Clay Bleck set example of service to community

Last Saturday was one of those sunrise-sunset days in our town.

Midmorning on the west edge of the city, a church was filled with friends and family for a memorial service recognizing how Clay Bleck’s life made other lives better. Bleck was a founder and sustained underwriter of Crosswalk, Spokane’s most effective program for homeless young people. He also was a new car dealer and longtime Democratic Party official.

About the same time, just past the southeast corner of the city, a big yellow ribbon was cut, opening the doors of the new Moran Prairie Library.

The memorial service was Bleck’s style – respectful, dignified, with a superb three-piece jazz band featured among the comments and commendations. It was said he disliked talking about himself and that he disliked memorials in which people troop up to the front and go on about the friend’s past. So, there was not much trooping up and not a great deal going on.

There was a straightforward recitation, with little embellishment, outlining Bleck’s generous, spirited support of the underdog and young people with promise. The words I heard were apropos, including Bleck’s admonition to vote a straight ticket only if it is all Democrat. There were some somber faces, longtime friends maybe recognizing their own mortality in the serious loss of a fine friend. And, there was light in literally hundreds of eyes glistening as many acknowledged and appreciated their relationship to Bleck.

If you know the joy of a new book and the bright orderliness of a library then you have a sense of the light in the new Moran Prairie Library. Friends of the Moran Prairie Library were rightfully brimming with pride about their citizen effort to support the new branch library.

It is one of the purest ways to build and sustain a community. Everyone built something for everybody. Seven out of 10 Moran Prairie voters chose to create a taxing district and then assess themselves the funds necessary to build the library. And they saved the trees, too.

Inside, off to the left, is the community room where tomorrow’s neighborhood plans will be drafted. Just beyond that is the children’s part of the library where little hands reach out to take hold of a world they cannot yet imagine.

I visited after attending the Bleck memorial. For a brief moment in the children’s section, I wanted to sit on the floor and stay awhile. It is a bright place, bright enough to draw children to acquire life’s greatest tool – the ability to read and know.

This particular sunrise-sunset Saturday seemed to me a day we were shown the way we ought always treat one another.

I am buoyed by the thought that it may have been happening all over the city and in every corner of the county.