Washington Voices

The Cheney Historical Museum has been keeping the history of Cheney, Four Lakes, Marshall, Tyler and Amber alive for years. The people, schools and some incorporated towns have come and gone, but residents can remember when they visit the museum. That all changed on Jan. 6, when the Wren Pierson Building in Cheney was deemed unsafe because of heavy snows last winter. Although the museum’s part of the building wasn’t damaged, the power was turned off and at the time, city officials weren’t sure what the extent of the damage would be. Everything in the museum had to be moved.

For 23 years Glen MacPhee has helped run the Outdoor Environmental Education program for fifth-graders in the Central Valley School District. Last week, however, he taught students about wildlife in the woods of the Liberty Lake County Park for the last time. The relatively inexpensive program has been a victim of the district’s budget cuts. “There’s absolutely no other place better than this,” he said of the park. “It has all the basics, all the animals you’d expect to find.”

The city of Cheney is hoping to become a Tree City USA, and to kick off its efforts, Mayor Allan Gainer and students from Kelly Fitzgerald’s fourth-grade class at Reid Elementary School planted a tree in Sutton Park. The tree-planting ceremony was May 29.

They came from all over the country to meet in the shade of the pines, by the big soccer goal on Roosevelt Elementary School’s sports field. Many had not seen each other since the last time they were at Roosevelt, 50 years ago, as part of the graduating class of 1959. “It took a lot of Googling to find everybody, and sometimes Google said to go to Yahoo and ask,” said Joyce Eltz, who now lives in Eugene, Ore., but was one of the people who set out to get her elementary school class together for a 50-year reunion.

When you meet Carmen Murray, she might ask you to hold your arm up, pointed toward the sky at about a 50-degree angle. She’ll put her hand near the top of your wrist and push down while telling you to resist. You’ll think, “Easy enough,” but she will win the first round. She will then give you a breathing exercise and ask you to do the arm thing again. You are much stronger the second time around. “You need to breathe,” she explained. Murray has a lot of tricks up her sleeve; she learned shaman teachings from her father and grandmother when she was a child growing up in Edinburg, Texas. Her ethnicity includes Spanish, Mayan and Apache traditions. Her spirituality led her to art. She painted her first piece on a brand-new canvas cotton-picking bag. “It was of the Virgin of Guadalupe and it was pretty good,” she said, “I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to paint. My dad always said ‘everything is possible.’ ”

It was dinnertime in the Skilled Nursing Unit at the Waterford retirement community in south Spokane. Michael Reofrir escorted a resident to the dining room. The lanky North Central High School senior carefully matched his stride to the faltering gait of the white-haired gentleman – Reofrir’s dark skin a striking contrast to his patient’s pallor. Placing a gentle hand on the resident’s back, Reofrir bent his head and listened attentively as the gentleman speculated about the upcoming meal.

Cheney couldn’t be a city until it had a cemetery, so in 1881 land was given for a burial ground. The stories of the people who are buried there are the stories of the history of Cheney. Helen Boots, Cheney Cemetery Association historian, decided that a walking tour of some of Fairview Cemetery’s earliest residents would generate an interest in the association.