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The Slice: About the picture, though …
Sometimes bureaucracy can be your friend.
“While I was going through our mini cedar chest given to my wife at her graduation in 1950 by a local furniture store, I found my first driver’s license, issued in 1947,” wrote Ray Blowers. “It listed my weight as 150 pounds.
“On my current license the weight is still the same 150 pounds. Bless the DMV’s hearts, that’s only 100 pounds off. But I’ll never complain.”
Slice answer: The question about the relative zeal of family historians reminded Spokane Valley’s Denise Marcum of a distant relation with a perverse sense of family pride.
“My mother’s second cousin’s hobby was collecting lurid episodes among my family and exposing family skeletons to every family member he met,” she wrote. “He especially delighted in finding ancestors who were deported from Ireland for various social dysfunctions.”
Going home again: The sites of two of the homes Mike Wirt grew up in back in snowy Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., wound up having significance to his family even after the houses were gone.
“One was torn down in the early 1960s as part of the redevelopment of a two-block area for senior citizen public housing, which my mom ended up living in for 15 years,” wrote Wirt, longtime director of the Spokane County Library District.
And that Upper Peninsula city’s public library, built in the 1980s, now stands on the site of the other house. Wirt’s late mother used to go there a couple of times a week, “and knew more about the collection than most of the staff.”
Three issues with the “they don’t even lock their doors” cliché employed to imply crime-free rural bliss: 1. It’s probably not true anymore. 2. It’s not a good idea, in any event. 3. If people are intent on breaking into a house, the whole locked-door thing is almost irrelevant.
Warm-up question: Did proposing on Valentine’s Day turn out to be a good move?
Today’s Slice question: What Inland Northwest resident has the local social circle that includes the greatest variety of international and regional accents?