Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Tekoa trestle light
It started in Monte Morgan’s garage.
After a weightlifting session with a new town resident, the idea of putting Christmas lights across the Tekoa trestle came up.
“I always wanted to do that,” Morgan said.
“Well let’s do it,” said Ted Blaszak, who moved to Tekoa in August with his wife and two young sons.
A plan was made and on Dec. 1, Morgan, Blaszak, John Miller, Ivan Mercer and one more resident — who didn’t want to be named — met at the old train bridge at 9 a.m. Blaszak brought strands of lights and 10 one-foot-wide, 2x12, 10-foot long boards to use to get them from a closed end of the trestle onto the bridge.
At the east end of the high span, at the top of the bluff, the men leaned a ladder up to an iron beam. Blaszak climbed it and went around the six-foot barrier which blocked access. The others followed, handing up boards, which they laid down to form a ramp over where the railroad ties had been taken out — a distance of 25 feet on that end of the trestle.
Setting the boards, they walked on 1.5-foot wide iron bars and criss-crossing beams.
“If you fall off either side, it’s a long way down,” Morgan said.
Once the temporary path was in place, the men could proceed onto the actual bridge span, which has walkways on both sides, along with the old cables for handrailing.
Morgan began to string the lights along the cable and the group then sent a guy down to locate a power source. Miller came out on the bridge with four wreaths, three-feet in diameter. They strung more lights, around the double cable and beyond the wreaths – centered over where Highway 27 crosses underneath – all the while watching for warped boards and exposed nails on the walkways.
Morgan later climbed down and talked to a nearby resident about using the outlet on her house, but it turned out longer extension cords were needed, because the house was two blocks from the bridge.
Soon an extension cord was added.
“We plugged in and nothing happened,” Morgan said. “Evidently, she had a switch in the basement that wasn’t turned on.”
Then they found a closer house.
So the group hauled back the cords and plugged them in again at the new location. It blew a fuse “after a half-second,” Morgan said. “So we realized we needed to have another power source up there.”
It was getting late, and the men called it a day, for the project they had estimated would take an hour.
The next morning, they met at E’Clair’s and went up again, the boards left in place overnight.
Back up on the bridge, they changed the fuses in two strands of lights, taking a whole line out to replace it. Morgan later went to Tekoa Hardware to get two more extension cords. They considered trying to tap the power source at Iron Horse Arena but didn’t know who paid the electricity there.
Nonetheless, once their work was complete, 1,200-feet of Christmas lights and 800 feet of extension cords were in operation.
“We had to adjust and adjust and adjust,” Morgan said. “We just kept adjusting ‘til we got it done.”
All told, the group spent six hours the first day, two hours the next and two hours the following.
“It was fun, it was the right combination,” said Blaszak. “It looked good, it was in the Christmas spirit and we’re a bunch of silly fools.”
The Tekoa Trestle at one time was part of the Milwaukee Railroad which became the John Wayne Trail. Never used as part of the trail, Washington State Parks have elected to fund installation of a surface over the bridge to continue the trail over the bridge. In turn, the trestle has been blocked off with ties removed at each end since the 1980s.
The purpose of putting up the Christmas lights was for decoration and to bring attention to the state of the trestle itself.
“That’s our goal, for people to be able to walk across it, jog across it, ride a horse across it,” Morgan said.
In turn the group started Tekoa Trail & Trestle Association, which now has seven members.
“The trestle is a big part of this town,” Morgan said. “We hope someday that the rest of the town will get to see the view we saw.”
On Saturday night, the lights failed to come on.
Blaszak went up to see what might have happened and found an unplugged extension cord.
After a quick fix, the lights were back on, shining a line above the town.
“I think its tremendous,” said Mayor John Jaeger. “You come into Tekoa at night and it’s the first thing you see. Everybody’s just wondering how in the h—- they got up there.”
Morgan grew up in Tekoa, graduating from Tekoa High School in 1958. After marrying Maita (Berger) as a student at Eastern Washington, the couple later moved to California, where they raised their children and Monte spent his career as a math teacher at public schools in Glendora, and later Santa Rosa.
After they divorced, Morgan returned to Tekoa and married another local girl, Cheryl (Heaton) after re-connecting at Slippery Gulch Days.
Blaszak moved to Tekoa with his family after selling his political consulting firm in Portland, Ore., where he lived for 20 years after growing up in Boston.
“The first seven weeks here, my kids had more playdates than they had in seven years,” he said. “It was hard not to fall in love with Tekoa.”
As for the lights, he sees a future there too.
Next year there will be a lot more,” Blaszak said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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