I was there, in Spokane, close by the John R. Rogers campus, to see aspects that no longer exist in that neighborhood. I was there, from my earliest memory until age eight. I lived at 1112 E Hoffman Ave, one block from Rogers’ athletic field. Hoffman is a block south of Wellesley. It terminates at Perry St, alongside the bleachers.
I often heard the Rogers band practice from my yard. I could see the press box. We kids used to enter the field through a missing board in the gray-painted wooden fence that was not a chain-link fence until much later. We short people actually jumped the hurdles there. My next-door neighbor, Dick-somebody, once did a great job of calling our bicycle race from the press box. The world beneath the gray wooden stands was fun and unique. There was even a tractor garaged inside the stands. We often climbed up the rear inside of the stands to emerge behind the top-most bench seat. Once coach brown caught us and kicked us out. Sometimes we attended a baseball game played by local teams sponsored by small businesses. A model airplane club flew control-line planes on the field. This was something Bob Parry and I were to do ten years later at Cooper school.
My grandparents lived at 1318 E Rich, a few hundred feet from the southeast corner of that athletic field. We would walk to their house for Sunday dinner. Remarkably, after my parents and I cleared Princeton Ave to the rear of our house, we passed NOTHING BUT PRAIRIE until we reached Nana’s house on Rich. Granted there were one or two houses in the middle, but no clusters or rows of houses. Nana’s house was the last in a row that extended from Nevada to Perry. There was nothing but prairie between that house and the Rogers campus. I can still see the orange brick building and its castellated smokestack in my mind’s eye. There was also prairie behind Nana’s house with another house about a hundred yards out. Those people had a cow! When I close my eyes I can hear the cowbell. When I slept over at Nana's a rooster awakened me. Several neighbors had chickens.
By the time I entered kindergarten, most of the rural prairie had sprouted the little GI Bill houses that persist there now. I’m amazed at how rural the area had been, how urban it became, and how fast was the transformation. I'm gratified that I saw it and that I remember. I don’t think, however, that because I was born, all change should have ceased. It is nice to know that I was there for some things, even if they no longer exist.