Jack Pring, Spokane Valley booster, car dealership owner and Playfair owner, dies at 92

Jack Pring, a car dealership owner, Spokane Valley booster and longtime supporter of horse racing in town, was hard at work right up until his death.

“The last time he was in the office was less than two weeks ago,” Pring’s son, Brad, said Friday from the offices of Pring Corp., the family’s development company started in 1960. “Was he retired? Not that I was ever aware of.”

John A. Pring Jr., the son of an automobile and business giant in Spokane Valley who saved Playfair Race Course from demolition in the early 1980s and built his own dealership group in town, died Monday. He was 92.

Pring was born in Spokane on Jan. 21, 1931, and grew up in a home on Argonne Road that was later moved to 20th Avenue. There, Pring rode horses that were cared for by his father, John Pring Sr., and mother, Pauline.

“He believed in this Valley and loved Spokane,” Jack Pring said of his father when he died in 1992. “It was the love of his life.”

That love passed on to the next generation, friends and family said.

“Every encounter I had with Jack Pring, he was nothing but a gentleman,” Spokane Valley City Councilman Arne Woodard said. “He was a real class act, and someone that really loves the Valley.”

Pring went to West Valley High School, where he met his wife, Donna. The couple dated for eight years before marrying, but Brad Pring said the lengthy courtship might be deceiving.

“A man that made decisions quickly was slow on that draw,” Brad Pring joked. “Rumor has it the first day he ever saw my mother, he told his best friend, ‘I’m going to marry that woman.’ ”

Pring joined the Coast Guard during the Korean War, serving aboard the USCGC Winona. In 2008, Pring suggested a nonprofit trying to open a Korean War museum was a scam and invited the executive director of a Korean War museum to Spokane Valley to explain why it had never opened a physical space and had so little money after receiving millions in donations. That museum did eventually open, but closed less than a decade later.

In December 2009, he received a Patriot Award from the Employer Support Group of the Guard and Reserve for his assistance to the family of an Army National Guard specialist serving in Iraq.

Brad Pring said people knew not to cross his dad, but they also knew he was a man who kept his promises.

“If you made a deal with Jack Pring, you couldn’t make a bad deal,” Brad Pring said. “When he gave you his word on something, his word was his bond.”

Jack Pring joined his dad at Appleway Motors, taking over ownership in 1955 and built the Appleway Automotive Group. While there, he sold many Valley residents their first cars, Woodard said.

In January 1981, Pring swooped in to purchase Playfair for an amount then reported in excess of $4 million after it appeared the race track that had been running since 1935 might be bulldozed for industrial uses.

“I love horses and I love horse racing,” Pring told The Spokesman-Review on Jan. 30, 1981, the day the deal was announced. “I’ve been around horses all my life and I’m excited about the Playfair operation.”

Brad Pring, then just out of college, began working with his dad at the track.

“It was, as we always tried to make it, the Disneyland of horse racing,” he said. “We tried to make it family friendly. We just wanted to put out the best product, a clean show.”

That included a partnership with the Spokane Youth Sports Association. Pring loaned the nonprofit $20,000 in 1985 to set up a bingo operation at Playfair that helped sustain its programming. Dwight Merkel, then-executive director of the organization, said Pring’s loan was key to the nonprofit’s expansion into other programs and offering affordable youth sports options for Spokane families.

“We probably exist today more or less because of Jack Pring,” Merkel told The Spokesman-Review in 1994.

The family operated Playfair until 1988, when it started leasing operations to other interests. It closed in 2000 and was later developed into the commerce park that continues to bear its name today.

“It’s the memories that will always be with you,” Brad Pring said. “He touched so many hearts.”

A celebration of life is planned for Pring on Wednesday, on what would have been he and his wife’s 70th wedding anniversary. It will be at the Mirabeau Park Hotel and Convention Center, 1100 N. Sullivan Road, beginning at 4 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the Boys and Girls Club of Spokane County, “in honor of Jack Pring.”