This day in history: Spokane honored for Expo. Rural school districts ceased to exist.

From 1975: Washington Gov. Dan Evans presented the city of Spokane with a Governor’s Arts Award for “it’s initiative in presenting Expo ’74.”

During a ceremony at the Seattle Art Museum, Evans noted that Expo presented “many national and international visual and performing arts activities.” It also resulted in a “redeveloped and beautified downtown core and waterfront area.”

Spokane Mayor David Rodgers was on hand to accept the award.

This was one of six awards presented by Evans, with others going to various artists and arts organizations.

From 1925: The proverbial “little red country schoolhouse” was slowly going extinct in the region.

The reason? “Large farms are taking the place of smaller tracts.”

This resulted in a loss in population and a scarcity of students. An area south of Cheney was a case in point. One schoolhouse, designated District 140, “lost all of the students as the small farms were absorbed by purchases.”

An adjoining school, District 17, had only two students left.

Those two districts now had to consolidate with a third nearby district, which “would eliminate the cost of separate schools.”

From the traffic beat: Charles Bishop, 17, was sentenced to 15 days in jail for riding 35 mph on a motorcycle on North Division Street. Two other 17-year-olds were listed as the first people sentenced under a law requiring lights on bicycles. They were fined $1 each. Spokane police recently announced they would crackdown on bicyclists not riding with lights at night as a result of a crash in which a retired judge was struck and killed by a bicycle.