The Slice: Maybe we can railroad them into a change

So I saw someone’s luggage adorned with “SPK” tags.

Hallelujah, I thought. At long last, some Spokane-friendly bureaucrats have gone and done it. Without making a big production of it, they have quietly replaced our head-scratcher GEG airport code with something immediately recognizable.

No longer would we have to explain about the old Geiger Field, named after a pioneering aviator from back East, et cetera. We’ll have a three-letter code that makes sense, just like other cities.

Then I looked closer. The travel tags had been issued by Amtrak. They referred to our train station.

Oh, well.

Well, which is it: A friend was at a baseball game at Avista Stadium the other night.

“I overheard a young man saying that he doesn’t want to work as a grocery checker, but will take the job if it’s offered,” he wrote.

The young man went on to say, “At this point, I’ll do anything to pay the bills.”

A little bit later, the Recycle Man mascot could be seen cavorting in his blue superhero costume.

Observing this, that same young man said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to do that.”

Today’s Slice question: Even those who do not attend class reunions probably get curious about childhood friends now and then. And thanks to Google and other Internet searching tools, it’s sometimes possible to answer “Where are they now?” with a few keystrokes.

Guys tend to be easier to find because their names don’t change.

But you never know what you will discover with some stream-of-consciousness searching. Current photos can be especially interesting because, though we’ve all aged, some faces remain unmistakable.

The other night I learned that a high school friend — and co-founder of a briefly legendary 1973 bicycle race in Burlington, Vt., the Edgemoor 500 — is the executive vice president at Seattle University.

I need to send a note to the president of that college and encourage him to surprise my old classmate by trotting out his Watergate era nickname.

“Otter, could you come in here for a moment?”

So here’s the question: Who have you found?