Doug Clark

A doggone nice surprise. Wendy Gerard tearfully hugs Max after her husband surprised her at work. Photo by Sandra Bancroft-Billings/The Spokesman-Review

Max

As a depraved youth, I once admired the telephone for its prankish possibilities. DOUG: "Hi, this is Bip Biperson with radio station KRUD. We'll give you a big prize if you can answer the following question." VICTIM: "Wow, great!"

On Easter, I abandoned my family to join the faithful inside the Quarterhorse, a downtown Spokane watering hole on West Second. There were about 75 of us, mostly male pilgrims drawn to this cigarette smoke-shrouded sanctuary to watch an affable young Southerner shoot pool. Pool with a capital "P" and that rhymes with "E" and that stands for Earl.

Spokane's Denny Yasuhara spent his life fighting for Japanese Americans. All the work paid off last August. Yasuhara was elected president of the 24,000-member Japanese American Citizens League. The league is one of the nation's largest civil rights organizations.

Cops wouldn't exactly paint Michelle Lowell as part of Spokane's criminal landscape. She's never been in trouble. The 42-year-old Spokane woman is a devout Catholic who runs a day care in the Spokane Valley. For a moment at Chuck E. Cheese's the other day, however, 5-foot-2 Lowell became Public Enemy No. 1.

I have scouted up the perfect new site for our calamityprone, soon-to-be-history Walk in the Wild zoo: The Union Gospel Mission kitchen. Please, don't thank me. When it comes to slicing and dicing the community's meaty problems, I am Betty Crocker's love child.

Last summer, Donald Alan Stewart claimed someone stole $31,000 cash out of his pickup truck. The other day, the 31-year-old Spokane contractor confirmed in court what the cops and those he conned knew all along: That Donald Alan Stewart is a thief and a liar.

Harvard-educated Charlie Dorn taught college law and served the public as a District Court judge. He's a respected expert on constitutional issues and has won plenty of big cases with his keen legal mind.

The obscure fight song Bing Crosby inspired for his alma mater in 1937 has found a home at the Knothole Tavern in Lake Wylie, S.C. "Bulldogs of Gonzaga" is a long, long way from "White Christmas," but then so is Lake Wylie from Spokane.

Garbage collecting. Sure, it sounds like a monotonous, thankless, underpaid and smelly job. But that's only because you've never felt the thrill of having your spleen bounce three feet each time the garbage truck plummets into one of Spokane's 8 million potholes.

Gary Scott Cunningham doesn't want this column to see the light of day. Recently freed from prison, he and his accomplice, Douglas James Dennis, hoped to slither quietly back into Spokane.

You've heard of the Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys.... Let me introduce you to one of America's lesser-known achievement awards: The Ruffies. Sounds silly, you say? Hah. How silly does free garbage bags for life sound?

Louis Davenport was a patriotic American, but also quite a short one. So short, legend has it, that before he could launch a counter-strike against Hitler's evil Axis powers some 50-odd years ago, Louis had a bellboy fetch him a ladder.

Ah, if only the battlescarred, red walls and stained shag carpet inside this old green house could speak. They'd probably say things like: "Hide the dope, man, it's the cops!"

After touring Spokane's mammoth garbage burner, I've concluded it would be much more difficult to dispose of a body there than I previously had suspected. You'd at least have to thoroughly dice your victim and then wrap the pieces tightly in newspaper to have any chance at all of getting away with the crime. True, our incinerator consumes some 800 tons of trash a day, but "the garbage gets a lot more inspection than in the days of the old landfills," says Damon Taam, assistant director of the waste-toenergy plant on Geiger Road.

They don't give medals for what Ed and Kathryn Parry have done, and that's a shame. This Spokane couple deserve some kind of award or at least a paid vacation. Next time you're balancing your checkbook and feel sorry for yourself, consider this: The Parrys just put their 12th and final kid through college.

It's as if some Hollywood script writer concocted the life and times of John Anthony Masterson. He was truly one of Spokane's brightest lights, an overachiever who soared far and away from his working-class roots and struck gold in nearly everything he touched.

John Weingart. Photo by Dan Pelle/The Spokesman-Review DAHO EDITION: It is only a matter of time before crazed consumers find John Weingart. Photo by Dan Pelle/The Spokesman-Review

Marvin, 90, and Amanda Henshaw, 87, were married Sept. 11, 1924, and their love has lasted from the Roaring '20s to the New Age '90s. Photo by Dan McComb/The Spokesman-Review

"I met all my wives in traffic jams. ... There's something women like about a pickup man." - from the country hit "Pickup Man" by Joe Diffie. He roared from out of nowhere in his big macho pickup truck. She gazed up at the dark stranger from her cute little Honda.

1. "I try to document those little bits of America that are fading away," George Goetzman says. 2. "Things become standardized. Today, every town has so much that looks the same as any other town," says George Goetzman. Photo by Christopher Anderson/The Spokesman-Review 3. It takes a man like Goetzman to see the greatness of Buds Tires.

A fter 40 years of teaching, Bob Schlim may have the bestbehaved students in town. They don't skip school. They don't smuggle weapons from home. They don't sneak out to the corner for a cigarette. Nobody ever claims the dog ate his homework.

She tied a yellow ribbon round the old street sign. Although green at fighting city hall, she pleaded her case to bureaucrats who patronized her and made empty promises. Now Patti Lauber sees red whenever she gazes out her office window and counts the daily motorcade of befuddled wrong-way drivers who think they still can travel north on Division from Sharp.