New Century Will Require A New Attitude

Cramming for final exams about the 20th century is about to begin.

In just 11 days the calendar turns to the last half of the last year of the 1990s.

In the next six months our families and our communities will be toting up how things went this century.

We will create lists of the best and worst, document achievements, recall notable characters, and, come Dec. 31, commit our psyches to a final essay on the meaning of it all.

The media, including The Spokesman-Review, will play a big part of this millennium-ending examination.

Staffers at the newspaper have written 100 years of local history one day at a time.

We have unmatched archives of what the people have done all these decades. And it’s just good fun to recall how much our lives have changed in 100 years.

And, we love lists, looking back, and old pictures.

Today, The Spokesman-Review publishes the second of its four millennium specials. By year’s end the paper will have marched through the century a year at a time, reviewing the memorable events and defining themes that shaped the Inland Northwest over the past 100 years.

Today’s second millennium edition topic is boom and bust.

The boom is easily documented.

At the beginning of this century, Spokane was hot, hot, hot.

But what about the end of the century?

Hot? Cool? Cold as a dead rainbow squirrel?

That answer isn’t easily decided. The most difficult time to put into context is the present, and at the moment it isn’t clear which way the arrow is pointing for Spokane and the Inland Northwest.

So, let’s revel, for a moment, in our past.

At the dawn of this century there was no doubt this was a happening place.

Between 1899 and 1909, Spokane’s population tripled.

The richest people in Washington state lived here. Millionaires were coined as fast as the Galena silver could be assayed from the Coeur d’Alene mining district, as quickly as local entrepreneurs could found banks, supply companies or services to support the glamour industries of the day mining, timber and agriculture.

Today, our eyes still are filled with images from that era.

Each time we dine at Patsy Clark’s, drive past the Spokane Club, or cross the Monroe Street Bridge, we are reminded that many of Spokane’s most memorable homes, vistas and institutions came out of the ground between 1899 and 1910.

That’s what makes the first part of the final exam on the 20th century a snap.

We can count great successes. The story of the railroads, the population growth, the overnight successes are the stuff of lore and legend.

But the end of the century? The legacy since 1950 isn’t as clear-cut.

Not a bust, not by any means.

Spokane and Coeur d’Alene have tripled in population since 1910.

But this time it took 80 years, not 10.

Everyone has better plumbing and few burn coal in the furnace. As a result, the air and water are far cleaner than 100 years ago.

Unemployment is low, under 5 percent.

Shopping is better.

The number of bars with illegal gambling and prostitutes is way down.

And, while we like to complain about the streets, they are, in fact, much improved from the potholes and bricks of 1899.

But to read through the newspapers of 100 years ago there is no doubt that something is missing today from that boomtown era.

The excitement created by an unbounded sense of opportunity clearly has diminished. Not disappeared altogether, but quieted.

The sense that not as much is happening here and that possibilities are limited has been fed by late-century changes in the regional economy and local community.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of locally owned businesses have disappeared in the national rush to consolidate ownership of everything from concrete companies to banks under fewer corporate umbrellas.

That means fewer people live here who really have bet the personal farm on the city’s success. More people quietly cash their paychecks from a Seattle bank.

They aren’t as committed to making this place really hum.

And, while timber, mining and agriculture were drivers of the economy in 1899, a century later software, airline manufacturing and information technology are attracting the young and the ambitious.

That leads many bright, young minds away from what was the boomtown of a century ago.

Frankly, I find it a bit uncomfortable to arrive at the end of a century with the sense that things were hotter 100 years ago.

That discomfort, however, likely will create the homework for the next century’s final exam.

Gilda Radner once said she wished there were perfect endings, but discovered at the end of her life that they were few. Some poems don’t rhyme, she said. So, you have to change the lyrics.

That’s not an altogether bad place to be as a city, or a region.

Writing a new hit song can be a thrill. It requires a new attitude about possibilities, not lyrics that sound like golden oldies.