Stefanie Pettit

I just came back from a delightful trip with our youngest son to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. We saw five plays, had terrific walks and talks, bought a few gifts and had some lovely meals at restaurants we found as we wandered through the city.

Sometimes something very new can speak to a time gone by, to people or events from an earlier day. One such very new thing in Spokane remembers Bert and Georgia Shaber – a memorial bench in their beloved Corbin Park. When Bert Shaber died in March 2015, his four children wanted to establish a permanent remembrance of their father and mother, Gloria, who died in 1998. Their parents conducted most of their courtship in Corbin Park in the 1940s, so a bench there seemed like the perfect memorial, said Susan Polakiewicz, of San Diego, their oldest child.

If you had seen my friend Mary Ellen Myrene in the last few years of her life, she’d have seemed pretty unremarkable – a tall and slender white-haired woman who blended into the landscape of other older women living on the periphery of the mainstream world.

Just about every week someone sets up a tripod along East Belmont Road east of the town of Mica to take photos of the historic Heathdale barn, a tall gambrel-style barn built in 1908. “We’ve had professional photographers and people who love barns stop by to take pictures, and we’ve even had high school students come to take their senior pictures here,” said Diane Latta, who owns the barn with her husband, Lance.

Clark’s impact in Spokane is probably most visible today in the Kirtland Cutter-designed Patsy Clark Mansion facing Coeur d’Alene Park that served as his family home until both he and his wife died. But in his lifetime, Clark became one of the most widely known mining pioneers in the country, opening or operating mines throughout the Northwest and British Columbia, including the famous Anaconda and Hecla mines.

No matter what kind of map I’d have, locating a particular grave stone was usually a challenge, and I’d often flag down a groundskeeper to help me in the task. I’ve brushed back limbs and decades of pine needles in nonendowed areas, dodged sprinklers and trudged through rural graveyards with no map at all and just the hope that the place was small enough that I could find what I was looking for.

Don’t wait for the perfect time, or the Big Anniversary to do something, Stefanie Pettit writes; - you may wait too long.

Charles Voorhees moved to Washington Territory in 1882, settling in the community of Colfax. He became prosecuting attorney for Whitman County, 1882-1885, and then, running as a Democrat, was elected as a territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress, serving from 1885 to 1889. It was during his time in Congress that the Enabling Act was passed that created the pathway for Washington to become a state in 1889.

Lexus Simmons loves her mother, but because of circumstances is not able to see her very much. At age 17, Simmons is the youngest of 10 half-, step- and full siblings and has largely been raised by her father.

When Vlad Kirichenko was in elementary school, he was bullied.

When William Harrington, 18, was a child just starting school, he did not get along with his peers. “I felt they were too childish,” said the young man about to graduate from Map High School, a Spokane Public Schools alternative school.

When Polly Officer was born, she was placed in temporary foster care to give her birth mother a chance to deal with drug and alcohol issues. But on a scheduled visit, her birth mother ran away with the infant, leaving foster parents Debbie and Barry Officer distraught over the fate of the child they had bonded with.

When Nick Katruska was a freshman at Shadle Park High School, it began to look as if he’d follow the family tradition of not graduating from high school. His attendance was sporadic and his academic work poor.

The quinceanera is an important tradition in the lives of many young women of Latin American heritage. For Diana Ramirez-Torres, 18, it became an interstate and international event that finally wound up with a celebration of 250 family and friends in Santa Rosa, California.

When Emily Tender was 14, her mother took what Tender described as some photos in “dorky” poses of her and submitted them to a modeling agency in Seattle. That agency signed her – as did Nous Model Management in Los Angeles in 2015 and the super big IMG Models in New York.

For history hunters, there’s no place like the Washington State Regional Archives. There are five branches in the state, with Eastern Washington University in Cheney serving as home to the Eastern Region branch. Want to find out if you have an ancestor accused of horse theft in pre-statehood days? Or just what kind of business was being conducted by city councils in a given year? The archives have information for you.

There are more than three dozen ponderosas surrounding my house, from a few that are 5 feet tall to the big guy just outside my front door that’s more than 100 feet tall and has a base diameter of 9 feet 5 inches. I love these trees.

Before Henry J. Kaiser became the huge American industrialist known as the father of modern shipbuilding, prime contractor for Hoover and Grand Coulee dams and founder of more than 100 companies, he fell in love. And that brought him to Spokane.

The Deep Creek Barn, also known as the Middleburg Barn, was built in 1916 by dairy farmer M.F. Middleburg during the height of what was called the “true circular” round barn era.

Caucusing a crowded, noisy, messy, exhilirating experience in participatory democracy.

The bison skull replicas on the Monroe Street Bridge were modeled after a real bison skull discovered in Alberta by a Spokane politician and attorney.

The 5-foot-tall bulldog has guarded the Kennel Club – or student – entrance to the arena where the Gonzaga Bulldogs play their brand of winning basketball since Oct. 6, 2007, and in the short time since has already become a landmark for students and visitors alike.

So just who is an American?

One of the first of the of the larger homes built in Spokane in the 1880s was the two-and-a-half story Queen Anne-style “dream home” of Hiram Muzzy. Constructed in 1889 in what is now the West Central neighborhood, it remains an historical gem now under the stewardship of owners who are working to restore it to its original grandeur.