Dateline August 14, 2019, Spokane and the Kalispel
Our first stop in Washington was Spokane, where both of John's parents were born. His mother grew up there, while his father's family moved on to Seattle, and the two of them met as students at the University of Washington. John had not set foot in Spokane since his grandmother passed away in 1964, just a few years back, and the return was full of old places to find and stories to share.
Golf at Kalispel. The first order of business was a round at the old Spokane Country Club, established back in 1898. John's grandparents were members from the early 1930s until his grandmother's death, and John took his very first golf lessons here, around the age of eight. He hardly remembered the course itself, but he had warm memories of his grandparents and of learning the game. His grandfather, Han, was active on the club's board of directors.
John's brother Will was given a "tank" watch by their mother on his fiftieth birthday, a watch the club's board had presented to their grandfather years before. We have been around country clubs a great many years and have never once seen a club give a watch to a member.
The Spokane Country Club fell into bankruptcy some years ago and was bought at auction by the Kalispel Indian Tribe. We checked in with the Director of Golf, the club being one on our list to write about, and the staff could not have been more gracious. We took a cart out to the range and met the local teaching pro, a regular Donnie Klem, as our RIV friends will understand, working with a fourteen-year-old who had the most amazing swing. The pro said the boy could already play; now he was teaching him how to swing.
We hit some balls and headed for the first tee.
The course is a wonderful test of golf and in immaculate condition. When we made the turn the couple playing behind us, Larry and Drew, local members who live right off the course, joined us for the rest of the round, and as John told them about his family's long history at the club, he asked how the Kalispel had come to own it.
The story, as they told it, begins with Larry's wife, Drew, and a few other women suing the Spokane Country Club for discrimination; they simply did not have the same rights as the male members, with restrictions on their tee times and no entry to the men's grill or the men's locker room. The club fought them for better than three years and lost. It meant to appeal, the judge put the award in escrow, and in the end the club ran through all its insurance money and went bankrupt. The property went up for auction with only two bidders, Phil Mickelson and the Kalispel tribe. Mickelson wanted guarantees on the membership that the court could not give, so the Kalispel paid three million dollars for the club and took it over without closing the doors or letting a single staff member go. Membership is full now, with a waiting list. We were not sure the whole tale was true until we checked in at the Kalispel RV Resort after the round, where the woman at the desk vouched for every word of it.
A good moose story. The cart girl had told us we might see a big bull moose beyond the seventeenth green. We were playing along with Larry and Drew, waiting on our third shots into the fifteenth, when Janice spotted something on the cart path. A moose? She managed only a photograph of his backside as he trotted off.
A few minutes later two more came down the next fairway over, young males by the look of them, and beautiful. Golf and the land together, that is what it is all about. Ever since our first RV trip to Alaska, where the rule was that if you did not have the picture you did not see it, Janice tries to get a shot of every animal, every time.
We reached the seventeenth to find no bull moose, but he had left his tracks right across the green. We finished the round, said our farewells to Larry and Drew, and thanked the Director of Golf for a fine day.
The resort. Then it was on to the Kalispel RV Resort, out near the Spokane airport, and what a place. The RV side had only just been finished that June, every site a level concrete pad with beautiful grass all around, a pool, a gym, grills, and laundry machines that take a credit card, which made us laugh, for who carries quarters in an RV? The people there even brought us ice when we asked and ran a shuttle from our site to the casino. It was a great place to rest for two nights after all our miles.
