S-R celebrates 125th anniversary

The Spokesman-Review celebrates its 125th birthday today. In all that time, it has never missed an issue.

Not during the Great Fire of 1889, when it printed a full map of the devastation. Not after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, when it documented an entire region at a standstill. Not during innumerable ice storms, fire storms and blizzards.

Except, quite possibly, for that very first issue.

Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Spokane Falls Review is dated May 19, 1883. However, the evidence suggests that the first issue didn’t hit the muddy streets of Spokane Falls until May 20.

Turns out, the paper’s new printing press was missing a key part, so editor Frank Dallam arranged to have that first issue printed at the Cheney Sentinel. Dallam loaded the forms – pages of type – into a wagon and began bouncing his way to Cheney.

The only problem: Dallam was a newcomer and didn’t know the way to Cheney. He clanged his way down a wagon road all night without hitting any kind of a town. When the sun finally came up, he walked up to a cabin, knocked on the door and asked, plaintively, where the heck he was.

Almost to Spangle, that’s where. So the farmer pointed Dallam back toward Cheney, but by the time he pulled into Cheney and ran the paper off the press, he had missed his first deadline.

“The paper is a day late on that account,” he wrote in that first issue, “but we hope this delay will not happen again anytime soon.”

By 1894, The Spokane Falls Review evolved into The Spokesman-Review. Ever since, it has faithfully delivered the news to the Inland Northwest.

Today, The Spokesman-Review is available online as well as in print, which means news can be transmitted instantly. The odds of missing an issue have shrunk even further.

So here’s to another 125 years with an unblemished record. No problem – just another 45,000-plus issues to go.