Chris Peck

Seattle doesn't seem too keen on keeping the Seahawks. Spokane does. In a poll 10 days ago, Washington state residents were asked how they would vote on a plan to build a new stadium to keep professional football in Seattle.

Not everyone in Eastern Washington likes horse racing. Not everyone in the region thinks betting on horses is a good way to spend an evening. Still, people who live on this side of the Cascades need to pay attention to what is happening to Playfair Race Course in the Washington state Legislature this year. The plight of Playfair provides another disturbing example of how West Side politics, money and power are used to enhance the Puget Sound side of the state, and shaft Eastern Washington in the process. Since the 1930s, Playfair has been a landmark that distinguishes Spokane from other cities in the state. Playfair has been a reason to visit Spokane, a reason Eastern Washington has a thriving horse-breeding industry, a reason to think Spokane indeed is a second city to Seattle. But the old formulas and assumptions that governed horse racing, and politics, in Washington state are changing fast. The closure of Longacres in 1992, the explosive growth of casino gambling on Indian reservations and the proliferation of national gaming technology have created new dynamics in horse racing. Playfair is trying to adapt. The current operators of the track want to hold on to live, Spokane-based horseracing. They think they have a way to do it if Playfair can gain a fraction of the statewide gambling market by having fans outside our region bet on Playfair races. "Today, satellite wagering is where a track makes its money," said Kim Rich, director of administration and comptroller for Playfair." In recent years Playfair has been able to make some progress in getting West Side wagers on Playfair races. The state currently has 28 off-track sites where Playfair races are being broadcast via satellite and where millions of dollars have been wagered on Playfair races. Last year, the Playfair races beamed into Puget Sound off-track betting parlors accounted for almost 90 percent of the track's total off-track betting. The future of Playfair depends on its ability to get even more off-track betting from the Puget Sound, and in time, more off-track betting from around the country. Since 1992, pari-mutuel betting in Washington state has shrunk by nearly $100 million, to a total of $144 million last year. Clearly, Playfair needs help from the Legislature to increase its access to statewide off-track betting sites and its access to national racing fans. A few days ago, the Legislature took up a bill designed to benefit Washington horse tracks. On Friday, the bill passed the Senate, 33-16. But it wasn't a bill designed to help Playfair. To the contrary, Senate Bill 5762 was designed primarily to help Emerald Downs, the new track south of Seattle. As things now stand, the bill only makes the future extremely dark for Playfair and underscores the leverage West Side interests now have to feather their nests at the expense of anyone else. Here is why. The bill that passed the Senate says no off-track betting parlors within 60 miles of Emerald Downs can offer national simulcast horse races when Emerald Downs is running its horses. This means the people who last year generated 90 percent of Playfair's off-track revenue won't have national races available in their off-track parlors. Instead, they will have to go to Emerald Downs to bet on the national races. Oh, and by the way, they can wager on Emerald Downs races, too. SB5762 also says tracks that run live horses can only bring in one other outside set of races. The result? Emerald Downs likely will run its own horses and bring in a big out-of-state card of races. It has no reason to even bother with bringing Playfair races into its facility. Playfair will be able to bring in simulcast racing here in Spokane and will be able to market its races to national audiences under the bill. But the critical West Side fans of racing, who had been betting in off-track parlors on Playfair races, are being guided to Emerald Downs at the same time Playfair is being frozen out. Last week, Emerald Downs added insult to these injuries in its contract proposal with Playfair. The West Side track asked whether Playfair would be willing to broadcast Emerald Downs races for only .5percent of the revenue generated at the Auburn track. Meanwhile, Emerald Downs suggested it would like 11 percent of any revenue generated at its track by Playfair races it broadcasts. "We're not going to sign it," said Playfair's Rich. Instead, the Playfair management this week is going to push for some amendments to the racing bill in the House. "If we can't get them, we would be better off if the bill dies," Rich said. This is a sad state of political affairs. It isn't just a problem with horse racing. Once, there was a quaint notion in state politics that when it came to higher education expenditures, capital building projects and transportation, Eastern Washington would get a piece of the pie. Now, the guiding principle is to keep the pie securely glued to plates west of the Cascades.

Dolly, the cloned sheep, isn't much of a writer herself. Her birth, however, and immediate entry into history as the first mammal ever to be made from a single cell extracted from an unfertilized egg, has prompted college professors around the world to rush to their keyboards and rewrite whole sections of basic science course work. You see, nobody thought it was possible to create a sheep from a single cell. "Oh yeah, I was amazed," said Gary Thorgaard , chairman of the zoology department at Washington State University. Thorgaard has taught the basics of genetics for years at WSU. Next month the 170 students in Thorgaard's General Genetics class are scheduled to learn about cloning. "Usually, when you teach a basic course like this you don't change the course outline much," Thorgaard said. "But this development represents a fundamental change that I have to put into the course. It's a huge jump."

As a woman, would you feel safe in a community of about 12,000 where only five sexual assaults have been reported in the last 12 years? As a woman, would you be fearful to live in a community where men dominate the power structure and where lurid accounts of sexual harassment misconduct fill the news?

Ty Wick doesn't come across as the man of steel, a caped crusader or someone who necessarily has the force with him. He was graduated from Washington State University as an agricultural management major, for heaven's sake.

Some wealthy, successful men around here recently have put on long faces about the region's future. In January, a corporate spokesman for NorthTown Mall suggested a development in downtown Spokane would be hurtful to the region. A successful downtown would "cannibalize" other businesses, said Sabey Corp. executive vice president Laurent Poole. Then, just last week Idaho business leader Duane Hagadone offered his own gloomy economic assessment. Noting tourism and construction in Idaho were down, Hagadone told Coeur d'Alene Realtors locals should "shop at home" so their hard-earned dollars don't come across the Washington-Idaho border into Spokane County. This hand-wringing seems out of place and out of context for leaders who have made careers of being upbeat and positive.

He has been dead for 247 years. Yet his music lives. No, his music towers above almost all that came before and after. This music resides high above the cacophony of rap, country and pop that fills the radio bandwidth and buzzes through our ears as background noise to what we call modern life. This is music which commands you to listen. Music which commands you to feel. Music which speaks profoundly to the very soul. To find a place to listen, to feel, to let the music reach your soul isn't easy.

Consider one question when deciding whether survivalists should be able to hold a convention in a Spokane public building: As an American, do you believe in the right of free expression? In theory, the right to free expression represents one of the bedrock, core values of this country. In practice, free expression means allowing groups you oppose to get together and talk.

When it comes to putting a hand into the public money cookie jar, nobody has a bigger fist than Seattle. The big fist rummages hard and deep in the Washington Legislature each year to pull out sweet morsels for residents of King County. In 1988, the Legislature funded $200 million to build The Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle.

This is rich: Los Angeles wants to launch an attack on "quality of life" crimes by cracking down on panhandling.

The February 1997 edition of National Geographic magazine hit millions of mailboxes this week. The classic cover features the furry face of the biggest cat in the world.

At Spokane's African American Forum luncheon a few days ago, Rob Fukai asked a question about the Martin Luther King holiday that probably is on many minds. "What does Martin Luther King mean to me?" he wondered. Fukai, vice president of external affairs for Washington Water Power, is a Japanese-American who grew up in Spokane and really didn't know much about King. Not until Fukai went away to college did he learn about King's work for civil rights. Only after King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, did then-college student Fukai begin to read about King. Only then did Fukai think back on growing up in Spokane in the 1950s and begin to understand the broad impact King's civil rights movement had across the country. For it wasn't just African-American families in the South that suffered indignities and injustices in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, when he was only 3 years old, Fukai recalled the day neighbors visited his parents and asked them to move away, because Japanese weren't welcome in that part of Spokane.

The other day someone driving his car in downtown Seattle called on his cell phone. He was returning a call for his boss, whom I had tried to reach, but whose cell phone calls were being forwarded to California. The woman in California took my message and forwarded it via a cellular pager that rang up his assistant in the car phone in downtown Seattle. As I waited on the line, the dead air was filled by a soft, digitally-remastered version of Nat King Cole singing with his daughter. Dad is dead, and has been since Feb. 15, 1965, but the all-digital, all-cellular world made it possible for them to croon as if they were sitting on a couch together. When the call finally came through, the man on the other end of the line was Dan Yeoumans, someone who used to work in the non-cellular world of politics. "Yeah, I used to work in government. I was deputy press secretary for Booth Gardner (Washington state governor from 1985 until 1993)," he said. "But about a month ago I took this new job with AT&T; Wireless Services. It's going to be a really, really interesting business."

Here's my 1997 New Year's list of 50 cheap, easy, meaningful ways to make life better around the Inland Northwest: 1. If you own a snowblower, clear at least one other driveway during the next snowstorm. 2. If your driveway gets cleared, offer to take in your neighbor's mail during his or her vacation.

If you want to build a bomb and blow up a building, guidebooks exist to tell you how to do it. We know because of the bomb that was detonated in front of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. We know because of the bombs that exploded outside this newspaper's office and at Planned Parenthood offices in Spokane in 1996.

On the cold, gray day of her funeral, the present generation of Spokane and Inland Northwest residents probably took little note of Mary Gaiser's passing. She was 95. She had outlived two husbands and most of the friends and associates of her lifetime. The imprint left by Mary Gaiser and her husbands, however, will forever be left on Spokane. And, her passing raises difficult questions about the future of good works funded by the wealthy and well-intentioned. Over the past 50 years, Mary Gaiser and the trust named for her first husband, George F. Jewett, gave Spokane and the Inland Northwest what today would add up to millions of dollars in gifts. Indeed, the Cathedral of St. John, perhaps Spokane's most dominant architectural landmark and the place where friends and family gathered to pay their last respects to Mary Gaiser on Thursday, was largely built by Mary Cooper Jewett Gaiser and astounding charity. Beginning in the early 1940s, Mary and George F. Jewett began donating part of the Jewett family fortune to finishing the cathedral. The gifts included: In 1943, $20,000 to pay off back debts at the cathedral, $16,000 to support construction, $50,000 of in-kind donations including a house near the cathedral that became the deanery. In 1953, $80,000 more to finish construction. For 50 years, ongoing contributions to cathedral operations and projects totaling thousands more. And the cathedral was only one of dozens of institutions and causes that benefited from Gaiser-Jewett charitable giving. From the time she moved West from Wellesley College to Coeur d'Alene in the 1920s and continuing throughout the years she raised her children on Sumner Ave., the combined giving of Mary and David Gaiser (her second husband) and gifts from the George F. Jewett Foundation have been one of the top three private sources of gifts for worthwhile causes across the Inland Northwest. How big is the iimpact of the Gaiser/Jewett philanthropy? Consider this sampling: $50,000 to Whitman College in 1962; $200,000 to the Spokane YWCA in 1963; $100,000 to the University of Idaho in 1969; $225,000 to the Spokane Symphony in 1987. These numbers don't begin to count other gifts in the $5,000 to $25,000 range, everything from painting houses to Meals on Wheels. "They were a great, great family for this region," said the Very Rev. Richard Coombs, retired dean of the St. John's Cathedral. The Jewett Foundation, which was built from fortunes made in the timber industry across the Pacific Northwest, continues to this day. But with Mary gone, and her children now living in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., the Spokane connections between the family and the foundation have grown thinner. Mary Gaiser's granddaughter, Betsy Jewett Coombs, still lives in Spokane and is active in community affairs. But the issue of whether the Jewett Foundation, or another, newer patron will step forward in the tradition of old monied families funding worthwhile causes in the region is far from clear. For example, a recent request to set up a Spokane division of the Jewett Foundation was politely turned down. "And, I don't see a lot of new patrons coming along," said Allan Toole, a founder of the public, Spokane-based Foundation Northwest, which has assets of about $18 million and is a place where people with more modest means can donate today. "It seems there are very few people who are really interested in establishing charitable foundations right now," Toole added. Earlier this year, a Gallup survey found evidence of this disturbing trend. The number of people who contribute to charity in any form dropped in 1995. The same poll also found something that holds some promise for the future of charity. The most effective way to get people to give to worthy causes is simply to ask. When asked to give, 85 percent of people do. When left to think of giving on their own, only 45 percent ever think to do it. For Spokane, the need to identify new givers, the imperative to find the next Mary Gaiser and ask her to step forward, will grow more critical now. One of the most generous benefactors in the history of the Inland Northwest is gone and her good deeds will be difficult to replace.

Four days into ice storm '96, Washington Water Power Chief Executive Officer Paul Redmond canceled his newspaper subscription. His company blew a fuse over a headline that read, "WWP turns away offer of help." The next day, Redmond issued a press release calling the headline, the story and the newspaper irresponsible. From WWP's perspective, the story while technically accurate, missed the bigger picture. WWP believed it was doing everything it could to get the power up. Crews were working extraordinary shifts. People were pulling together, trying to do the best they could under difficult circumstances. The headline hit WWP employees like a low blow in the middle of a gallant fight, knocking the wind from their morale. WWP's response blew a few fuses around my office. From the newspaper's perspective, the story about the crews being turned away was accurate and the headline reflected what the story said. Writers and editors believed the story about developed largely because WWP issued contradictory statements on why the crews were being turned away. First it was because of the Border Patrol. Then it was because of paperwork. Finally, and logically, it was because the company felt it couldn't safely handle any more crews as it struggled to get a grip on its overall repair strategy. Thousands of phone lines lit up at WWP and at the newspaper that Saturday as people offered choice words and opinions about WWP's response to the ice storm or the newspaper headline they read as putting down the hard work of the utility. Today, nearly a month later, as houses have warmed and emotions cooled, the questions raised on each side are still valid. Was WWP prepared? Did the newspaper make too much of the crews being turned away? Over the last few days, the newspaper has initiated a number of community conversations about these questions. The paper has convened its citizens advisory councils in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene. The publisher and editor met with representatives of WWP. The news staff has conversed with friends and neighbors.< Here is what these conversations have revealed. First, this region was hit hard by a crisis. It was big. It was nasty. Decisions had to be made on the fly, without power, without heat, and with significant pressure on time and resources. Tempers grew short and it showed. Second, both WWP and this newspaper threw everything they had into serving the community. Descriptions of long hours, difficult working environments, dedication to the job sounded amazingly similar as I listened to WWP workers tell their stories, and heard tales from my staffers. These efforts speak well of each institution. Third, neither side was perfect. To date, WWP has acknowledged at a press conference a few days ago that it struggled with its communications and learned it did not have a smoothly-functioning system to bring in crews from the outside. The newspaper learned some things, too. We learned that in extraordinary times, a big headline carries even more weight and significance than we imagined. In retrospect, I have concluded, along with our publisher, that the headline about the crews should have been toned down. It should have been toned down because it led to unintended hardship for the people whom the community was relying on to get the power back. I felt that hardship from the WWP workers who spoke about the headline's impact. I respect public reaction from friends of the newspaper who said we had made the crew issue out to be a bigger problem than it probably turned out to be. The newspaper regrets any hardship the headline caused WWP's workers or any undue anxiety it caused readers. Still, I would humbly ask WWP and readers of the paper remember that November 20 and December 8, this paper ran 290 stories, columns, tip sheets, and personal journals about ice storm '96. On many days and in many ways, the paper's coverage of the storm aided this community, and WWP, in ways no other medium could when the power was out. The paper always got through to worried, cold citizens hungry for information and warmed by our presence. Of that overall effort, we are proud. Yet we also are sobered by the knowledge that much of our good work was damaged in the minds of some by one headline that, in hindsight, was too big. This public critique of our work, the Monday-morning quarterbacking if you will, has been painful for us. The public hearings on WWP's performance, which are scheduled early next year, could be painful for WWP, too. I tell my people that public comment and criticism come with the territory for a newspaper that strives to be a responsible, candid friend to its readers. That's what we are. In the spirit of the season, I've personally renewed Paul Redmond's subscription. We do a good job down here. He does a good job over there. All the fuses around town are back in place and we need to get on with rebuilding a community.

The future of Christmas has been sighted at the corner of Sprague and Sullivan in the Spokane Valley. Other places, of course, also will be used to stock Santa's sleigh with computers, software, modems, scanners, joy sticks and printers.

The elections are history. Now the truth can come out. Don't you feel a wee bit guilty about your vote on bear baiting? All the experts on bear baiting, please raise your hands.

Yes, other stuff happened last week. The trade deficit went to $11 billion. Boeing signed a contract to sell 103 new jets to American Airlines. Some dogs and cats played football down in Pullman. So what? A 100 hours spent freezing in the dark after the Inland Northwest's worst weather disaster in 50 years makes all that stuff seem about as significant as one more tree limb cracking beneath the weight of the ice. When you are cold, in the dark and uncertain about tomorrow, the world narrows down.

Is Spokane mentally ill? Or, to put the question more clinically, are there significant numbers of people living here in God's Country so enmeshed in emotional problems they cannot do their work or accomplish what they would like? The depressing, troubling answer: yes. A just released survey on the mental health of Spokane County suggests an astonishing 77,000 men and women here suffer from emotional distress so significant that it gets in the way of their work and personal lives. The numbers are projections based on a Spokane County Health District survey of 1,850 households. The health district found that 1 in 4 adults here feel downhearted, angry, depressed or powerless to a point where they say they cannot accomplish what is asked of them or what they believe they are capable of doing. Conversely, only a few thousand people, perhaps 15,000 in all, say they are functioning at a very high level of emotional stability and health.

The Spokesman-Review editorial board, as portrayed by political cartoonist Milt Priggee: From left, editorial writer D.F. Oliveria, opinion editor John Webster, interactive editor Rebecca Nappi, publisher Stacey Cowles, editor Chris Peck, managing editor Scott Sines, civic journalism reporter Elana Ashanti Jefferson, interactive editor Doug Floyd and Our Generation editor Anne Windishar.

The Grand Canyon. Custer Battlefield. Craters of the Moon. Mount St. Helens. Each is a site where generations go to reflect on landscapes, panoramas and history that span more than a session of Congress or a swing of the political pendulum.

Charity ranks high among human virtues. Recent events in Spokane suggest charity is neither threatened nor endangered. Last Sunday this paper published the story of Anni Ryan Meyer and her heroic effort to aid children living horrible lives in Romania.