The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Then and Now: Rutter Parkway is banker’s enduring legacy

1938: This photo of Griffiths Hill on the Rutter Parkway was taken shortly after the roadway was completed by the Works Progress Administration. A rock retaining wall was built and granite posts were a feature of the construction. The hillside at left was to be seeded later.
1938: This photo of Griffiths Hill on the Rutter Parkway was taken shortly after the roadway was completed by the Works Progress Administration. A rock retaining wall was built and granite posts were a feature of the construction. The hillside at left was to be seeded later.

Robert Lewis Rutter, born in Philadelphia in 1867, arrived in Spokane in 1892 and was a prominent business and civic leader for more than 50 years. He founded the Western Union Life Insurance Co. and in 1904 became president of the Spokane and Eastern Trust Co., one of Spokane’s biggest banks.

In 1926, Phineas Saffron shot Rutter twice in the back after the bank foreclosed on Saffron’s pawn shop. The banker survived and spent a month in the hospital.

Rutter bought a rural estate near the Spokane Country Club and the Little Spokane River in 1928. He was at the helm when the Spokane and Eastern constructed a seven-story art deco building at Howard and Riverside. He helped found St. Luke’s Hospital and served as road supervisor for the Five Mile Township.

Perhaps Rutter’s most enduring legacy resulted from his work as head of the county welfare administration during the Great Depression. The committee spent money from the federal Works Progress Administration to hire thousands of unemployed men to build roads and make utility improvements. Through the 1930s, up to 5,000 men worked on projects like High Drive, Riverside State Park and city sewer lines. The WPA crews paved a sportsman’s trail, later called Rutter Parkway, along the Little Spokane River near the Rutter home.

During the construction in January 1937, the then-retired banker got a phone call from the wife of a WPA laborer, saying J.A. Cole was missing after dark and the temperatures were around zero. Rutter bundled up and ventured out in his own car to find the missing man, whose car had gotten stuck in mud and snow. Cole was “stiff and chattering with cold,” so he took the man to the Rutter home to warm up.

The finished road connected Nine Mile Road, now Highway 291, with the highway to Colville, now U.S. 395. The new scenic roadway, one newspaper said, “stands as a monument to the tireless zeal and ceaseless unpaid efforts of one man, R.L. Rutter, banker by profession, road maker by choice, as a spare time hobby.”

Rutter Parkway is still a popular route for commuters traversing the North Side. Rutter is also remembered as the father of Sally Rutter, who went to Hollywood, took the screen name Gale Page and had a brief career as a movie and radio actress. She played Pat O’Brien’s wife in “Knute Rockne - All American.”

R.L. Rutter died in 1948.

  

– Jesse Tinsley