Take a stroll on city's sidewalks

(Lately, there has been a lot of talk about more and better sidewalks in Sandpoint. The subject has been trod upon from every conceivable direction. Problems have arisen about how wide a space people needed to get where they were going so a concrete decision is yet to be made. I recalled when Erik Daarstad and I interviewed the late Bob Selle for the Sandpoint centennial movie and we found that our city was having a few problems with sidewalks way back then. I decided to share some of that interview with you because it portrays the charm of a small town and it might inspire some to want to replicate the sidewalks of Bob Selle's time. Below, in his own words, Bob gives us a peek at a young person's Sandpoint of yesteryear and the ever present sidewalk.)

“There used to be a creek come from out of where the airport is now and it ran all down through and it probably ended up in the river.

“Each street had to have a little bridge or a culvert, and they had wooden sidewalks then. The sidewalks were elevated up on eight, ten-foot standards. They were four-foot wide. They all were made out of wood and nailed down.

“I remember those sidewalks because there was one place on Lake Street where we used to plug the culvert and make the slough flood in the fall. We would stuff anything we could find in there so the water couldn't get through and we'd have a skating pond.”

“Then we got to taking planks off of the sidewalks to build our bonfires for our skating parties. The police arrested me one night and took me downtown and then I had to go and report to the truant officer for about six months.

“Every Saturday I had to go and tell her I was being good and all that kind of stuff. So I remember about the wooden sidewalks. They picked on me because I was probably the instigator of the whole thing. They had to take somebody out of the bunch that had the bonfire going and the boards were lying there that we tore off of the sidewalk.”

“They just had one city policeman when I was young and they were usually nice guys. We'd bump into ‘em once in a while when we would make too much noise downtown or something.

“There were very few cars back then but some people had the old Model A cars and they had a muffler whistle on ‘em. We wired ‘em up through the floorboards and had a branch off of the exhaust coming from the engine and had a whistle in there and we'd pull that and go down and drive down First Street and blow that whistle. They'd always chase us down and stop us for that.

“I don't think kids tore things up and destroyed things in those days like they do now. Because things were too hard to come by. Boy, it was hard.”