Over the past several months, our team here has been digging through old issues, and whether you just started or have worked here as long as I have, it's a ton of fun. We're sharing a bunch of those old memories this week in our 30th Anniversary Issue.
Meanwhile, I've been plowing through our old anniversary issues. Every time there's a big birthday, we pause to reflect on what this all means and offer up a little nostalgia. Looking back at what I wrote every stop along the way tells a story, too.
More than three years before our first issue, I was already thinking about the Inlander. I made it the subject of my final project for my graduate degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Here's one early observation from that Aug. 2, 1990 report:
"If a clever editorial plan was the only necessary ingredient to success, every competent mind with half a hankering would have his or her own magazine. Publishing is a tricky field because so many factors influence the potential for success... Nonetheless, the editorial content is the crux of the whole package... It also gives the creative mind a vent and a voice in the community."
For our inaugural issue on Oct. 20, 1993, I kicked this whole enterprise off by quoting Ansel Adams from his autobiography.
"The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe," Adams wrote, recalling an epiphany he had camping under the stars at Yosemite's Fletcher Lake, "are the creative works of the human spirit."
And I guess I made a promise, too: "Here at the Inlander," I told our hoped-for readers, "we will showcase the creativity that is thriving in this region. ... Clearly there are many challenges before us as a community. It all starts at the local level. Apathy starts with the individual, as does participation. To participate, however, one must be informed..."
That first year went by in a flash, and we celebrated with a cake on the Oct. 19, 1994, cover that our former art director Chris Bovey described as "rainbow brite puked here." My message? Help!
"One of the things that seems easy to forget is that we are a business, too," I reasoned. "So a plea or a challenge... If you like what we stand for, or if you just want to help local businesses succeed, please support us."
Life keeps happening, too. Anne and I were three weeks away from welcoming the first of our three sons when the Inlander turned five.
"We still get asked about where the Inlander came from," I wrote on Oct. 14, 1998. "It has really come from a simple place every week for the past 260 weeks: hard work. It's said that labor is our most precious commodity, and those back issues reflect countless hours of the stuff by our sales staff, our production staff, the artists, photographers and writers who bring you a fresh, new paper every week."
To really highlight our 10th anniversary, we busted out all the stops and published our first-ever glossy magazine in October 2003. (We even put Ted Sr. on the cover!) Today, of course, we publish lots of them. In my publisher's note, I referenced a comment we were including from Nick Heil, who was a freelance writer in our very first issue and later our arts editor. As he was leaving town for a job at Outside magazine, he wrote:
"I might be Spokane's biggest booster if not for the simple fact that it just doesn't seem to recognize what it has," Nick wrote. "And that it continues to lurch along, caught up in petty feuds, apologizing for itself, accepting mediocrity."
Nick had it right: At that time, Spokane had self-confidence issues. "We at the Inlander try to challenge that mindset," I added to his message, "in ways as subtle as a calendar listing and as audacious as a cover story. We simply don't accept that Spokane is inferior to any city."
Five years after that, the nostalgia was starting to hit, and in my piece for the Oct. 16, 2008, 15th Anniversary Issue, I recalled the pride at the office that first day, after we managed to get the papers out: "We all felt like we had just rolled the first Model T off the assembly line."
At 20, on Oct. 24, 2013, we were no longer begging for help, like back in Year One; it was time to simply be thankful — a sentiment that holds to this day.
"Jer and I are humbled by how we have been embraced over these past 20 years... I believe our success reflects the vitality of our city and region. Everyone can take credit for our thriving newspaper. We owe great thanks to our staff — past and present — along with our readers and our advertisers. Spokane, Inland Northwest — you are amazing. It's been a privilege for all of us here at the Inlander to reflect you in our pages these past two decades."
Music is a through-line for all of this. The tunes we listened to around that first office provided the soundtrack for our aspirations. One song in particular has been with me throughout this journey: "Telegraph Road" by Mark Knopfler's Dire Straits. I quoted extensively from it in our very first cover story, "Growth: Boon or Bust?" (We still have not answered that question, by the way.) For the 25th, I explained my obsession:
"In its opening bars, the song encapsulates the birth of a Western town — from an individual act to a collective enterprise."
A long time ago came a man on a track / Walking 30 miles with a sack on his back / And he put down his load where he thought it was the best / Made a home in the wilderness.
He built a cabin and a winter store / And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore / And the other travelers came walking down the track / And they never went further, no, they never went back.
Then came the churches, then came the schools / Then came the lawyers, then came the rules / Then came the trains and the trucks with their load / And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road.
"Newspapers came, too," I continued, "as the health and growth of all American cities were attended by the basic act of sharing the news. 'Telegraph Road' is... a meditation on the tension between the freedom of the individual and the responsibility to the collective. And that tension ('the rules') propels the messy, glorious story of society. It's the road that connects what we've been writing about for 1,300 weeks now."
So here we are, 30 years old. I keep coming back to the people. Readers, local business owners and our team. Working with so many great people has been a gift no business plan could promise. So I tried to collect the name of every staffer, regular freelancer writer and contributing artist. (Apologies if I missed you!) There have been like 850 of us; you can see every name on page 36.
Over millennia, people working together have created cathedrals and spaceships, iPhones and vaccines. We're human, we build stuff. Here in Spokane, starting in 1993, we built something, too. ♦
Ted S. McGregor Jr. is the publisher of the Inlander.
