A Glimpse Into the Past

Herb Speller 2 months old, photo recovered in 1992. 

By: Liv Stecker

Black Canyon Fire, early 1920s

a very young Herb Speller near Northport, WA

Hubert Speller's horse drawn logging equipment

  They say that nothing ever changes up in Northport, Washington, but Herb Speller might beg to differ. Born September 12, 1919, to Hubert and Emma Meriam (Hallenius) Speller, Herbert Sidney Speller was the last baby born in the Northport Hospital before it closed the doors. Herb’s father, Hubert, was a logger working out in the Black Canyon area, east of Northport, where the family lived in a cabin that remained standing until the early 1990s. Hubert’s parents (Herb’s grandparents) had homesteaded up on Bodie Mountain, some of the earliest settlers in the Northport area, Hubert’s mother died in childbirth when he was a small child and the boy grew up in the mountains outside of Northport with his father. Hubert and Emma were cut from the strong cloth of hardy pioneer stock, not shirking from the brutal life that turn of the century logging posed. Emma Speller used to take baby Herb, perched on her hip, for a hike up into the steep Black Canyon country to visit Hubert where he was logging. The terrain was rough and one year Hubert lost a team of logging horses over the edge of the canyon. Hauling logs out of the woods on a wagon during the summer and fall or a sledge in the winter was not for the faint of heart, and Herb helped his father in the woods after he graduated from high school in Northport in 1936. When Herb was 11 years old, his mother Emma was diagnosed with breast cancer and went back east for treatment for several months. Herb took care of the home and his father while Emma was gone.  Her cancer treatment was successful and Emma returned home to Northport cancer free. While in high school, Herb helped to build the impressive log gymnasium in Northport that burned down years later. Hubert and Emma owned a postcard camera that they used to document their life out in Black Canyon, and later in the Spirit Junction area where they moved when Herb was a young boy. The photographs chronicle a lifestyle that most of us have only imagined, giving us a stark glimpse at what life in rural Washington was really like in the early 20^th century. 

the first Speller logging truck

Herb and Mapel Speller near Spirit Junction

Hubert and Emma had a baby girl named Mapel when Herb was 16 and the family lived at Spirit Junction. Herb was a good brother to his baby sister in their life in the woods near Northport. Hubert and Herb continued to log around Spirit Junction and up Smackout Pass, and into the 1930s. In the mid 1920s, Hubert purchased his first log hauling truck, with solid rubber tires and the Spellers began to move ahead with the times.

Herb driving bus

  Herb left Northport in 1939 to work for a logging operation in St. Maries, Idaho, where he met Ida Helen Dodson, whom he married on Valentines Day of 1941. Answering a call for interstate bus drivers, Herb took a job for North Coast Lines out of Seattle, driving bus until 1946, with a brief interlude with the army in 1944. Drafted for the war effort, Herb was more than happy to go to Camp Roberts and begin his basic training, but he was shortly given a medical discharge for health problems and went back to driving bus. In 1946, Herb once again went back to logging, and eventually to heavy-haul truck driving in 1951. He worked for Consolidated Freightways and owned his own trucks into the 80s. In the early 50s, Herb built a house on Rowan Street in Spokane where he and his wife Ida and their children lived for 40 years. In the 70s and 80s made his way with his own log truck operation and grain hauling until he retired in 1984.

Herb at Camp Roberts, 1944

Hubert and Emma, along with Mapel, moved out to Flat Creek Road in the 40s after Herb left the Northport area, where they remained until Hubert’s passing. Mapel and her mother moved to Spokane where Mapel finished high school. Eventually, after moving all over the United States, Mapel found her way back to Colville where she lives now.

  In 1992, Herb and his sister Mapel, who was visiting from Alaska at the time, paid a visit to the old cabin site on Black Canyon. The cabin was gone when they arrived, but they came across a young man who lived on the property and had helped to tear the old homestead down. Herb tells the story like this:

the homestead at Black Canyon

  

“When we arrived in Northport, we decided to drive up to Black Canyon, about seven miles away. We had lived in this area from the time I was born through my early school years. There had been a large house where we had lived, plus some miscellaneous buildings. We drove up to a clearing near the old house, which was being dismantled. We alit from my pickup and were confronted by a boy on an off-road vehicle. We responded and told him that we wanted to see what changes by-gone years had made.

  In the conversation, he told us that he was salvaging some of the lumber from the old house to use in the home where he lived. In this procedure, a picture postcard fell out of a wall. He had never found out who the baby was in this picture.

  He asked us to stop at his house to look at the picture. When I looked at it, I said, “that’s me”. When I turned the picture over, it had my mother’s handwriting on it – ‘Herbert Sidney Speller – age 2 months’. I pulled my driver’s license out and showed it to him. This picture had been taken 72 years before.”

-       Herb Speller, Colville, Washington

  Herb’s connection to the history of the Northport area was strong. His time there was during the boom days: big Fourth of July celebrations, a growing timber and mining economy, and an influx of new families. Coming back more than seven decades later to find a piece of his own story left in the repurposed beams of his childhood home was a precious glimpse back to young and hardy parents and a wild country full of opportunity, adventure and possibility.  The photograph of that two-month-old baby represented 72 years of change, but a consistent devotion to family and hard work.

Herb's high school graduation photo, 1936, Northport, WA

  Herb moved back to Idaho after his wife Ida passed away, then returned briefly to Colville in 2004, and then finally moved to a retirement center in Spokane, in a room adjacent to the one that his mother Emma had lived in until she passed at the age of 95. Decades later, Herb passed away at the same age, on April 1, 2015. He left his legacy of hard work, perseverance and the value of family behind him in this world, along with a vivid capturing of life as it truly was more than half a century ago. Hubert and Emma’s photographs are a historical treasure for more than just the Speller family. They tell the story for all of us about what it took to get here.

Out of the past

Colville Republican Vol IV. Colville, Stevens County, Washington, Saturday, May 13, 1893, No. 20, page 1

Freak of Nature

A flood of debris, mud, and water submerges and destroys the farm of T. J. Patton

Spokane and Northern damaged

One of the most surprising and disastrous floods that has occurred in the history of the Colville Valley, broke from the mountains, near the little station of Sherwood, about ten miles south of this city last Monday evening.  Had a city of the size and importance of Johnstown been situated along the path of the destructive elements, the result would have been little less in loss of life and property.

It seems that a short time ago, a slide of earth from the north side of Iron Mountain (now Addy Mountain) made its descent into the canon (canyon) which traces the base of the mountain, at a point about four miles east of the Colville River, thus forming a dam across the ravine nearly 100 feet in height. The waters of the little creek at the bottom of the ravine was thus arrested, and held in abeyance for several days.  After the water had accumulated to a depth of nearly 90 feet the pressure against the dam was so great the prison wall of loose earth gave way, and in an instant the tide of destruction went tearing down the canon at a most terrific speed, tearing the earth from the sides of the mountain on each side of the narrow ravine, rolling great boulders in its breakers, and snapping the largest tree known to the forests from their moorings like so many pipe stems.

Thomas J. Patton, a well to do and industrious farmer, who lives in the beautiful spread of prairie that widens out at the lower end of the canon to a width of nearly half a mile, was an eye witness, and tells u how the elements destroyed the home that he had been four long years in building, in less than two minutes.  He states that at about 7 o’clock in the evening, he heard the distant rumbling as of an approaching railway train.  The direction from whence the noise came was the question that puzzled all the members of his family as well has himself. The rumbling became more distinct, and came at intervals of a minute or such as matter as the approaching of a thunder storm.  It was some little time after they heard the first sounds of approaching disaster before the timber far up the canon could be seen to give way to some relentless forces, as the field of grain would fall before the sickle. They realized that there was not time to be lost in seeking a place of safety, and after taking from the house, such things as they could conveniently carry, they ran to the side hills several hundred yards away and awaited results. They had scarcely reached a place of safety before the flood of water and debris forming a breast 40 feet in height broke from the timber about a quarter of a mile above the house and spread all over the valley.  What may have been pure sparkling water at the time it broke through the earthen dam from its cistern far back in the mountain fastness was a mass of thin mud, mingled with rocks and trees of all sizes and lengths, by the time it reached the habitations of the people living along the valley and in the foot hills.  The flood spread out over the fields and gardens of Mr. Patton, and also over those of his neighbors that happened to be so situated as to receive it, and in less time than it takes to tell the story, their homes were covered four feet deep in debris.  It so happened that that residence of Mr. Patton, was situated just below a clump of large cottonwood trees, which formed a sufficient protection to ward off the stream that had lost the great part of its force by having spread over the valley. Every other spot on the place was covered with the flood, and the lands that had been seeded, but a few days ago in the fond hope of a bounteous crop, were covered four feet deep in newly made earth’s surface.

The track of the Spokane and Northern railway was covered up with debris for a distance of several hundred feet, and the Tuesday morning express, from Spokane, was obliged to hang up and transfer around the wreckage.  The clearing of the track proved a very difficult task, owing to the continued flow of the stream of mud for two days after the first rush of the flood.

Original newspaper viewable on the Crossroads on the Columbia project http://www.crossroadsarchive.net/items/show/13202

Taste the Love

By: Liv Stecker

  In 1989, Peter Karatzas and his family brought a global love affair with international cuisine to little Kettle Falls, Washington. Café Italiano opened for the first time on Meyer’s Street in down town Kettle Falls and was an instant success. Fans of Peter’s cooking came from all over the region and beyond for his original Italian dishes and were never disappointed. Mouth-watering pizzas and delectable sauces on pasta and meat dishes kept customers coming back again and again. Locals knew that the hardest part about a visit to Café Italiano would be narrowing down what to order. The tiny restaurant in the even smaller town was given a complimentary nod in Gourmet Magazine in 1992, and listed as one of the “places to go” in the northwest in a 1993 edition of Northwest Airlines Magazine, putting Kettle Falls on the culinary map. Peter’s passion for creating one of a kind, world-class international dishes is a rare treat in the northwest, let alone rural Stevens County.

 Born on a small island in Greece, Peter left his native land as a teenager and learned to cook on a resort island in the Bahamas as a young man. Training as a chef on cruise ships and in high-end hotels around the world, Peter picked up cooking skills from some of the greatest five-star chefs in the world, preparing all types of international foods. Eventually landing in Alaska, Peter worked at a restaurant in Anchorage for a while before he headed south to California, where he met his wife to be, Cherryl. They were married in 1977 and returned to Greece briefly where their first son Vagalie was born. A few more years of moving, cooking and a couple more babies, and the Karatzas stopped in Colville to visit Cherryl’s brother.

  Before long, they had moved to Stevens County, and after a little bit of encouragement from local fans, they opened Café Italiano to an immediate cult following. After 5 years, the business needed room to grow, and Peter and Cherryl turned down offers in Spokane and more urban areas to build their own restaurant in downtown Colville. The stuccoed building with Mediterranean archways and a breathtaking patio was home to Café Italiano until the family decided to test the waters in Spokane after much urging. The Café on the south hill did all right, receiving top reviews on Urban Spoon and several local awards, but the Karatzas missed their friends and neighbors from Colville, many of who came down to visit them in Spokane at their new location. One busy dinnertime, Peter recalls a local businessman who had been offering to franchise Café Italiano all over the United States. Peter had insisted that he wanted to stay small, and maybe go back home to Colville, and on the night in question, there were seven different families in the south hill location of Café Italiano who had travelled from the Colville area for Peter’s cooking. The big-city businessman conceded his loss and asked Peter what he was still doing in Spokane. Shortly afterward, Peter and Cherryl made their move back to Colville.

 Café Italiano was re-opened in February of 2015 in downtown Colville and the response was immediately overwhelming. “It’s a madhouse! Crazy! I’m too old for this!” Peter jokes about the busy restaurant. In the same breath he says how grateful he is to be home. “I love Colville,” he says. “I want to leave my bones here.” The new location, at 153 West 2^nd Avenue, is just a half a block off Main Street. The cozy setting is like stepping out of Stevens County into a little Italian eatery - easy to imagine a gondolier sailing by with a love song. The patrons coming into the café recognize Peter and he greets them all by name or with a pat on the shoulder. Café Italiano is definitely a family affair – Cherryl plays hostess and keeps the dining room flowing smoothly during mealtime rushes and their youngest son, Telly, helps prepare in the kitchen what is easily argued “the finest food in the world.” According to Peter, the dishes he prepares are “all one of a kind recipes.” He considers cooking his passion, and the love affair that he started so long ago has only expanded. Using exotic, world-class ingredients, including wild boar, fresh seafood, Greek saffron, and delectable international wines, nothing but the best will do for Peter’s recipes. “Colville is special. I am going to help keep it special.” He smiles.

The Karatzas love Colville, and Colville loves Café Italiano. Peter calls the café his life’s work, and is dedicated to making his customers happy. “I want all of our lives to be a little better,” he says, “I want to make your eyes roll back in your head from happiness.” And it’s a goal he isn’t far from achieving. With fantastic and creative poultry, veal and seafood dishes, always-surprising daily specials and of course, to-die-for pizza, Peter’s cooking brings about all the happiness you can handle in one sitting. “I have dedicated my whole life to this craft – it’s world class cooking, and I know – I’ve been all over the world.” For those of us who rarely make it out of Stevens County, it’s not hard to believe, but even local globe trotters have come back to Peter to let him know that his cooking stood the test of small Greek Delis, Italian Bistros and gourmet French Restaurants. For the Karatzas and their little café, it’s about a lot more than running a business. Coming back to friends and family in Colville is a move that the whole family is happy about. Cooking for the people that he cares about most is where Peter wants to stay. “There’s a pride in it,” according to Peter, “with no dollar value” that can be placed on the contentment of his customers. It’s about bringing joy to their community, and like Peter says: “This is beyond food. It’s an experience.”

Jack Nisbet presents “Getting To Kettle Falls”

season Kick off for Historical Center

  Well-known author and regional historian, Jack Nisbet, will be giving a hand to local volunteers in starting out the 2015 season at the Kettle Falls Historical Center. On Saturday, May 16^th at 1:00PM. Nisbet will be presenting “Getting To Kettle Falls”,  a detailed slide show of explorer David Thompson’s map from 1810, when he toured the Kettle Falls area to meet local Native American tribes. The map is one of the centerpieces of Nisbet’s latest book, Ancient Places, which incudes extensive information about the 9000 years of human history in the Kettle Falls region. Nisbet will read portions of Ancient Places as well as guiding an outdoor tour to historical points of interest around the Historical Center if weather permits. Ancient Places, as well as Nisbet’s other books will be available for purchase and Nisbet will be available to sign copies. The event is free to the public.

  The Historical Center is located 3 miles west of Kettle Falls on Highway 395. Turn right on St. Paul’s Mission road and look for signs.