Spin Control: Spokane owes Hal McGlathery a debt of gratitude

If you come downtown to Riverfront Park this summer, or play in Hoopfest later this month, or spend time admiring the view of the falls from the Monroe Street Bridge, or shoot baskets at a community rec center, you owe a debt of gratitude to the late Hal McGlathery.

A 34-year employee of the Spokane Parks Department, McGlathery died in April at 89 and was remembered at a service last Sunday. He had an outsized impact on the city he served and the parks he championed – sometimes in the face of what some folks might refer to as “the powers that be.”

For nearly half of that tenure, from 1982 to 1996, McGlathery was the Riverfront Park manager. A better title, though, might’ve been its guardian.

He was given responsibility for the park just eight years after Expo ’74, when the city was still trying to figure out the long-term future of the land that had been cleared, then built up, then mostly cleared again for the world’s fair. The city worried about the cost of upkeep, problems with graffiti and teenage “gangs” who were hanging out in the park late at night.

There were lots of ideas. McGlathery, who had a master’s degree in parks and recreation from Indiana University, was a strong proponent of having more recreational activities that would bring more people down to spend more money to help with upkeep.

Others were what longtime friend Steve Corker called the “proponents of open space.” They wanted fewer rides, or none at all.

McGlathery stuck to his guns, and to make it more accessible for more people the city started offering a season pass to all the rides and attractions for $20. Later the city partnered with the Spokane Transit Authority for a joint summer pass for the park and the buses for $22.75.

“He was thinking about making it affordable to people as well as the park’s viability,” Corker said.

That viable park would become a magnet for downtown and a key feature of some of its biggest events, including Bloomsday, Hoopfest and Pig Out in the Park.

“He loved the park and the city,” said Sheri Barnard, who was on the council and later mayor when McGlathery was Riverfront Park manager. “He was always willing to work and help. He put his heart and soul into everything.”

McGlathery was a court monitor at the first Hoopfest in 1996 and later became part of the operating committee that oversaw all officials at the tournament, his daughter Traci McGlathery said.

“He was always kind of looking out for the underdog,” she said. Among his many legacies, she said, is serving on the committee for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial statue that was placed in Riverfront Park in 1985.

But some things he put his heart and soul into rubbed people in City Hall the wrong way. In the 1990s, he opposed the city’s plans, backed by much of the downtown business establishment, for a new bridge over the Spokane River at Lincoln Street, arguing it would ruin views of the river.

“I urge you, who take pride in Spokane, Riverfront Park, the Spokane River and the Spokane Falls, to consider the impact of another bridge spanning the river between the upper and lower falls,” he wrote in a guest column for The Spokesman-Review in 1991. In it he urged people to stand on the Monroe Street Bridge and look east at the spectacular views. He also urged them to contact the City Council to cancel the project.

City officials didn’t drop the bridge then but it was eventually abandoned after city voters passed a ballot initiative requiring public approval of any bridge across the river in 1995 and a majority of opponents of the bridge were elected to the council.

McGlathery also locked horns with other city officials and the business establishment when he opposed a plan to put a science center in the park Pavilion. Corker, who was an ally of his longtime friend in that campaign, said McGlathery was concerned about the amount of space in the middle of the park that would be needed for parking and the exhaust fumes from the school buses bringing children in and out.

The proposed lease for the science center was put on the September 1995 ballot and was defeated by about 200 votes out of more than 25,000 cast.

The next year, McGlathery was moved from his job as Riverfront Park manager with a lateral move, to head up the department’s Recreation Division.

McGlathery told the newspaper’s City Hall reporter at the time, Kristina Johnson, it was payback for opposing the science center.

“If I’d been supportive of the science center, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d still be” Rivefront Park manager, he told Johnson. Ange Taylor, the parks director, told her the move “has nothing to do with the science center.” It was an attempt to get the departments to work closer together, and he switched McGlathery with the current recreation director.

In his new position, her father decided to make lemonade out of lemons, Traci McGlathery said. In 1971, he had written a federal grant that helped create the Northeast, East Central and West Central Community Centers. Returning to the recreation division, he set about reinvigorating recreational and senior center programs around the city.

He stayed active at the Northeast Youth Center even after he retired from the city, she said. A youth scholarship fund in his name has been set up at the center

On Saturdays, she would go for “a drive” with her father as he checked on the city’s neighborhood parks in his 1977 Thunderbird. The car rode low on its shocks because the trunk was full of bases for the ball fields and copper sprinkler heads for the irrigation systems.

Outside of his official city park duties, McGlathery was active in many phases of youth, high school and collegiate sports.

If your daughter or granddaughter played high school basketball in the 1990s or 2000s, he might have been the referee on the court. He had been an official for boys and men’s basketball before Title IX mandated equal treatment for women’s sports and became a referee for West Coast, Big Sky and Mountain West conference games. For his 30 years of refereeing high school and college basketball games, as well as his early support of women in sports, McGlathery was inducted into the Scroll of Honor for the Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame in 2024.

Along with his daughter, McGlathery is survived by his wife, Marilyn McGlathery; his former wife Dawn Antonelli, his son Craig, stepsons Matt Shuster and Jeff Shuster, as well as five grandchildren. A celebration of McGlathery’s life was held earlier this month at – where else? – the Riverfront Park Pavilion Lobby.