John Webster

This week, Kim Crompton’s career comes to an end. He’s retiring as editor of the Journal of Business.

Then, as now, smoke hung in the pines overlooking the young pioneer town beside the Spokane Falls. Area forests were ablaze. People and horses trudged along the dusty streets in the heat of an August afternoon. Little did they imagine that the buildings they passed within hours would catch fire and collapse into 32 blocks of ruin. Friday, 128 years later, Spokane history lovers plan to re-enact the day their city burned to the ground.

For more than a century, Avista and Washington Water Power Co. contributed leadership and charitable support to the Spokane area’s economic development and civic betterment initiatives.

Once upon a time there was a gritty little railroad town. Next to the switching yards where locomotives chuffed and cinders flew, its downtown had a nice department store where everybody shopped, and a famous hotel where everybody stayed. But in the 1960s a freeway bypassed the gritty little town, and out beyond its outskirts of bars and used-car lots some shiny suburban shopping malls appeared. We’re new, they said to the gritty little town, and you’re old. The future is here and it will pass you by. We will change, said the leaders of the gritty little town, rolling up their sleeves.

The choir of Whitworth University staged a flash mob Sunday in Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Last week a group called Friends of the Davenport disbanded. Thirty-one years have come and gone since the group was created. Years marked by cutthroat business competition, some of most divisive political battles the city of Spokane has ever experienced, and, in the end, a triumph – a victory not just for a much-loved building, but also for the spirit of a community, a city of people who each considered the Davenport Hotel to be theirs. More on the Davenport Hotel, including historic and new photos, can be found in The Spokesman-Review’s

As Republicans tried to repeal coverage for mental health and substance abuse, a Princeton research paper exposed a worsening death rate from suicide and drugs among white, poorly educated Americans.