Reluctant Leader Left His Mark

As a mayoral candidate, Neal Fosseen initially was reluctant.

As mayor, he occasionally was frustrated.

But as a former mayor, he’s a standard-setter.

The mark of the 90-year-old former public official, military officer and bank executive is all over Spokane.

There’s the Fosseen Room on the campus of Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute.

There’s the Fosseen Award, given each year to a military unit for community service.

There’s Camp Fosseen for Boy Scouts, named for a person who, at age 12, was the nation’s youngest Eagle Scout and decades later was president of its national council.

Other things carry his mark, if not his name, such as Riverfront Park and the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute.

From his office on the top floor of the U.S. Bank Building, Fosseen looks out over the park and the changes he helped bring on both sides of the Spokane River.

He’s been a part of downtown Spokane for more than 60 years. Today’s wide expanse of green and open vistas of the river are a sharp contrast to the day in March 1960 when Fosseen, then a bank vice president, was called to a meeting. His office was in the same building back then, but the view to the north was of railroad tracks and aging buildings.

Fosseen and other businessmen had struggled for months to reverse the flight of stores and jobs from downtown. He had been instrumental in raising $100,000 for a study that would propose major projects to turn around Spokane.

Fosseen’s brother-in-law, bank president Bill Witherspoon, was waiting for him with three friends: John Hieber, leader of Spokane Unlimited, which was behind the study; Bill Hyde, general manager of Cowles Publishing Co.; and Horton Herman, president of the Municipal League that pushed for a new government system that voters had just approved.

It was a system designed to run city government like a business, they all believed. Instead of electing professional politicians, voters would choose public-spirited citizens for the City Council who would act as the city’s board of directors and hire a city manager to act as the chief executive officer.

The council needed a mayor, to act as chairman of the board. At the meeting, Fosseen was asked to seek the post as part of his civic responsibility.

“I thought to myself, `How am I going to get out of this thing?”’ Fosseen recalled recently.

He couldn’t. Everyone he suggested as an alternative was already mulling a request to run for the new City Council. “We all finally said, `If those other guys will do it, I will too.”’

He campaigned on a simple philosophy: The best way to bring jobs to Spokane was to have a well-run city. When he won, he found the position more difficult and time-consuming than anyone could have guessed.

It was supposed to be a part-time job; he worked 60 to 70 hours a week.

With no blueprint to run the new form of government, he fell back on his experience as president of a family business, as a Marine officer in the South Pacific, even as a Scout camp counselor.

“I guess I’d just absorbed knowledge of what you need to do - use your good common sense, be reasonable and be fair.”

Sometimes he clashed with the very people who had convinced him to run and funded his campaign.

“There were times I wouldn’t agree with what he did,” Hieber said recently. “Later, I realized he did it for the good of the community.”

Fosseen defused some controversies by delegating. “Any time anybody complained to Neal about anything, he’d appoint a committee. It was the beginning of our proliferation of committees,” Herman said.

But Fosseen ran the new City Council meetings with an iron hand - no interruptions from the audience, recalled Jack Geraghty, who was hired in 1961 to be the mayor’s administrative assistant and later served as mayor himself.

When voters turned down money for a new airport, Fosseen helped find a source of money for the proposed Spokane International Airport that didn’t require a vote. “It was a gutsy decision,” Geraghty said.

Fosseen said his proudest accomplishment as mayor was “bringing down the total cost of government.”

Does he miss anything about the job?

“No,” he said without hesitation.

After retiring in 1967, he served on the executive committee of the Expo ‘74 World’s Fair, which had become the key element in the ongoing fight to save downtown. He also received the special title of mayor emeritus, the city’s unofficial ambassador.

The walk is a little slower these days and the hair has turned snow white, but ambassador Fosseen can still be spotted most days walking purposefully through downtown. He’s on his way to or from a meeting, a luncheon or an announcement about one of the dozens of issues or projects that interest him.

He’s had an office in downtown Spokane for more than 60 years. First it was as an executive with his family’s business, Washington Brick and Lime Co., then as an officer of Old National Bank, owned by the family of his wife, the former Helen Witherspoon, then as mayor and finally as the owner and operator of 420 Investment Company. In those early decades, he helped raise two sons; later he helped transform a city.

In a few weeks, he and Helen will move from Rockwood Forest Estates into the retirement center. He’ll still keep an office, he said, it will just be at his home.

Fosseen has served on the boards or received awards from every institution of higher learning in Spokane. Certificates and plaques from civic groups, charities and business organizations cover his office wall.

His most prized award had its seeds in his first term as mayor. When citizens balked at the cost of a trip to Spokane’s proposed sister city of Nishinomiya, Japan, Fosseen paid his own way. He and Helen became regular visitors to Japan over the next three decades. The sister city ties led to the establishment of Mukogawa’s branch campus at the former Fort Wright College - a piece of Japan in Spokane.

Fosseen was later named to the Order of the Rising Sun by the emperor of Japan, a rare honor for a foreigner. That award is not on the wall, but in the room that carries his name at the institute.

All these things have happened because the reluctant candidate said yes.

“Not in the wildest stretch of my imagination would I have thought that,” he said.