Voices

While a hefty percentage of Eastern Washington University students and faculty take the bus or park in the paid lots near campus, a large portion of university-related traffic is parked on city streets. On a typical class day vehicles are parked bumper-to-bumper along city streets for easily a quarter-mile around the university.

He’s been a dishwasher, a school teacher, a research chemist and a business owner, but these days Clyde Decker is better known as the Hillyard Santa. For the past five years, the 70-year-old Hillyard resident has handed out hundreds of toys to area children. In 2003, at the CHAS clinic (Community Health Association of Spokane) in the Northeast Community Center, Decker heard about children who needed Christmas gifts. Clinic coordinator Tenny Sanelli, who started the Kids Christmas in Hillyard program, recalled, “I ran into Clyde as he was coming through the door. I told him how many families we served.” She also told him they were running out of toys. That’s all it took.

A seasonal mystery is again unfolding across the region: Santa Claus seems to be everywhere at once. In Spokane Valley, he’s driven the White Elephant store’s iconic pachyderm off the roof.

At a recent meeting of Idaho school superintendents, Post Falls’ Jerry Keane stood to leave, needing to pick up some colleagues at the airport. That’s when the executive director of the Idaho School Superintendents’ Association stopped him. Turns out, the ISSA had something special in mind: They named Keane as Idaho’s Superintendent of the Year.

Herman Victor St. Patrick probably will not notice the difference in the landscaping outside St. Patrick Catholic School in Hillyard. He’s the school’s hamster, and from his cage in the back of the computer lab, nothing much seems to have changed. But in front of the school, a new flagpole has sprouted, green grass stretches out between the big, old brick building and the sidewalks, and in the back by the paved-parking-lot-turned-playground, trees and bushes have been planted.