Garden Springs Experience Spans Three Generations School Represents Deep-Rooted Tradition

Three decades passed before Debbie Spannagel had to face her father’s fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Seigert.

Fortunately, Spannagel’s father “turned out all right,” and she didn’t have to overcome his reputation as “a little redheaded mischief maker.”

Chauncey “C.W.” Hoyt, 78, and his 43-year-old daughter attended Garden Springs Elementary 35 years apart and shared the same teacher.

“It was a standing joke,” Spannagel said of her father’s reputation.

But Mrs. Seigert kept an eye on “C.W.” long after he graduated, eventually concluding he had mended his ways, Spannagel said.

Hoyt attended Garden Springs from 1924 to 1932; Spannagel from 1959 to 1964.

Last year the family tradition continued when Spannagel’s son, Travis, 6, passed through the same red-gabled doors as his grandfather and mother and played amid the same pines near the grassy playground.

“I would love to see my grandchildren go there, as long as the building was intact and safe,” Spannagel said.

The Garden Springs neighborhood is scattered with residents, young and old, who call the 108-year-old school their alma mater.

While many of Spokane County’s original schools have been demolished and replaced with larger buildings, Garden Springs has had only a few upgrades. The major overhaul was in 1929, when a 40-year-old, L-shaped wooden school building was replaced with one made of bricks and mortar.

Henry Peirone, 78, still lives three houses away from the school he attended 66 years ago.

During his eight-year stint at Garden Springs, he had just two teachers and traded classrooms only once.

The two-room school housed 50 students, grades kindergarten through four in one room and grades five through eight in the other.

“I do remember the teachers worked really hard,” Peirone said. “I think we got a good education there, just as good as the city schools.”

Peirone’s father, Domenic, was a school board member in the 1920s.

Domenic also laid bricks for the new school since he was a stoneworker by trade, Peirone said.

Garden Springs was never a town, only a sprawling neighborhood of bricklayers like Peirone’s father, railroad engineers and truck farmers.

“It wasn’t a close-knit community because it was so spread out,” Peirone said.

During the 1920s the population, with many Italian and Japanese families, fluctuated between 200 and 300 people.

Four miles southwest of Spokane, Garden Springs was the last stop on Washington Water Power’s southernmost trolley line.

“Kids used to pull the trolley off the track,” said Peirone, adding, “but I wasn’t one of those kids.”

Phillip Stainer, 74, was one of “those kids.” He also attended Garden Springs.

“I was a flag-raiser and a hell-raiser,” the retired electrician admitted.

Many mornings Stainer raised the flag at Garden Springs School. After school, he raised cain.

“We used to go down to the end of the trolley line at night and pull it off the track with a rope,” he said. “The next morning we’d watch the driver come storming out.”

But at school, Stainer said he was a teacher’s pet, namely for Mrs. Lydig, who taught grades five through eight.

“She had a 1929 Ford Model A ragtop, and she designated me to bring her car around to the front of the school,” Stainer said.

Stainer never left Garden Springs, except during World War II, when the Army stationed him in Iran for three years.

“I came back to Garden Springs,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to live elsewhere.”

Henry Peirone is his neighbor, as is the tiny red-brick school where they went to school.

“I live a nine-iron shot from Garden Springs (school),” Stainer said.

, DataTimes