Rob Curley: A look back at the 10 most notable wild moments from Further Review pages, ahead of Charles Apple book release

Every industry has its rock stars. You know, the kind of person everyone in a chosen profession knows exactly who he or she is.

Well, in the newspaper world, Charles Apple is a Rock Star. Especially if you are a designer or produce informational graphics. His work at newspapers across the nation has always been attention-grabbing, is the topic of conferences and is even taught in journalism schools.

In many ways, his Further Review pages for The Spokesman-Review have even grown that reputation. The same full-page graphics he does for our newspaper now appear in hundreds of other newspapers across the country, including as far as Georgia, where Apple often sees his Further Review pages in his hometown newspaper, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. His first book – a very cool retrospective look at some of his best historical pages – releases in just a few days.

When readers talk to us about the things they love the most about our newspaper, Further Reviews always end up as part of the discussion. When we visit high schools, we literally see Charles’ pages hanging on the walls of classrooms.

Outside of the rarity of a newspaper publishing several full-page infographics every week, part of the reason his audience continues to grow is that readers literally have no idea what to expect each morning when they see one of his pages. Science, pop culture, history, government, toys, sports … Further Reviews can be about anything.

And they are.

In his five years at The Spokesman-Review, Charles has researched, written and designed more than 1,000 Further Review pages. The guy really should be a writer for “Jeopardy!”because there can’t be many people who know more obscure facts than him. If people still played Trivial Pursuit, he’s the guy you’d want on your team.

Which brings up an interesting question.

After more than 1,000 of his pages have appeared in our newspaper, and an upcoming book release that includes all of us getting to hang out with Charles at Sunday’s Northwest Passages event at Gonzaga, let’s take a look back on what we’ve all learned.

Or maybe it would be easier to just pick 10 notable, weird, wild, interesting, borderline esoteric things we’ve learned from Charles.

Borrowing liberally from Mr. Apple himself, here is my list.

• The principle upon which Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and cellphone technology is based came from a famous female movie star from the 1930s. She dreamed up the concept, filed for a patent, and then gifted the patent to the U.S. Navy. Which ignored it. (Sept. 20, 2022)
• It would cost about $6,750 to deliver one day’s edition of The Spokesman-Review to astronaut Anne McClain when she’s in orbit aboard the International Space Station. So instead of the print edition, it’d be cheaper to sell her a subscription to the e-edition. (July 7, 2019)
• Actor Dustin Hoffman, who was 33 at the time, was nearly killed as he was leaving his Greenwich Village apartment on March 6, 1970, when a bomb went off in the apartment next door. Next door was rented out by the Weather Underground terrorist organization, which was making bombs to set off at an Army Base to protest the Vietnam War. (March 20, 2000)
• The first 10 amendments to the Constitution were ratified in December 1791 and became known as the Bill of Rights. But Congress had actually passed 12 amendments. Two weren’t ratified by the states. One was about Congressional apportionment. The other – about Congress voting itself a pay increase – was finally ratified in 1992. (May 12, 2000)
• Henry Ford built his first car – he called it a quadricycle – in the garage behind his home in Detroit. But when he got ready to take it for its first test drive, he discovered he had built it too wide for his garage doors. He had friends take out a brick wall with an ax so he could drive out. (June 3, 2021)
• The Declaration of Independence was not signed by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The Congress met on July 1 and formally declared independence on July 2. It took a calligrapher two days to write up a clean copy of the document. Most of the members of Congress didn’t sign it until August. (July 4, 2023)
• In 1952, the U.S. Navy sent some of its nuclear submarine experts to Ontario to help clean up a damaged nuclear reactor at the Chalk River power plant there. Among them: Navy Lt. Jimmy Carter. (March 28, 2024)
• Among the young people who appeared as regulars on the old “Barney & Friends” TV show on PBS in the 1990s were two who’d go on to become big TV stars for Disney and then recording stars: Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. (March 31, 2022)
• Elvis Presley heard Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and wanted to record it. However, Presley’s manager – the notorious Colonel Tom Parker – demanded half of Dolly’s publishing rights to the song. Parton declined and said later she “cried all night.” But after Whitney Houston turned the song into a huge hit in 1992, Parton would say she earned “enough money to buy Graceland.” (June 4, 2024)
• The Barbie doll is based on Lilli, the star of a naughty comic strip in a German tabloid newspaper in the 1950s. Lilli was made into a doll that Ruth Handler found in a tobacco shop in Switzerland in 1956. She thought an actual doll would be better than paper dolls for little girls to dress up and had her husband, the co-founder of Mattel, buy the rights to the Lilli doll. The Barbie doll debuted in the U.S. in 1959. (March 3, 2024)

But there’s actually one more.

It’s not really some cool fact, per se, but more of something that just makes Charles even more unique … or possibly even more peculiar. Being honest, it could go either way. He’d agree with that.

While Apple has a nicely outfitted home graphics studio – not to mention an extensive home library with 2,777 books, at last count – he often builds his Further Review pages at his favorite table at Chick-fil-A. Not only does it get him out of the house, but he says he loves the free refills of Diet Coke.

He’s been hanging out (or some might say loitering) at Chick-fil-A for many years. During his years in Houston, Charles spent hours and hours blogging about newspaper design from his favorite table there. When he left Houston, the manager put a plaque on the table, dedicating it to him.

The other regulars at the Chick-fil-A he writes from now in Atlanta have all preordered his book, which is available for $34.95 at the Sunday event and Auntie’s Bookstore or for $44.95 online at Apple.PictorialBook.com.

When Chick-fil-A opened its first restaurant in Spokane in December 2020, Charles built a page about the history of the franchise and its most popular menu items. The headline on his page: “An expert’s guide to Chick-fil-A.”

It was an understatement.

But rock stars and the word “understatement” rarely go together. Which, oddly enough, brings us back to Charles’ new book and our release party with him on Sunday.

Really successful rock stars have to release a Greatest Hits album every few years. Charles couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but seeing these Further Review pages formatted for a coffee-table book and printed so beautifully and with so much detail, you realize that his pages totally sing. Even if he can’t.

Accomplishing that meant Charles had to reformat all of his broadsheet newspaper pages that first appeared in The Spokesman-Review to work as a book. A real book that’s actually shaped like a book. That might seem like a ton of work – and it was – but ask a real Rock Star if they think it’s important to remaster their favorite songs if they’re going to be rereleased in a better format, and the answer is always “absolutely.”

Same with Charles.

Besides, the guy’s brain never stops thinking about these pages and all of their facts, and he’s clearly hopped up on chicken sandwiches and Diet Coke.

In the newspaper world, that basically solidifies someone’s Rock Star cred.