Lawrence Goncalves stood inside the large bay doors of the Spokane Fire Department’s Station 1 and looked around. Somehow, even 30 years after his departure, things looked remarkably similar.
“Back there was the kitchen,” he said last week. And the bunk beds, just behind that wall. Those doors, where the engines would race through before turning onto Riverside Avenue, as big then as now.
Of course, some things had changed – the new fire engines and the bright red paint, the unfamiliar faces. And across the street, where a butcher’s shop once hung strips of beef in the window, a Banner Bank.
“We ate good back then,” Goncalves said with a smile.