Millwood Reflections At The Church Where He Broke Windows As A Youth, Spike Grosvenor Is Replacing Windows With Stained Glass

Fragile memories and a strong sense of community are part of the design in the stained glass windows that brighten the new chapel at Millwood Community Presbyterian Church.

Spike Grosvenor and a pal used to play stickball in the lot next to the church in the 1950s, and shattered a church window with an enthusiastically misdirected ball. Nearly 45 years later, Spike is back in the church … replacing glass again.

Square-built and white-bearded, Spike stretched a yellow measuring tape across a sill in the chapel, then jotted down figures on a notepad. “I made these two landscape windows for the families of Del Wall and William Herbert. They all were friends of my parents, and I went to school with their children,” he said.

“And this third window will be in memory of my baseball coach, Joe Stout. He was the first Little League coach in Millwood - a very kind and gentle man who never raised his voice, and still managed to teach baseball to 12-year-old boys.”

Millwood businesses paid for the team’s blue uniforms that were blazoned across the back with the sponsors’ names. “We all argued over who’d get to wear ‘The Mill Tavern,”’ recalled the former pitcher. “But my parents wouldn’t allow me to wear it. And no-one ever wanted to wear ‘Homo Milk.”’

Spike, now a Whitworth College art professor, shifted the tape measure from hand to hand like a baseball, and looked through the clear glass into his past. “I’d lived in foster homes since I was 2 or 3, and moved wherever people sent me. I attended 15 different schools. The most painful thing was to come home from school and see a little suitcase packed and sitting by the door. I never knew where I was going, or why.”

When Spike landed on the Spokane doorstep of Frank and Nadine Grosvenor, he had come home for good. The couple nurtured him, and tried to keep him out of trouble. But Spike fell in with a tough crowd of boys in that neighborhood. He shoplifted marbles and toy soldiers from the 5-and-10-cent store. And he broke a lot of glass.

“We lived across the street from the Inland Casket Company on Division then,” recounted Spike. “And I picked up every rock I could find and busted over 100 of their windows.”

The Grosvenors promptly removed Spike to Millwood, and bought a small clapboard house - this time across the street from the Millwood Community Presbyterian Church. Frank served on the city council, and was an elder of the church. Nadine was the secretary at Otis Orchards High School.

Spike befriended Ed Arildson, who missed the pitch in that stickball game. They joined the same teams, went to the same school, entered the Army together, and both eventually graduated from Whitworth.

“Those really were ‘Happy Days,”’ said Arildson, a 30-year veteran of IBM who now lives in Bellevue. The “boys” still get together for a round of golf every year. “We experienced Millwood in its best years. No pressure, no social turmoil - we never locked the doors, or took the keys out of the car.” The small grocery where Arildson’s mother shopped didn’t expect payment until Saturday, when paychecks were issued at the lumber mill.

Not far from Spike’s house was the Sugar Bowl, the boys’ favorite stop for milkshakes and fresh-baked cinnamon bread. Other community businesses included the Mill Tavern, John Little’s 5 & 10, the barber shop where Spike got his crewcuts, and M & L Drygoods where he got his first job as a stock boy. Spike also was Millwood’s one and only streetsweeper. “Just me and a pushbroom,” he said.

Arildson said that local businessmen had an informal policy to hire the local kids in the summer so they could earn money for college.

But the boys grew up, and moved away. The Grosvenors sold their house to make room for a parking lot for the church. The outline of its foundation is still visible in the asphalt.

After his hitch in the Army - playing baseball for Special Services - Spike enrolled at Whitworth College, and pitched on the baseball team that won the NAIA championship. Following grad school at the University of Washington and a teaching-coaching stint in Issaquah, Wash., he returned to Spokane in 1968 to teach art at Whitworth. He began the stained glass program there 18 years ago, and is involved in national stained glass groups and exhibitions.

When his old hometown church remodeled, Spike’s name came up for doing the glasswork. Dr. D. William McIvor, senior pastor at Millwood Community Presbyterian Church, explained that the 1920s-era building needed extensive repair. Part of the refurbishment was to convert a section of the original sanctuary into the chapel.

“From the very beginning we’d hoped that we could do some stained glass in the new chapel,” said the pastor. The Herbert and Wall families commissioned Spike through the church, and worked with him on the designs for the windows that memorialize their loved ones. “It’s just very meaningful,” said McIvor, “especially for those who have been around since the 1930s and 40s … that it was done by someone who was a ‘local boy,’ who literally grew up in what is now the church’s parking lot - a kid that some of our folks remember as a kid, anyway.”

“Back when the church was founded 75 years ago, it was called the Millwood Community Presbyterian Church - that name was on it from the very beginning. And as the community changes, and as the needs in the community change, we have to adapt to that,” McIvor reflected. “There are more and more families, and families come in all different shapes and sizes - blended families, single parent families - and we need to be very conscious of that.”

That sense of family and community bonded Spike to the Millwood church, and freed him to explore his abilities with confidence.

“When I was in high school, I pitched three no-hitters and another two on a national champion team in college,” Spike said. “But as important as those events are to me it was Millwood that changed my life. I knew I could go home after school and there wouldn’t be a suitcase by the door. Millwood in the 1950s was in a league of its own.”