Parks Department’s Angove Leaves Angry Tide For Calmer Waters Tough Boss Called Driving Force Behind Trail, Protection Of Many Parks

Sam Angove has been to a movie theater just once in five years. He watched “Grumpy Old Men.”

“You seen it?” Angove barked. “You oughta see it. It’s great.”

That was August, and Angove had reason to be grumpy.

Nearing his 26th anniversary as Spokane County parks director, Angove could look back on many accomplishments, including creation of the Little Spokane River recreational area and construction of the Centennial Trail.

But for the second time in his career, Angove faced the prospect of closing several parks for lack of money. And taxpayers were more surly than he had ever seen them.

In recent months he had angered baseball fans, walleye fishermen and Bear Lake neighbors.

The stress was aggravating Angove’s diabetes, causing his vision to blur. His doctor told him it was time to retire.

The grumpy old man of the parks department took his doctor’s advice Tuesday, a week after commissioners began investigating complaints from 11 of Angove’s 45 employees. The workers, whom commissioners will not identify, say Angove created a hostile work environment and made demeaning remarks.

There’s no doubt the former Navy Seal was a tough boss. Friends describe him as abrasive, impatient and confrontational.

“Sam is an extremely effective director of parks,” said Claude Morris, a member of the county parks board since 1988. “But as an executive, he fails. He does not delegate well. He lacks human relations skills.”

Angove, 58, will not talk about his departure, except to say that it is best for himself and the county.

Asked about his management style, Angove said he sometimes feels like the aging outlaw John Wayne portrayed in “The Shootist.” He’s a gunslinger in an age of smoothtalkers.

“Sometimes times change and you don’t see it happening,” said Angove, who left Friday for an extended vacation that will include his seventh kayaking trip along the Baja Peninsula.

He doesn’t know if he’ll return to Spokane. He doesn’t own a house or have family here. His daughter lives in Seattle and his son in Guam.

He hasn’t decided whether to retire.

Angove agreed to an interview on one condition:

“Tell people that I’m very grateful to Spokane County. Where else can some kid come from nowhere and have the opportunity to be a part of a success story that we’ve had here.”

Friends say it is county residents who should be grateful.

Always under-funded, the parks department had to close 32 parks between 1977 and 1987. The budget was so meager in 1982, Angove cut his own position to part time.

Although Angove took heat each time a park closed, supporters say it was amazing more weren’t lost.

“Without Sam, we probably wouldn’t have any park system,” then-Commissioner Pat Mummey said during the crisis.

Others say that if not for Angove, the Centennial Trail may not have been built. He was called a “pinko commie” in the early 1980s for suggesting the county, city and state buy private land to build a trail along the Spokane River.

“I don’t want to take away anything from all the other people who were involved, but Sam was certainly the driving force in getting the (trail) done,” said Clyde Anderson, an early proponent of the trail.

Angove takes credit for nothing except hard work. Nothing would be accomplished without the work of Anderson and others too numerous to name, he said.

Among them is Morey Haggin, who showed up at the new park director’s office in 1970.

“He said, `Do you know that they’re starting to develop the Little Spokane River?”’ Angove recalled. “I didn’t even know where the (river) was.”

Since then, the county and the state have set aside 1,500 acres of shoreline. The natural area attracted 41,000 canoeists and hikers last year.

“It would have been very difficult for anybody else but Sam to do it,” said Haggin, one of many county residents who donated money, land and time to the project.

The association between Angove and Haggin didn’t end with the river. Together, they traveled to Montana and Idaho “weekend after weekend” to protest timber sales Haggin describes as “the worst butchery.”

A former Sierra Club chairman, Angove was on the opposite side of the logging debate in 1991, when he negotiated a land trade with Inland Empire Paper Co. The paper company would have received 375 acres in a remote corner of Liberty Lake County Park in exchange for 38 acres along the Spokane River.

Liberty Lake residents who successfully fought the sale were angry to learn that Angove for years had approved selective logging in the park. Money from the timber sales helped keep the parks department open during lean years.

It was not the last time Angove was denounced for efforts to boost the parks budget with private money.

Neighborhood opposition last year killed a proposal to put an RV park at Bear Lake Park.

Baseball fans were angry when Indians Stadium became Seafirst Stadium. Angove didn’t negotiate the deal, but he approved it without a public hearing or informing the commissioners.

And members of the Spokane Walleye Club hired an attorney when Angove told them they could not hold their annual fishing exhibition at the fairgrounds unless they dropped boat displays.

Showing fishing boats put the exhibition in competition with a larger boat show at the fairgrounds, Angove said. Commissioners overturned his decision, amid threats of an antitrust lawsuit.

Angove escapes to the woods or a river when the pressure becomes most fierce.

“The caddis flies are out early,” he said during a summer trip down the Little Spokane.

Slicing the water with his paddle, he identified flying blurs or distant calls as goldfinch, pine siskin, and a red-tailed hawk.

He pointed to heron nests in the cottonwoods, noted that wood ducks were using boxes nailed to trees by volunteers and identified white and purple lupine growing along the stream.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” he asked.

For a while, the grumpiness was gone from his voice.