The Slice: We could promote it as Smogfest Week

Bloomsday seems to be hanging in there, and we all know about Hoopfest’s success.

But if a Spokane event organizer wanted to promote something that would really be a hit, he or she could plan “Drive to Work Week.”

On this one special week, Spokane-area residents would be encouraged to drive their cars to the office.

I’m telling you. That would be huge.

•Slice answers: “My favorite bridge is the Latah Bridge, on the Sunset Highway where it crosses High Bridge Park,” wrote Tim Finneran. “I have a great view of it from my Browne’s Addition apartment.”

Robert Wakefield mentioned the Washington Street Bridge. “Nice view of Riverfront Park,” he said.

And then there was this from Patricia Holland.

“My first bridge was the beautiful Monroe Street Bridge, which I thought was thrilling to go across when I was little. My dad would always stop on the bridge and let us children get out and look at the falls.

“But my favorite bridge was the Maple Street Bridge. I watched it being built. It was so much fun to toss the 10 cents in the metal basket at the toll booth. It was the first toll booth I had ever seen. I still remember the misspelled sign they had on it for a long time, ‘No Pennys.’ ”

•Our shared burden: When WSU professor Carmen Lugo-Lugo’s father was in the military as a young man, he spent time in Tacoma. He did some regional traveling while stationed there. And apparently he came to regard himself as something of an expert on all things Washington.

Because when Lugo-Lugo was planning to move from her family home in Puerto Rico to Pullman, her dad took the liberty of correcting one particular place-name pronunciation.

It’s not Spo-can, he told her. It’s Spo-cane.

“He continued to correct me on the city’s pronunciation for years after I’d been living in Pullman, until one day, while mustering all the patience I was able, I finally told him that it was pretty presumptuous of him to suggest that he knows the pronunciation of a place better than I did, when I actually lived in the area. That seemed to do the trick.”

A few years later, her mother and brother came for a visit. And as the plane was landing, a flight attendant welcomed everyone to “Spo-cane, Washington.”

“My mother volunteered she would not tell my father.”

•Downtown Spokane’s 241st neatest attraction: Going by Pacific Pak Ice on a warm day and overhearing a little kid get all excited about seeing small mounds of discarded “snow” outside the Jefferson Street facility.

•Today’s Slice question: If the Review Tower was no longer used for newspaper offices and you owned the building, what would you do with it?