Harold Van Horne a ‘good man, good friend’

Harold Van Horne believed in passing along his history. He often told stories to his wife, Evelyn, who wrote them down. The work was still unfinished when he died of congestive heart failure on July 10. He was 89.

He remembered all the stories with the clarity he remembered everything else. He was a whiz at Trivial Pursuit. “He had an amazing memory,” Evelyn said.

Van Horne was a mailman for many years. He started in 1936 and worked one of the last horse and cart routes, rambling through downtown Spokane and Hillyard with his horse Molly and dog Percy.

Van Horne, who grew up in Spokane, left the Post Office in 1944 for the Army. He was a postal clerk at Camp Roberts, Calif. After his stint in the military, he owned shoe repair shops in California before coming back to Spokane and opening a shoe shop at Nevada and Bridgeport for a short time.

But delivering mail was what he did best, and he went back to it. In 1952 he moved to Elk, where he was a rural mail carrier for many years. The Roberts family, which included young Evelyn Roberts, was one of the families he delivered to. “He’d known our family for 60 years because he delivered our mail,” Evelyn said.

He retired as the Elk postmaster in 1972. He was always meeting people who used to live on his route, and he always remembered them. “One day we went out to the Elk Post Office, and he took me along his whole route,” Evelyn said. “He still remembered everyone.”

While working for the Post Office he also owned and operated the Richfield Service Station on the Newport Highway. In 1961, he built a drive-in called Van’s Horne of Plenty. He sold it when he retired, and it is now the Ram Drive-Inn.

His son Steve Van Horne was 11 when he retired. “He pulled me out of school and home-schooled me, and we traveled around the country,” his son said. “I was in every state in the union by the time I was 13. It was a good time.”

Steve Van Horne remembers his father as someone he could go to for advice. “I considered him a teacher and a mentor,” he said. “He was actually one of my best friends in the whole world.”

His father was also someone with an active, and sometimes off-color, sense of humor. “He was pretty funny,” Steve Van Horne said. “My friends were always impressed by him.”

Van Horne was married to his first wife Grace, for 56 years. They raised two sons, David and Steve, and daughter Merrie Lynn. A second daughter, Janet, was killed in 1953 at the age of 16 in a car accident.

Grace Van Horne was killed in a car accident at Eloika Road and U.S. Highway 2 in 1992. The passenger in her car was Elma Roberts, Evelyn’s mother. Even in his grief, Van Horne visited every day to see how Elma was doing, Evelyn said. “At first he felt responsible,” she said. “He just said, ‘I should have been driving.’ “

Evelyn had been alone since her husband of 41 years, George Cross, died in 1987. Soon she and Van Horne were going out to dinner. “He was just easy to talk to. He just really made you feel comfortable.” They married in 1993 and made their home in Spokane Valley.

Van Horne loved to camp, fish and pick huckleberries. He was also a member of the Fertile Valley Grange for many years. He and Evelyn went on numerous trips together. “Now I’ve been to every state other than Hawaii,” she said.

Steve Van Horne credits Evelyn with his father’s quality of life in his later years. He probably would have died soon after his wife Grace otherwise, he said. “I don’t think we would have had him longer than four years,” he said. “He was heartbroken and lonely. She was the best thing that ever happened to him.”

Van Horne had been ill in the last month of his life, but Evelyn said she expected him to bounce back as he had several times before. One night he said he felt strange and she sat up with him all night. In the early morning he told her to get some rest, so she lay down. “He called me and when I got up he was gone,” she said. “It was that fast.”

“I really miss him,” said his son Steve. “I cherish the moments I had with him. He was a good man and a good friend.”