Three North Side Residents Talk About Their…Childhoods To Remember

Railyards made Hillyard a busy community VIRGINIA HANSEN

Almost every afternoon, Virginia Hansen walked Hillyard’s dusty streets toward the Great Northern Railway roundhouse to bring a lunchpail dinner to her favorite guy in the world.

Her father, a yard supervisor, would pull the sandwiches from the metal lunch bucket and, over the hooting train whistles and shouts from the round-house, would talk fishing with his daughter.

The Hillyard of Virginia Hansen’s youth in the 1920s and ‘30s was crackling with possibilities. Trains constantly rolled through the railroad community. The Market Street shops were full. Great Northern workers filled the restaurants and bars. Grocers knew their customers and made home deliveries.

“It was a little city, and everybody was friendly,” said Hansen, 80.

Life was rarely dull for Hansen. She and her girlfriends floated celluloid dolls with bright red lips down the irrigation ditches in her mother’s raspberry garden. There were plenty of empty lots for baseball. Dad took her stream fishing.

Radio was like a signal from another world. There were Gene Autry and Hoot Gibson westerns at Hillyard’s Rialto Theater.

Sometimes, her father would take her to downtown Spokane. It seemed like it took “all day” to drive in a Model-T Ford over the unpaved roads.

“Life was simple,” said Hansen, who is staying temporarily with her daughter in Chattaroy. “We were poor, but we didn’t know it.”

At the old Arlington Elementary, she made friends with Edith and Mildred Simpson, sisters with whom she still maintains friendships.

Though friendly, Hillyard was also a bit dark and mysterious. “Dog Town,” full of rough Italians and Irish immigrants, was literally on the other side of the tracks. Hansen’s mom told her not to roller skate with the boys on East Queen after supper.

Prohibition added mystery. Her dates would occasionally stop at a shack to pick up a bottle. At Schultz’s Corner, a restaurant, a door would occasionally swing open to reveal secret card games in a smoky room. “It was a speakeasy, I’m sure,” said Hansen.

She went to Hillyard High School at Regal and Sanson before Rogers High School opened. She graduated from Rogers in 1934, the third class at the school. She later rented a room in the old Hillyard High building after it was converted to an apartment building.

The Depression hit Hansen, although indirectly.

She knew some of the men laid off by the railroad. Her mom sent packages to a sister caught in the Oklahoma drought. A field trip to the Hotel DeGink in Spokane showed Hansen hundreds of desperate men sleeping on rows of metal bunk beds. They were dirty and poorly clothed, she said.

But the era was happy, she said. Dressed in loose cotton skirts well below the knee, Hansen and the Simpson sisters took nickel trolley rides into downtown Spokane for movies at the Orpheum Theater. “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” were favorites. Afterwards, they would stop in for malts at the soda shop. School dances at the Davenport Hotel required dance cards; boys would stop girls in the halls of school to sign up for a waltz.

“Your dance card would be full a week early,” said Hansen, sighing.

An exciting time growing up on North Side during jazz era FRED WANLESS

Before TV and toolin’ on Riverside, there was Stan Kenton at the Nat.

A teenage Fred Wanless didn’t miss a show when the jazz hepcats blew into Spokane. Dressed to the nines in a single-breasted, one-button grey flannel suit and a pink shirt, Wanless would take his girl, Ellen Hall, to dance to the big band tunes in the dance hall at Natatorium Park.

A trombonist, Wanless would watch from the front row as Kenton, Maynard Ferguson, Harry James and other jazz giants played to a hall full of kids. Tickets were less than $5. No drinking, no smoking. Just jazz.

“I think at that time, anything was possible,” said Ellen, 58, who married Fred in 1954. “You could do anything you wanted to do.”

Fred and Ellen Wanless grew up on the North Side during the 1940s and early 50s, an uncomplicated time free of fear and full of promise.

They have lived most of their lives within two miles of their childhood homes in the West Central neighborhood.

Fred’s family is solid Spokane. Growing up, he knew all his cousins.

As children, war blew over Fred like a summer cloud. While his parents watched food rations and had the tires on their new car confiscated by the government, Fred played war against the Japanese. He and his pals at Audobon Elementary - many of whom he still meets once a year - armed themselves with broomsticks and cap guns.

Eventually bored and hot in the summer sun, they wandered barefoot and shirtless to the Cannon Park pool or to the river. “You stayed that way until school started,” said Fred, 61.

The Pacific war ended with an allnight street party. It was a treat for a 10-year-old Fred. Firecrackers popped. People hugged. The celebration stretched up Monroe from the Spokane River to Garland.

In post-war euphoria, any goal seemed reachable. Fred once estimated that he would earn $1 million in his lifetime as an engineer. “When I was going to school, every kid, not just the A students, had a feeling you could make it,” said Fred. “You could be a plumber or a mechanic and do all right.”

As a senior at North Central High, Fred got a purple, two-door 1941 Ford with a torpedo back. He had walked everywhere until then, often hiking home from a girl’s house in the Shadle neighborhood at midnight.

“I don’t remember having a fear under the sun,” said Fred.

In the Ford, Fred hit the cruising circuit with Ellen. “We went from drive-in to drive-in to see who was there,” said Ellen. The circuit included Gages at Northwest Boulevard and Monroe and the “XXX” and Baker’s Beacon on North Division.

Few drank or smoked, even on Friday nights. Music was Fred’s drug.

His band of North Central High pals played at parties and occasionally on local TV. They played “Sentimental Journey,” “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Blue Skys.”

“Life was free,” said Fred.

Living on the verge of the modern era SHELLY CLARY

Shelly Clary spent much of the Summer of Love in a barn.

While youths elsewhere were creating the flower child cliche, Clary and her friends at Shadle Park High School were grooving to Beatles imitation bands at Graffmiller’s barn in Nine Mile Falls.

The bands - often Seattle bands like The Sonics and Kingsmen - would play loud and late. The parties, held at a private residence, would last late, until Shelly and boyfriend Dan would pile into her 1952 Studebaker with oxidized paint and no shocks and roar home.

No protests, patchouli or pot, Clary said. Vietnam was just an excuse to go to college. “We didn’t feel like we had to protest. We didn’t know any better,” she said.

North Spokane in the 1960s was a tranquil bedroom community on the verge of opening its doors. Development stopped at Francis and Mead was a distant cowboy outpost. The A&W drive-in on North Monroe was the hot burger joint.

Clary grew up in northwest Spokane, a mostly blue-collar neighborhood of people who believed in the American work ethic and never criticized the government.

School kids said the Pledge of Allegiance and sang “God Bless America” before class. “You weren’t cynical,” said Clary, 44. “You were very patriotic. I remember singing ‘God Bless America’ in class one morning … and seeing my girlfriend crying. I felt that way inside, too.”

Summer days were spent on Slip N’ Slides, summer nights at the movies. Drive-ins “were everywhere.”

For Clary and many others, music defined the ‘60s. The Beatles were more than rock - they broke the radio standard fare of country and soul. When she saw a “Hard Day’s Night” movie at the Fox ($1 ticket), she promised herself she wouldn’t start screaming for Paul like “an idiot.”

“But you couldn’t help yourself,” she said, laughing.

The subculture that formed around ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll was around Clary, but missed her. Raised on country (Eddie Arnold and Jim Reeves), she wore wire-rimmed glasses and overalls while hipsters wore gingham and floral prints.

“We wanted to fit into that culture,” said Clary, speaking for her high school sweetheart and husband, Dan. “We wanted to be independent. But that wasn’t in me.”

If she wasn’t hip, she faked it well. She and Dan saw Jimi Hendrix when he came to Spokane, and caught John Denver with 300 others at Gonzaga University.

She learned to make funky dresses out of floral print fabrics - three yards for $1. Dan grew long hair. She religiously went to Shadle slab dances, which featured a band of high school students.

Contrary to the “60s image, there was little drug use, Clary said. She knew no more than five students in her graduating class of 850 that used LSD regularly, and less than 15 smoked pot.

Around graduation in 1970, she developed strong feelings about the Vietnam War, as she recognized names of youths killed. There were no organized protests away from college campuses, she said.

“Everyone started realizing what a mistake we had made,” said Clary, an optometrist at a downtown clinic. “You began to understand what a waste of life it was.”

Several in her class joined military reserve units to avoid the draft. Others took college deferments.

Shelly and Dan married after graduation. They never considered college; there was no need. “Your future was bright if you wanted to work hard. You didn’t need to be bright - you just needed a work ethic.”