In my last post, I mentioned that we’d be checking out some of Spokane’s statues. It’s not like I’m a great connoisseur of statues or anything, it’s just that there happens to be some very interesting statues in Spokane.
For our tour – at least, the American portion of our tour – I like to consult the website Roadside America. It’s this online compendium of buildings shaped like things, family-run zoos, and other assorted tourist traps and odd places. One of the Spokane attractions that caught my eye was titled “Statue – Victim of Sewage Tank Collapse“, which is about a statue created in honor of Spokane Wastewater maintenance worker Mike Cmos Jr., who died in May 2004, when – indeed – the roof of the sewage tank he was working on collapsed. A local nun/metal scupltor, Sister Paula Turnbull was commisioned to create a statue honoring Cmos, and it was installed in front of the wastewater plant in 2006. I was planning on including a picture of the statue, titled “Fish On” (Cmos loved to fish with his daughter, and the statue depicts them both), but for the life of me, this has been the hardest thing to find on the Internet. After hours (yes: hours) of searching for an image of it, I finally found it here on Google Street View. Sorry, but that’s seriously the best I could do. If you can do better post it in the comments.
Sister Paula Turnbull also created another noteworthy statue in Spokane: Spokane’s garbage eating goat!
The goat was created for the environmentally-themed Expo ‘74, and it is built with a vacuum function in the goat’s mouth area that is designed to suck garbage from your hand:
Watch this one if you prefer something unfunny and kind of obnoxious:
Oh, and just because I’m looking for an excuse to use this video… Expo 74!
There’s another sculpture not too far from the garbage goat, and that’s the world’s largest radio flyer wagon. Actually, this entire park (Riverfront Park, site of Expo 74!) has quite a few statues in it; there’s a whole sculpture walk dedicated to them.
One other sculpture here in Riverfront Park bears direct mention, but this is less about the work and more about a long-forgotten personal experience I had. It relates to this statue, “The Joy of Running Together”:
I had forgotten about this memory until I was searching for the tribute to the sewage worker and I ended up coming across photos of these very 80s-looking stylized runners. It brought back the memory of first seeing them, back when they were newly installed – I was close to turning eleven, and my family was taking a trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia, for *ahem* Expo 86! For reasons that completely elude me now, I decided that these statues were a tribute to all of the victims of the Green River killer, and it really freaked me out. Nevermind, by the way, that the Green River itself is on the completely opposite side of the state; I was ten, I was geographically-challenged. Remembering back on it now, all I can wonder is how I got that idea into my head in the first place?
We’ll try to wrangle us a Spokanian to write a little about the town for the next post, or we’ll head on out. How are you enjoying Spokane so far?
Tags: spokane, statues, usa, Washington
Hi Khris:
While I can no longer call myself a local, my father and his parents are from Spokane and my family lived there for my second-grade year while my dad attended the community college there. Apparently they have a great musical instrument repair program, that’s what he studied. My brother and sister and I loved the Garbage Goat! What a great piece of public art. It is next to a classic old carousel, we always ran to get one of the outside horses so we could try to grab the brass ring and get a free ride. Speaking of ride, there is a stunning gondola ride over Spokane Falls. I also remember Toyland (great picture!) the smell of hot dust and pine trees in the summer and lots of snow in the Winter. I don’t think most people consider Spokane as a destination but the downtown is really beautiful, especially the world’s fair site, and there are lots of great outdoor activities nearby. The last time I was there to visit my grandma we went to a micro-brewery with live music, I was surprised to see there was such an active youth culture. Thanks for the walk down memory lane! Erin
[...] I had written something about this sort of tacky public fund-raising project when we were visiting Spokane, but I guess I ended up dropping it from the final draft. Apparently, these cow sculpture [...]
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