Document 74: King Cole Interview
King Cole [interview with Sean Elwood], 9 June 1975, Expo’74 Transcripts, Eastern Washington State Historical Society.
This is an edited version of the original interview with King Cole by Sean Elwood on June 9, 1975, in King Cole's office in the Fidelity Bank Building. . . .
Q: Why did you grasp onto that means of doing things?
A: We had some very high goals back then. They seemed almost unachievable. We wanted to clean up the river, eliminate the blight on the riverbanks and the islands, especially in the downtown area. Our 1960 downtown plan called for removal of all the railroads and the establishment of a park and cultural center with an Opera House and Performing Arts Center right on the riverfront. To do this, they called for this to happen, not just for its own sake, but in order to create a development catalyst to renew the rest of the central business district as well as the rest of the city and the region. We were also trying to enhance our community image. . . .
Q: Which came first, the idea of a world's fair or the ERA report?
A: . . . . The fair closed about the end of '74; the ERA report was done in '70, and the idea of something very big on the river came to me in '65 in St. Louis when I was looking at the banks of the Mississippi and the way they had taken the railroads off and they were putting in the beautiful Gateway Arch. The idea was of something very monumental and way beyond the community capacity to achieve in and of itself, something that would have so much external force that it would bring along with it the goals that we sought and that would leverage most of the money for the program from outside sources. Well, all of this sort of evolved into the idea of a world's fair within the next few months. . . .
Q: Tell me a little bit about Spokane during the mid-'60's.
A: I arrived in Spokane in 1963—the low point, in my opinion, of Spokane's pschological [sic] and economical cycle. The worst part was the psychology of the public attitude. Everybody was talking the city down. When they had bond issues, they all stressed the negative aspects. Even the people in favor would say, “if you don't do this, something terrible is going to happen.” Just before I arrived they had a bond issue whose theme was “City Hall is falling down.” Well that just made people more angry. The kids in town had a nickname for the city; in a reversed English type of phraseology, the called Spokane “Spokaloo” or “Sin City.” Obviously, in their opinion, nothing exciting every happened there. The attitude of the average high school kid or college student was that they had to get out of town when they finished school because there was nothing to do and no way to earn a living. We had had virtually no construction in the central business district for ten years. Now downtown is key to everything, in my book. It is the heart of the city, and if you don't have vitality and life in the central district, you don't have it anywhere else. There had been no real building permits, no new developments. Just before I arrived, the Ridpath Hotel had built its new Motor Inn and the Lincoln Building was about to start construction. Even the Lincoln Building was predicted to be a failure. The Lindsay brothers had been told by the people in the community that it would be a white elephant—said it would never fill up because of the rents they had to charge, which were, again, a result of the costs of the building and the land. They went ahead and they built it anyhow and they filled it up immediately and then they wished almost immediately they had made it larger. You know that sort of thing hadn't happened for ten years. Well, that was the status of Spokane. The site for Expo '74 hadn't changed much down on the riverfront. The downtown plan with its dream of the railroads being removed and of the park and cultural activities being put there hadn't really stimulated anybody to do anything, except the YMCA. You will remember that the YMCA is supported mainly by the same people who put up the money and the ideas for the downtown plan of 1960, and in a sense they put their money where their mouth was by building a new YMCA in the very heart of this future “paradise” along the riverbanks. But the YMCA sat there in solitary isolation from the rest of the community for many years—a nice looking shell, but basically an unfinished interior surrounded by railroad tracks and derelicts. Across the street was a small Travellodge Motel which was very successful because it was looking out over the river, and people who knew about the river's potential, that were travelers, loved to stay there, especially when the water was rushing and high. . . .
Q: Where are you from? Where did you come from?
A: I am from California. Professionally, I am a graduate of Law School and a professional city planner. I've been active in urban renewal, downtown development, industrial development, citizen activities, and construction.
Q: When did the Expo Corporation come into being? As a series of offices with staff?
A: It was at first a two or three man office. This lasted about a year. We just went out and got consultants at first to do our feasibility studies, our physical design, planning, and our initial government—local, federal, and international—approvals here, in Washington, and in Paris, and also in Olympia. We had a very small staff. . . . Going back to the railroad situation, remember there were four railroads to talk to, and we were hoping and helping as best we could to see that two of them would merge, and in fact they later did. But that still reduced it only to three railroads, and two of them now were left on the riverfront and they both had to move to the third tract, which runs on the south side of the central business district. It sounded a little easier, but it really wasn't. In the early days it was the Mayor, me, the president of Spokane Unlimited, the chairman of the County Commission, and the vice presidents of the railroads meeting together. Then we finally got down to their staff and our staff here in Spokane, both our staff on Expo and our staff on the City. Then we started with them publicly about the exposition. . . .
Q: At what point did the scene change from recreation to environment? Whose decision was that?
A: The fair never had a theme of recreation, but we did approach the ERA people with a two-fold question in asking for the feasibility study: should we have a local, a regional or a national exposition, or a world's fair? Should it be themed to outdoor recreation or to the environment? Well, they examined all of the different combinations, and in fact had a serious internal debate among themselves and with their own consultants on these questions, and came up with a positive answer that it must be an international exposition or we wouldn't get our money back. It must be environmental (the theme) because that was the one theme that would attract the most attention and do the most good—both for Spokane and for the exposition itself. Now this was a time when the word “environment” wasn't being bandied around too much, and they were worried about it being a passing fancy of the public. They were concerned that even then the whole ecological issue would die out and be passé by the time the exposition opened. But after they looked it all over, the decided that it was excellent and that it would work. So before we every officially formed a corporation to put on the exposition, the theme and the time of the exposition were already decided. By the way, on the question of an international exposition, the ERA people, as a part of their contract with us, had explored that by writing to some contacts they had in Europe and by finding out that the Bureau of International Expositions probably would be very much in favor of an exposition with a theme of the environment. At least this was the opinion of the chief staff people of the exposition. . . .
Q: I'm getting ahead of myself here. Did the theme ever give you any problems?
A: Sure. In the first place, the environmentalists immediately rose to the challenge. We were called to task by both the local and Washington State Environmental Council. They asked for and received meetings with us, many of them. They asked many questions. First of all, were we going file an environmental [impact] statement? Well, our lawyer said we didn't have to because we were not a government unit and only government units had to do this. But we agreed with them that we should do it anyhow and so we prepaid the first environmental impact statement of any exposition and the first one that had ever been submitted to the Department of Commerce. It was excellent. They wanted to know about the river, about the pollution running through a site that was going to house environmental expositions. So we pledged ourselves to the best efforts we could give to straighten out the pollution in the river. Then they wanted a member on the Board of their group, on our Board. So we agreed to that and then that member, Dr. Frank Nicholls, put together an independent committee, completely uncontrolled by our Board, and that committee wrote independently of us the environmental impact statement. The environmental impact statement was a model, as I said earlier. It went to every agency in the federal government and was sited by many of them, including the Environmental Protection Agency, on review as being the best environmental impact statement that they had ever been produced to date. We are out of print and I have one file copy and I am still making photostats of it for people. By the way, I forgot to mention that the biggest fear of all by the environmentalists was that the exposition would itself degrade the environment by having too many people come to Spokane. The environmental impact statement said that this would happen only in a modest degree if certain precautions were taken and the slight disadvantages if this would be outweighed by the environmental benefits of the exposition. The chief concern was for levels of carbon monoxide, and in fact there were some instances of this in the spring and the fall of the year. But we were very lucky because we had very good air movement through the downtown during 1974 and that summer, and we didn't have too many instances. But most of the community responded beautifully by taking the bus, by parking in outlying areas so that the concentrations didn't build up as much as they might have. Then too, the river was dramatically depoluted by virtue of many activities up and down its watershed, which were a direct result of the pressure that was put on by the coming of the exposition and by the members of the board and others who saw the need for doing something that they had been putting off for years. So sewer treatment facilities were built, against all odds, by public bond issues up in Idaho along the reaches of the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene and the Silver Valley, where many of these communities had to vote jointly on this, by Coeur d'Alene River, by Coeur d'Alene city on Coeur d'Alene Lake, and by the many manufacturing and other types of plants along the river in Spokane Valley and up in the Idaho area around Post Falls. The big industries completely eliminated some of their effluence from the river. The ponded it, they treated it, and the City Council itself tripled the sewage rates and used the money to fund some major beginning of sewage treatment plants improvements which were scheduled to be underway by the time the exposition opened. Well, upstream of the exposition there was a drastic change in the pollution bacteria count. The problem downstream didn't cure itself immediately because the sewage treatment plant was still putting out effluence that was undesirable during heavy rains. The lake that was formed below the dam was in a bad state of eutrophication, and when we had these big run-offs from snow melting or heavy rains and the nutrients would get very high, but that will be corrected with the new secondary treatment facility that is being installed.