Three Beautiful Things 05-06-2025: Stiff Back, Flexibility and Expo 74, Looking at Pictures

1. All of a sudden this morning the lowest region of my back stiffened and so started my Amos McCoy day. I gave myself multiple heating pad treatments and was able to get a few things I wanted to accomplish done around the house. 

I think the stiffness is subsiding.

The other good news is being slightly immobilized gave me all the more time to read more deeply into The Fair and the Falls. 

2. In my reading today, I learned much more about the obstacles the City of Spokane and the leaders of private enterprise had to confront and overcome to secure the land for Expo '74 and to secure finances for the making this dream come true. 

I can't sum it all up here -- and, besides, I have more challenges to read about. 

I will say, though, that had the business leaders and elected officials of Spokane and Washington State assumed inflexible ideologically defined stances toward working with the federal government and taxation, the fair never would have happened. 

At one crucial point in time, after a city wide bond measure failed, a signifiicant number of Spokane business leaders wrote letters to city council members in support of a Business and Occupation Tax, a tax these leaders found odious. It would tax the businesses' gross, not net earnings, and would be a tax on the businesses themselves, not on the consumers. The city council, despite their general opposition to the tax, put it into effect, unanimously, and four of those council members faced a primary election the very next day, knowing that their "yes" votes might cost them their seats. They were all victorious in the primary, remarkably. 

Voting in this tax cleared the way for the project to move forward. 

3. While reading this book, I also looked up pictures of what the area we now know of as Riverfront Park looked like with the train trestles, train stations and warehouses, and other businesses dominating it. What is now Spokane Falls Boulevard was Trent Avenue and I have been working at getting a better visual sense of what it looked like before the transformation of Expo 74. 

It all was dreary. 

Try as I might, though, I don't have my own memories of that area. I have memories of parts of downtown south of the train yards -- I remember The Crescent and J J Newberry and the Bon Marche and P. M. Jacoy's and  other stores, but not the tracks and places razed and transformed as Expo 74 and Riverfront Park came into being.