Spokane

Spokane is the setting of Joe Rantz’s earliest home and the point from which his childhood is abruptly dispersed. In the growing city, Harry Rantz established a business and a settled family routine; after illness and loss broke that household apart, Spokane persisted in Joe’s memory as both an origin and a place to which he could return.

A growing city and a family home

The Rantz family settled in Spokane in 1906, after leaving Williamsport, Pennsylvania, as Harry Rantz sought a place to establish himself. The arrival of the Northern Pacific Railway had helped bring tens of thousands of people to the Northwest, and Spokane’s population had grown beyond 100,000. A more prosperous commercial community had developed beside the older lumber town: brick hotels, limestone banks, and mercantile businesses stood on the south side of the river, while small houses with lawns filled residential squares to the north.

Harry and Nellie Maxwell Rantz and their son Fred lived in one of those northern neighborhoods, at 1023 East Nora Avenue. Joe was born there in March 1914. The house anchors the city’s place in his story: Spokane was not only a name attached to his family’s past, but the setting of his first home and the early life he would later remember in fragments.

The city’s setting included the Spokane River and the falls around which the town had grown. Its regional character combined commercial expansion with a climate and landscape marked by hot, dry summers, cold winters, and dust from the wheat country to the west. The book places the family’s respectable domestic life within this larger, mixed urban environment, rather than presenting Spokane as either a purely industrial town or an untouched frontier.

Harry Rantz’s work and the family routine

Harry opened an automobile manufacturing and repair shop soon after the family arrived. He repaired a broad range of vehicles and also built them, assembling McIntyre one-cylinder cycle-cars and devising cars of his own. With his partner Charles Halstead, he obtained a local sales agency for new Franklin automobiles. As Spokane expanded, the repair shop and sales office developed enough business to keep the partners occupied.

That work shaped the household’s daily schedule. Harry rose at 4:30 in the morning and often returned after 7 in the evening. Nellie taught piano to neighborhood children and cared for Joe during the week, while Fred attended school and helped at the shop on Saturdays. The family also shared a regular religious and social life: they attended Central Christian Church on Sunday mornings, where Nellie played piano and Harry sang in the choir.

Their Sunday afternoons offered a counterpoint to Harry’s long working days. The family sometimes walked downtown for ice cream, drove to Medical Lake for a picnic, or visited Natatorium Park. There they could watch semiprofessional baseball, ride the Looff Carousel, or hear a concert by John Philip Sousa. These activities describe Spokane as the ground of a family’s ordinary pleasures, as well as the place where Harry’s commercial ambitions seemed to have found room to prosper.

Separation, illness, and remembered Spokane

Joe’s recollection of early childhood does not preserve that secure routine as a continuous story. His memories begin around the spring of 1918, shortly before his fourth birthday, when his mother was seriously ill. He remembered a doctor coming to the house and, later, sitting in church while she lay in a coffin. The memory of his older brother Fred speaking with him at home also joined the immediate family crisis to the future: Fred discussed death, angels, college, and why he could not accompany Joe east to Pennsylvania.

Joe was sent east by train to stay with his aunt Alma. During the journey, a porter watched over him, brought him food, and helped him settle in his berth. Soon after arriving, Joe developed scarlet fever and spent weeks ill in an unfamiliar attic room. The episode marks the point at which Spokane becomes, in his recollection, a home left behind: his parents and Fred were absent, and the landscape that had framed his first years gave way to an unfamiliar household and a prolonged illness.

While Joe was away, the family’s life in Spokane changed irreversibly. Nellie died of throat cancer and was buried without care. Fred left to finish college, and Harry, devastated by his wife’s final illness, went north to Canada. The city’s earlier promise of work and domestic stability could not hold the family together after Nellie’s death. Its importance in the narrative therefore lies partly in the contrast between the household’s former routines and the dispersal that followed.

A place revisited

Spokane remained part of Joe’s personal geography after he grew up. During his later work at Grand Coulee, Joe and his companions sometimes drove to the city to explore his old haunts. The return was brief, but it made the city more than a lost childhood setting: Spokane could be approached again from the life he had built elsewhere, carrying memories of the family home alongside the changes that had separated him from it.

That earlier history also entered Joe’s conversations at the University of Washington shell house. When George Pocock asked how he had come to be there and where he had come from, Joe spoke in hesitant fragments about his family and about Spokane, as well as the Gold and Ruby mine and Sequim. Pocock’s own childhood had included the loss of his mother, and that shared experience helped him understand the weight behind Joe’s account. Spokane thus returns not only as a location Joe visits, but as part of the history he gradually allows another person to hear.

The city’s narrative function is defined by these changes in scale. It begins as a growing place where the Rantzes establish a home, business, church routine, and shared leisure; it becomes the setting of illness, bereavement, and separation; and later it is a landscape revisited and recounted. Spokane connects Joe’s beginnings to the losses that shaped his early life, without reducing the city to those losses alone.