Voices

CHENEY – It’s been a couple of months since Leslie Johnston opened Cabin Fever in the old Rose of Sharon building on First and G streets in Cheney, but Pathways to Progress, the city of Cheney and the West Plains Chamber of Commerce threw her a party last week to celebrate the addition of the Pottery Shed on the other half of the building. “We really welcome you to the city of Cheney,” said City Council member Curt Huff.

Brandon Rankin, who just turned 14, thinks of himself as a normal teen. Those who don’t know him would think the same at first glance. He is going to be an eighth-grader this fall at Mountain View Middle School and he participates in normal activities – sports, band, paintball and hanging out with his friends.

The Garland Street Fair can grow on you. Just ask Lou Carver. Four years ago, the art instructor was pressed into service as a volunteer. “I was teaching mosaic classes at the Tinman Gallery,” Carver said. “The fair needed some help with kids’ crafts, so I just stepped right in.” Now, she oversees the work of 80 arts-and-crafts volunteers.

How’s your vegetable garden doing this year? If you’re like a lot of gardeners, after that first vegetable gets ripe, there comes a flood of produce, often more than you could possibly use. After all, if two plants looked like a good idea in the spring, six looked even better. The neighbors and co-workers can only take so much. There is one neighbor, though, who will take any and all of your extra garden produce: your local food bank and the Plant a Row for the Hungry project. According to Rod Wieber, director of donor and community relations for Second Harvest, the need is growing rapidly as low-income families struggle to balance rising fuel and food costs with other expenses. Buying expensive but healthy produce and fruit usually ends up low on the list. Wieber noted that the rising cost of fuel to truck food to Second Harvest means they can’t bring in as much food to meet the need.

Mountain Dome Winery, a family-owned sparkling wine producer in the Foothills area of Spokane County, helped create Grande Ronde Cellars back in the late 1990s, and now Grande Ronde is widely regarded for producing elegant red wines. This year, the pattern is repeating itself with Grande Ronde and Mountain Dome giving life to three new labels, under cooperative arrangement in two cases with new winemaking families.

Q: Five people in Post Falls were asked: “Are you excited about the Olympics?”

Don Ressa arrived at University High School to coach baseball three decades ago. Over the years he learned how to build and organize a successful baseball operation, an operation that still produces quality players and quality teams. “One of the greatest compliments you can get as a coach is to, first of all, have your former players come back and talk to you,” Ressa said. “But above that, to have them come back and tell you that they want to go into teaching and become a coach themselves.”

The first home Wilbur Fisk Bassett built for his family in 1872 near Four Lakes burned down during a large grass fire two years later. He built his second cabin on the same spot in 1874 – and it remains today the oldest still-standing home in the county. Historians are quick to point out that there is a structure at Fort Spokane, at the confluence of the Spokane and Columbia rivers, that is older. True, but that building was used for other purposes and was never an inhabited home – which leaves the Bassett home recognized as the oldest in the county.

Billy Miles has an expansive imagination, like the skies and galaxies he portrays in his artwork. He began at age 5, capturing means of travel by painting airplanes and cars. Today his pieces illustrate more far-fetched ways of transportation through space and the deep recesses of the mind, with bold blended color, futuristic ships and atmospheric displays. “I like to take viewers to places they’ve never been before,” he said.

Judy Morbeck doesn’t mind the noise from the day-care playground across the street from her office in downtown Coeur d’Alene. She leaves her door propped open.