effectiveness drew on his own passionate commitment

Remembering King Cole — whose fingerprints are all over the successes of 2024 Spokane

BY BILL YOUNGS

to beautifying Spokane. One of his favorite memories was his first view of the downtown without the wall of tracks that had separated the city from its falls. Cole remembered: “The day that I actually drove down, and they weren’t there, I felt like, if nothing happens, if the fair didn’t happen, if I died, whatever happened, what I really wanted to do the most of all was to get rid of those damn tracks!”

My interviews with Cole came about 20 years after Expo ’74. Retired by then, he was philosophical about his work in Spokane. “When I was young,” he said, “I used to love to take bows. I’d work my buns off to get some project going and, in some cases, put in a huge percentage of the energy and creativity, and then no credit — boy it hurt! But when you get older, you find out that what’s important for the future is that the job gets done.”

The urban renewal job in Spokane did get done remarkably well, first with the world’s fair, then the transformation of the fair site into one of the loveliest downtown parks in any American city, and subsequently in the ongoing development of Spokane.

In 1994, on the 20th anniversary of the fair, three mayors of Spokane spoke at an event in his honor. Former mayor David Rodgers said King Cole had been the “stem-winder,” the one essential person in Spokane’s rebirth. Rodgers’s mayoral predecessor, Neal Fosseen struck a personal note: “I don’t know of a finer, more honest, more caring person than King Cole,” he said.

And the then-current mayor, Jack Geraghty, himself an Expo employee, noted

JUST OPENED IN SPOKANE IN 1974

SPOKANE GOT SPIFFED UP FOR EXPO

Nordstrom

The Flour Mill

Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Petts

The Sheraton Hotel (now the DoubleTree)

Washington Trust Bank Tower

River Park Square

Nishinomiya Tsutakawa

Japanese Garden at Manito Park

Old Port Spokane (featuring Pupo’s Restaurant)

man the city had ever known. Geraghty declared there are few charmed moments in the history of a community when the people share a common vision: The era of the world’s fair was one such time for Spokane, and King Cole provided the vision.

During one of our meetings, Cole told me he thought of his life as being like a rock thrown into water. “The water all sloshes back, runs back and forth and bubbles, and makes a bunch of waves, and they get smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller.” As he continued, Cole was whispering. “Pretty soon,” he said, “it’s perfectly calm, like nothing ever happened. That’s what life is like.”

The sentiment is profound. And yet, of course, in King Cole’s case, something — something very big — did happen.

So the next time you see children playing in Riverfront Park, or feel the spray of the falls from one of the footbridges, or ride the carousel, or watch the sun setting over the frame of the U.S. Pavilion — experience, in short, the beauty of Spokane’s downtown heart, think of our own King Cole.

King Cole died at the age of 88 on Dec. 19, 2010. Bill Youngs is the author of The Fair and the Falls, now out in a new, updated 50th anniversary edition.

It was years in the making, but King Cole (left) managed to cut the ribbon on the opening of the 1974 World’s Fair. NORTHWEST MUSEUM OF ARTS AND CULTURE PHOTO

Bill Youngs

The Spokane Region’s Business Development Organization.

Greater Spokane Inc. creates the place where organizations come together to advocate for the region, drive strategic economic growth, and champion a talented workforce. Together we’re greater.

CAMERA READY

CHICAGO • MAMMA MI A! • WICKED • JERSEY BOYS • THE BOOK OF MORMON

SIX • HAMILTON • DISNEY'S ALADDIN • BONNIE RA I TT • BETTE MIDLER

BOB HOPE • CO NAN • RAY CHARLES • NEIL YOU NG • ELLA FITZGERALD

BOB DYLAN • BERT KR EISCHER • HOZIER • ROBERT PLANT • JERRY SEINFELD

JO KOY • THE CA RPENTERS • THE JOFFERY BALLE T • BING CROSBY

TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA • FIRST PERFORMANCE - OPERA • NELLY • P!NK

SPOKANE SYMPHO NY • TOTO • DEATH CAB FOR CU TIE • ALICE COOPER

PHISH • DOLLY PARTON • LINDSEY STIRLING • MOTLEY CRUE • RENT

MATCHBOX TWENTY • SAMMY HAGAR • HOOTIE & THE BLOWFISH BARRY MANILOW • THE HEAD AND THE HEART • THE CARPENTERS

EDUCATION

BEET-ING THE COMPETITION

North Central’s ProStart culinary team competes nationally for the first time in Spokane Public Schools’ history

BY ELIZA BILLINGHAM

It’s a sunny afternoon in mid-April at Casa Cano Farms. Madyson Cano stands in front of a semicircle of curious students, chefs and teachers, explaining why her farm doesn’t have more of the bright pink and green veggies she last gave them.

“Watermelon radishes will bolt if you plant them in the spring, so usually they’re more of a fall thing,” Cano says. “You could still get them if you stored them all winter, but we don’t have any [anymore]. We will have red spring radishes.”

“Do you have any right now that we can look at?” high school student Arlen Everman-Jones asks.

Everman-Jones is one of the four seniors on this year’s ProStart culinary competition team at North Central High School. The team, which also includes Allison German, Elina Khadka and Elisa Wilbur, has been dialing in their competition menu since November. With mentorship from their instructor Kim Stewart, plus Wild Sage’s managing partner Garth Hicks and chef Elijah Crume, the team’s Inland Northwest-themed menu won

the statewide competition earlier this year.

Culinary competitions in Washington are typically dominated by well-funded west side schools. They’re able to supply ingredients that schools like North Central, a “high poverty” school according to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, can’t afford. But the student’s intense thoughtfulness, top-notch technique and flawless execution earned them Spokane Public Schools’ first-ever spot at the national competition in Baltimore, Maryland, last Thursday, April 25.

Even though they didn’t place in the top five, representing Washington at the national level was an honor and responsibility the four high schoolers didn’t take lightly. The students’ menu was so local, they decided to swap out seasonal ingredients a couple weeks before the big day.

Eye-catching watermelon radishes were originally a pop of color in a fennel and citrus salad that accompanied a steelhead filet. The team wasn’t thrilled about subbing the bright heirloom radishes for common ones, which are

mostly pale white inside. After talking it through with the Canos, the four young chefs decided to sub in Chioggia beets instead.

“It has like a peppermint swirl look to it,” Wilbur says. “The sweetness goes really well with the vinaigrette that we have on it.”

In the midst of competition season, the students are learning first hand the flexibility and creativity that professional chefs need to create fresh, seasonal dishes. It’s an education that’s too often left out of culinary school, one that only comes from intentional relationship building with local growers.

It’s mostly thanks to the strong ties that Hicks, Crume and the Canos have made between Wild Sage and Casa Cano that the students can enter into these conversations about what’s in the field and on the plate. It can make cooking even more complicated, but also that much more impressive.

“When they’re judging and say, ‘Hey, your recipe ...continued on next page

Washington state culinary champions! ELIZA BILLINGHAM PHOTO

says watermelon radishes,’” Hicks instructs his team, “you can say, ‘Well, a local farmer that we work with back in Washington didn’t have any watermelon radishes, so we actually went to their farm and we picked out something better.’ A little backstory narrative doesn’t hurt.”

But for high school cooking competitions, it’s not enough to have only an entree and a side. For state, the team had to cook a three-course meal in two hours with just two bunsen burners between the four of them. Their first course features pesto-stuffed morel mushrooms, and their dessert is a fry bread topped with huckleberry compote and a huckleberry and hazelnutstudded sugarwork garnish.

For nationals, the team has to make the same three-course meal in only one hour. To get everything ready in time, its members have to choreograph their work down to the second.

“I start off with the mandoline and I cut the fennel and the beet,” Wilbur says. “Then after that I cut the shallots, which I then give to Allison.”

“I brine the shallots,” German says. “I also char tomato and poblano for the poblano sauce, and I give them both to Arlen so he can cut them up.”

“Then I give her the asparagus so she can char them,” Everman-Jones says. “And when she’s doing asparagus, I cut the poblano so I can give it to her and then I make the romesco. And while that’s happening, Allison’s also charring some hazelnuts. Elina is cutting herbs for pesto. So it’s all just working together and just trying to not get in each other’s ways.”

“I don’t know how we haven’t stabbed each

other yet,” Wilbur laughs.

But the high intensity choreography can also be what helps keep the group calm.

“I’m a very organized person,” Khadka says. “I have to have a specific way that I do things. If it’s not there, I get nervous and I mess up and it kind of falls apart.”

When they first started brainstorming their menu, the team toyed with dishes that represented each of their individual identities — Khadka’s South Asian heritage, or Wilbur’s Irish ancestry.

“But that didn’t really create something cohesive,” Everman-Jones says. “Instead, we just wanted to create something relevant to all of us in our entire menu.”

In addition to consistent mentorship from Wild Sage, the students also met with the local tribal members and the owners of Indigenous Eats restaurant. The recipe for the team’s fry bread was donated by a North Central teacher’s grandmother, which she has preserved for generations.

The competition in Baltimore is the cherry on top of a wildly successful season for the underdog team. While Wilbur and Everman-Jones plan to continue pursuing culinary education after high school, German and Khadka are ready to invest in other interests after the trip to Baltimore.

“I think it’s more about the experience of going to Nationals,” Everman-Jones says. “And eating soft shell crab. That’s my No. 1 goal. I’ve been wanting it for a long time.”

“I think it’s mostly just a have fun kind of thing,” German says. “It’d be really cool to win, but I don’t expect it out of this. I’m just excited to go because honestly, I didn’t even think we were gonna go.” n

Full Belly, Full Mind

Our yearlong project “Around the World in 80 Plates” is a third of the way done, but the hard questions are just starting

BY ELIZA BILLINGHAM

Hello! ¡Hola! Salam! Ni hao! Hallo! Merhaba! We’re 18 weeks into the year and 31 dishes into the Inlander’s “Around the World in 80 Plates,” our quest to find 80 menu items in and around Spokane that represent 80 different places around the globe. So far, I’ve sampled milk cakes from north India, pupusas from El Salvador, pastries from Turkey, head cheese from Germany and sea buckthorn tea from Ukraine. Spoiler alert: Everything’s been delicious — yes, even the head cheese. (Read it at Inlander.com/aroundtheworld.)

The thing is, I haven’t even hit up Spokane’s biggest import shops yet. I’ve yet to set foot in Asian World, Kiev Market or African Market and Beauty Supply. I haven’t even stopped into many international restaurants. In an effort to save the easy stuff for last, I’ve focused my initial efforts on gas station snacks, cafes, mom-and-pop shops and back shelves. I’ve been able to keep this up for a third of the year, and it hasn’t gotten difficult yet.

Take, for example, my trip to Main Market in downtown Spokane, a co-op dedicated mostly to local foodstuffs. In the last aisle across from the bulk foods, a famous Dutch cocoa and an ancient grain from the slopes of a Syrian volcano were wedged between local dry goods.

Or, between interviews in Spokane Valley, I stopped into a gas station and found an entire Indian mini mart, complete with imported spices and handmade sweets. Even local cafes like Ladder Coffee and Cedar Coffee have unique international drinks for those who scan the corners of the menu.

Yes, I’ve also explored the far-flung expertise of established chefs like Chad White at Zona Blanca and Ruins’ Tony Brown and Peter Adams. But mostly, this has been an exercise in finding stories that are hiding in plain sight at our routine, everyday places. Food today is so globalized, it hasn’t been very hard. Which begs the question, should it be this easy? Not only is growing food labor and resource intensive, but shipping that food around the world leaves a massive carbon footprint. According to a 2022 study published in Nature Food, global “food miles,” which consider emissions from the entire food system, might release up to 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. High income nations like the U.S. represent only 12.5% of the global population but are responsible for about half of those emissions.

I love wandering through crowded aisles and finding ingredients I don’t recognize. But they don’t just magically appear on the shelf. Each took some amount of fertilizer and fossil fuel to get here. It might not be wrong, but it’s something to think about.

Some researchers took issue with the 2022 study, as a healthy scientific community is prone to do. The lead researcher gave an interesting caveat, too — that eliminating international food distribution would reduce food mile emissions by just 9%, and that eating seasonally and limiting meat consumption were important puzzle pieces for reducing food’s carbon footprint.

Eating responsibly is really hard. We don’t have many systems that reward it. But the first step might be becoming more aware of what our food represents, from history and culture to resources and lobbying. There’s cause for both celebration and concern. The only thing we’re running out of room for is ignorance. n

Casa Cano Farms’ Jorge Cano lets the team sample super fresh food. ELIZA BILLINGHAM PHOTO

“BEET-ING THE COMPETITION,” CONTINUED...

Podrace Like It’s 1999

Star Wars: The Phantom Manace’s rerelease proves every saga has a beginning… again…

BY JASON BAXTER

Lately, it can be hard to fathom a time when one’s average pop culture carte du jour wasn’t dominated by content derived from George Lucas’ space fantasy universe, especially after the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm and subsequent abundance of new material. From streaming shows to movies, there’s more Star Wars than you could shake a Tusken Raider gaderffii at. But back in 1999, there hadn’t been a new Star Wars film or television offering in almost two decades. Now, 25 years hence, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace — the controversial first installment of Lucas’ prequel trilogy — struts back into theaters.

There is precedent for such an occasion: In 1997, 20 years after the premiere of Star Wars (subsequently subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope), Lucasfilm rereleased the initial three theatrical chapters as “Special Editions,” featuring arguably unnecessary modern CGI embellishments. For 7-year-old me, it was a first-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these films on the big screen as opposed to my well-worn VHS copies. It felt like a rite of passage — to experience the kind of revelatory awe my parents would speak of in hushed, reverent tones about when they had lost their Star Wars virginity (specifically, the iconic opening frames of a gigantic Star Destroyer zooming overhead with teeth-rattling THX surround sound).

Concurrent with the Special Editions, the promotional campaign for the upcoming prequel saga was underway in the pages of the Star Wars Insider magazine (yes, it was mostly a catalog, and, yes, I was a subscriber). The hype soon ballooned past the borders of die-hard fandom. When the first teaser trailer for The Phantom Menace made its online debut in November 1998, it nearly cratered an adolescent internet, accruing millions of downloads in a matter of hours. Star Wars acolytes paid full ticket prices just to see the two-minute-and12-second clip on the silver screen, boosting the box office for films like Martin Brest’s unintentionally hilarious romance Meet Joe Black

When the anticipated origin story of the future Sith Lord Anakin Skywalker finally podraced into cinemas on May 19, 1999, millions were unsurprisingly agog, for better and for worse. This was a Star Wars for our generation. The sense of uncertainty and possibility was tantalizing. As hyped as many of us were at the time, The Phantom Menace was not received with universal

adulation, especially among the generation that grew up on the original trilogy in theaters. In his generally enthusiastic review, Roger Ebert admitted that, “The story level isn’t always as interesting as the visuals.” Variety’s Todd McCarthy echoed this sentiment, writing, “While the film hardly lacks for visual creativity, it lacks resonance, freshness and a sense of wonder… Phantom is easily consumable eye candy, but it contains no nutrients for the heart or mind.”

Some fans were even more apoplectic, taking to web forums and comment threads to bemoan the emphasis on the Trade Federations’ capitalist scheming and politics-heavy scenes that played like C-SPAN by way of the Mos Eisley cantina (C-3PO-SPAN?).

Then there was the infamous Gungan goofball Jar Jar Binks. While a technological breakthrough — the first major CGI character in a live-action film — that was intended as a throwback to the slapstick comedies of yore and meant to connect with younger viewers, Jar Jar was received as a fiasco. It didn’t help that his exaggerated dialect and ethnic patois prompted understandable racial criticism. If the anti-Menace “not my Star Wars” contingent of very vocal, very online posters sounds familiar in the wake of Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy, recall what Lucas has long said about his saga and its parade of repeating motifs: “It’s like poetry, it rhymes.”

Now, as I stare down the blaster barrel of oncoming middle age, I remain an ardent defender of Lucas’ prequel trilogy. The Phantom Menace, in particular, is resplendent with iconic sequences — especially the podrace which transmutes Lucas’ fixation on hot rods and drag racing into a breathtaking symphony of high-velocity vehicular drama, and the lightsaber duel pitting Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi against the satanic Darth Maul, set to John Williams’ indelible “The Duel of the Fates.”

Thematically, the prequels are more resonant than those befuddled and frustrated by all the political machinations and talk of microbiology may deign to acknowl-

edge. Though they work just as effectively as innocuous popcorn entertainment, there are philosophical depths to the trilogy that are worth discussing. Episode I continues the capitalist megapower vs. indigenous culture themes of Return of the Jedi, Episode II includes digs at unchecked military expansion, and Episode III is, in part, a further refutation of Bush-era post-9/11 imperialism and crackdowns on civil liberties.

You can revisit The Phantom Menace just for its playground thrills or you can plumb its spectacle for greater meaning. Regardless, you have to respect Episode I’s chutzpah. As a feat of technical filmmaking, it is in rarified company. As a welcome mat for new fans of the franchise, it was an enormous success. And it has likely aged better than you might think (FYI: the prequels are huge among Gen Z TikTokers).

Let’s raise a glass. It’s time to celebrate a silver anniversary with Padmé Amidala and friends! Pour yourself a big sugary soda into your KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut commemorative Watto cup, grab a seat in a darkened theater, and lose yourself once more in a galaxy far, far away. n

Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace returns to theaters starting May 3.

Anne Hath a Way to Silence the Haters

The Idea of You is a sweet yet still thoughtful romantic dramedy thanks to its star

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

Who is Anne Hathaway?

If you were to pose that question not too long ago, there would be a perplexing number of people who would respond with bizarre vitriol. Though even mentioning it now is probably giving gossip of yesteryear far more credence than it’s worth, it is something that feels particularly relevant to Hathaway’s latest. This isn’t because The Idea of You is autobiographical, it’s more because of the way the film ends up being about societal expectations, especially for women. An adaptation of the romance novel by Robinne Lee that drew inspiration — in part — from Harry Styles, it tells a story of a woman who begins a relationship with a younger boy-band star after meeting him at Coachella. However its premise sounds to you on paper, if you look beneath the surface, you’ll discover it’s a film about aging, the pressures the world places on you and starting over again. That’s all carried by Hathaway, who gives a typically nuanced performance.

This all begins with Hathaway’s Solène as she navigates the various complications of her life. She has gotten divorced from her shitstain of an ex-husband (who got remarried to a younger woman), and is now trying to co-parent their daughter while running an art gallery she is passionate about. When Solène must step in and take said daughter to Coachella, she ends up meeting Hayes

DRAGONKEEPER

In this Spanish-Chinese CGI animated fantasy adventure, an orphan girl stumbles across banished dragons and must try to protect them and one of the last dragon eggs in order to save the mythical beasts from extinction. Rated PG

THE FALL GUY

THE IDEA OF YOU

Campbell, played by Nicholas Galitzine of last year’s breakout comedy hit Bottoms. Though his character’s name sounds as fake as the music of his fictional band, the two become drawn together. After some initial hesitation on her part, they launch headfirst into a whirlwind romance. Soon, the fantasy of it fades away as a more reflective film takes hold. It makes for a surprisingly bittersweet romantic dramedy that, some contrivances aside, hits home.

None of this would work without Hathaway’s ability to be wickedly funny, effortlessly charming and, most crucially, authentically vulnerable without missing a step. Even when the film starts to feel a little shaky and you can see the narrative strings being pulled to create rather forced conflict, she is the beating heart that makes you willing to forgive such flaws. For all the flak Hathaway has gotten in the past, her work in everything from Brokeback Mountain to Interstellar as well as the more recent Armageddon Time and Eileen shows she deserves more praise than she gets. She’s always been able to give something special to even small supporting characters, capturing and conveying emotional strife — both external and internal — in just the small physical aspects of her performances. She turns The Idea of You into something that feels a great deal closer to a thoughtful character study about finding a way to be happy in a world that is more interested in tearing

you apart.

The life of a stuntman (Ryan Gosling) gets more hard-hitting and actionpacked when he starts working on a movie directed by his ex (Emily Blunt) and gets caught up in a deadly plot targeting the star of the film. Rated PG-13

JEANNE DU BARRY

The rise and fall of French King Louis XV’s titular chief royal mistress comes to the big screen in this French drama. Not Rated

TAROT

After having their fortunes read using a mysterious spooky tarot deck, a group of college friends start dying off in ways related to the cards in this horror flick. Rated PG-13

With that being said, it is certainly not the best film she has ever done by any stretch of the imagination. The way it is shot, with strange split screen sequences during banal musical performances which undercut its strengths, often leaves much to be desired. On top of that, the ending starts to run out of steam and shy away from seeing through some of the deeper questions it seemed to initially be interested in exploring. While Hathaway’s performance is consistently great, the film can’t always live up to it. There’s just too much left dangling at key points. It almost feels like the movie is nervous about going down the honest path and discovering more complicated and not always neat answers.

Still, The Idea of You does manage to provide an answer to the question of who Hathaway is: a talented performer who doesn’t need to get your approval or push back against all the nonsense thrown her way. That this is captured in a film about a character realizing the same thing only makes the revelation all the sweeter and more sincere. As its title expresses, The Idea of You is a playful yet poetic rejection of all that has been placed on those like Hathaway by people who don’t even know them. It still won’t stop them from judging anyway, but that’s fine. As Hathaway proves once more, the best things can come from keeping on your path. That’s the most important idea of her. n

Directed by Michael Showalter

Starring Anne Hathaway, Nicholas Galitzine

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Art sort of imitates life for Hathaway in The Idea of You.

“But to confess the Truth, I am now too lazy, or too busy to make it shorter.”

— JOHN LOCKE (AND, PRESUMABLY, TAYLOR SWIFT)

POP MUSIC NEEDS AN EDITOR

On Taylor Swift and the trend of extremely overlong albums…

BY SETH SOMMERFELD

Ultra marathons. Triathlons.

Listening to pop albums.

Endurance sports come in many forms these days. It’s been said that brevity is the soul of wit. And framed in those terms, my goodness has modern popular music gotten so, so, so dumb.

Over the past decade or so, musical stars’ releasing extremely overlong albums hasn’t become just a trend but the new norm.

While it’s long been the belief that the ideal pop song comes in at three to three-and-a-half minutes, the albums by the premiere purveyors of such tunes now regularly stretch well over an hour. They’ve crossed the tipping point from being fun collections of new songs to endurance tests for anyone who’s not a total stan.

The latest and highest profile example comes in the form of Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department. While the album kicks off with a nice little catchy, if subdued, pop tune in “Fortnight,” it’s also probably Swift’s least universal album to date with some cringy try-hard cursing (“Down Bad”) and features more of Jack Antonoff’s truly terrible and boring production (he’s the continual plague on modern female pop music — thank the Lord that St. Vincent finally freed herself from his grasp). It’s far from peak Swift, but for the most part it’s inoffensively milk-toast.

But The Tortured Poets Department goes down as smooth

as swallowing gravel because it just keeps on going… and going… and going… and going…

The core album is an exhausting 65 minutes, 8 seconds that loses all momentum by track 10 of 16. But really this is a double album — The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology — which stretches on for an interminable 2 hours, 2 minutes, 21 seconds. And we are supposed to listen to it all — that second record isn’t meant as bonus content, which is clear simply by the fact her team had visualizers for each of the songs on YouTube the day the album dropped. That’s an insane ask for music lovers that aren’t dyed-in-the-wool Swifties.

More to the point — that’s just bad art.

This is not trying to yuck anyone’s yum. Swifties are welcome to listen to The Tortured Poets Department to their heart’s content (one Inlander staffer listened to it six times on its release date!). If anything Swift is good Swift in your eyes, go for it.

And Swift is far from the only artist in desperate need of an editor. Plenty of other megastars suffer from the same affliction. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Resistance both last over an hour. Four of the last five Drake albums have checked in at over 81 minutes. Metallica’s new album 72 Seasons gets outnumbered by its 77-minute runtime. Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time is 111 minutes, while Kayne West’s latest, Donda, is a whopping 130 minutes (both just “great” dudes).

Digital production has certainly made the process of

making songs quicker and easier. Physical media fading also allows for the ballooning album lengths. But these overlong albums aren’t exercises in boundless creativity — they’re exercises in commercial content creation.

It’s not that albums should never be long, but there should be an artistic reason to justify lengths nearing or exceeding an hour. Perhaps it’s a concept album with a strong hook like Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville being a song-by-song response to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. or Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City being a coming-of-age snapshot of growing up in Compton. Maybe it’s a rock opera that actually has a narrative arc that needs to play out over many tunes like Green Day’s American Idiot or The Who’s Tommy. It could even just be needing the space for true sonic experimentation — something also rare in modern popular music — like The Beatles did on The White Album

But none of those creative endeavors are driving the glut of laborious marathon albums.

Rather, the music industry has oriented itself around quantity over quality in the streaming age. In 2007, Billboard started incorporating streaming numbers into their calculus and for already established acts like Swift, having a glut of tracks is basically a cheat code for recordbreaking charting. Add in that the larcenous streaming platforms only significantly pay the superstars — Spotify announced it will stop paying smaller artists that don’t

hit streaming minimums that the company sets and can tweak — means that stars making overlong albums is an effective and unsubtle money grab.

To be blunt, there’s one reason albums shouldn’t be so long: Almost nobody can write that many good songs in one fell swoop. Just look at the pop realm. What are some of the best pop albums in recent memory? Lorde’s Pure Heroine? 37 minutes. Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?? 42 minutes. Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia? 37 minutes. Charli XCX’s Crash? 33 minutes. Heck, even Swift’s 1989 — her best album in the last decade? A much briefer 49 minutes.

And you know one of the reasons why all those records are so great? They cut out all the unnecessary fat. Those albums are lean — when you put them on, you’re not tempted to hit the skip track button to get past a host of filler songs. Acts almost always come into the studio with more songs than end up on a record, but the smart ones streamline things down to the best tracks. Sometimes the best thing an artist (or their team) can do to maximize the lasting impact of these albums is to edit them down. It’s never easy to kill your darlings — to toss aside songs the songwriters are attached to because they put emotional effort into crafting them. But it is an essential part of the artistic process.

Maybe it’s a fool’s errand to care about the integrity of the album at all. With streaming being the dominant listening medium, the idea of cohesive visions for albums begins to fade. For the superstars, albums seem increasingly less like artistic statements and more like content drops to be added to playlists.

But I do think some of these artists still care about their craft and are probably gonna look back on these listening endurance tests as embarrassingly self-indulgent exercises as the years pass. These tortured poets should stop trying to write the Iliad and instead attempt to write a coherent chapbook. n

Swift, Drake, and Morgan Wallen are among the many who stuggle with brevity.

LOCAL POP PUNK NOT FOR NOTHING DOOM METAL BODY VOID

Thursday, 5/2

J J THE BIG DIPPER, CD Ghost, Bandit Train, August to August

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Thursday Night Jam

CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM, Weathered Shepherds

COEUR D’ALENE CASINO, Scotty McCreery

J QQ SUSHI & KITCHEN, Just Plain Darin

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Hip-Hop Night

ZOLA, Blake Braley

Friday, 5/3

THE BEE’S KNEES WHISKEY BAR, Pamela Benton

J J THE BIG DIPPER, Not For Nothing: Circles Album Release Show with Pulling 4 Victory, Thundergun Express, Her Memory BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, The Shift

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Usual Suspects

CHINOOK STEAK, SEAFOOD & PASTA, Jason Evans

THE DISTRICT BAR, Youth Fountain, Action/Adventure, Like Roses

J THE GRAIN SHED, Haywire

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE (CDA CASINO), Loose Gazoonz

J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, The Bellamy Brothers

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Jake Robin

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Live DJs

J REPUBLIC BREWING CO., Dani Bacon and Clarence Gallagher

THE RIDLER PIANO BAR, Just Plain Darin

ZOLA, Austin Miller

ZOLA, The Rub

Saturday, 5/4

J THE BIG DIPPER, Weep Wave, Pit, Kneebone

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, The Shift

CHALICE BREWING CO., Son of Brad

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Vern and the Volcanoes

CHINOOK STEAK, SEAFOOD & PASTA, Jason Evans

DE LEON’S TACO & BAR, Brassless Chaps

THE DISTRICT BAR, Smash Into Pieces

J HAMILTON STUDIO, Stephanie Anne Johnson

J LAKE CITY CENTER, Rusty Jackson Band, Carson Rhodes, Mel Dalton

NEATO BURRITO, E.T., Iron Chain

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE (CDA CASINO), Loose Gazoonz

OLD SCHOOL LIQUOR BAR, Pamela Benton

J PAVILION AT RIVERFRONT, Kalimba:

The Spirit of Earth, Wind & Fire

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Ian Newbill

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Live DJs

J SNOW EATER BREWING CO., Just Plain Darin

ZOLA, Aspen Kye

ZOLA, Royale

Sunday, 5/5

J THE BIG DIPPER, Scum, Lex The Hex Master, Mikahl Lawless, Madopelli Music, Element-X, Dirty Savage, Mr. ERB

Alittle over a year after playing its first show, Spokane pop punk band Not for Nothing is ready to deliver its first LP. Circles serves up a collection of mostly straightforward Warped Touresque melodic pop punk with a pretty nice production polish for a local record. While Circles’ pop punk core features are dashes of sounds ranging from Fenix TX to Jimmy Eat World’s pre-fame album Static Prevails, there are also plenty of more metalcore moments of guitar shredding and background growl scream vocals occupying the mix. For the elder millennial pop punk crowd that’s not… well… nothing.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Not for Nothing Circles Album Release Show with Pulling 4 Victory, Thundergun Express, Her Memory • Fri, May 3 at 7 pm • $15 • All ages • The Big Dipper • 171 S. Washington St. • thebigdipperspokane.com

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Other folks? Well, to get a little Alfred Pennyworth on y’all, some of them just want to listen to the world burn. And that’s what doom metal bands like Body Void provide. The extremely heavy noise that the trio creates sounds like the end of the world. It’s a brutal and unforgiving mix of clashing drums, deep bass, thundering riffs and scream singing mixed to the back on tracks so that the vocal shredding feels like just another instrument of chaos. If listeners allow their minds to disconnect while listening to Body Void’s most recent album, Atrocity Machine, there’s almost a zen-like quality to the avalanche of aggressive noise after a while. Rather than fret about the end of the world, why not bask in it during Body Void’s gig at the Dipper?

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Brat, Body Void, Bonginator, Tomb Ripper, Bonemass • Wed, May 8 at 6:30 pm • $20 • All ages • The Big Dipper • 171 S. Washington St. • thebigdipperspokane.com

CANTARITO MEXICAN RESTAURANT, Brassless Chaps

J CASA DE ORO MEXICAN CANTINA, PJ Destiny HOGFISH, Open Mic IRON HORSE (VALLEY), Son of Brad

J SOUTH HILL GRILL, Just Plain Darin ZOLA, SideStep

Monday, 5/6

EICHARDT’S PUB, Monday Night Blues Jam with John Firshi

KNITTING FACTORY, No Strings Attached: An Orchestra Rendition of Dr. Dre’s 2001 RED ROOM LOUNGE, Open Mic Night

Tuesday, 5/7

ZOLA, Jerry Lee and the Groove, Steve Schennum

Wednesday, 5/8

J J THE BIG DIPPER, Brat, Body Void, Bonginator, Tomb Ripper, Bonemass

J THE CHAMELEON, Stinkfoot Orchestra

THE DRAFT ZONE, The Draft Zone Open Mic

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Red Room Lounge Jam

J TIMBERS ROADHOUSE, Cary Beare Presents ZOLA, Justyn Priest, Brett Hite

Coming Up ...

J J KNITTING FACTORY, INZO, May 9, 7 pm.

THE CHAMELEON, The Ivy, May 9, 8 pm.

J J WEST CENTRAL ABBEY, Laura Gibson, May 9, 8 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Static-X, Sevendust, May 10, 6 pm.

J BING CROSBY THEATER, Firehouse Sessions, May 10, 7:30 pm.

J THE JACKLIN ARTS CENTER, Andre Feriante, May 11, 7-9 pm.

J THE CHAMELEON, Zach Person, May 11, 8 pm.

SPOKANE TRIBE CASINO, Hunter Hayes, Oston, May 11, 8 pm.

THE DISTRICT BAR, Broadway Rave, May 11, 8:30 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Ascended, Dead TrashCasket, Seven Chains, Doomgazer, May 12, 7 pm.

J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, NEEDTOBREATHE, Judah & the Lion, May 12, 7 pm.

J RIVERFRONT PARK, Dario Ré, May 14, 11 am-2 pm.

J J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, Boyz II Men, May 15, 7:30 pm.

J SINTO ACTIVITY CENTER, Hillyard Bells & Show Band, May 16, 12-3 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Dead Bob, May 16, 7:30 pm.

J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, Riley Green, May 16, 7:30 pm.

THE CHAMELEON, Desolation Horse, King Ropes, BaLonely, May 16, 8 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Sam Barber, Kade Hoffman, May 16, 8 pm.

J J SPOKANE ARENA, Lil Wayne, DDG, Kash and King, YngSolomon, May 16, 8 pm.

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Brian Jacobs, May 17, 5-8 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Rock Club Spring Showcase IV, May 17, 5:30 pm.

J BING CROSBY THEATER, ABBAFAB: The Premier ABBA Experience, May 17, 8-10 pm.

J REPUBLIC BREWING CO., Clanna Morna, May 18, 7-9 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Metal Mayhem: Outer Resistance, Enemy Mine, Mezzanine, Fate Defined, Dayshadow, May 18, 8 pm.

J SPOKANE TRIBE CASINO, Anthem Road, May 18, 8 pm.

THE CHAMELEON, Sorry for Party Rocking, May 18, 9 pm.

THE DISTRICT BAR, The Last Revel, May 18, 9 pm.

THE DISTRICT BAR, Flamingosis, Diastrata, May 19, 9 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Dying Fetus, 200 Stab Wounds, Kruelty, May 20, 8 pm.

J THE CHAMELEON, The Buttertones, The Hayds, The Wow Wows, May 21, 8 pm.

J J THE BIG DIPPER, Agent Orange, Messer Chups, The Dilrods, May 22, 7:30 pm.

THE DISTRICT BAR, Ora Cogan, May 22, 8 pm.

THE CHAMELEON, The Wildwoods, Jake Rozier, May 23, 8 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Portugal. The Man, Reyna Tropical, May 23, 8 pm.

J J MIKEY’S GYROS, Punk Palouse Fest, May 24 and May 25.

NYNE BAR & BISTRO, Jenny Don’t and The Spurs, Silver Treason, May 24, 7 am-10 pm.

J J GORGE AMPHITHEATER, Illenium, Kaskade, Blanke, KREAM, HVDES, Fairlane, Cinema Kid, May 25.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Digress, Shade Apollo, Xstitch, 97ares, Taki. Taki, St4tik, May 25, 7:30 pm.

J J GORGE AMPHITHEATER, Illenium, Two Friends, Ghengar, Level Up, BIJOU, Midnight Kids, PAWS, May 26.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Finesse2Tymes, RJMrLA, Savii 3rd, May 26, 8 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, MST, Sick Pay Holiday, Snacks At Midnight, May 30, 7:30 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Kaivon, May 30, 8 pm.

J J GORGE AMPHITHEATER, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ken Carson, Irontom, May 31, 7 pm.

J THE CHAMELEON, Jason Perry Flavor Factory Album Release Show with Evergreen Afrodub Orchestra, May 31, 8 pm.

J HAMILTON STUDIO, Prizmatica, June 1, 6-8 pm.

J EICHARDT’S PUB, Heat Speak, June 1, 7-10 pm.

J REPUBLIC BREWING CO., Hannah Jackson, Kunda! Marimba, June 1, 7-10 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, The Wallflowers, June 1, 8 pm.

SPOKANE TRIBE CASINO, Soul Proprietor, June 1, 8-11 pm.

J J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, Daryl Hall, Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Charlie Sexton, June 4, 7 pm.

J BING CROSBY THEATER, Buckethead, June 4, 7:30 pm.

THE CHAMELEON, Seaside Tryst, Zara, Saxtoother, June 6, 8 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Taking Back Sunday, Citizen, June 6, 8 pm.

J THE CHAMELEON, Quarter Monkey Chronic Nuisance Album Release Show with Tone Sober, B Radicals, June 7, 8 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Krooked Kings, June 7, 8 pm.

J J NORTHERN QUEST CASINO, Third Eye Blind, Yellowcard, Arizona, June 8, 6:30 pm.

SPOKANE TRIBE CASINO, Smash Mouth, June 8, 8 pm.

J J THE BIG DIPPER, The HIRS Collective, Psychic Death, June 11, 7:30 pm.

MUSIC | VENUES

219 LOUNGE • 219 N. First Ave., Sandpoint • 208-263-5673

ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-927-9463

BABY BAR • 827 W. First Ave. • 509-847-1234

BARRISTER WINERY • 1213 W. Railroad Ave. • 509-465-3591

BEE’S KNEES WHISKY BAR • 1324 W. Lancaster Rd.., Hayden • 208-758-0558

BERSERK • 125 S. Stevens St. • 509-315-5101

THE BIG DIPPER • 171 S. Washington St. • 509-863-8098

BIGFOOT PUB • 9115 N. Division St. • 509-467-9638

BING CROSBY THEATER • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-227-7638

BLACK DIAMOND • 9614 E. Sprague Ave. • 509891-8357

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL • 116 S. Best Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-891-8995

BOOMERS CLASSIC ROCK BAR • 18219 E. Appleway Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-368-9847

BUCER’S COFFEEHOUSE PUB • 201 S. Main St., Moscow • 208-596-0887

THE BULL HEAD • 10211 S. Electric St., Four Lakes • 509-838-9717

CHAN’S RED DRAGON • 1406 W. Third Ave. • 509-838-6688

THE CHAMELEON • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd.

CHECKERBOARD • 1716 E. Sprague Ave. • 509-443-4767

COEUR D’ALENE CASINO • 37914 S. Nukwalqw St., Worley • 800-523-2464

COEUR D’ALENE CELLARS • 3890 N. Schreiber Way, Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-2336

CRUISERS BAR & GRILL • 6105 W Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-446-7154

CURLEY’S HAUSER JUNCTION • 26433 W. Hwy. 53, Post Falls • 208-773-5816

THE DISTRICT BAR • 916 W. 1st Ave. • 509-244-3279

EICHARDT’S PUB • 212 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-263-4005

FIRST INTERSTATE CENTER FOR THE ARTS • 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. • 509-279-7000

FOX THEATER • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-624-1200

IRON HORSE • 407 E. Sherman, Coeur d’Alene • 208-667-7314

IRON HORSE BAR & GRILL • 11105 E. Sprague Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-926-8411

JOHN’S ALLEY • 114 E. Sixth St., Moscow • 208-883-7662

KNITTING FACTORY • 911 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-244-3279

MARYHILL WINERY • 1303 W. Summit Pkwy. • 509-443-3832

MILLIE’S • 28441 Hwy 57, Priest Lake • 208-443-0510

MOOSE LOUNGE • 401 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-7901

NASHVILLE NORTH • 6361 W. Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-457-9128

NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO • 100 N. Hayford Rd., Airway Heights • 877-871-6772

NYNE BAR & BISTRO • 232 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-474-1621

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY • 301 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-265-8545

POST FALLS BREWING CO. • 112 N. Spokane St., Post Falls • 208-773-7301

RAZZLE’S BAR & GRILL • 10325 N. Government Way, Hayden • 208-635-5874

RED ROOM LOUNGE • 521 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-7613

THE RIDLER PIANO BAR • 718 W. Riverside Ave. • 509-822-7938

SEASONS OF COEUR D’ALENE • 1004 S. Perry St. • 208-664-8008

SPOKANE ARENA • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • 509-279-7000

SPOKANE TRIBE CASINO • 14300 US-2, Airway Heights • 877-786-9467

SOUTH PERRY LANTERN • 12303 E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-473-9098

STORMIN’ NORMAN’S SHIPFACED SALOON • 12303 E. Trent Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-862-4852

TRANCHE • 705 Berney Dr., Wall Walla • 509-526-3500

ZOLA • 22 W. Main Ave. • 509-624-2416

FREE ADMISSION

2024 Spokane Garden Expo

Community College Lair 1810 N Greene Street, Spokane Bring your wagon or garden cart 250+ Vendors and Plant Sellers

by The Inland Empire Gardeners • 509-535-8434 • gardenexpo@comcast.net

COMMUNITY NIFTY FIFTY

If you haven’t already figured it out, this weekend marks 50 years since the opening of the 1974 World’s Fair held in Spokane. Beginning May 4, the city is kicking off nine weeks of Expo-themed celebrations with an opening ceremony where it all started 50 years ago — Riverfront Park. The event begins at 3 pm with several cultural performances on the Pavilion stage, a reading from Spokane’s Poet Laureate Mery Smith, a reprise of 1974’s Mormon Expo Choir and recreational activities in the park. At 6 pm, the official opening ceremony begins with a procession featuring representatives from each Expo pillar, and voices from Expo’s past, present and future. Festivities continue with a performance from Kalimba Band playing the hits from the epic ’70s band, Earth, Wind and Fire. And it wraps up with a drone show displaying images celebrating the region and the legacy of Expo ’74. Here’s to the beginning of a summer of celebration!

— MADISON PEARSON

Expo ’74 50th Anniversary Opening Celebration • Sat, May 4 from 3-9 pm • Free • All ages • Pavilion at Riverfront Park • expo50spokane.com

MUSIC + FILM IMPERIAL MARCHIN’

There’s an argument to be made that Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back has the greatest score of all time. Not only does the master John Williams carry over his timeless themes from the original film, but he adds an all-time spine-tingling menacing classic: “The Imperial March.” Hearing the Spokane Symphony perform the score on its own would be an absolute blast, but seeing them perform along with a screening of the cinematic jewel that is The Empire Strikes Back? Well, that’s as perfect as a Star Wars Day can be. Under the direction of conductor Morihiko Nakahara, the Spokane Symphony’s film events are always a treat, but it may be impossible to top this one. May the Fourth be with you all!

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Spokane Symphony performs Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back • Sat, May 4 at 7:30 pm; Sun, May 5 at 3 pm • $64-$106 • The Fox Theater • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • foxtheaterspokane.org

COMMUNITY BOOM! CRASH! POW!

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of reading a comic book. Whether you’re an avid collector or a nerdy newbie, the eye-popping action and gorgeous art style of comic books are completely unparalleled. Fans across the country get a chance to experience that joy this weekend as Free Comic Book Day makes its annual appearance. Many of Spokane’s comic shops, including Merlyn’s Comic and Games and the Comic Book Shop, allow customers to pick up a couple of free comics each from among the more than 48 titles featured this year, including installments from One Piece, Doctor Who, Street Fighter and Star Wars. The Comic Book Shop’s Northtown Mall location is also holding a cosplay contest at 4 pm, adding to the excitement of receiving a free comic. Find all participating stores locally and elsewhere at freecomicbookday.com.

— COLTON RASANEN

Free Comic Book Day • Sat, May 4 from 11 am-8 pm • Free • All ages • Locations vary • freecomicbookday.com ABOVE: An early artist’s rendering of the

GET LISTED!

Submit events online at Inlander.com/getlisted or email relevant details to getlisted@inlander.com. We need the details one week prior to our publication date.

COMMUNITY HEARTY HERITAGE

May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month in the U.S., during which the invaluable contributions and influence of these communities are celebrated. For the second year in a row, Spokane’s AANHPI Coalition is hosting its Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Festival. The festival kicks off with a meal featuring a wide variety of Asian cuisines and desserts. A cultural showcase featuring performances by the Filipino American Northwest Association, the Indian Youth Club of Spokane and the Marshallese Youth Community, among others, finishes out the festival, with proceeds from tickets and any other donations going towards supporting Asian youth arts programs in Spokane. Local AANHPI month celebrations continue the following weekend, May 10-12, with Spokane United We Stand’s festival at Riverfront Park.

— LUCY KLEBECK

Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Festival • Sun, May 5 from 2-5:30 pm • All ages • $20-$25 • Spokane Community College, Lair Auditorium • 1810 N. Greene St. • aanhpispokane.org • 509-590-6613

VISUAL ARTS FRI-YAY

May’s First Friday is a precursor to a packed weekend here in Spokane, with the Expo ’74 50th Anniversary kickoff on Saturday and Bloomsday on Sunday. So why not start your weekend on a more low-key note by checking out some local art Friday night? Spokane artist Mark Moore is showcasing a collection of functional ceramic pieces (above) and planters at Trackside Studio that complement Expo’s environmental themes. Terrain Gallery hosts Jiemei Lin and a collection of paintings, prints and installations exploring the everyday moments that shape our lives and the harm that can result from gender, culture and societal pressures. Along with First Friday, you can also celebrate “Fiber Friday” at the Gallery at Entropy with fiber artist Anna Reynolds Wallis and her show “Tapestries,” featuring vibrant tapestry “paintings” made from acrylic yarn. Or see Jodie Stejer’s encaustic art at Uptic Curated (402 E. Sprague). Make sure to pop your head into other local businesses — you never know what art you’ll find!

— MADISON PEARSON

I SAW YOU

RIVERFRONT BRIDGES & PAVILION We passed a few times on 4/22 around 4. Me, blue T-shirt/black jacket. You, shorts and a grey T-shirt. I wanted to say “hi” the last time we passed, but all I could do was smile (face-palm)... Give me another chance this Friday around the same time @ pavilion?

THE ART & YARD SALE I saw you last weekend at the E. 13th Ave. yard & art sale. You said you’d be there again this weekend! I’m hoping to get more of those cute cats you make! I’m showing up, bright and early, whether you’re there or not!

CHEERS

GRACIOUS, GENEROUS, KIND Stephanie P., special collections librarian, Gonzaga University, Foley Library, is a gracious, generous, & kind representative of GU. When asked for some obscure, very old info, she went above & beyond in helping our research. Thank you, Stephanie, your personable & professional assistance meant a lot and is most appreciated.

SKILLED, CARING THERAPIST-HEALER

Patricia W., occupational therapist (hand specialist), at our Spokane VA Medical Center, is a skilled therapist, technician & artist in caring for her patients. She makes customized splints & other treatment devices to help heal us. She has a fun sense of humor and is always personable and professional in caring for us. Thank you, Patricia, for all the good you do.

BIRTHDAY CHEERS Birthday cheers to a very special Inlander-reading, gin-drinking, joke-making, adventure-seeking Taurus! May your Saturn return bring more cheers than jeers!

HOLY FAMILY ICU HEROES Last week was the scariest time of my life as I was far too close to actual death and admitted to the ICU at Holy Family hospital, where I stayed for several nights. The nurses and doctor there not only saved my life, but brought me as much comfort as I could have had given the situation. They were nothing short of amazing and I am beyond grateful for their support and care. Thank you... to Marilyn for being so gentle and loving, for holding my hand as I tried to take in all of the overwhelming news and information; to Mariah for your patience each night in handling my restlessness and doing your best to help me be comfortable so I could attempt rest, and for listening to me; to Trever for your quirky jokes and comments, bringing some humor to my day, and for being so thorough and particular in your methods and care, and for celebrating every seemingly minor step of improvement with me as if they were the most major moments; and to Dr. Anderson for your compassion, for your determination in making me better, and for your incredible bedside manner, taking the time to explain things in detail to myself and even repeating it later to my family. You all truly saved me, and I will never forget it. Thank you.

MY TAN CAN MAN Every Thursday night I put my tan can out by the curb for collection. And every Friday morning around 11 am you come by and take away last week’s garbage. I always smile and wave at you, and you always smile and wave back. I am so grateful for the work you do and the kindness that you never fail to share with a lady in Browne’s Addition. A small thoughtful human connection like this is priceless. Thank you!

SHADLE LIBRARY PLANT SWAP Yesterday, I attended my first ever Plant Swap at the Shadle Library. What an uplifting event! Gardeners brought their “extra” plants that they had purposely grown to give away to other gardeners in abundance. People giving away a variety of trees and plants all for the love of growing and to encourage others to grow food and flowers, shade trees and tulips. A truly wonderful event. All for free! Thank you so much! I plan to attend and swap regularly from now on.

JEERS

ILLEGAL LICENSE PLATES Jeers to those who still don’t know how to drive but continue to do so down city streets. Here is a lesson for those of you who are too dense to figure it out. There is a stoplight at Ermina and Greene Street. That light is the one that allows students to turn left to enter

the Spokane Community College property from Greene Street. When the light turns red on Greene Street, that means that you idiots who are driving down the road are supposed to stop. Red means stop. Again, red means stop. Yellow means prepare to stop. You idiots continue to run the red light. Red means you stop and allow those who have a green light to turn left, stupid. Also, just north of that intersection is a pedestrian crossing. There is a sign that indicates when the lights are red, that you stop to allow pedestrians to cross. Here is hoping that the next time you speed through that red light, law enforcement actually does their job and stops you and tickets you before you actually hurt someone. Spokane. Near Nature. Near stupidity. Learn to drive!

BARELY HOUSED Shame on all of you landlords and their representatives at city council. I’m sorry that you all can’t afford to give your tenants notice that you’re going to increase their rent. I am sorry that this is somehow taking food or shelter from your own families. I am aware your jobs are so hard when you don’t have to equip ventilation fans in the kitchens or supply fire extinguishers, or that my apartment is not ADA compliant. I can imagine how scary it is to think that you may have to get a real job one day.

GET A LIFE At the Building and Planning Office on April 23. You were in there wanting to make a complaint on the dirt bike riding and ATVs in two north Spokane County areas off of Market. Your complaint was all the noise and that it was so loud it inconvenienced you in your

home. Problem with your complaint is you can’t be inconvenienced by both places. First area has no housing near it, unless you’re the homeless person trespassing on the property. Second area you’re only complaining about because you found out where they moved their recreation to, plus, you had no clue that it was just a long access road with no name. I guess that you are so bored and disappointed that

ParkMobile. Does this app work in other cities? If your app is broken on an iPhone it’s on the app developers, not my use of tech. Every other time I park downtown I need to sign back in. Great, I have a password. Nah that’s not secure enough for a $2 parking charge. You need to check your email. And resend it, and you get other emails but not the one that will allow you to pay for parking. Curious enough when I signed in

you want everybody to be as miserable as you. I’d rather see people doing this and enjoying life. You need to get a life, make some friends, get some hobbies, and stay out of other people’s business, especially if the activity in question does not directly concern you or harm you.

MAN-CHILD MELTDOWN To the fully grown man-child who chose to throw two toddlers out of his way at Little Garden Cafe on a recent Wednesday, maybe talk to your doctor about adjusting that supplemental testosterone dose

RE: WEATHER Dear meteorologists, How dare you fail to accurately predict the future consistently! Everyone knows how easy it is to read weather charts and know with great precision exactly what the weather will do! You all act like it takes a college degree to do your job! Come on, get your act together!

ARIZONIANS FILLING NON-EXISTANT SHORTAGE OF GOONS IN SPOKANE Oh, it’s patriots this, and patriots that, and “the last refuge of the scoundrel” as Samuel Johnson so aptly and overy politely put it many, many years ago.

395 LITTER DISGRACE To all those who travel Highway 395 north and leave their litter and trash along side the road. We’ve lived here more than 30 years and have noticed a definite uptick in garbage, especially south of Deer Park on our occasional trips to Spokane. It’s truly disgusting. Do folks not know how to use a trash bag anymore?

ARE THERE REALLY MULTIPLE WAYS TO SIGN IN? To Spokane’s contract with

through Gmail, it worked. Now I know how ParkMobile is making money on the side.

CELEBRATING SLAUGHTER? I’m appalled by your six-page cattle ranch advertisement. It’s 2024. More of your readers than ever refuse to eat animals, whether because animal agriculture is responsible for 17% of greenhouse emissions or because slitting the throat of a living being after stunning her with a captive bolt gun and hanging her by a chain around one ankle doesn’t sit well with us. Responsible media does journalism without callous jokes about how cute an animal was before she was dismembered.

RE: STOP STOPPING Drivers are actually required by law to stop for pedestrians on the sideways. See RCW 46.61.621 If a pedestrian is within a lane of a driver that driver is also required to stop. I recommend you learn a little more about laws before you submit driving advice to the Inlander. Your bad advice is a huge safety issue. n

NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves

EVENTS | CALENDAR

BENEFIT

HEART SPRING FUNDRAISER A fundraiser for HEART (Humane Evacuation Animal Rescue Team) featuring live and silent auctions, dinner, beer from Lumberbeard, Locust Cider and more. Ages 21+. May 2, 5:30-9 pm. $45. Shriners Event Center, 7217 W. Westbow Blvd. heartofspokane.org (509-624-4199)

RUN FOR THE ROSES GALA A fundraiser for the Jacklin Center featuring a cocktail hour, silent auction, whiskey tasting and more. May 2, 5-8:30 pm. $125. The Jacklin Arts & Cultural Center, 405 N. William St. thejacklincenter.org (208-457-8950)

STAGE LIGHTS FOR OUR PLACE FUNDRAISER A fundraiser for Our Place Spokane featuring auctions, entertainment and food. May 9, 6-9 pm. $40. Salem Lutheran Church, 1428 W. Broadway Ave. ourplacespokane.org (509-326-7267)

COMEDY

FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY JOKE JOKE JOKE A comedy show combining standup, live sketches, and other mixed-media comedic bits. This month features Charles Hall Jr., Jon Hodge and Sophie Thomi. May 2, 7:30-9 pm. $15. Garland Theater, 924 W. Garland Ave. garlandtheater.org

JAY CHANDRASEKHAR Chandrasekhar is an American comedian, film director, screenwriter, and actor best known for his work with comedy group Broken Lizard. May 2, 7 pm, May 3-4, 7 & 9:45 pm $22-$35. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

DUNGEONS & DRAG QUEENS Three drag queens play the legendary tabletop game of Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeon Master Paul Curry, musician Carson Grubb and audience participation lead the queens through the game. May 3, noon. $33. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. bingcrosbytheater.com

JOSH FONOKALAFI Fonokalafi is a comedian and actor who shares experiences about being Polynesian. Ages 13+. May 4, 7-7:30 am. $20-$25. Lyfe Coffee Roasters & Public House, 116 E. Lakeside Ave. merlinscomedyclub.com

SAFARI The Blue Door Theatre’s version of Whose Line with comedy skits improvised from audience suggestions. Every Saturday at 7:30 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 319 S. Cedar. bluedoortheatre.com

DAVE SMITH Smith is a stand up comedian, podcast host and Libertarian political commentator. May 5, 7 pm. $22-$30. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

DERIC CAHILL Cahill gained recognition through his TikTok videos. May 8, 7 pm. $20-$30. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

COMMUNITY

WHEATLAND BANK FREE HORSE & CARRIAGE RIDES Experience the sights of Riverfront Park and downtown Spokane from a horse-drawn carriage. Pick up across from the Numerica Skate Ribbon entrance. May 3-June 21, Fri from 4-8 pm. Free. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. downtownspokane.org

AVISTA WATER POWER WALKING

TOUR A self-guided tour using a series of QR codes and interpretive signs. Visitors learn about the history and integrated water power system in Spokane. May 4-July 4. Free. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. expo50spokane.com

EXPO ’74: 50TH ANNIVERSARY OPENING CELEBRATION A kick-off for the nine-week 50th anniversary celebration. The event features live performances from arts, cultural, tribal and community organizations. May 4, 3-9 pm. Free. Pavilion at Riverfront, 574 N. Howard St. expo50spokane.com (509-625-6000)

EXPO ’74 HISTORIC TIMELINE OUT-

DOOR EXHIBIT An open-air exhibit detailing the pivotal moments of Expo ’74 and its legacy in environmental consciousness. May 4-July 4, daily. Free. Pavilion at Riverfront, 574 N. Howard St. visitspokane.com

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY Stop into any of the Comic Book Shop’s three locations and pick up three free comics among participating titles. May 4, 11 am-8 pm. Free. The Comic Book Shop. thecomicbookshop.net

IT HAPPENED HERE: EXPO ’74 FIFTY YEARS LATER This exhibition revisits the historical roots of Expo ’74’s legacy. It incorporates recognizable elements from Expo’s built environment with museum artifacts and archival materials. May 4-Jan. 25, 2025; Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm. $7-$12. the MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

MOSCOW RENAISSANCE FAIR A traditional renaissance fair with live music from local and regional musicians, artisan booths, a food court, beer garden, kid activities plus a costume contest. May 4-5; Sat from 10 am-8 pm, Sun from 10 am-5 pm. Free. East City Park, 900 E. Third St. moscowrenfair.org

SEARCHING FOR TRENT ALLEY: ASIAN AMERICAN FOOTPRINTS IN DOWNTOWN SPOKANE This exhibit celebrates and honors the history and legacy of Asian/Asian Americans in Spokane. May 4-June 2; Mon-Thu from 9 am-7 pm, FriSat from 10 am-5 pm and Sun from 12-4 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5336)

UNIVERSITY HIGH SCHOOL SPRING

CRAFT FAIR A craft fair with over 100 vendor booths. May 4, 10 am-5 pm. $2. University High School, 12320 E. 32nd Ave. facebook.com/uhicraftfair

ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER

HERITAGE FESTIVAL A festival featuring cultural performances from various traditions, interactive booths, cultural food and more. May 5, 2-5:30 pm. $20. Spokane Community College, 1810 N. Greene St. aanhpispokane.org (509-590-6613)

SPOKANE COMMUNITY OBSERVANCE OF THE HOLOCAUST A candle lighting and processional, plus music by the Central Valley High School Chamber Orchestra and Spokane Jewish Community Choir. May 6, 7 pm. Free. Temple Beth Shalom, 1322 E. 30th. spokanetbs.org/ yomhashoah

EXPO ’74: 50 YEARS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS Talk about how individuals, neighborhoods and municipalities can take action to prepare for the impacts of the climate crisis. May 8, 6:308 pm. Free. Spokane Valley Library, 22 N. Herald Rd. scld.org (509-893-8400)

VIETNAMESE HERITAGE DAY CELEBRATION Programming includes videos, slideshows, guest speakers, a city proclamation, performances and food. May 10, 5-7:30 pm. Free. Pavilion at Riverfront, 574 N. Howard. freevietnews.com

JUNIOR LILAC PARADE Marching bands, drill units and youth organizations perform along the downtown streets May 11, 10:30 am. Free. Downtown Spokane. spokanelilacfestival.org/parade

FILM

EXPO ‘74: FILMS FROM THE VAULT A selection of recently digitized film footage from the 1974 World’s Fair. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through Sep. 8. $7-$12. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

PALOUSE CULT FILM REVIVAL: AIRPLANE! After the crew becomes sick with food poisoning, a neurotic ex-fighter pilot must safely land a commercial airplane full of passengers. May 2, 7-9 pm. $8. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. kenworthy.org (208-882-4127)

GALAXY QUEST The alumni cast of a space opera TV series have to play their roles as the real thing when an alien race needs their help. May 3, 7:30 pm. $5. Garland Theater, 924 W. Garland Ave. garlandtheater.org (509-327-1050)

SPOKANE SYMPHONY: STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK A screening of The Empire Strikes Back accompanied by John Williams’ score performed by the Spokane Symphony. May 4, 7:30 pm and May 5, 3 pm. $28-$106. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague. foxtheaterspokane.org

DIGITIZING HOME MOVIES: VIDEO & AUDIO ESSENTIALS Learn how to transfer different home media into digital formats using various types of archiving equipment. May 11, 4:30-5:30 pm. Free. Spokane Valley Library, 22 N. Herald Rd. scld.org (509-893-8400)

FOOD & DRINK

CLUB ’74 SPEAKEASY A retro speakeasy in Riverfront Park with themed-drinks, food, DJs, dancing and more. May 3-19, Fri-Sun from 6-11 pm. 21+. $10; free with Club ’74 membership. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. expo50spokane.com

POP-UP MEXICAN RESTAURANT Jamie Aquino cooks an all-vegetarian menu with plant-based and gluten-free options. Order online for pick-up. May 3, 3:30-6 pm. $46. The Kitchen Engine, 621 W. Mallon Ave. thekitchenengine.com

A CULINARY TOUR OF THE PALOUSE: POZOLE Learn how to prepare pozole, a traditional Mexican stew, with James Beard award-winning chef Yvve Austin. May 4, 12-3 pm. $55. Dahmen Barn, 419 N. Park Way, Uniontown. artisanbarn.org

TEQUILA ROYALE A Cinco de Mayo tequila testing event featuring over 40 varieties. Participants receive a tasting glass, a passport and tapas-style bites. May 4. $85. The Coeur d’Alene Resort, 115 S. Second. cdaresort.com

CINCO DE MAYO SUNDAY BRUNCH A brunch featuring duck chilaquiles, shrimp and grits, bone marrow, frozen margaritas and more. May 5, 12-4 pm. $15 to reserve a seat. Zona Blanca, 157 S. Howard St. limefishsalt.com (509-241-3385)

WINE, BEER & TACOS Taste a selection of chef-curated gourmet tacos paired with wine-aritas with Arbor Crest wines. May 5, 6 pm. $70. Arbor Crest Wine Cellars, 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd. arborcrest.com

SWEET & SAVORY GALETTES Kristi Fountain teaches how to make versatile rustic tarts. May 7, 5:45-8:15 pm. $85. The Kitchen Engine, 621 W. Mallon Ave. thekitchenengine.com (509-328-3335)

WORLD COOKING: LEBANESE FOOD

Chef Madolin Haddad of Café Lebanon, demonstrates the cooking of a traditional Lebanese dish during an online presentation. May 7, 6:30-7:30 pm. Free. scld.org

EVENTS | CALENDAR

MUSIC

COEUR D’ALEERS SPRING TUNE UP This spring concert raises funds for Cancer and Community Charities (3Cs). May 3, 7-8:30 pm. By donation. Trinity Lutheran Church, 812 N. Fifth St. 3cscda.com

EWU MARIACHI LAS ÁGUILAS CON -

CERT A mariachi concert featuring soloists José Iñguez and Mareanne Silva. At the EWU Recital Hall. May 3, 12-12:50 pm. Free. Eastern Washington University, 526 Fifth St. ewu.edu/music (509-259-2241)

GEORGEFEST An assembly of Seattle musicians honoring the life and music of George Harrison of Beatles fame. May 4, 8-10 pm. $40. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. bingcrosbytheater.com

SONGS IN THE ROUND A roundtablestyle performance of blues, swing and folk music performed by Brad Keeler, Lyle Morse and Patrice Webb. May 4, 7-8:45 pm. By donation. Harrington Opera House, 19 S. Third St. fb.me/e/zI1EQkK0n

TAPESTRY WOMEN’S CHOIR: BEAUTIFUL WORLD An evening of vocal music to celebrate spring featuring The Rose Garden Trio of Moscow. May 4, 7:30-8:30 pm. Free. St. James Episcopal Church, 1410 NE. Stadium. stjamespullman.org

GONZAGA SPRING CHORAL CELEBRATION A concert featuring the Discantus Treble Chorus, Concert Choir, Glee Club, Big Bing Theory and the Vocal Jazz ensemble. May 5, 2-3:30 pm. $10-$15. Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, 211 E. Desmet Ave. gonzaga.edu/mwpac

BICYCLE TIRE REPLACEMENT Learn how to change a bicycle tire and how to perform a safety check before each ride. Presented by Robin DeRuwe from Fitness Fanatics. Registration required. May 6, 6-7 pm. Free. Argonne Library, 4322 N. Argonne Rd. scld.org

SPOCANOPY WEEK & EXPO FOREST

The Lands Council aims to plant 500 trees during the week to celebrate Expo ’74’s 50th anniversary. Sign up to volunteer at locations around Spokane and Spokane Valley. May 7-11, 10 am-2 pm. Free. landscouncil.org

THEATER & DANCE

GYPSY The tale of an ambitious stage mother fighting for her daughters’ success while secretly yearning for her own. Thu-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sat-Sun at 2 pm through May 5. $22-$28. Kroc Center, 1765 W. Golf Course Rd. aspirecda.com

ORLANDO The story of Orlando, who is drawn into a love affair with Queen Elizabeth. May 5, 2 pm. $5-$25. The Forge Theater, 404 Sweet Ave. uidaho.edu/ class/theatre (208-885-6465)

HAROLD BALAZS: LEAVING MARKS

This exhibition celebrates Balazs’ regional impact through 30 new additions to the museum’s permanent collection. The show focuses on Balazs’ later woks in sculpture, drawing and enamel. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through June 3. $8-$12. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

HIGHER GROUND: AN EXHIBITION OF ART, EPHEMERA & FORM Artwork and archival material from across the Palouse that speaks to the history of queer experience in the area. Mon-Fri from 8:30 am4:30 pm through Oct. 31. Free. Washington State University, 2000 NE Stadium Way. libraries.wsu.edu/masc

SAMANTHA WALL: IN A NEW LIGHT

Drawings created over the last two years that reflect the artist’s experiences as a Black Korean immigrant. Mon-Fri from 8:30 am-3:30 pm through May 9. Free. SFCC Fine Arts Gallery, 3410 W. Whistalks Way, Bldg. 6. samanthawall.com

FRIDAY

SPOKANE SYMPHONY MASTERWORKS 9: EXPO ’74 Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Expo ’74 with music played that season by the Spokane Symphony. May 11, 7:30 pm and May 12, 3 pm. $19-$68. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org

SPORTS & OUTDOORS

MEATEATER LIVE The MeatEater crew delivers trivia, news and opinion from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife conservation and wild foods. May 2, 8-10 pm. $62.50-$112.50. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. bingcrosbytheater.com

SPOKANE INDIANS VS. EUGENE EMERALDS Series promos include Fireworks Night and more. May 4, 5:09 pm and May 5, 1:05 pm. Avista Stadium, 602 N. Havana. milb.com/spokane

MASTER GARDENERS PLANT CLINIC Master Gardener volunteers help with a wide variety of horticulture issues. May 3, 1-5 pm. Free. Cheney Library, 610 First St. scld.org (509-893-8280)

RITTERS’ ANUAL COLOR SERIES Make a potted container for your porch or patio with Ritters’ designers. May 4, 2-3 pm. $55. Ritters Garden & Gift, 10120 N. Division St. 4ritter.com (509 467-5258)

SPRING PLANT SALES Spokane Community College horticulture students sell their greenhouse/nursery crops including annuals, perennials, trees, shrubs and hanging baskets. May 4, 9 am-4 pm and May 11, 9 am-5 pm. Free. Spokane Community College, 1810 N. Greene St. scc. spokane.edu (509-533-7277)

BLOOMSDAY 2024 Run or walk 7.46 miles on a course around Spokane for the 47th Bloomsday race. May 5, 8:30 am. $28-$50. Downtown Spokane. bloomsdayrun.org

CATS The Jellicle Cats come out to play on one special night of the year — the night of the Jellicle Ball. One by one they tell their stories to Old Deuteronomy, their leader, who must choose one of the Cats to ascend to The Heaviside Layer. May 10-June 16; Wed-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. $20-$40. Spokane Civic Theatre, 1020 N. Howard. spokanecivictheatrecom

THE HEART OF A GRAND OLD TOWN: THE VOICES OF EXPO ’74 Using original oral histories of those who organized and experienced Expo, performers from Gonzaga University recount the motives for the Expo, its development and visitors’ experiences and its lasting impact on the Spokane region. May 11, 1 & 3 pm. Free. River Park Square, 808 W. Main Ave. expo50spokane.com (509-624-3945)

SPOKANE FOLKLORE SOCIETY CALLERS WORKSHOP A workshop for those interested in learning how to call a contra dance. Other topics include repertoire, teaching and programing. May 11, 2:304:30 pm. Free. East Spokane Grange, 1621 N. Park Rd. spokanefolklore.org

VISUAL ARTS

1924: SOVEREIGNTY, LEADERSHIP AND THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT This exhibition commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act and centers on photographs of early local tribal leadership as they and their people navigated the sometimes-conflicting nature of being both U.S. citizens and citizens of their own sovereign nations. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through Feb. 2. $7-$12. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

BEYOND HOPE: KIENHOLZ AND THE INLAND NORTHWEST EXHIBITION

This exhibition delves into the collaborative artistic journey of American artist Edward Kienholz and his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, in Hope, Idaho. Tue-Sat from 10 am-4 pm through June 29. Free. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, 1535 NE Wilson Rd. museum.wsu.edu

BY THE DOZEN Art created by seniors in the Whitworth University Art & Design Department. Mon-Fri from 10 am-4:30 pm, Sat from 10 am-2 pm. through May 18. Free. Bryan Oliver Gallery, Whitworth, 300 W. Hawthorne Ave. whitworth.edu

MASTER OF FINE ARTS THESIS EXHIBITION Works by MFA candidates Mozi Jones and Reika Okuhara that have been honed through years of study and exploration, with visual narratives and conceptual pieces. Tue-Sat from 10 am-4 pm through June 29. Free. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, 1535 NE Wilson Rd. museum.wsu.edu

CHERYLEE DUNCAN: THREADSCAPES Duncan uses scrap fabric from other projects for her mixed media paintings. May 1-30, daily from 11 am-7 pm through May 30. Free. Pottery Place Plus, 203 N. Washington St. potteryplaceplus.com

PLAYTIME: THEN AND NOW An outdoor art exhibition illustrating the universality of play throughout culture and time held in conjunction with the Expo ’74 50th anniversary celebration. May 2-30, daily during park hours. Free. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. friendsofmmofra.org

LITTLE SPOKANE RIVER ARTIST STUDIO TOUR PREVIEW SHOW A preview of work featured in the upcoming tour. Daily from 11 am-7 pm through May 25, 11 am-7 pm. Free. Liberty Building, 203 N. Washington. spokanelibertybuilding.com

SUBVERSIVE INTENT: SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION EXHIBITION

This show features rarely displayed artworks from the museum’s permanent collection, spanning from historical pieces by Hogarth and Goya to contemporary works by Holzer and Shimomura. Tue-Sat from 10 am-4 pm through June 29. Free. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, 1535 NE Wilson Rd. museum.wsu.edu

JIEMEI LIN: INSIDIOUS: THOSE TINY THINGS A solo exhibition showcasing paintings, prints and installations offering exploration of the everyday moments that shape our lives. May 4-25, Thu-Sat from 4-7 pm. Free. Terrain Gallery, 628 N. Monroe St. terrainspokane.com

BLIND DATE: 4 ARTISTS Artists Annie Feuerstein, Christopher Russell, Garric Simonsen and Joe Tomlinson mingle with others. Blind Date welcomes voluntary social engagements and the idea of the unexpected in art and life. May 3, 5-8 pm. Free. Kolva-Sullivan Gallery, 115 S. Adams St. fb.me/e/3wMIsDIDT (509-458-5517)

CHRISTY BRANSON: UNEARTHED New encaustic paintings by local artist Christy Branson. May 3-31; daily from 12-6 pm. Free. Barrister Winery, 1213 W. Railroad Ave. christybranson.com

TRINA SNEDIKER: FIND YOUR FORMULA Abstract acrylic mixed media paintings depicting the journey of life. May 3,

5-8 pm. Free. The Candle Bar Co., 817 W. Garland Ave. thecandlebarco.com

FIRST FRIDAY Art galleries and businesses across downtown Spokane and beyond host monthly receptions to showcase new art. Fri, May 3 from 5-8 pm. Free. firstfridayspokane.org

MARY CARUSO & ERIC SANCHEZ Geometric paintings by Eric Sanchez and watercolor painting by Mary Caruso. May 3-31, Thu-Sat from 11 am-7 pm. Free. Avenue West Gallery, 907 W. Boone Ave. avenuewestgallery.com (509-838-4999)

ANNA REYNOLDS WALLIS: TAPESTRIES The local fiber artist displays various tapestries made from yarn and other textiles. May 3-June 3, daily from 11 am-6 pm. Free. Entropy, 101 N. Stevens St. explodingstars.com (509-414-3226)

WITCHING HOUR: SENIOR ART EXHIBIT

Artworks by Gonzaga’s current BFA and BA senior candidates. Fri from 4-7 pm, Sat from 10 am-3 pm through May 10. Free. Gonzaga University Urban Arts Center, 125 S. Stevens St. gonzaga.edu

JODIE STEJE Th local artist showcases her encaustic paintings. May 3, 5-8 pm. Free. Uptic Studios, 402 E. Sprague Ave. upticcurated.com

JOSHUA HOBSON: POTENTIAL SYNER-

GY The local, lens-based artist’s current projects engage with dire environmental issues and the effects of climate change. May 3-June 1, Fri-Sat from noon-8 pm. 12-8 pm through June 1. Free. Saranac Art Projects, 25 W. Main Ave. sapgallery.com

LISA NAPPA & ROGER RALSTON: IN TECHNICOLOR This exhibition showcases new multimedia work by that explore color and themes of wonder. May 3-June 1, Fri-Sat from noon-8 pm. Free. Saranac Art Projects, 25 W. Main. sapgallery.com

MARK MOORE: EARTH TONES The local ceramic artist showcases functional ceramic pieces with a focus on planters. May 3-31; Wed-Fri from 11 am-5 pm. Call to ensure gallery is open. Free. Trackside Studio, 115 S. Adams. tracksidestudio.net

MEGAN MARTENS-HAWORTH: THE INTERLUDE Martens-Haworth explores the relationships between humanity and the animal kingdom through various artistic mediums. May 3-31; Mon-Fri from 10 am-5 pm. Free. Spokane Art School, 503 E. Second Ave. spokaneartschool.net

RIVER RIDGE ASSOCIATION OF FINE ARTS EXPO ’74 SHOW Expo ’74-themed art by members of the River Ridge Association of Fine Arts. First Friday kickoff on May 3 features custom radio programming, giveaways, a display of Expo memorabilia and storytelling by fair-goers. May 3-31; daily from 7 am-7 pm. Free. Indaba Coffee Roasters, 518 W. Riverside. rrafaofspokane.com

SUPAR VERITATEM: BEYOND REALISM

A compilation of personal and individual expressions of the artists’ dreams, imaginations and visions. Featured artists include Beth Ann Rimmelspacher, Theresa Henson, Linda Hyatt Cancel and John Sebastian. May 3-26, Thu-Sun from 10 am-6 pm. Free. Dahmen Barn, 419 N. Park Way. artisanbarn.org (509-229-3414)

VISIONS A group show featuring Melissa Cole, Aaron Smith and Sara Conybeer. May 3-June 1, Wed-Sat from 11 am-5 pm. Free. New Moon Art Gallery, 1326 E. Sprague Ave. manicmoonandmore.com

WEST CENTRAL POSTER CONTEST

SHOW Children from West Central schools designed posters for the neighborhood. All 180 entries are on view. May 8-22; Mon-Thu from 9 am-7 pm, Fri-Sat

from 10 am-5 pm, Sun from noon-4 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. westcentraldevelopmentproject.org

BIG INK! A CELEBRATION OF WOOD

BLOCK PRINTING A traveling print workshop featuring a very large printing press called The Big Tuna. Watch it in action and take away a souvenir print from The Anchovy (a very tiny press). May 4-5, 1-4 pm. Free. The Hive, 2904 E. Sprague Ave. spokanelibrary.org

EXPO REVIVAL: SEARCHING FOR TRENT ALLEY OPENING RECEPTION

This show celebrates and honors the history and legacy of Asian/Asian Americans in and Spokane. Opening reception features performances and artist talks. May 4, 11 am-4 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main. spokanelibrary.org

WORDS

MOMENTS OF DELIGHT IN THE GARDEN

Author, blogger and rose gardener Anne Reeves presents this program about finding delight in everyday life. May 2, 4-6 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. tieg.org (509-535-8434)

DROP IN & WRITE Writers are invited to be a part of a supportive writers’ community. Bring works in progress to share and spend some time writing. Thursdays from 5:30-7 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

WRITE TOGETHER: A COMMUNITY

WRITING SESSION Bring your current writing project. Local novelist and Writing Education Specialist Sharma Shields provides prompts and advice if needed. May 2, 3:30-5 pm. Free. Hillyard Library, 4110 N. Cook. spokanelibrary.org

3 MINUTE MIC Auntie’s first Friday poetry open mic. Each participant shares three minutes worth of poetry. May 3, 7-8:30 pm. Free. Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave. auntiesbooks.com

ECHOES OF EXPO This seven-episode series explores the World Fair’s lasting impact on urban renewal, environmental awakening, the complexities of progress and community dynamics in Spokane. Scan wayfinding signs in the park to listen to each episode. May 4-July 7. Free. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. visitspokane.com (509-625-6600)

GONDOLAS & GARBAGE GOATS A three-week prose and poetry workshop with discussions about craft, prompts, readings and images based on the history of Spokane. Pieces generated from the workshop will be published in a book. For teens and adults. May 6-20, Mon from 5:30-7:30 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

BROKEN MIC Spokane Poetry Slam’s longest-running, weekly open mic reading series. Wednesdays at 6:30 pm; signups at 6 pm. Free. Neato Burrito, 827 W. First Ave. bit.ly/2ZAbugD

TEEN WRITE CLUB Teen writers are invited to get feedback on their work and explore all things prose and poetry. Tuesdays from 5:30-7 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

POETRY AFTER DARK EWU MFA students lead discussions about craft elements, style and form in poetry. Every second and fourth Wednesday of each month from 7-8 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

PIVOT OPEN MIC NIGHT The theme of the night is “duped.” Bring your stories of deception, white lies and tricks. May 9, 7 pm. Free. Whistle Punk Brewing, 122 S. Monroe St. pivotspokane.com n

Come Celebrate the Spirit of Aloha at Riverfront Park!

2024 Asian Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Festival FREE Admission, Asian Food, Vendors & Parenting Resources, Performances, Silk Road Marketplace w/ the Adrian Empire & Spokane Renaissance Fair.

Friday, May 10, 2024 | 4 pm to 7:30 pm Vietnamese Heritage Day.

Saturday, May 11, 2024 | 10 am to 8 pm

Luau at 5 pm & Fire-Knife Show at 7 pm w/ 4x Fire-Knife World Champion. WA Care-A-Van & Vaccination Clinic Onsite.

Sunday, May 12, 2024 | 11 am to 4 pm

Mother’s Day Themed Activities, Demos, Food Samples & Gifts for MOM ’s

Please visit our facebook, instagram or website for the program schedule. Charitydoyl@yahoo.com | 509.928.9664 | SpokaneUnitedWeStand.org

The Sober Generation

Young people aren’t consuming cannabis like they used to

BY WILL MAUPIN

In the 1980s, Nancy Reagan, then first lady during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, helped popularize the phrase “just say no” when it came to recreational drugs.

Now, in the 2020s, the youth appear to be following Mrs. Reagan’s advice. According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, minors are not turning to cannabis even though it has become legal (for adults 21 and older) in Washington and many other states.

Based on national studies of youth risk behaviors, recreational marijuana law “adoption was not associated with current marijuana use,” the study’s researchers found.

Furthermore, the study, published in March 2024, found

that “there was no evidence of an increase in marijuana use” among minors in places that legalized recreational marijuana.

Plainly said, legalization of recreational cannabis has not led to an increase in cannabis use among minors, even in places where that use is allowed for adults, such as Washington.

One of the many fears associated with the legalization of cannabis was that it could lead to an increase in drug use among minors. For prohibitionists, cannabis was regularly characterized, without evidence, as a so-called “gateway drug.” One of their most impactful talking points was that legalization would increase cannabis use by children.

Well, it hasn’t.

“There was no evidence that [recreational marijuana laws] were associated with encouraging youth marijuana use,” the study found.

Moreover, it appears that underage cannabis use is actually on the decline in Washington state.

“In 2021, survey data showed a 50% decline in youth cannabis and alcohol use in the past 30 days among 10th graders. The 2023 results show these numbers have remained stable since 2021,” the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board reports, based on the state’s 2023 Healthy Youth Survey data.

As of the 2023 Healthy Youth Survey, 8% of 10th graders said they had used cannabis within the last 30 days. That number has dropped from 19.3% in 2012, the year voters agreed to legalize recreational cannabis in Washington.

A decade after legalization, data set after data set has come back showing that increased access for adults has not led to the feared increase of use by kids. In fact, the data show the opposite has been true.

The kids are alright. Maybe even more so than ever before. n

GREEN ZONE

possessing, using, distributing and selling

remains illegal under federal law. In Washington state, consuming marijuana in

driving while under the influence of marijuana and transporting marijuana across state lines are all illegal. Marijuana has intoxicating effects; there may be health risks associated with its consumption, and it may be habit-forming. It can also impair concentration, coordination and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Keep out of reach of children. For more information, consult the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board at www.liq.wa.gov.

NOTE TO READERS

Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho. Possessing up to an ounce is a misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and up to a $1,000 fine; more than three ounces is a felony that can carry a five-year sentence and fine of up to $10,000. Transporting marijuana across state lines, like from Washington into Idaho, is a felony under federal law.

WARNING: This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Cannabis can impair concentration, coordination, and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery

Spice Girl who turned 50 in April 2024 41. “___ I a stinker?” (Bugs Bunny line) 42. Tricks

Cold War broadcast across the Atlantic, for short

Unfortunate event

Exactly right, but without the blood? 53. Lawnmower brand that means “bull”

54. Play dirty, per a Michelle Obama catchphrase

55. Rowboat need

57. Coating material

58. Is repentant of 59. “Like that’s believable, even at this awful height!”

62. Admin.’s aide

63. One of the Hawaiian Islands

64. Nervous utterances

65. Chaotic state

66. Tiny puff of smoke

67. Act gloomy

1. Seat at a barn dance, maybe 2. Footstool

3. When doubled, a guitar effect

4. “A ___ Is Born” 5. Shrek’s wife

6. It might be clerical

7. Old ewe in “Babe”

8. Response, for short 9. “Peer Gynt” composer Edvard 10. Nimble

11. Road-surface material

12. Songwriter Buddy who co-founded Capitol Records

Mystery guest moniker

13. Gives away the ending of 17. 100 ___ (“Doritos & Fritos” duo)

Internet comedy group since 2002

Live and breathe

___-1 (“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” vehicle)

Legendary Notre Dame coach Parseghian

32. Acid in proteins

33. Ant. antonym

34. Goethe “deal with the devil” character

36. Injure badly

37. ‘80s anti-missile plan, for