Cabbie With A Camera Wallace Gamble Recorded Historic Scenes Of Downtown Spokane While Driving Streets In A Checker Cab

On a crisp December day in 1938, a Spokane cab driver, his uniform pressed sharp, his cap snug and straight on his head, leans against his Checker Cab.

Watching the rush of Christmas shoppers along Riverside Avenue, the cabbie lifts his compact black camera to his eye, framing the scene. Click.

Women in fur-trimmed coats.Click.

A businessman wearing a fedora, squeezing through the crowd. Click

Shoppers with their arms full of wrapped presents crushing past the Mode O’Day on the corner. Click.

For nearly 30 years, downtown cabbie Wallace Gamble photographed the passing parade of characters and every-day people who filled the streets of Spokane.

In his spare time he quietly developed the black and white pictures in his basement, carefully noting the locations and special events. Over the years he filled boxes, drawers, albums and shelves.

The pictures mostly went unnoticed until recently.

Some have found their way into Carolyn Hage Nunemaker’s recent book “Downtown Spokane Images, 1930-1949.”

Nunemaker and Gamble will be signing books at Clarke & Stone Book Company, N. 204 Division St., at 4 p.m. tomorrow.

“He was very good at taking pictures of regional scenery,” said Karen DeSeve, special collections curator for the Eastern Washington Historical Society. “His work has a certain artistry. It has aesthetic interest as well as historic value.”

In the past Gamble rarely showed off his pictures. Occasionally he’d enter one in the Spokane Chronicle’s photo contest: a cute squirrel, or a close-up of a rose glistening with dew. He inevitably won first place and was paid a dollar or two.

He also sold news photos to the Spokesman-Review. He sold one of the Spokane Falls to National Geographic, and he once won a national award for a portrait of horses dashing through a field kicking up a cloud of dust.

But his passion was the people he saw everyday while driving his cab.

“I was interested in preserving anything I thought might be of historical interest,” Gamble, 96, recalled recently.

In 1985 he hauled boxes of pictures to the historical society.

“My health had gotten bad and I knew I had some pictures they might want,” he said.

“He brought in nine albums, movie film, and negatives. He was very prolific,” said DeSeve.

Originally combined with the rest of the museum’s collection, the pictures are now being sorted into the Wallace Gamble Collection.

Although the historical society is credited with the pictures in Nunemaker’s book, many were taken by Gamble and he is mentioned in the acknowledgments.

“You learn so much from the pictures,” said Nunemaker. “Looking through them at the museum, I learned things I didn’t know. They also corroborated some things I thought I remembered, but wasn’t sure.”

Gamble’s picture of the Globe Hotel played a key role in the building’s recent restoration. “Without a particular picture he took of the Globe Building in 1938, we wouldn’t have known what it looked like. It gave us the design and reference for bringing it back to the way it was,” said Julie Clarke, owner of the The Globe.

The building was recently nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, by historic preservation planning consultant Linda Yeomans.

The Globe was one of Gamble’s favorite buildings. He still remembers the solicitor who worked for the hotel. The wiry man would wait at the train station, looking for customers, then load their luggage in his cart and lead them back to the businessman’s hotel.

Gamble’s photos are rich in contrast, shadows, ranges of grays, plays of light. They are reminiscent of work being done by the new photojournalists of the same period, especially Margaret Bourke-White, Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans. Gamble had a penchant for climbing to the highest point in the city for a bird’s-eye view.

One of his most recognized pictures was taken when a fire gutted the P.M. Jacoy building in November 1939. He climbed to the top of the Hutton Building and aimed his camera through the smoke to focus on the tangle of fire hoses and scrambling firemen below.

He sold the picture to the Spokesman-Review for $3.50.

Born in Greer, Wash., in 1901, Gamble first wrapped his hands around a box camera when he was 9 years old, taking pictures of the farm and his family. The love affair began.

After graduation, he worked as a chauffeur for T.J. Humbird, who lived at 612 W. Sumner.

“He lived in the nicest house on Sumner,” said Gamble, who lived with his young bride, Pearl, in the apartment over the garage. He was paid $120 a month.

“It was my first good job,” he said.

But Gamble had dreams of being independent.

He borrowed money and bought a butter, egg, and bakery stall at the corner of Second Avenue and Washington Street.

“It didn’t do well enough to make a living,” he said.

When Gamble heard about an opening at the Yellow Cab company in the late 1920s, he grabbed it. “I drove a puddle-jumper. That’s what we called them,” he said. The passengers were enclosed in the back, but the driver sat in the open.

It wasn’t long before Gamble began noticing the Checker Cab Co. was doing all the business. He saved his money and bought an interest in the company.

The Gambles lived in apartments downtown until 1937, when they built their cozy brick home on the South Hill where Wallace still lives. His wife and daughter have died.

The Gambles traveled regularly throughout Eastern Washington, taking vacations and weekend jaunts.

Wherever he wandered, Gamble always carried his camera, a lightweight Voigtlander loaded with 120 millimeter film that produced negatives nearly the size of a baseball card.

For more formal work he often used a big black box that gave him negatives like postcards.

Besides hundreds of pictures of downtown Spokane, Gamble’s collection includes fishermen on the Bull River reeling in hefty trout. There are loggers wearing T-shirts and suspenders felling thick trees and working the Potlatch logging flumes. Industrial pictures show workers at the Long Lake power station.

There are faces: Native Americans with long braids; miners craggy and weathered; his own sweet-faced daughter surrounded by bushes heavy with cherries; farmers bent over boxes of strawberries at harvest time in the Valley.

He also took “gobs and gobs” of 8-millimeter movie film. Some of it has been transferred to video. It will be shown during the book signing at Clarke & Stone.

The black and white montage is narrated by Gamble.

In the background streetcars zip by, the sidewalks seem extraordinarily crowded.

“There were a lot of people who worked, shopped and lived downtown,” said Gamble. “I’ve just always enjoyed meeting people and seeing everything.”