Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
After the Golden Grain Tavern burned down on a rainy night in 1995, the town of Tekoa later installed public restrooms in the alley where it stood.
Once the restrooms were there, they had to be maintained. Ever since, it has been a job of volunteers.
The city council voted Feb. 3 to pay these volunteers $75 per month.
Jerry Heitt and his wife Mary were the first involved, after which they asked Barbara Huff to help too, and she brought in husband Harold.
“It’s just something we’ve done for a long time,” said Jerry.
“There’s so many volunteers that do things,” said Barbara Huff. “That’s what keeps our town going.”
The Heitts, who first moved to Tekoa in 1961 when Jerry got a job as a milkman for Early Dawn Dairy, take turns cleaning the restrooms.
He takes four days, she takes three during the week.
When they have a conflict or otherwise, the Huffs do it.
“I was just asked by Jerry at first,” said Barbara, who with husband Harold ran the former Tekoa True Value Hardware for many years. “We had been wanting public bathrooms in our town for a long time and it’s just something we figure we can do to help our town out.”
Harold was on the volunteer fire department when the old tavern burned down.
“It was a good thing that it was raining hard that night,” Barbara said, noting how hot coals landed on the top of the hardware store.
The restrooms are funded by donations from various townspeople, who have bought supplies as well as deposited cash into an account at Tekoa’s AmericanWest bank.
The grass has also been cut by volunteers, including Jack Bowman, who has done it for the past three years.
Overall, the restroom volunteers have different levels of work to do depending on the season.
During the summer, or when there is an event downtown such as at the Empire Theater, the restrooms are checked sometimes twice per day while during the winter, a volunteer checks them and finds nothing even in the trash cans.
The city may soon be looking for more volunteers as Barbara said she and Harold may hand over the job to someone new.
“To me, after all these years, Jerry and I are not as young as we used to be,” she said with a laugh. “We probably will retire from that job sometime.”
“I’ve always been a volunteer,” said Heitt. “In a small town like this, you’ve got to be a volunteer at different things.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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