Once an Athol, always an Athol
Kim Moors said there is no correcting her 97-year-old Spokane grandfather when it comes to pronouncing Inland Northwest place names.
He says it his way.
“The list in my life is quite long as we lived in such places as Kooskia, Kamiah, Orofino, Coeur d’Alene and now Athol,” she wrote.
But her grandfather doesn’t restrict himself to personalized pronunciations of towns. He also “corrects” the way people say their names.
“My own husband, for example, was stunned to learn that he had been mispronouncing his own last name his whole life.”
•Restroom conversations: After a meeting in Buffalo, Teresa Oszurko went into a restroom and met a woman who turned out to be one of her daughter’s college professors there in New York.
“While we were talking, we found out that we attended the same convent school in India,” she wrote.
Years ago, Mike Carlson was in the men’s room at a downtown Spokane bar. A guy next to him had long, blond hair and appeared to be wearing some sort of costume.
Someone else entered the restroom and asked Carlson if he had just come from the Cheap Trick concert. Carlson said he had not and proceeded to dismiss the band in unflattering terms.
You guessed it. One of Carlson’s friends eventually clued him in to the fact that Mr. Long Hair and Costume was Cheap Trick’s lead singer.
•Parting shot: Graduate student Katie Delderfield recently left a job as a telemarketer. And she has something to say.
“When we finish our spiel, and you ask us to hang on a sec, and go back to eating your dinner? It’s really not as funny as you think it is.”
•Slice answers: Several readers said their fear isn’t that a windfall will somehow trigger cascading appliance failures. It’s that the expiration of warranties will.
•Privacy and the kitchen phone of yesteryear: A friend told me her older brothers invented a code for when the “pars” were within earshot.
•When exercise machines attack: OK, two more.
Mark Wand has a friend who was charging out to shush the family’s barking dog one night and got tangled up in a stationary bike. “His wife said all she could see were arms, legs, handlebars and wheels,” wrote Wand. “By the time it was over he had two cracked ribs, a black eye and a sprained wrist.”
The dog did stop barking, though.
Another reader told about how a power outage at his Spokane fitness club brought half a dozen treadmills to a sudden halt and caused users to do some involuntary rhumba steps.
•Today’s Slice question: How many Slice readers remember telephone party lines?