Shawn Vestal

Mike Hamilton’s hands tell the story. His fingers are short and thick – too short, you realize – and it’s hard not to look at them and wonder what happened. Back in December of 2009, Hamilton was clearing away snow for a place to camp, in a below-freezing wind chill. He’d lost his gloves. When he noticed, eventually, the blackening of his fingers, he tried without success to wash it off.

Last June 6, Michael Miller, a teacher at Shadle Park High School, wrote a series of email messages regarding school board candidate – now school board member – Deana Brower. According to a complaint filed with state officials, Miller described Brower in one note as “INCREDIBLE.” In another, he urged a teacher at Lewis and Clark to invite Brower to meet with teachers there. In another, he wrote to Jenny Rose, president of the Spokane Education Association, granting her permission to send a message he’d written on behalf of Brower to “other buildings” to help them arrange events.

If you want to give Patrick Malone a nice present for his 60th birthday, buy something for yourself. A cup of coffee. A sandwich. A book. He won’t mind. Malone, a longtime West Central resident and volunteer, is asking everyone he knows to celebrate his birthday today by supporting neighborhood businesses Indaba Coffeehouse and The Book Parlor, on the 1400 block of West Broadway Avenue. It may feel like a small thing, but it’s not. A cup of coffee, a place to see neighbors, support for business close to home – these are the threads that help to connect neighborhoods, and they’re one expression of Malone’s longtime passion and project: building stability and community in West Central.

A lot of show biz has crossed the stage at the Bing, and Thursday was no different. Fans stood in line more than an hour before showtime. Some held signs or dressed up. A tour bus lurked outside, and police rerouted traffic. When the doors opened, people flooded in, filling the ground floor immediately and then streaming up to the balcony.

In the 1990-’91 school year, Brian Burrow and 26 other sixth-graders from Holmes Elementary lined up for a class photograph. Twenty-one years later, Burrow set out to find what had happened to his classmates. He found all but two of those who had been in his classroom, and he tracked down more than half of all Holmes sixth-graders from that year, he said.

When Brian Burrow returned to West Central – the neighborhood where he grew up, where his parents grew up, where four generations of his family now live – it wasn’t by choice. Burrow lost his business and his South Hill home in the economic crash. He went through a foreclosure and a bankruptcy. Returning in 2008 with his wife and two young children to the block where he’d grown up, in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, seemed like an utter defeat.

Second of two parts Through late February and into March, the massive investigation into the attempted bombing at Spokane’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day march focused its considerable resources on Kevin William Harpham.

First of two parts

Get your yellow flier yet? If so, and if the scare language and the big numbers are giving you pause, when it comes to supporting your local schools, you might want to consider one more number: 1972. Or, in the words of one old newspaper article: “the gloomy specter of 1972.”

We’ve heard all the perfectly reasonable reasons for the wild salaries being paid to the new football coaches at Washington State University. You gotta pay to compete. Everybody does it. It’s the market.

The governor says it’s time to legalize gay marriage. The increasingly shrinking opposition says it’s not time to legalize gay marriage.