Panida mom loses battle with cancer

SANDPOINT — One of the Panida moms died Saturday in Coeur d’Alene.

Laurel Ann Wagers, 61, one of the women responsible for saving the Panida Theater from the wrecking ball in 1985, is described by her friends as an imaginative artist who could remember facts with casual brilliance and whose determination helped save the Sandpoint landmark from being razed and converted into a parking lot.

“Laurel was artistic,” Susan Bates-Harbuck, a long-time friend of Wagers, said. “She could act, she could write, she did art, she could sing beautifully and play the piano.”

Wagers, who died at Life Care of Coeur d’Alene after a two-year battle with cancer, wrote Sailing Among the Stars about Sea Dart, the sailboat known for its South American exploits in Tristan Jones’ The Incredible Voyage. She acted in many local productions with the Unicorn Theater players, a community acting troupe, and her admirers remember her musical performances where she displayed a voice that captivated audiences.

To many Sandpoint residents, however, she will be remembered as part of a trio of women who worked to purchase the historic Panida when its owners, a Canadian holding company called Black Diamond Cattle Co. bought the shuttered theater with plans to destroy it.

Wagers, Bates-Harbuck and another woman, Jane Evans, became known as the “Panida Moms,” as they rallied the community in 1985 to help raise $75,000 for a down payment to purchase the classical landmark.

“We wanted it to be a community-owned theater that was there for community and all kinds of events,” Bates-Harbuck said. “We wanted to keep it as historically accurate as possible and not change what it was.”

They dressed up as Charlie Chaplin and a Keystone Cop in the Fourth of July parade, sold memorial bricks and tiles and collected donations to meet the four-month deadline for the down payment.

A decade and many fundraisers later they burned the mortgage along with marshmallows, Bates-Harbuck said, and the theater has been the centerpiece of the community ever since.

 That may have been the women’s crowning event, but their friendship was established early on.

“We were just alike in a lot of ways,” Bates-Harbuck said. “We just hit it off. One of us would get a crazy idea and the other would say, sure, let’s do that.”

Deb McShane, a Sandpoint school teacher, fellow thespian and director, befriended Wagers in the Unicorn Theater, and remembers one of her performances in a lead role in Thornton Wilder’s, The Matchmaker.

“She was phenomenal,” McShane said. “She was magical under the lights. She was absolutely beautiful. She mesmerized the audience.”

Wagers, one of three children, grew up in Alaska before moving to Sandpoint with her parents and graduating from high school as a 15-year-old. She earned a journalism degree from Michigan State University and worked as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News.

She was married and divorced and returned to Sandpoint with her son, Lee, to be near her parents, her mother, Margery Pratt, said.

“She was really a pretty good kid,” Pratt said. “She was so much younger than her (high school) classmates, it seemed she had to overcome that a lot.”

When it came to music, her daughter was gifted, she said.

“She had a gorgeous voice,” she said.

Before her mission to save the Panida, she asked her dad, Joe’s, advice.

“He told her it wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work,” Pratt said. “She showed him it did.”

Wagers later went to work as the managing editor at Multilingual Publishing in Sandpoint.

Her boss and friend, Multilingual’s publisher, Donna Parrish, played piano duets with Wagers.

“She was incredibly bright,” Parrish said. “She was a walking encyclopedia, and a very talented artist and musician.”

After being diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, and not being able to attend meetings, her peers continued to keep her on Panida’s board of directors, her mother said.

“She appreciated just having her name there,” Pratt said. “She really enjoyed that, she enjoyed most everything.”

If they shared Wagers joy while she was alive, her friends have another thing in common now.

“I miss her,” Bates-Harbuck said.

Memorial services will be at 1 p.m. Wednesday at Coffelt Funeral Chapel.