Stefanie Pettit

If a person thought it unlikely that a small community in the region might be home to a residence that embodies the finest grandeur and elegance of high Victorian architecture, then that person has never been to Cheney. There – at 306 F St., just a few blocks downhill from Showalter Hall, the main administration building at Eastern Washington University – sits the remarkable David Lowe House, listed in 1983 on the National Register of Historic Places. This Queen Anne-style structure, especially with its playful and airy exterior detailing, is a leading example of ornate turn-of-the-century domestic architecture.

Most angels come with beautiful wings. Some come with beautiful kidneys. I know one of those angels. Her name is Kay Mohr, my friend, and she just gave one of her precious kidneys to her even more precious cousin Diana Owens. It’s a story 30 years in the making.

I don’t text. I don’t tweet. I don’t Facebook. I’ve heard of but don’t have any idea what Angry Birds really is. And I’m fine with it that way. Moreover, when my old flip phone finally died, I replaced it with a cellphone pretty much just like it. I can make and receive calls. I have voicemail and phone book functions, both of which are handy. There may be other things I can do with the phone, but I really have no interest in learning what they may be. I was not remotely tempted to get a smartphone or any of its cousins because, for one, they do a bunch of stuff I don’t need and, for another, I resent mightily having a device, by its name alone, that is clearly brighter than I am.

During Spokane’s early days, the central business area was populated by many single-room occupancy hotels to accommodate the burgeoning numbers of individuals flocking to the area to seek employment. Most of these hotels provided rooms on the upper floors and retail space at street level. Typical of these is the Woodward Building at 117 N. Howard St., which stands today as one of the few commercial buildings remaining from the building boom between 1890 and 1893 in the aftermath of the 1889 great fire that consumed 30 blocks of Spokane’s central district. Some 500 buildings went up during this period, and the Woodward Building, erected in 1890, is one of about two dozen still standing.

As I look out the window on a rainy day late in March, I spy a man building an ark on my front lawn. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating about the boat-building thing, but the sky is truly heavy with clouds. It’s kind of foggy, and it’s certainly raining a lot (in volume and intensity) – with a few breaks from time to time to allow for a little snowfall. Welcome to spring in the Inland Northwest.

When it comes to home renovations, Sherry Knott picked perhaps the most challenging one possible. Having once lived in a row house in Philadelphia that she loved, she always wanted to do a loft renovation for herself – and in 1978 when she came across the old derelict Frequency Changing Station on the bluff just above Liberty Park, she found her opportunity. “It was a clear-span building with no interior walls and with 11,000 square feet on the main floor. It was being used as a storage facility for a boat dealer,” she said. “And it was perfect for what I wanted to do.”

When it comes to home renovations, Sherry Knott picked perhaps the most challenging one possible. Having once lived in a row house in Philadelphia that she loved, she always wanted to do a loft renovation for herself – and in 1978 when she came across the old derelict Frequency Changing Station on the bluff just above Liberty Park, she found her opportunity. “It was a clear-span building with no interior walls and with 11,000 square feet on the main floor. It was being used as a storage facility for a boat dealer,” she said. “And it was perfect for what I wanted to do.”

The readers of this newspaper are pretty special people – particularly those who read the Voice section, and most specifically, those who regularly make their way through the Front Porch column. I know this because I’ve heard from an awful lot of you, and I am grateful. Oh sure, sometimes you take me to task for something I’ve said or how I’ve said it and sometimes you challenge me on the facts or the feelings about some point of view I put forth. But by and large, you’re courteous and thoughtful about it. Sometimes you make me chuckle and sometimes you make me think anew about one subject or another that I was pretty sure I already had a handle on. The best part, the very best, whether you agree or disagree, is that you share your own stories about whatever the topic is.

There are a number of landmarks around town honoring the legacy of Spokane Garry, the storied leader in the Spokane Tribe of Indians who is also considered the region’s first educator. Interestingly, the man himself was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave, and it was the activities of a few citizens and a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution that provided a more appropriate burial site and a landmark-worthy headstone.

I really miss Andy Rooney. Nobody could do curmudgeon as well as he could, and I would so like to hear his crusty but-no-doubt insightful take on the current presidential primary season. I’m sure he’d have something so pungent and revealing to say or write that we’d all be nodding in bemused agreement. Or at least I would.

If this old barn and rock house look somehow familiar, you probably have seen them before – even if you’ve never stopped by their location on the Moran Prairie. Every year students who are seeking interesting locales for their senior pictures stop by the home of Ann E. Yates off South Regal Road and ask if they can shoot their photos there. She always agrees, and so the old barn and stone structure – both built in 1879 – have appeared as the backdrop in dozens of area high school graduation portraits.

You’re never done being a mom. Ever. I’ve been vaguely aware of this for some time, but now even more so. It’s not like I see my grown sons all the time and can physically fuss over them, express concern when they look tired or have them over for Sunday dinner. The nearest one lives in Seattle, the other in Portugal. Communication, except for the occasional visit, is via phone, email and Skype – which you might think mutes the mother gene or lessens the maternal pull.

The old parochial school gym building in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood is not only beautiful, it is a wonderful example of a strikingly different kind of early-Spokane architecture. St. Joseph’s Catholic School Auditorium/Gymnasium sits on the corner of Walnut Street and Dean Avenue, a few blocks east of the hectic Maple-Ash corridor on the city’s near North Side, just across the street from the church, rectory and convent. It was constructed in the Spanish eclectic tradition, which is rooted in Spanish Colonial architecture, influenced by Moorish, Gothic, Renaissance and Byzantine styles.

Valentine’s Day has come and gone. The chocolate truffles have been consumed, the romantic dinner long since digested and/or the lovely new earrings happily worn. These are the symbols of this day of romance, the something intimate given to our beloveds to let them know how special they are to us. Well, not quite. There are some among us who haven’t a clue. They are shopping impaired generally, and especially so when it comes to this particular holiday. Allow me to present my husband, Bruce, a steadfast and otherwise wonderful spouse who just can’t get a handle on this romantic gesture thing.

When my cousin Susan and I were young girls, we would delight in listening to our mothers talk about their childhoods. Their backgrounds as children of immigrants growing up in the South Bronx sounded so exotic and fascinating – and so different from our lives. While we loved the warmth of the discussions, we also noted that no matter how poor our mothers were growing up and how happy they were to have risen to the middle class, they somehow always concluded that morality, business, politics, whatever, was kinder, gentler, better, back then. Not that they wanted to go backward in time, of course, but modern times seemed to present problems and concerns that were not an improvement over what they remembered.

It’s 155 days until Hoopfest 2012, and if things had worked out differently, Jerry Talley would be on the basketball court in Peaceful Valley getting ready – snow or no snow. Jerry Talley was a tall, good-looking Native American man who his friends called the King of Peaceful Valley. Most of the time you could see him at the basketball court near Main Avenue and Maple Street in his beloved Peaceful Valley just downhill west of downtown Spokane. He’d be there for a pick-up game with any and all takers – the first one on the court and the last one to leave it.

I almost met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once. I belonged to the Luther League at my church in Miami back in the early 1960s. There was going to be a national Luther League conference in Miami Beach, and two kids from the group were chosen to be delegates. I was the alternate – hence the “almost.”

As a new year begins, another newspaper bites the dust. The Star (originally the Rathdrum Star), a weekly paper that covered the news of the North Idaho communities of Rathdrum, Spirit Lake, Blanchard, Athol and Hauser Lake, has closed its doors. Unless you live in one of those communities, you may not care. I suspect a lot of the residents there don’t care just yet either, though I believe they will. But I think the demise of the Star says something particularly sad about the disappearing print media because weeklies just like the Star were held up as the hope for the future of print journalism.

The Pillars of Hercules are commonly considered to be those large promontories in Spain and North Africa that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. But Cheney has its own Herculean pillars – though not as large, they are every bit as important to the history of the region in which they reside. The pillars are at the bottom of the walkway leading to Showalter Hall, the main administration building at Eastern Washington University, located right where College Avenue ends at Fifth Street.

Probably the best 360-degree view of the city from the downtown area is atop the 155-foot-tall Clock Tower in Riverfront Park. And pretty much the only person who gets to see it is David Randolph, laborer foreperson for the city of Spokane. He’s the man who winds the clock. Although the clock can be wound to run for eight days, Randolph makes the climb once every seven days – allowing a day’s leeway, just in case – to ensure that the clock runs, well, like clockwork. It’s a combination of 133 steps and ladder rungs up to reach the little room where the mechanism for the clock’s four faces is housed. The crank has a 2-foot-long handle, and it takes 99 turns of the crank to keep things working for the next week.

There was a time when the old Dybdall gristmill was known throughout the region for producing the finest baking flour available. But that was a long time ago, and today the mill, though on the National Register of Historic Places, is a declining reflection of what it once was. It is pretty much falling apart. “I wish we could go back 30 years and put it back the way it was,” said Mary Kaplan, daughter of the mill’s owner, Margaret Kaplan. Back then a millwright in Portland had offered to dismantle the vacant gristmill and put it back together again in a new location.

Today is Thanksgiving, a day for gratitude, for gathering around the dinner table in large and small numbers and for reflection on the many gifts of our lives. I am this day grateful for tomatoes. I don’t mean to trivialize the larger intent of the day, the giving of thanks for the truly great gifts of love and family and all that we hold dear. But I just can’t get my focus off those tomatoes. Sometimes it is about the small stuff.