Tom Lutey

Single, pregnant and alone in the world, 20-year-old Janis Krepcik took herself out of the running for mother of the year. It was 1965, she had met a guy while doing seasonal work at Sun Valley, Idaho, and they had gotten careless. She found herself in a San Francisco home for young, unwed mothers.

There are rules, probably collecting dust in the Library of Congress, about who gets to be "Super." Value meals and sporting events aside, self-appointment is unacceptable. There's no Cartesian shortcut to superdom, no "I think therefore I am." Almost always, grateful crowds bestow the title on those who readily deny receiving it. Which is why Bob Christensen never rises to the bait of the title "Super Fan."

The invisible woman of Sprague Avenue pulled her back door partially open, and peered with suspicion through the screen, seemingly surprised she'd been noticed. No one notices the invisible woman, not the kids on bicycles cutting through her lawn, not the myriad motorists ruffling her hedges with their mechanized wind, not the patrons of the restaurants and you-finish furniture stores surrounding her.

As he drove over the Montana state line April 7, Michael Roe had one eye on the odometer of his Chevrolet Cavalier and one on the rock piles along the U.S. Highway 2 shoulder. This was a day 15 years in the making, one buoyed by a lot of blood, sweat and, well, urine, really, more than sweat. Roe, 41, is a rural route driver for Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories. He logs more than 1,300 miles a week collecting bodily fluids between Spokane and Troy, Mont.

"Kids." That's the first thing Evelyn Van Horne thought of as she stared at the charred stack of patio chairs leaning against the back wall of her house and the refrigerator-size burn mark on her home's wooden siding. Some kid had started a fire just a few feet to the left of her back door and it had gotten out of control, she concluded, probably while she was at church. Van Horne had just come home. It was Sunday, March 13, the day her sense of security on quiet Desmet Avenue changed.

First there was the labored breath of a locomotive rolling past Art Mahn's home, then the iron clap of boxcars derailing. A curtain of dust drew dark over the 81-year-old's farm north of Freeman, followed by silence. It was as if someone paused the soundtrack of Mahn's life. The pulsating roar of the Union Pacific train to St. Maries, Idaho, and the endless drone of traffic on State Highway 27, both a few paces from his doorstep, were gone.

An Amtrak passenger-train derailment Sunday morning in the Columbia River Gorge injured several passengers and cut train service between Spokane and Portland for the foreseeable future. The derailment stranded 115 Portland-bound passengers in White Salmon, Wash., the train's last Washington stop before reaching Portland some 65 miles farther west.

There are nearly a dozen Chevy El Caminos in Darrel Boardman's Spokane Valley back yard, buxom car-truck hybrids, with throaty motors and air shocks to stiffen the ride with the blow of a hose. Guys, gearheads in particular, go bonkers for this kind of stuff, mechanical beasts assembled in a half circle waiting like lions for a tamer in greasy bib overalls and wielding a box-end wrench to open their hoods and lean in deeply.

In the corner of Lidiya Medvedev's living room, in the blue glow of a television that these days hardly ever turns off, there is a glimpse of tomorrow that frightens those who watch. Words stream across the bottom of a screen in Russian, telling of a parliament that has fallen, a president who has fled, a country – Medvedev's homeland of Kyrgyzstan – that is embroiled in revolution.

Exit 289 may have erred two weeks ago by inviting readers to come up with a new nickname for Spokane Valley. Monday's paper lands on more than 98,000 doorsteps. Only about a fourth of those papers are delivered between Havana Street and the Idaho state line, which is this column's area of concern. We should have kept it in the family.

Dorothy Altringer and Lee Herman were teenage girls on an extended adventure when they met in World War II era Spokane. They were country girls who'd moved to the big city for jobs re-skinning Bell P-39 airplane wings for the military, real "Rosie Riveters."

Alan Harbine is finding out that asking your neighbors for a cup of sugar is one thing and asking 200 or more of them for $100 each is quite another. The Northwood resident and others are passing the hat, hoping to create a $20,000 legal fund to fight a nearby housing development, Valley Springs, a 369-home project proposed by Bryan Walker. They fear their home values could suffer if they do nothing.

His flak jacket and drab-green duffle bags lay in the entryway of his Spokane Valley house as if James Dokken walked out of the desert yesterday and hastily dumped the load. There are patriotic balloons tied to the chain-link fence outside and tiny American flags along the walkway to the front door. Ask any one of the Dokken girls what's going on. They'll tell you, "Daddy's home."

Alan Harbine and his Northwood neighbors hired a traffic engineer to forge a truce with the developer of a pending mega subdivision, which they opposed. Residents of the cul-de-sac community feared the new, 369-home development would bisect their neighborhood with a through street from north Spokane to Spokane Valley. They got the road changed, but because they didn't check with the county, it appears the road to Hillyard will go through, albeit paved with good intentions.

In the picture, a Picasso-esque nurse shepherds two children through a doctor's office. Her jigsaw-puzzled face is split. She is half mother, half care provider. The children are both ailing and on the mend. The piece, which bears the title "A Time Stands Still" is a thought provoking look at the nursing profession that stops people in their tracks as they walk the halls of Tech Group Inc., a medical field employment agency in downtown Spokane. The style is interesting, but so is the medium – fabric. Hundreds of different patterns of cloth make up the vibrant colored picture. Such creations are Nan Drye's trademark.

A fire that gutted a Millwood restaurant early Monday was deliberately set, investigators said Wednesday. Spokane Valley firefighters, working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, now believe someone broke into Susie's Steak and Seafood early Monday and started the blaze that destroyed the inside of the business at 9611 E. Trent Ave.

There was a time when Harry Goedde, a decorated World War II veteran, took guff from no one. He wasn't cocky, just confident, a young soldier from Uniontown, Wash., willing to take a bullet for the right reason. The young Harry Goedde would have righted a few wrongs in Valley Mission Park on Feb. 9, when the old Harry Goedde, 81, was slammed to the ground so hard by a young male. The impact of the older man's frame hitting the ground was so hard it blackened Goedde's right arm with bruises from wrist to shoulder.