Community Effort

Life in North Idaho improves every year thanks to people with bright vision and endless energy. They’re the folks who awaken imaginations, inspire involvement and excite community spirit.

Handle Extra profiled some of North Idaho’s “everyday heroes” over the past 15 months in a regular “Making a Difference” feature. What follows are the abbreviated stories of a dozen of those people who deserve North Idaho’s heartiest appreciation.

John Dunlap

For John Dunlap, veterans’ funerals take precedence over everything. “I went to 68 funerals last year. Sometimes I go to three or four a week,” he says. “A veteran rates everything he can get.”

Regional funeral directors rely on Dunlap to supply guns for a salute, flags to drape over coffins, color guards and inspiring graveside words.

Dunlap commands American Legion Post 143 at Ross Point. Membership there has risen from 19 to 585 under his leadership.

Post 143 also:

Offers free lunch every weekday between October and May for anyone. All-you-can-eat Sunday breakfasts at the post cost $3.50, and Saturday dinners cost $5. Anyone who can’t afford the price eats free.

Sponsors two baseball teams, four pool teams, 52 Boy Scouts, 250 Cub Scouts and a Girl Scout troop.

Sponsors three high school scholarships and an oratorical contest and sends students to mock legislature camps.

Steers veterans to organizations that can help them, and collects food for the Veteran’s Home in Lewiston.

Dunlap is career U.S. Navy. He retired a chief after 31 years, but lets that information out grudgingly. Rank has no place in the American Legion. Neither does branch affiliation. “We’re individuals,” he says. “We are what we are.”

The Post Falls Chamber of Commerce named him Post Falls Citizen of the Year two years ago. The American Legion has heaped state and national honors on him.

“If you’re going to do something, do it right,” he says. “If I can see a smile on a young child’s face or see a veteran get what’s coming to him, that’s what I’m here for.”

Linda Seed

The telephone at Linda Seed’s house rings five times an hour. School secretaries depend on Seed to find the best deal on 375 rolls of LifeSavers for Teacher Appreciation Week.

People pull into Seed’s driveway, drag heavy items - furniture? yard equipment? - over her concrete and drive away. She putters inside her house unconcerned.

“Little League concession stands,” she says, noticing a visitor’s curiosity. “That’s my life. I like to feel connected.”

Seed is as connected as a multi-socket extension cord. The Andrew Rypien Memorial Softball Tournament is lost without her. She’s the heartbeat in Post Falls’ Youth First. Her organizational skills strengthen Little League. The Post Falls Middle School PTA would need five people to replace her.

Seed, 48, united Post Falls parents worried that kids didn’t have enough to do. “We got frustrated because our kids didn’t have places to play their sports. They were playing in cow pastures,” says Vicki Caughran, another parent volunteer.

Such energy is particularly praiseworthy in Seed. She’s fought cancer of the blood and the lymph nodes for eight years.

“It humbles you, puts your priorities in order,” she says, glancing at photos of her 15-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her 12-year-old son, D.J. “I think that’s why I’m so driven.”

“Her enthusiasm and passion for this community are something I wish we could duplicate,” says Kerri Thoreson, Post Falls Chamber of Commerce director. “She’s one of our very special resources here.”

Tawnda Bromley

John Brown Elementary had no full-time nurse in 1978, so school secretary Tawnda Bromley trained as an EMT.

“I really felt it was necessary,” she says.

Bromley trained as a reserve police officer a few years later because Rathdrum’s Police Department had no women in uniform.

“It was a small department and a lot of times they’d need a woman,” she says. She discovered the void while she volunteered there summers as a secretary.

So, when Rathdrum needed a mayor six years ago because residents recalled the one in office, Bromley accepted the job. Last fall, she easily won re-election to her second term.

“She’s one of the best mayors we’ve ever had,” says Alvina Wolheter, a town resident for 47 years. “She speaks her mind, and that’s the only way to be.”

Under Bromley’s quiet leadership, Rathdrum has added a new City Hall, expanded its police force, finished a city park, persuaded a doctor to open the town’s first medical office and begun a town revitalization project. A skate park is in the works and a gas-fired power plant is moving in, promising to fatten Rathdrum’s tax base.

“I like working with her. She’s always been a friend,” says Police Chief Bob Moore, who’s worked for Rathdrum since 1976. “She’s a positive force for the city, always trying to improve things. It’d be hard to find better.”

Steve Gibbs

There’s no sales talk at Coeur d’Alene’s tiny Art Spirit Gallery, but everything - from wood sculptures to ceramic vases to lush oil paintings - is for sale. And it sells, because manager Steve Gibbs attracts buyers as well as the region’s most acclaimed artists.

“He has such high integrity. I absolutely trust the guy,” says George Carlson, a Harrison-based painter and bronze sculptor. His work has graced the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. “He’s so egoless and willing to set aside his own art career to get involved in keeping art spirit alive in the whole community.”

Gibbs’s low-key approach has raised Coeur d’Alene’s interest in fine art, encouraged artists to work together and taken the art process out of studios and into the public.

He’s the energy behind Art in the Making, a frequent gathering of working artists in the Coeur d’Alene Plaza Shops.

“There’s nothing like this in Spokane,” says Mickey Mank, a Spokane sculptor who’s a regular at Art in the Making. “This is fun, and it makes art more human.”

Which is Gibbs’s objective. “Retail is not my intent,” he says. “My intent is purely to promote art. The more exposure you have, the more interest grows.”

Gibbs rises at 5:15 a.m. to paint and study his intricate color charts before the gallery pulls him away. Sales there earned him $5,000 last year - his only earnings.

“I really want to focus on painting, but I see a real benefit at the gallery,” he says. “I wish there were 36-hour days.”

Stephanie Powers

The letters and numbers pour from Stephanie Powers’ mouth in a fluent stream. “Is the district budgeting 7 percent of its ICTL money?” she casually asks a phone caller and offers no translation.

She’s speaking education, a tongue she’s mastered during years of volunteer work in the Coeur d’Alene School District.

Powers, 36, has led parent-teacher organizations, read to children and run errands for teachers. She’s helped the district analyze school borders, evaluate technology and plan for the future.

She runs Coeur d’Alene’s EXCEL Foundation, which raises money for school projects the district can’t afford. And she evaluates school programs for the University of Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Center.

“She’s a person who can take a big picture and break it down into components and go out and deal with those components,” says Jack Dawson, who directs UI’s Coeur d’Alene Center. “She’s a gem.”

The schedule doesn’t tax her.

“I don’t really get wound up,” she says.

But she does get absorbed. She’s immersed herself in the education world so completely that she uses “facilitate” and “curriculum integration” in casual conversation without noticing.

“I enjoy what I’m doing as long as I’m learning something,” she says. “When you wake up every morning and know you’re making a difference, you just do whatever it takes.”

Steve Schenk

Steve Schenk never screamed at Coeur d’Alene to “show me the money,” but people came through anyway.

At Schenk’s urging, they flooded North Idaho College with enough $100 donations to wallpaper Boswell Hall. In return, they got a chance to win a brand new $200,000 home.

The Really Big Raffle has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for NIC’s Foundation, which Schenk directs. Much of that money has gone to scholarships, providing community college educations for hundreds of people.

“Without Steve, the foundation positively wouldn’t have taken off the way it did,” says Jo Webb, the foundation’s founder. “He’s a marvelous guy.”

He didn’t expect a career in fund-raising. “But this is the best job I’ve ever had,” he says. “Once I realized I was raising money for something I truly believe in, it got easy.”

The foundation’s assets have mushroomed from $250,000 to $7 million during Schenk’s 15-year reign over the fund.

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen at what he does,” says Jerry Gee, NIC’s vice president of instruction. “He really believes in what he’s doing and he gives it all the effort he has, all the time.”

Sandy Mamola

It started with an arrest in 1961. Sandy Mamola, 15, was incensed that a Long Beach, Calif., store had fired a black woman for reportedly racist reasons. Mamola picketed with 30 people. The protest was nonviolent. She was charged with civil disobedience.

Her values next motivated her to depart from her church. Her Baptist minister asked a visiting black minister to leave during a service. Mamola left, too.

“My father’s best friend was black. I’d lived in Panama and Puerto Rico,” she says. “I don’t remember ever being a person who didn’t care about other people.”

The spark that ignited Mamola’s stance against injustice has grown into a blazing torch that lights the way for Coeur d’Alene’s poor.

Now 53, Mamola runs the area’s oldest weekly soup kitchen and directs the Panhandle’s only health center for the needy.

Mamola’s no bleeding heart. She’s frank to the brink of rudeness. She points out holes in the stories people tell to win low-cost health care.

She expects volunteers to honor their commitment as if it were a job. She demands professionalism and courtesy, and asks those who can’t muster either to leave.

“Dignity is something we all deserve,” she says. “If you treat people with dignity, you’ll receive it back.”

Ben Keeley

Disabled veterans called on Ben Keeley when they had difficulties dealing with the government.

“Ben is one hell of a man to help with the veterans,” said Milt Stafford, who received benefits thanks only to Keeley.

“He’ll go backward to help if a veteran has a legitimate cause.”

Keeley, 53, was Kootenai County’s veterans services officer, and his passion for his job was renowned.

“His level of commitment you can’t teach people,” said Gary Bermeosolo, administrator of Idaho’s Veterans Services in Boise.

Keeley lived undercover in the Vietnam jungle in 1966, then fought his way through the Tet Offensive in 1968. After 18 months without a break, he was assigned to work in California. An on-the-job accident ended his Army career.

He moved to Coeur d’Alene and volunteered at the American Legion Hall to help veterans secure benefits. By 1994 Keeley was filing 10 times more claims for veterans’ benefits than Kootenai County’s veterans’ service officer. By the end of that year, he was the county’s veterans’ service officer.

Keeley filed nearly half of all claims filed in Idaho his last year on the job. Nearly all were approved.

“Working takes my mind off the chronic pain,” he said. “You have to have a heart for this. You have to want to help people.”

Ken Korczyk

The boys laughed at the mentally retarded kid on their team. He swung at every pitch, his bat slicing through the air with no satisfying whack. Every time.

Ken Korczyk was 20, in college and coaching the Little League team because he loved sports. He’d never encountered mental retardation before. But he knew the laughing had to stop.

His team complied. Near the end of the season, the boy made it to base on a walk. “I don’t think there was a dry eye there,” Korczyk says. “I felt like I’d made a small difference in a kid’s life.”

Korczyk is 50 now, and the director of TESH Inc., a nonprofit organization that teaches developmentally disabled people skills to work and live independently.

Under Korczyk’s calm leadership, TESH has blossomed into a steady supplier of skilled workers, a financially healthy business and a prime promoter of the abilities of people with disabilities.

“He’s literally dedicated his life to the cause, and he does it with respect and compassion and a level of commitment that I think is hard to find,” says JoAnn Curtis, chairman of the TESH board of directors. “He loves what he does, and he’s always thinking of the clients first.”

The success surprises Korczyk.

“There’s not a better feeling in the world than knowing you made a difference.”

Colleen Allison

Colleen Allison was 68 when misguided attackers forced her from her home state. Montana’s loss was Idaho’s gain. The former mayor of Columbia Falls, Mont., took refuge in Coeur d’Alene in 1995 and wasted no time blessing her new home with her talents.

She took charge of coordinating the Panhandle Kiwanis Club’s community playground-building project in City Park. She accepted chairmanship of Kootenai County’s citizens’ committee on the jail. And she filled the Kootenai County courthouse’s need for an extra receptionist during property tax-complaint season.

“She knows how to deal with people,” says Richard Seward, a member of the jail committee.

“She has a knack for recognizing the problem, separating the chaff from the wheat and getting right to the point.”

Allison hardly fits the fugitive role. At 72, her hair is gray, her cheeks are pink and her manner is contagiously hearty. She laughs loudly from deep inside, and her eyes shine with an enviable vitality.

“I thought I’d live out my days in Columbia Falls,” she says, with just a hint of wistfulness. “But being here is the best thing that’s happened to me.”

John Centa

It never occurred to John Centa to learn sign language when he learned his hearing was flawed a half century ago.

“You can’t treat the hard of hearing the same as deaf people,” he says. “The deaf are visually centered. The hard-of-hearing want to use whatever hearing they have to stay in the hearing world.”

That conviction has pushed Centa, 82, into the activist’s role where he’s evolved into Idaho’s foremost champion for the hard of hearing population.

“He believes in what he’s doing,” says Pat Young, director of the state’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. “And everything he’s done is right. He’s been the leader of the hard of hearing in the state.”

His latest project is getting the state’s vocational rehabilitation program to provide assistive devices to people who need help hearing at work.

“If I don’t have something in the fire with value and meaning, I’m lost,” Centa says. “What’s the point of living if you’re not doing something useful?”

Sue Thilo

When Sue Thilo marched to the forefront of Coeur d’Alene’s recent drive for a community center, the collective sigh of relief from supporters could have raised a hot air balloon.

“She’s very, very, very keen at knowing what’s going to make a project successful,” says Erna Rhinehart, a parent and public relations specialist. “She brings so much passion to the table. It’s phenomenal.”

Community center supporters are not alone in their admiration for the 45-year-old Thilo.

“If you want something done in this community, call Sue Thilo,” says Nancy Sue Wallace, City Council president. “She doesn’t have any ulterior motives.”

From the Kootenai Medical Center’s Festival of Trees to the Coeur d’Alene School District’s EXCEL Foundation, Thilo has proved herself hard-working, tenacious and focused.

“I won’t do something unless I believe in it,” she says. “I would never fund-raise for something I wouldn’t write the first check for.”