Kootenai Mail Call Has Long Been Her Calling

West of Sandpoint on state Highway 200 and one block north of the Payless Gas & Mini-Mart in Kootenai is a small, quiet, green building.

The combination City Hall/post office sits in the center of an unpaved lot.

Behind the window of the post office you will find Postmistress Ruth Kohler.

This diminutive grandmother has been doling out stamps, packages and vacation mail at the Kootenai Post Office for more than four decades. She’s on a first-name basis with her customers, and she added spice to local history a few years back when she swept a potential thief from her post office with a broom.

On a snow-laden, sunny afternoon, in the house where she was born and returned to after her husband and parents died, Kohler shared memories.

“I took over (the post office) when Amy Miller retired. June Swanstrom had it for years,” she said. When Miller took over in the 1940s, she bought the building, moved in and kept the post office there until she retired.

Kohler helped move the post office to Claude Spangle’s store, where Kootenai Used Furniture Store and the Sub Shoppe are now. In 1963, she moved the post office from Spangle’s to City Hall when it was built, and has been here ever since.

“There was no plumbing, no toilet,” she said. “I had to go next door to Amy Miller’s. Bill (my husband) and I had the plumbing put in and took it off the post office rent.”

The post office, which received a much-needed update last summer, hasn’t always been something Kootenai residents could take for granted.

For many years, the train dropped the mailbag near a mail hook as it passed through town south of the highway. Someone would pick it up and bring it to the post office.

She remembers the time when Kootenai had a street car, a fire station, a bank, a hotel and competed with Sandpoint to be the county seat.

Kohler lives on Whiskey Jack Road, in the comfortably remodeled home of her youth, next door to her brother.

“I was born here. My dad, Albert Bellamy, built it.” Her father owned seven or eight acres. Her husband Bill moved to Kootenai with his family in 1934, from a wheat farm in eastern Montana.

Ruth and Bill Kohler were married at Naples in 1941. They moved to Bill’s father’s farm, on the Dover Highway, which is now Northshore Drive.

“There was nothing but farms out there, back then. After that, we lived in Sandpoint ‘til he went in the service. While he was gone, I moved back home. After he got back, we bought seven or eight acres across from this place and built on the other side of the creek.”

The couple’s first daughter, Coyla, was born before Bill went into the service. Gail, their second daughter, was a year old when they moved into the house he built.

“Our kids were all born here and went to Kootenai School, same as me, my brother, Wayne, and sister, Lisa. I went all eight grades there. I’ve got grandkids going there today.”