Growing up in Sandpoint was great for young kids

Sandpoint Furniture/Carpet One, home of The Ponderay Design Center and Selkirk Glass & Cabinets (208-263-5138), sponsors this column and it will appear in your Daily Bee each Sunday.

(Today’s article concludes the centennial interview with Patricia Mailey. Her reflections gave us a glimpse of a small town that has stood the test of time and still evokes a deep sense of pride when one can say, “That’s my town.”)

“I recall that Halloween was pretty bad around Sandpoint. I didn’t do any bad stuff but there were a good many houses in town that had outhouses, and there were certain kids that thought the best part about Halloween was pushing over Mr. So-and-So’s outhouse. Some really bad kids would take candles and write on windows. That was not nice because it was a very hard job to get candle wax off glass windows. The kids I ran with didn’t do that and about the most devilish thing we did was to soap windows — we used plain soap. My sister and I did one very bad thing one Halloween. We went up to the library and my sister had a dill pickle wrapped up in some paper. We put a slice of dill pickle in a book and then we ran home.  We thought we were going to get put in jail for that one. My sister was 7 and I was about 5.  

“Back then, there were no “tricks or treat” — it was all tricks. No one ever gave us a candy bar and no one ever told us to go home. Halloween was a pretty exciting time.

“I’ll tell you something else that happened in Sandpoint that was so nice for all the young people. It was the basketball games at the high school. On a cold winter evening you could go and watch a basketball game in a nice warm gym. We always followed our team if they went to Coeur d’Alene or Bonners Berry to play. I recall they had the Idaho panhandle teams and they’d have tournaments and that was always fun for the kids.

“Girls did not participate in athletics when I was young. I asked my Aunt Julie why the girls in school did not have an athletic program. She said at one time when she was in school there was a girl’s team but some girl came down with appendicitis, or some ghastly thing, and they decided they better not have any girls athletics. Some girls I knew played tennis, and I suppose they had volleyball, but I’m not sure of that. I wasn’t very athletically inclined and I didn’t own a tennis racket, so I couldn’t play tennis. Swimming was the sport my sister and I participated in mostly; and we did a lot of that.

“I’ll tell you another nice thing about Sandpoint. On summer evenings they would have band concerts. There was a little park on Oak Street and it had a little bandstand or pavilion. On a warm summer evening, the band would be there playing, and the kids would be running around enjoying themselves. I remember that there were some berry bushes around the band stand and some naughty kids would pick the berries and throw them and hit the trombone player in the head, and then they would run away. The music was nice on a summer evening, so very nice.

“Fourth of July celebrations were very nice in Sandpoint. The city always planned a three day celebration for the 4th and they would have parades, contests, and especially swimming contests. The American Legion always had flag waving bands, and circuses and carnivals would come to town and set up down at the beach at the same place the powwows had been. There was always some excitement going on down there.

“I don’t have anymore to say but I do have a question. Why did they take the apostrophe out of Pend d’ Oreille and end up with, Pend Oreille?  The French spelling looked so good and had character. Coeur d’Alene left their apostrophe in, so why didn’t Pend d’Oreille leave their apostrophe in? I’m just going to request that whoever took it out — put it back.”