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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Rebecca Nappi

This individual is no longer an employee with The Spokesman-Review.

All Stories

News >  Features

Elder care, personified

My father, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1996 at age 77, lived the last year of his life in an Alzheimer’s unit in a Spokane-area nursing home. The facility’s excellent staffers, including my sister, a nurse who oversaw the unit, were trying new ideas to preserve the dignity of its residents.
News >  Features

Aegis Living CEO puts seniors on pedestal

Dwayne Clark, CEO and founder of Aegis Living, is putting a man cave in his newest assisted living community near downtown Seattle. “It has a Wall Street ticker, and multiple televisions for sports,” he said. “A poker table, a bar, wine taps, beer taps, dart board. It’s like the American Legion on steroids.”
News >  Features

A legacy of caring

Thirty-five years ago, Hospice of Spokane helped its first dying person. Monday evening, three of the five original founders gathered to reminisce. Over dinner at the home of Gina Drummond, Hospice’s chief executive officer, Barb Savage, Johnny Cox, Marj Humphrey, along with Hospice’s first clinical director, Barb Cox, looked back three decades.
News >  Features

Forgotten towns

Grady Knight, a Colville-area video producer, is looking for Spokane and North Idaho people in their 80s and older who grew up on the upper Columbia River before it was tamed into Lake Roosevelt by Grand Coulee Dam. The dam was completed in 1941, but relocation happened throughout the late 1930s. Some of the families moved into new towns named after their old towns, such as Kettle Falls. Some families moved to Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.
News >  Spokane

Catholic Schools in Spokane

Sept. 3, 1888: Though classes for Catholic students had been held before this date, the official beginning of Catholic schools in Spokane is usually traced to the opening of Our Lady of Lourdes school in a new, two-story brick building staffed by Holy Names sisters. Enrollment: 58 girls and 44 boys. The building, thanks to a “miracle,” survived downtown Spokane’s destructive fire of 1889. According to Spokesman-Review archives: “As the flames neared the school, Sister Mary Michael gave Father Rebmann a relic of Saint Amable to throw into the fire … Suddenly and swiftly the wind changed. Church and school were saved.”
News >  Features

Connecting with compassion

On Oct. 19, 2008, at 6 in the morning, the answering machine in Jack McPeck’s bedroom awakened him and his wife, Bonnie, with this ominous message: “I’m a police chaplain, and I am at your front door, please come out.” Their 22-year-old son, Zachary, had died accidentally in his apartment.
News >  Features

‘Admissions’ set to film in Inland Northwest

Moviemaking will return to the Inland Northwest on July 16 when North by Northwest begins filming “Admissions” in several locations, including Gonzaga University and Washington State University’s Pullman and Spokane campuses. The film will star well-known actors Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air”) and Andy Garcia (“The Godfather: Part III”). On the movie website IMDb, the plot is described as “A man and a woman fall in love while taking their kids on a college admissions tour.”
News >  Features

Aging boomers ready to shed their possessions

In the late 1990s, Inette Miller shed almost all her possessions – house, car, furniture, clothes, even a mink coat – and moved from Portland to Hawaii to live in cars, tents and borrowed homes with the love of her love, a Hawaiian man she met on vacation. The former Vietnam war correspondent for Time magazine – who donated journals and other documents to Gonzaga University when she made the life change – role-modeled for her then teenage sons how people can live without a lot of “stuff.” But even Miller has her moments of doubt.
News >  Features

Getting their Act 2 together

The Institute for Extended Learning’s popular “seniors program” is undergoing a name change. Seniors is out. Act 2 is in. Pat Freeman, 68, has been the manager of the Community Colleges of Spokane seniors program since 1989. She’ll retire Friday. She’ll sign up for classes she never had time to take before, perhaps Pilates and an art class.
News >  Washington Voices

Career women in King photos; painting surfaces

In our newsroom, we call it the Spokane Vortex. It occurs when someone from the Inland Northwest is involved with a national or international news event. Or someone is related to someone in Spokane in coincidences beyond explanation. Recently, I discovered some Spokane Vortex in history.
News >  Features

Descendants converge on Bozarth Mansion for family reunion

Sue Arnson, 72, spent every holiday and summer at her grandmother’s house. And what a house. Now known as Bozarth Mansion, it’s owned by Gonzaga University and rented out for meetings, weddings and retreats. But its name was Waikiki when Arnson spent childhood vacations on the estate from the 1940s through the early 1960s.
News >  Features

Past meets present

The dozens of small towns that reside within an hour’s drive of Spokane and Coeur d’Alene can surprise visitors with their beauty and history. But sometimes people need an excuse to visit. Today, Palouse, Wash., is offering a great excuse – a home and garden tour featuring four homes, one garden, a historic chapel, a restored opera house/hotel building and a modern apartment built above McLeod’s grocery store.
News >  Washington Voices

King Collection: Nurse photo triggers wave of responses

You run her photo in the newspaper and ask if anyone recognizes the woman, an intelligent-looking nurse from Spokane. The photo, found in the King Collection archives of The Spokesman-Review, has no name, no date. And the day the photo appears, the phone calls begin. Her name is Alice Hope, the callers say. These callers are nurses, mostly now retired, proud graduates of Deaconess Hospital’s nursing school. They looked in their school’s history book, which contains photos of all the classes, and they discovered the mystery woman.
News >  Spokane

Baby boomers change demographics of working population

Connie and Scott Brunell were living the early-retirement dream shared by many baby boomers once upon a time. They left telephone company jobs in the Seattle area to work for an oil company in Saudi Arabia. They stayed 12 years, making and saving good money. Connie retired in 1996 at 45. Scott retired a year later at 51.
News >  Features

Baker hopes his family’s cystic fibrosis story can save lives

The 14-and-15-year-olds, sitting in Ferris High School gym bleachers, yawned. They popped their knuckles. It was 10 in the morning, and some wore the bored stares of kids trapped indoors too long. Summer break was still more than a month away. John Baker, 59, told the students that more than 110,000 people in the U.S. are in need of organ and tissue transplants, and 18 die each day waiting.
News >  Features

Home tour promises to be worth the journey to Palouse

The season for long, scenic drives is upon us again, and it’s worth the gas Saturday to make the hour-plus journey to Palouse, Wash. You’ll be treated to a tour of four homes, a historic chapel and a stunning English style garden. The homes span 100 years in age, from the Victorian era to modern time.
News >  Features

Ensemble of note

Bob Moylan, manager of the choral ensemble Riversong – an outreach program of Spokane’s Riverview Retirement Community – knows all the stereotypes. “What we are fighting here is the image of old folks warbling ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,’ ” Moylan said.
News >  Washington Voices

Don’t forget to jot down names

This is the time of year when milestone photographs arrive in your regular mail and in your email inbox. The senior photos. The engagement pictures, the wedding shots. You likely place these photos in a box, a drawer, an album – or store them on your computer. If no name or date is on the photo, you may think no big deal, because you will never forget the handsome face of your godson or the smiling faces of your niece and her fiancé.
News >  Features

Women Helping Women Fund celebrates 20 years

The Women Helping Women Fund will celebrate its 20th anniversary at its annual luncheon Monday. In two decades, it has raised $5.4 million and given grants to 350 programs that help women and children. Women involved in the fund over the years attribute its success to:
News >  Washington Voices

King Collection: Picnics in the park

On the first day of hot weather at the end of April, young women throughout the Inland Northwest dressed for the heat and walked through the region’s parks in short-shorts, swirly skirts, sleeveless tops and open-toed sandals. It’s a sartorial rite of spring. When the warm days arrive, so do the light clothes. Ahhh.