Life’S Work Foundation For Legacies
One hundred and nine years ago, a young Spokane recovering from a fire that nearly leveled its downtown elected my great-great uncle Charles Clough as mayor. Small segments of family stories offered glimpses of him and, more interesting, of this city that is my home four generations later.
But during a recent family move, I discovered and reveled in the really good stuff about my ancestor, described by his business partner J.P. Graves as “a dogged little man with a beak of a nose.”
Family and city history were mixed in boxes and when all was read and photos examined, it amounted to a legacy. And the beauty of it is that Charles Clough probably didn’t intend it as such. But then, that’s the serendipity of some of the best legacies.
What Charles left and certainly this can be said of many others is an example of a life rich in love of the city he nurtured and helped to grow. He had unwavering hope for the civic and his family’s future and a sturdiness of spirit undaunted by failures.
Charles Clough is our family’s poster boy for the American dream of opportunity. He started with nothing, worked hard, made and lost a fortune and along the way carved a solid life out of a new community.
There’s no record of why he came West after serving with the Rhode Island Fifth Regiment in the Civil War. Perhaps it was simply the West’s promise of a grand and exciting life for those with any luck. But once here, he opened a bookstore in downtown Spokane, then switched to real estate to take advantage of a booming town; he and J.P. Graves closed their first deal in January 1888.
Together they bought property in downtown Spokane and Graves watched it burn. Charles was in Paris. Together they helped rebuild the city and developed subdivisions west of Browne’s Addition and what’s now the West Central neighborhood. Along the way Charles married a much younger woman named Mildred and they lived in grand style in a mansion with two-story columns out front on West Ninth.
They rubbed elbows in elite social and financial circles. For example, Charles accompanied the Ochs family, owners of the New York Times, on a tour of the booming Idaho mining district in August 1909.
Then Charles and Mildred got caught in the 1910 crash and lost everything but their style. That, they maintained and the vestiges were packed and passed along when Charles, and then Mildred, died early this century.
As I sorted through letters and photos, I thought about legacies how they are made and how they are passed on.
I thought about Bill Clinton, who’s trying so very hard with the help of professional image-makers to reshape his legacy, to control what he will be known for in historical accounts. I began thinking that unlike image that can be made and shaped, legacies have depth and substance, and sometimes they are passed to people we brush up against for only the briefest time. We never know which people these are.
And more often recently, I read of newly-wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs pushing piles of money at something that’s more lasting than anything in cyberspace buying professional sports teams or giving computers to poor children in developing nations in order to create new markets for their software. And I know real legacies can’t be bought and sold as though they’re a retail item.
I think that my great-great uncle didn’t spend time shaping his image as a civic leader; he was busy building this new little city. And he didn’t leave a pile of money as a legacy; he made and lost it.
Nonetheless, he left a great legacy: evidence of a life well-lived. Because when you live well, you value a whole lot of the things we think of as good and decent a generous spirit, a sharing, compassionate demeanor, an interest in whether the next generation, whether they are your children or not, will have a better life.
As I repacked the boxes, I forgot momentarily that Charles was related by marriage and I looked in the mirror to see if the family legacy also included that beak of a nose.