Tom Lutey

Back when Chuck Pierce was learning to fly a plane, it was common for flight instructors to guide their students over the southeast corner of Spokane Valley and kill the engines. As gravity kicked in, Pierce and other newbies were told to gaze down at the rapidly approaching terra firma in order to find a safe place to land. It was 1960 and there wasn't much to zero in on – a few truck farms, some pasture land; that was about it.

A Spokane Valley landmark, one that churned out the ingredients for Grand Coulee Dam and outlasted legal jousts from a noteworthy Spokane man, is going toe to toe with a wrecking ball this week. At least in the early rounds, the seven surviving silos of the International Portland Cement Co. seem to be holding up. A Louisiana crew was pounding away at them Monday with a wrecking ball the size of an office desk, but it was taking a good 10 whacks to make visible progress.

In Edgecliff, on East Sixth Avenue, where the homes are little too small, the grass a little too high and the dogs more than a little mean, there sits a house of glass 50 yards long with a chimney 30 feet tall. You can look right through it to the homes across the street. No one lives in this glass house anymore, this greenhouse. Like a thin ghost, it barely casts a shadow. But it has a soul, a story anyway, one few people know better than Claude Montecucco.

In the picture, Harry McVay is perched atop an office desk. He has the glimmer of success in his eyes, and his hands, poking out from the sleeves of a twill suit coat, appear large and capable. Brother Warren McVay stands, leaning engagingly toward the camera lens, smiling confidently. They were the McVay Brothers, roofing and siding contractors. Theirs is an American success story, one that ended for Harry when he died March 29, at age 89.

Ballots are in the mail for a revote on a crucial $7 million replacement levy for West Valley School District. The ballots, due back by May 16, are a retry for a levy that failed by 43 votes in March. The levy pays for some of the school district's most basic services, including some busing, which could be on the chopping block if the revote fails. West Valley buses 85 percent of its elementary school students.

Feeling the classroom squeeze, the Central Valley School Board on Monday night approved a sweeping relocation plan that will send students from three schools elsewhere in the fall. "I'm excited about a kindergarten center, because I think we can focus on the needs of the really young students," board member Cindy McMullen said.

Arturo Morando was a 7-year-old in Mexico when his parents sent him to a local artisan to see whether the old man would teach the boy a trade. "Yes," said the artisan, Rodolfo Torres. He would, but only on the condition that Morando work with him daily. To an American child, to American parents, this kind of arrangement is foreign, but for the Morandos this agreement was the ticket to a good life, ensuring that their youngest son would have work, literally until he died.

Twenty years ago, when Keith Raschko started pulling parts from busted motorcycles junked at Independent Cycle, some of those widgets were only worth their weight in carbon. But time and the Internet have turned those parts into diamonds, and Raschko now has a brisk eBay business where he has sold almost 12,000 items in the past five years. And he's not alone.

Every month, Alyson Mai ventures out to Barker High School to instruct a handful of students on making a healthy meal on a blue-collar budget. The students blurt out a top-dollar request.

Fancy Richardson, well coifed and perfectly postured, struts into her mother's living room like the Queen of the Nile, and it's easy to see why. There are tiny porcelain statues of Fancy's likeness on every available space, a Fancy-esque comforter folded over the back of a sitting chair. In the kitchen, Fancy-style salt and pepper shakers smooch on a shelf above the stove.

'Ride-a-buck" is a term that's been all but erased from the Spokane Valley vernacular. Even though we no longer know what it means, we have the feeling it's not something you'd invite the neighbors over to do. Yet, down in the basin of Valley Mission Park on a Saturday threatening April rain, cowgirl Pat Terry was collecting $4 a head from anyone eager for a bareback lesson in forgotten culture. It was part of an annual play day for horses and mules.

Bus driver John Ruscio and barber Tom Groh have been having variations of the same conversation for the past 38 years. Every couple of weeks, Ruscio's wife, Ellen, dispatches him to Tom's Barber Shop on Bowdish Road for a little haircut. She prefers Ruscio's hair a little longer. Ruscio prefers it short, which makes Groh the King Solomon of combs and shears.

At Andrew Bowerson's age, everybody who wants to be an astronaut gets to be an astronaut – or in the 13-year-old's case, an FBI agent – when they grow up. At least that's what parents and teachers tell their children, that life is an open book with pages yet to be written. But Pam Francis, Andrew's principal at Centennial Middle School, knows the chapters of the seventh-grader's life being written right now can dramatically affect the outcome. Whenever the teenager skips to the happy ending, Francis brings him back to the chapter he's on now.

Calving season is all of life's meaningful riddles answered at once: birth, death, motherhood, dumb luck and cruel consequence. The answers all unfold in a rancher's field between January and March even as winter's bite closes the door on spring and the Palouse sky's brilliant blue squint fences in the horizon in every direction.

The countdown has begun for the Panda Channel morning news, but there's a word on the teleprompter that co-anchor Jessica Demchuk just can't wrap her brain around, "participants." She sputters on the first try, passing up the "t" and blurting out the "c." The word comes out "parcipants," then "parsp" on second try and finally "pbpt." The technician on the teleprompter scrolls the word up and down until the newscaster is totally tongue-tied. It's not even a big word, not a real big word anyway, not for Demchuk.

Deer meet their maker all too often along the chewed-up shoulders of rural highways and on the nagging top strands of barbed-wire fencing. When this happens, Jim Kujala is called to pick through the accident scene with a bone-handled hunting knife. Kujala, of Greenacres, is part David Caruso, part Daniel Boone. His mission is simple: Salvage the meat if possible and try to determine the cause of death.

The girl behind the paint counter at Home Depot wore a T-shirt that stopped at her rib cage and revealed a sexy tattoo slightly above her tailbone. Leone Johnson glanced at the woman's backside briefly, and then noticed a man at the opposite end of the counter doing the same. A prison minister, Johnson recognized the man as a level 3 sex offender. She could see that the tattoo had the man entranced.