A Look At Old Sandpoint
by Bob Gunter
To
experience the charm of a town one must live there.
Bob Selle is an old-timer in the Sandpoint area.
Here, in his own words, he gives us a peek at a
young person's Sandpoint of yesteryear.
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 it crossed, they either 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 about those wooden sidewalks because
there was one place on Lake Street where we used to
plug the culvert and make the slough flood in the
fall, on purpose. 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 get together.
The police came and arrested me one night and took
me downtown and then I had to go and report to the
truant officer for about six months.
Click on photograph to
enlarge
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.
Click
on photograph to enlarge
They just had one city police when I was young and
they were usually nice guys. We'd bump into 'em
once in a 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.
Click
on photograph to enlarge
All photographs have been used with permission of the Bonner County Museum.
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