The Slice: Orange juice? Hot chocolate? You make the call

I’ve actually wondered about this.

What do most people in Spokane who don’t drink coffee order when they meet someone for coffee?

Let’s move on.

Slice answers: “I stopped watching local news when Bob Briley left,” wrote Joe Jovanovich.

“I stopped watching local TV news when Ira Joe Fisher left,” wrote Arthur Dendy.

Uh, that was a while ago.

“I’m not sure if I’d quit watching but I might if Jane McCarthy ever left the Spokane news scene,” wrote Tom Hilliard of Moses Lake.

And in another matter, The Slice heard from Jana Dubes, a longtime reader.

“I have a Rolodex at my desk that is older than some of my co-workers.”

Halloween 1957: Howard Kent and a friend decided to concentrate their trick-or-treat efforts that year on a part of Bonners Ferry known to be a target rich environment for kids seeking high-quality candy. And they had a plan to maximize their take.

“After making our first haul, we returned to my home, changed into different costumes, and set out to make a second haul from the same area.”

All went well until they got to one house where the owner required trick-or-treat kids to sign a guest book before he dispensed candy.

This forced the boys to make a decision. Bonners Ferry isn’t that big of a town. So totally bogus names, say Count Chocula or Boris Karloff, would not work. They needed another plan.

“We knew we couldn’t use our own names again, so we each used a name of one of our classmates.”

One problem. The classmate whose name young Howard forged had already been to this particular house.

The homeowner smelled a rat. (Cue the ominous “Dragnet” tones.)

“He had us take off our masks.”

On future Halloweens, Howard and his friend would avoid the house with the trick-or-treat registry.

Slice answer: What would Spokane be like if you had never existed?

“How would I know,” wrote Rich Young.

Today’s self-serving Slice question: Were baby boomers trained from childhood in the art of making tough decisions because 50 years ago it was virtually impossible to record TV shows on channels you were not watching so you had to choose between viewing, for instance, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Rat Patrol”?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. It amuses Mike Storms to open his copy of TV Week and see, in the Saturday grids, the old Western “Wanted: Dead or Alive” truncated to “Wanted: Dead …”