Albi Would Love Fanning Statue Debate Champion Of Local Sporting Events Also Couldn’t Resist Shaking Things Up

The golfer steps onto the ordered hush of the green, tense with concentration, demanding absolute quiet.

That’s when Joe Albi would toss a firecracker at his feet.

Whatever Albi would’ve thought of the public art controversy over Albi Stadium today, he’d have loved the bang.

The attorney and civic booster was an international diplomat, candidate for Congress and the human equivalent of the whoopee cushion.

He once held a hole-in-one contest downtown. The prize: two airplanes and a convertible. The club he headed threw massive Christmas parties - on the Fourth of July. Albi organized “firecracker” golf tournaments where spectators tossed lit firecrackers at the duffers and spotted live alligators in the sand traps.

“He was crazy about sports and comic routines and playing practical jokes on people,” said his son, J.J. Albi of Eugene, Ore.

“He was rotund, jovial, always had a joke up his sleeve,” said attorney Larry Cary Smith, president of the Spokane Athletic Round Table, the nonprofit club Albi founded in 1920. More than $6.5 million has flowed into Spokane sports, events and scholarships through the organization.

“That statue out there should be called ‘Joe Albi,”’ said Cary Smith, whose father was a pallbearer at Albi’s funeral in 1962. “He really was Joe Fan.”

In a North Side basement this week, artist Vincent De Felice paused with a handful of sculpting clay, studying a portrait of Albi.

De Felice is the 29-year-old Spokane artist creating public art for Albi Stadium. Joseph Aloysius Albi is his subject.

De Felice said he always intended the proposed 600-pound bronze statue to be Joe Fan/Joe Albi. The man represents what is crucial to all events at the stadium - the fan.

He says the Joe Albi element got lost in the paperwork when City Council members objected to Joe Fan’s gender, saying it excluded women.

Since both the artist and council agreed the statue should look like Albi, De Felice has raced home from his day job as art director at North by Northwest Productions to capture Albi’s face and spirit.

“It’s not important whether it looks like him as much as whether it feels like Joe Albi,” he said.

To feel Albi is to reach deep in Spokane’s Italian neighborhoods where De Felice’s great-grandfather once threw a party for Albi in 1930. Two hundred people attended and gave speeches all evening - none in English.

Born in Spokane in 1892, Albi was the son of a prominent banker, Garibaldi Albi, founder of the Italian community here. Young Joe graduated from Gonzaga University and Georgetown University Law School, and served two years in the Army Air Corps before returning to Spokane to raise a family and practice law.

He was eating lunch with six business friends one day in 1920 when an argument broke out over a football game. The debate begat the Athletic Round Table, a social club that met for lunch every business day for 36 years and eventually signed up 2,000 members.

The club, operating at various locations downtown, raised money through a cocktail bar and slot machines, proceeds “beyond dreams of avarice,” he once joked. The money was invested by Albi and his brother, Ted, in the stock market.

Even after slot machines were outlawed in the 1950s, the Round Table managed to raise and give away $1 million while other nonprofits floundered, said Chuck Stolz, club secretary since the 1940s.

Under Albi the club funded nearly half of Spokane Memorial Stadium, a third of the Coliseum, the entire Esmeralda Golf Course, tennis courts, playgrounds, swimming pools and scholarships. Orphans and poor children were among the biggest beneficiaries. Through A.R.T. Bingo, the organization still raises about $150,000 a year for junior golf, scholarships and other events.

Albi headed the Round Table for 42 years. At 5-foot-6, the fast-talking trial attorney tossed firecracker after firecracker into the mix - all to get Spokane national attention.

He once sent a basketball team on a cross-country tour in a fleet of yellow taxis.

In 1944, he sold the national Professional Golfers Association on championships at Manito. When the men’s pro circuit got too expensive, he wooed the Women’s National Open to Spokane.

Albi “did more materially and spiritually for sports than any other man in this community,” said a city councilman who proposed renaming the stadium after Albi.

“Spokane is my city,” Albi would simply say. “I work here.”

In addition to law, he served 12 years as the Italian consul agent for Eastern Washington. He ran for Congress in 1942, finishing fifth out of six candidates. But his son says he carried Spokane.

The election came on the heels of his most famous gag when, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Congress voted itself into the federal pension program.

From Spokane, Albi launched “Bundles for Congress,” a national campaign in which people sent care packages of used clothing, mousetraps, artificial limbs and corsets to Congress. The lawmakers subsequently dropped their retirement plans, but not without rancor. After a senator called him Un-American Albi in an anonymous article for Pic magazine, he sued for libel - and won.

Throughout he golfed three days a week with his foursome, though daughter Jaclyn Flaherty jokes she had a better handicap. He was golfing when he began to notice a weakness in his left hand affecting his grip. It was Lou Gehrig’s disease.

By March 1962, he was critically ill when the City Council voted to rename the 12-year-old stadium after Albi. He died weeks later, on May 8.

Thirty-five years later, De Felice works on Albi’s likeness in his home, eight blocks from Albi Stadium.

In June, De Felice plans to cut the finished sculpture in half before he and his wife Monique borrow a truck to haul the piece to a foundry in Joseph, Ore.

In September, the bronze Joe Albi is expected to be bolted to the bleachers. The figure leans toward the action with binoculars around his neck, a Thermos of coffee at his feet. “He is Joe Average, Joe Everybody. He is what makes the events and the games possible. He represents all the people that are there,” De Felice said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)