Doug Clark

It is one of those Kodak moments claustrophobic Californians dream about. Clean skies. Pine trees. Cold beer. ... Four family members relax around a front-yard picnic table, swatting mosquitoes and swapping yarns in the waning light of a glorious July day.

Tex Nixon, who turns 75 on Monday, drives an 18-wheeler seven days a week and has passed the 5-million-mile mark. He's driven for 52 years without an accident. Photo by Kristy MacDonald/The Spokesman-Review

In a bizarre videotape that aired during Monday's Spokane City Council meeting, Chris Anderson explains why he abandoned the voters to drive an equipment truck on the "Dante's Peak" movie set. "The $18,000-a-year salary paid to council members isn't enough to support a family," sniffs the councilman, who says he'll be working in Wallace for the next six to eight weeks. But is this really what's going on? Thanks to my extensive contacts within the Hollywood community, I was able to get copies of all 29 of the other videotaped excuses Anderson dreamed up to explain away his disappearance.

Spokane has certainly arrived as a sports mecca. One weekend we get Olympic wrestlers. The next weekend it's world-class ice skaters. And on Sunday, had you a mind to, you could have gone to the smoky Valley Eagles hall to watch some true legends of the game slug it out in the finals of a nationally ranked tournament.

Above the highs "I call 'em animals," says Hal King, manager of the Alberta Hotel, who watches drug dealers ply their trade from a window above Madison Stree. Photo by Dan McComb/The Spokesman-Review

I once covered a John Birch Society meeting where a paranoid speaker insisted world events were actually orchestrated by a vast Masonic conspiracy. These can't be the same Masons that Seattle resident Martin D. Ringhofer is wrangling with. To hear him tell it, the exalted pooh-bahs of Washington's Grand Lodge are a thin-skinned gang of vindictive geezers whose lack of vision and inept leadership contributes to a critical decline in membership.

For years Irene Olin stood guard over an embarrassing secret locked deep inside her heart. She kept it from friends. She kept it from employers. She even kept it from her husband, Mike.

When the warbirds went up in this sleepy St. John neighborhood, 80-year-old Ed Schierman struck back to save his honor. The World War II artilleryman paid sculptor Cedric Huseby to create a detailed two-foot replica of the 155mm "Long Tom" cannon used to pound the Nazis back when Schierman fought under Gen. George Patton. In a few days, the retired farmer will mount his new weapon on his roof. He intends to aim it defiantly across the street, at the model warplanes his pilot neighbors stuck atop their homes.

E.T. would never phone home with these rip-off rates. Beverly and Greg Strate wish they hadn't. The couple is levitating over the shocker of a telephone bill that recently arrived in the mail. One two-minute collect call from Post Falls to their North Spokane home 20 miles away: $12.86.

Any judge with his head screwed on tight would have one thing to say before locking up a pervert like Roy "Bubba" Love: "Don't let the courtroom door smack you in the backside on your way to the slammer." In Adams County, however, the judicial attitude toward child rape is still stuck in the sexist Stone Age. Love, 19, showed up at the Ritzville courthouse the other day to be sentenced for having sex with a 12-year-old girl. This prize louse is no stranger to courtrooms. He already has a prior juvenile conviction for molesting a 5-year-old child.

My dear departing members of the Ferris High School senior class. As I mingle among you in the wee hours of graduation night, eating omelets and sipping espresso at 3 a.m., a few words of wisdom come to mind: It's probably downhill from here.

A bat rap Donna Hensley and her pet bat, Sweetie, share a quiet moment Wednesday. Photo by Dan McComb/The Spokesman-Review

Perspiring author Marvin N. Carr formed his own publishing company and then tossed a wad of cash down a pothole printing 17,000 copies of his two novels. Fortunately for Simon & Schuster, attracting readers remains a tough proposition. For all his efforts, Carr says he sold only 300 copies of his first tome, the 567-page "Positively Negative." And, well, three copies of the 396-page second, "Men Are Cruel, but Women Are Dangerous." "I can't buck the big boys," complains Carr, 69, of the publishing establishment.

Her well-hugged brown teddy bear waits expectantly on a corner of the unmade bed. The self-improvement reminders she drew in cartoonish block letters are still taped to the pink walls. "Do All Homework," warns one. "Get Good Grades," advises another.

Local yokel weathercasters got their shorts in a twister a year ago after Bill Hockett put their forecasting skills on a par with carnival palm readers. Today, Hockett offers a heartfelt apology: "I'm sure palm readers have a lot more experience," says the Spokane market analyst, breaking into a belly laugh. Results are in from Hockett's weather challenge that examined the accuracy of our meteorological witch doctors over the last 11 months.

If ever a book were begging for a bonfire, "The Turner Diaries" is it. This goose steppers manifesto will raise more goose bumps than R.L. Stine ever could. It's far more vile than Madonna romping nude in the aluminum-bound pages of "SEX." "The Turner Diaries" is as nasty as any porn.

Brave Mormon pioneers traversed the plains in the late-1840's in search of their promised land. Now comes a band of hardy Mormon Utah Jazz basketball zealots about to embark on their own cross-country pilgrimage. This trek, however, seems a bit out of whack with the teetotaling tenets of Mormonism. These latter-day scamps are risking life and limb on mountain bikes to get from Provo to a Spokane saloon.

Dirk Minatre's so-called pals skewered him with a hoax as fiendishly clever as any "Mission Impossible" adventure. It's been weeks since Minatre endured the most humiliating moment of his life: scammed into picking up litter along a lonely stretch of highway in northwest Spokane. Yet the three medical workers who engineered Minatre's downfall still can't pass each other in the halls at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center without erupting into uncontrollable hilarity.

There's a killer shadowing Jim Williams. It's not what you think. Williams doesn't fear losing his life, just losing his credit rating. Or maybe his sanity.

It figures a herd of graying, nostalgia-driven Baby Boomers would line up to meet the star of a TV show that went out of production 10 weeks before John Kennedy got shot. But teenagers in letter jackets? Jeepers, Wally! How can kids of the 1990's possibly relate to "Leave it to Beaver?" "It's huge. Huuuuge," says 16-year-old Central Valley High School student Tyler Zyph. "It keeps me in touch with what life was like back then." Zyph was one of hundreds of Beaver boosters drawn Saturday to the A Sign of the Times store in Spokane's University City. They came for a glimpse of Jerry Mathers, who played the hit show's impish namesake during its six-year run from 1957 to 1963.

Going with the Flo. Muriel Connerton, right, holds hands with her mother, 104-year-old Flossie Hammer, who made her first airplane flight Tuesday. Photo by Shawn Jacobson/The Spokesman-Review

Dick Heldenbrand, 48, was at a Zip-Trip, grabbing a soda and a copy of Wheel Deals. Dave Halvorson, 39, was driving to Costco with his wife. Rob, 49, who doesn't want his last name used, was filling his car's tank at a self-service gas station.

Corrina Harless, Shawn Hamilton and Pamela Ridley will spend Mother's Day at Geiger Corrections Center. Photo by Colin Mulvany/The Spokesman-Review

The Silver Spurs dancers in 1955. File/The Spokesman-Review