Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 351 - 375 of 570
The long-awaited Oakesdale business incubator has met with one hitch; the office is directly under the city fire siren. The siren lets out an ear-splitting alarm once a day, blasted out over this rural town of 350 people. Oakesdale city council at their last meeting discussed what to do about the situation. The old-school siren scream can be heard daily all over town at noon. City clerk Mary DeGon said the city called Avista to see what could be done about the siren. Avista representatives pointed out moving the structure to another location...
Camp fire recollections of the sprawling expanse of the Palouse were a thing of the past for county parks until this year. This summer, the outdoor amphitheater at Kamiak Butte county park will open Saturday nights with speakers talking about various aspects of the Palouse country. “A lot of people can come out for the picnic and stay a bit later,” said Dan Leonard of Johnson, a member of the Whitman County Park board. He reported on the revival of the program at the park board meeting last Thursday at the Wawawai Park picnic shelter. Leo...
Whitman county parks are in dire need of volunteers this year because the parks department has fewer seasonal employees. Leaf raking, tree planting, trash collecting, sign painting and other outdoor chores all need to be done in the county’s four parks and miles of county trails. The department has two full-time office staff, two full-time park rangers and one and a half seasonal employees to cover a year fraught with cuts and delays to the park budget. “We are so limited in staff now. We just don’t have enough people to put together to do so...
Green Frog co-owner Tiana Gregg is releasing several CDs of her music, some of which has been played during the cafe’s live music nights. Tiana Gregg of the Green Frog reaches for something between the bins of the Green Frog sandwich table. It is a sheet of lyrics. She grabs some slices of ham off the counter, where a Walkman lies. In the corner, next to a refrigerator rests a little red guitar; a gift from a friend that day. This is the woman behind the live music Friday nights at the Green Frog cafe in Palouse. Gregg just released two of h...
The Bill Chipman trail will soon have a mid-trail “trail head” for users. A lighted parking lot will be constructed along the trail, just off the Sunshine Road overpass along the Moscow/Pullman highway. The lot will have 14 to 21 parking spaces, depending on how much funding is available. While this current work on the lot does not include a restroom, the department has plans to leave in space for future space for a facility. The project will be put out to bid early to mid-summer, according to Park Ranger Justus Barton. The trail runs eig...
In the wake of two tense public meetings full of protesting land-owners, the state department of fish and wildlife is holding its own public meeting April 27. The game department is floating a proposal to turn thousands of acres of farmland along Bonnie and Rock Lake into a state-owned, public water corridor. More than 40 land-owners, some from families that have farmed the land for more than 100 years, have strongly protested the state’s plan. Protestors came to a county park board meeting and a county commissioner meeting in March. R...
- Photo by Mike Day.Mangled metal reveals a missing cash box on this Rosalia vending machine. Thieves dragged a pop vending machine from outside the Tekoa Market and smashed open the contents in the early morning hours Monday. Another machine in Tekoa, one in Farmington and one in Rosalia were also broken into the same morning. Deputy Vince Waltz believes the crimes are linked. The thieves emptied the dollar changers of each machine and stole all the pop from the machines. Waltz said they have no suspects at this time. He believed the thefts...
Downtown Colfax is going all 1940s for three days next month at the hands of a Japanese television station here to film a TV mini-series. Up to 100 Japanese filmmakers out of Los Angeles and New York City will fly into Spokane to film for three weeks on locations around Eastern Washington. A major Japanese company, Tokyo Broadcasting System, plans to shoot a 10 hour, five episode docu-drama mini-series depicting the Japanese interment camps in America during World War II. It will be broadcast exclusively on the Tokyo Broadcasting System for...
The Lisonbee family of Colfax stars in Guys and Dolls. A nightclub singer in a red dress bats her eyelashes at her fiancee of 14 years on the set at the Regional Theater of the Palouse in Pullman. Hardened gamblers paw the newspapers for gambling info. Such was the scene at the media day preview Monday for Guys and Dolls which will begin a three-week run in the RTOP Theater Friday. Performances will be April 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23 and 24, all at 7:30 p.m. The plot: hot-headed gambler Sky Masterson (George Carson) strikes a bet with Nathan...
The history of the Palouse will come to light April 15 when local authors Alex McGregor and Richard Scheuerman lecture at Washington State University. McGregor and Scheuerman will speak April 15 in the CUB Junior Ballroom at 7:30 p.m. The event is the 14th Paul Catts Memorial Lecture. Title of the talk will be “Remarkable People and a Remarkable Land.” “It’s about pioneer values that endure. It’s about the last bastion of family businesses, farming families,” McGregor said of his lecture. McGregor will detail the changes brought about by Eu...
A scam targeting people in the 509 area code surfaced March 31. Known as “phishing,” the scam sent texts, automated phone messages, and e-mails advising Bank of Whitman customers and non-customers alike their accounts had been frozen. Victims were asked to provide credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes to re-activate the cards, according to Bill Knox, Bank of Whitman president. “They are usually being put together by some very sophisticated people. This seems to be a rampant one in the sense it took some coord...
The former livestock feed mill in Rosalia has switched hands to become a general farm supply store. Rosalia couple Heather and Mat Smith took over the lease for the former Elenbaas mill April 1. Their Smith Country Store will soon carry farm, livestock and gardening supplies. “It’s going to cater to more of a farm supply store,” said Heather. She hopes to have the new products in stock by May 1. The store is open six days a week: 8 a .m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and Saturday, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. They will still carry livestock feed from El...
Kayla Johnson and Marlena Olson Two teenage Colfax student artists spent the past month and a half painting 14 ceiling tiles, each a reflection of a school program. Their work now spreads across the ceiling outside the school art room on the high school’s second floor. Seniors Kayla Johnson and Marlena Olson started working on the panels in January, carefully wiping the colors of the rainbow on the dark side of some extra ceiling tiles. “We wanted to leave our mark on the school somehow,” said Olson, 17. Together, the two researched the logos a...
A levy figure of $950,000 is on the county April 27 special election ballot for the second Colfax levy after the public voted down a levy of $1.3 million in February. The levy figure comes in the wake of a series of public meetings in which voters turned out to ask the district about the failed levy and voice opinions on a new figure. The board came to the $950,000 figure after more than six and a half hours of discussion at a public session in the CHS cafeteria Feb. 27, four hours of which was spent answering questions about school finance to...
Within the month, construction crews will be tearing up 8.6 miles of Highway 195 south of Colton in a federally funded project to resurface the highway. From the south Colton city limits to the Washington/Idaho state line, the project calls for removal of the present surface, a new base layer and re-surfacing. Poe Asphalt out of Pullman won the contract for the project with a bid of $2,014, 000. The DOT is paying for the project from federal stimulus dollars granted to the DOT. DOT spokesman Al Gilson said the aim is to stabilize the base of...
All the ingredients for a nasty explosion were in place: the Garfield Meat Shop smokehouse room was full of leaking propane and no oxygen. A few burning wood embers were on the floor of the closed room. All it needed was oxygen. When Garfield butcher Tom Tevlin opened the door, the explosion blew him across the room, nearly removing both of his hands and an ear and singeing off his hair. The accident three years ago burned almost a third of Tevlin’s body and landed him in Harborview Medical Center at Seattle for a month. Today, Tevlin’s dog...
Twelve six-foot-high trees are in the works for the city of Palouse’s RV park. The city council at its March 23 meeting approved a motion to spend $500 from the RV park earnings to purchase the trees. The $500 will be combined with $800 which have been received in donations for the park. The 12 trees include European Mountain Ash, Crusader Thornless Hawthorn, Golden Desert Ash, and Japanese Tree Lilac. City Clerk Ann Thompson said the city has already ordered the trees, which are expected to arrive within the next three weeks. The Palouse P...
Garfield Palouse actors starred in the Tekoa Empire Theater. Rouge, mascara, lots of lace, wigs and hairspray made it onto the stage of the historic Empire Theatre in Tekoa last week, making that stage creak with the rowdy acting of yet another cast. Students from the Garfield/Palouse Middle School performed the Royal Bachelor at the Tekoa theatre after a performance at the school. The Royal Bachelor is a musical comedy. Queen Eva (Sammi Johnson) dies, unexpectedly passing her throne to a country bumpkin Yokel (Adrian Green) who must then...
A new home for the developmentally disabled is now completed in Pullman with residents soon to move in. Community Action Center used a $397,000 grant from the state to construct a building with four apartments and a common living center. CAC already owns two homes for the disabled in Pullman; Epton and Hughes House. The new house, Steptoe Court, sits adjacent to the Hughes house. Dale Miller, manager of CAC housing program, said CAC will transfer four residents from the Epton House to the new Steptoe Court. Once all residents are transferred,...
Rock crushing machinery blows rock dust into the March air at the Entel Rock Quarry. After blasting rock out of a 40-foot deep hole, tractors hauled the rubble up to the conveyor belt where it was smashed into three-inch sized rocks. Construction workers March 29 hauled out their last loads of rock from the Entel Rock Quarry north of Colton for construction of the new Wal-Mart in Pullman. DeAtley Construction has cut out 4,000 to 6,000 tons of gravel a day for the past three weeks, then loaded it on trucks to Pullman. Roughly 78,000 tons were...
Riding on the coat tails of the bigger Port of Whitman grant to run fiber optic cables through the county, one Palouse resident is working to get wider internet broadband service into Palouse. Former Palouse councilman Mark Bailey has a goal of hooking internet of a higher capacity (a wider broadband) to homes in Palouse. This is possible, he reasoned, if the port’s plan to reach many Whitman County libraries with high-speed internet happens. “I’ve just been looking at the possibilities for expanding beyond the library- kind of a last-...
A 33-strong crowd of landowners from Rock Lake and Bonnie Lake filed into the Whitman County commissioners’ chambers Monday to protest a state proposal to turn their land into a public water corridor. The land owners told county commissioners and Fish and Wildlife officials who were present under no condition would they sell land to the state for the park. The United Bonnie Lake Landowners have spread the same message in the weeks since they first heard of the proposal. Commissioners and state officials Monday gave the same response: if you don...
Whitman Conservation District Coordinator Kimberly Morse explains the tree planting to students at Maple K Farms. Dozens of little hands dug into the soil beside Spring Flat Creek March 26. Children oohed and ahhed over earthworms and the prickly feel of the saplings they were planting in the chilly March weather. “ the digging and planting because I get to get dirty,” said Colfax fifth grader Brody Yarnell. Two fifth grade Colfax classrooms descended on a pasture of Tom Kammerzell’s land next to Highway 195 Friday to plant roughly 300 young...
A small parcel of county owned land in the city of Palouse may soon be transferred from the county to the city of Palouse. Palouse city council at its March 9 council meeting approved a motion authorizing Mayor Michael Echanove to send a letter of interest to the county. The land parcel is near the intersection of Highway 272 and the North River Road east of downtown Palouse. With an eye on extending sewer and water lines to a future housing development in the Breedings Addition neighborhood, Jim Farr and John Eastburn of Palouse had asked the...
Gazette Reporter Whitman County library branches will be open for a few extra hours over the next months to boost the time patrons can use their computers. Because of a $50,000 state grant provided to the county library system, the library has more funds to open more hours for patron computer use, job search classes and putting patrons in touch with local employment resources. The library official hired on the nine-month grant said the extra hours give patrons more time to learn and practice their job-hunting skills. Most of the small town...
