It Has Stamps’ Approval

A return home

Brenda Stamps thought she had said goodbye to Spokane for good.

But after 20 years, she’s back at 218 S. Hogan, greeting anyone who knocks on her door with a gentle hello.

Stamps left California to come home in January. She returned to pay tribute to her mother and the old East Sprague neighborhood she once loved to hate.

“Mom would not leave … for nobody and nothing,” Stamps said of her mother, Nellie Lay, an educator and neighborhood activist. “We just want to show our thanks for her struggle to keep these homes and our neighborhood together.”

Lay and her neighborhood gave anyone with gumption a chance to succeed, said Stamps.

Doyle and Nellie Lay bought a home on Hogan in 1957 because it was the only place blacks could buy. White families in other neighborhoods wouldn’t sell to the young couple.

They lived in a simple two-story house. Nellie’s sister, Valeria Jones, moved in next door.

For the next 20 years, the Lays raised six children on a salary from Kaiser Aluminum. Then Doyle died. Nellie became the director of the East Central Neighborhood Center and started college at age 40 in the 1970’s.

She held her family together on the tightest of budgets. She died in November, a poor woman in a rundown home.

Soon after, Stamps and her husband left their house and private investigation business in San Jose, joining her sister Fleta in their mother’s home. Furniture crowds tiny rooms, family pictures coat the walls.

“If we leave, what was the whole struggle for?” Stamps asked.

They’re not going in blind. They know the drug dealers and prostitution infesting East Sprague are not easily exterminated. More families are moving out than in.

Forty years ago, Brenda and Fleta roamed the streets without fear. All they ever worried about was the neighborhood wino.

Today, Fleta’s 17-year-old daughter, Tracy, can’t stand across from Sonnenberg’s Market to catch a school bus without trouble.

“Cars pull up all the time,” and men ask for sex, the Ferris High School student said. “I just think, ‘Eyes straight and keep walking.”’

At school, East Sprague is called “the ghetto.”

Nellie Lay’s children want to change that image.

They have organized a group of neighbors to lobby the city to have street lights installed on residential streets, trees trimmed and side streets paved.

Work has begun to landscape corner parks along Second and Pacific. Trash is cleared from alleys.

“What will this place be like for my 3-year-old nephew Nicholas?” Stamps asked. “It has to change.”

The family also hopes to make their deceased aunt’s home next door liveable again. It’s been vacant since she died in 1982.

“My dream is to see that house light up,” Stamps said, staring at it from the window. “My mother worked so hard to give us something when she was gone.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo