Couple’s Haunting Yard Display Shows Love Of Timely Decorating

Thu., Oct. 26, 1995

Bruce Krasnow The Spokesman-Rev

On Spokane’s North Hill, Clark and Shirley Graham have become a neighborhood institution in less than five years.

It started when Shirley retired from the Moezy Inn and picked up a wooden Santa Claus decoration carved by her husband. That year their whole yard at 1003 W. Kiernan was filled with lights, the wooden Santa, reindeer and sleigh.

The next year the decorations spread to Easter, and three years ago to Halloween.

Last week the couple were putting the finishing touches on the Halloween display.

Clark, 57, worked in his basement wood shop. Shirley, 56, painted the pieces upstairs.

The lawn was already filled with vampires and coyotes, ghosts and skeletons. Witches and monster heads were strung around the bushes, and ghosts and bats around the trees.

“Most people don’t go out quite as much as we do on Halloween,” said Clark, a dispatcher and transportation coordinator at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Clark gets ideas for the carvings from catalogs and newspaper photographs. His newest is a crooked-hat witch that he saw on a lunch menu at the hospital last Halloween.

The couple’s carvings are so popular that one went on a recent trip. In August, a carving of a little apple boy was taken by a prankster who traveled around Idaho sending the couple photographs and postcards signed by “Ollie,”’ the name given to the lawn display.

The Grahams received photographs of the carving outside Worley, Idaho, Boise, the 45th Parallel, and being served breakfast at Elmer’s in Lewiston.

The return address on the envelope with the photographs read, “The Roadtrip Bandits.”

The couple have more than 100 wooden lawn ornaments, including planter boxes they display in summer.

They also make shirt-size pins and hope, after Clark retires, to travel around to craft shows.

“Once we started putting them up, people wanted them,” he said. “I’ve got them scattered all over town.”

But for now, they have their holidays.

“He keeps saying he’s going to do Thanksgiving next year,” Shirley said.

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