Bob Kalamasz is music in human form; he is compelling, pure, and loved by many. It is rare to meet a person for only 20 minutes and as a result, feel at ease with the fate of your future.

However that’s the case with Kalamasz; if a simple life in Dayton, Washington, is good enough for him, it’s good enough for anyone.

Music has been the longest romance in Kalamasz’s life. Now 69 years old, he has been playing guitar for 61 years. He even prefers to go by his stage name, Bobby K.

“I played in my first tavern when I was 10 years old,” Kalamasz said.

In 1969 Kalamasz formed the band “The Damnation of Adam Blessing” with several of his close friends. The band was picked up by United Artists, the label of legends such as Janis Joplin and Alice Cooper. They were in Houston, Texas, working and recording a series of albums when the band began to fall apart. Kalamasz said many of his bandmates had developed a drinking problem.

“It would be 1 in the afternoon and they’d all be sitting around and I was like, 'Come on, let’s work!'” said Kalamasz.

Although the band was on the verge of stardom, Kalamasz felt the band had become too toxic for him. Luckily, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect; his wife, a marine biologist, was offered a job at a dam near Dayton. After years of moving seasonally, the two felt it was time to settle down. When they moved to Dayton, Kalamasz took the role of stay-at-home dad while his wife pursued her dreams.

“I thought, 'I can do this, I can watch the kids…' I started sending my mom flowers all the time,” Kalamasz said.

He plays Friday nights at Noble Hunt, a restaurant in Dayton, and records in his home studio.

After a long and well-lived life as a rock star, Kalamasz lives on 83 acres and is no stranger to solitude. He and his wife are happy with the relaxed nature of Dayton.

— Written by Kaleigh Willie

Friday nights Sherry Robanske is found singing alongside her friend Bobby K. at Dayton’s weekend eatery, Noble Hunt.

Robanske’s powerful voice hardly needs a microphone — it fills the room easily, a tribute to her years of theater.

A school bus driver and employee at the historic Weinhard Hotel, Robanske is an artist at heart. The longtime Dayton resident says her love of the arts was spurred by encouragement from her third-grade teacher.

“[She] loved my voice, and she wanted me to sing a song in front of the whole school,” Robanske says. “That’s pretty much what sparked my love of music because she saw that in me as a teacher and encouraged that.”

As a young woman, Robanske had dreamed of going into theater professionally but wasn’t able to get the loans she had hoped for.

“I think I would have been a really great drama teacher,” Robanske says. “Something along that line, encouraging people to sing and use their gifts.”

Robanske continues to encourage young artists through volunteering at the Liberty Theater downtown.

“I’ve been involved in most of the productions one way or another,” she says. “Either doing theater makeup or on the stage.”

Before volunteering for the theater, Robanske also worked mentoring children at her church.

“One of the boys ended up loving music that he ended up being a very well-renowned music teacher,” she says. “He would say, ‘Sherry, I did that because you worked with me and inspired me.’”

Robanske says she loves living in the small town, where her family goes back generations to early wheat farmers and Romanian immigrants who came to neighboring Walla Walla.

“I like walking down the town and laughing and smiling and knowing everybody," she said. “We’ve been very fortunate to have a community where everybody seems to care about each other.”

— Written by Rachel Sun

Dayton’s Village Shoppes 26 Shops in 1, is like a thrift store with an added twist. Along with the consignment items, locals have their own sections throughout the store for them to sell their creative work or collections.

Owner Candy Jones said the community is her favorite part of having this business.

“You feel like you’re contributing,” Jones said. “You’re just part of the thread of life here, that’s the reward.”

She and her husband plan to retire soon and hope to pass the baton off to Rori Budden who just moved to the area about two years ago.

“I drove through Dayton in 2009, and I said ‘I want to live here someday,’” Budden said. “I bought a house here last year.”

Budden met Jones while browsing the store. Jones can always tell when someone isn’t a local, so she’ll ask them, ‘where are you from?’ she said.

“I walked into the store one day, because these are the kind of stores that attract me,” Budden said, “and then we actually became friends at the dog park.”

If Budden ends up taking over the store, she plans to sell some of her dad’s lifelong antique collection including his old-timey vehicles. As vendors cycle out, he would slowly transition into the mix.

Both Budden and Jones said they love how the store supports the community and want that part to continue.

“It’s been a wonderful experience and I’m going to cry all the way home,” Jones said, “but she said I could come visit.”

— Written by Latisha Jensen

Situated right on highway 12 in the town of Kamiah, Idaho, is a large church-like building with a red tin roof and blue trim. Outside of the building are boxes and shelves of knick-knacks.

Welcome to Lynn’s Resale and Consignment Shop.

Inside the shop, walls are covered in artwork from multiple decades and rows of shelves filled with objects from strangers’ lives. Country music plays quietly in the background.

Lynn Sanderson stands behind the counter with a warm smile and a friendly hello. She is bundled up in jackets listening to a police scanner.

Sanderson has been running her business out of this church turned grange hall turned shop for 16 years.

Sanderson has always enjoyed collecting items and found antiquing to be a great fit for her.

Most of the items in the store come from auctions. Sanderson said she used to do storage auctions a lot until the show Storage Wars aired.

“Units that cost me $20 were now going for $200 because of the show,” Sanderson said, “I kept being outbid.”

Sanderson’s son hated the idea of his mother collecting all these items. Mainly because he had to do all the heavy lifting, Sanderson said.

It wasn’t until Sanderson’s son watched his mother find an item of value that he really agreed with his mother’s career choice.

One of Sanderson’s highest sales was a missionary style china hutch that was hand crafted. It sold for $2,500.

Lately though, business has been slow.

“Nowadays people don’t want stuff they can’t reuse and that they will have to dust,” Sanderson said.

Sanderson is now at the age where she wishes to retire. She is currently trying to sell every item in the shop so that she can refurnish it into a recreational room for her grandkids when they visit.

— Written by Zana Crites

In Kamiah, there is an organization that wants to provide its youth with a vision of a drug-free community.

Upriver Youth Leadership Council is an organization run by volunteers and students with goal to empower both youth and their parents to make safe decisions.

Sharlene Johnson is the president of UYLC. She has spent most of her life living in Kamiah and has noticed a shift in substance use within the community.

Johnson was driven to start this program in February of 2017, because she has seen the effects substance use can have on a love one and hopes to deter others from following in the same path.

In small towns such as Kamiah, leisure activities are hard to come by. Because of this, UYLC has set goals to provide 2-3 activities a month ranging from movie nights, open gyms, and youth fest.

These activities are put on by UYLC’s youth advisory board, composed of Kamiah students, many of which are children to the UYLC volunteer members and Johnson’s own son.

“The youth board puts on all their events and even raised $10,000 to attend a youth conference in Orlando, Florida,” Johnson said.

The UYLC has also begun to implement the SAFE HOMES initiative for parents in Kamiah to get involved. By pledging, parents agree that they will not condone any substance use by a minor on their property.

Johnson said that one of most amazing results to come from this program is that the youth are taking the forefront and are empowering their peers to avoid substance use.

— Written by Osvaldo Moran

'Home is where the heart is'

Ruth*, a single mother of three, didn’t let homelessness beat her down when tragedy struck many years ago. Even when fire took her home, fire couldn’t take away her positivity.

Ruth had left the clothes dryer on while she went to go pick up her children from the bus stop. When she returned home with her children, they arrived to see their house in flames.

“My kids just turned to me and asked, ‘Well, now what are we going to do?’” Ruth said. “We’re going camping!” she replied.

She took her truck, her trailer, and a tent and set up camp for her family under a local bridge after the accident. “My son’s room was in the front seat of the truck, and my two daughters slept in the camper,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter what you have, as long as you have family,” she said. Her children made a sign for the camp that read “home is where the heart is,” and placed it on the front door of the truck.

“People called CPS on me, and I don’t blame them, they had every right,” Johnson said. Social workers asked all the children individually if they wanted to stay at the camp or leave with them. “My kids obviously answered, ‘I wanna stay with Mommy,’ then they closed the door on the workers, and the workers saw the sign my kids made on the door,” Johnson said.

The social workers decided to leave the children at the camp. “It was a better situation than the last home they had visited,” Ruth said.

Now, years after the fire, Ruth spends time with her 10 grandchildren and continues to keep family and positivity as her main priorities in life.

Name changed to protect the identity of the subject due to domestic violence concerns

— Written by Karen Gallardo

Grandma Jenny has too many grandkids to count.

Jenny Meyer is not biologically related to all 200-some residents of Endicott, but she considers them family.

“The kids grow up here and I’m Grandma Jenny to everybody’s kids,” Meyer said. “I yell at them just like I yell at my own grandkids.”

Meyer owns the Endicott Food Center, a large brick building downtown with an aging red sign and a soda machine outside. It sits kitty-corner from the closed-up bank and the lot where the gas station used to be. Inside, the bottom floor is divided into two sections: a two-aisle grocery store and a dining room. Four long, family-style tables with cream tablecloths line the dining room and are filled every morning with the men, and later, the women, of Endicott, who come to drink coffee, chat and eat lunch.

On this particular morning, Meyer is hosting the annual Hunters’ Breakfast to celebrate the first day of hunting season. The streets outside are lined with cars and inside, the Endicott Food Center exudes a busy hum of morning chatter. Older and younger residents, hunters and non-hunters, dish up breakfast: pumpkin pancakes, sausage, eggs and maple bars.

Meyer bustles around in her teal T-shirt and black apron, helping customers, popping in and out of the kitchen, sharing recipes, and checking to make sure everyone had enough to eat.

The crowd filters in and out, but many people hang around long after they have finished breakfast, talking about surgery recoveries and the new internet service coming to Endicott.

One of these people is David Bilow, the current mayor of Endicott, who said Meyer’s shop is the center of town.

“It’s food, it’s milk, it’s [the] grocery store,” Bilow said. “It’s ice cream on a hot summer day. It’s beer when you can’t get home from town in time. It’s more than just a store.”

That sentiment runs deep with many people around town, including Tia Langston, the Endicott Branch Manager of the Whitman County Library and Meyer’s daughter, who says the shop is more like a second home to her and her kids.

“There’s usually a lot of kids around and it’s not just my children running around,” Langston said. “It’s everybody because they feel comfortable here.”

It’s easy to see the passion and love Meyer has for Endicott as she talks about its people. On top of her duties at the shop, she has also driven the school bus in town for 35 years; so long, in fact, that she has now driven many of her past students’ children as well.

“It’s a lot of work,” Meyer said. “Some days it’s more work than I want. I wouldn’t have it any other way now.”

But Meyer, who has now lived in Endicott for 42 years and will be celebrating the shop’s 30th anniversary in April, is training a new owner, her 10-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Anderson, even if she won’t be able to take over for a few years.

Anderson has helped her grandma around the shop for the past two years and loves baking cookies. There is no doubt that Meyer will pass along love for her community with the Endicott Food Center itself when the time comes. Donning a neon pink sweatshirt and two braids, Anderson talked about her Halloween costume, her trampoline and her favorite thing about Endicott: the shop.

— Written by Kari Jakobsen

David Wells, 77, feels strongly about what he calls “the demise of rural America.”

Wells knows that rural towns are difficult to sustain.

“A good deal of it has to do with government policy in my mind,” Wells said. “LaCrosse now, its net value of the town is approximately 30 percent of its net value 50 years ago. We don’t have a John Deere dealer, a Caterpillar dealer, a grocery store or a hardware store. We can’t keep a cafe open.”

The cost of living in a rural town is cheap, and unoccupied houses are not expensive, so people receiving welfare can afford to live there. The government also keeps rental rates low. Wells does not agree with this because he believes that money should be earned.

“The infrastructure of the town is really funded largely by federal policy. But with the land conservation act, paying people not to work is not really a moral decision,” he said.

The government also has put no resources in crop diversification. Wells has been working with farmers for years on irrigation, which would help with diversification of crops.

“These two communities from here to the river [Endicott and LaCrosse] could [feed] Washington easy. Government policy isn’t interested in that,” he said.

Wells would like it if more people from rural communities were involved in government.

“I’ve polled all the doctors at the Whitman Hospital. And in the process of ‘Would you please run for county commissioner?’, [they] say ‘No, I’m busy.’ And they have chosen to be here.”

Wells likes that they have chosen to be in Whitman County, but he does not like the fact that rural communities are less represented in government.

“It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever considered not bothering to vote,” he said.

— Written by Cheryl Aarnio

The community in Endicott is small, yet the hearts within are considerably big. Upon my visit, I came across a group of women who with just their presence seemed immensely inviting. Weekly coffee gatherings, knitting, and encouraging conversations keep the women of Endicott upbeat and filled with laughter during both good and bad times.

With coffee in front of us, I gained the privilege of having a conversation with four of the women of Endicott: Pat Byers, Jerine Grey, Anne Lowe and Georgia Wells.

When asked, “How are the women contributing in the Endicott community?” Wells explained, "hospitality and creating support for one another.”

Grey explained, “A group of us go and receive mammograms in support of each other. At my age, it is important and I thought, hmm, it would be a lot more fun if someone goes with me.”

A tradition was born. Since then, the women come together with coffee followed by a trip to Whitman Hospital and Medical Center in Colfax. In addition to the support within the group, the women receive support of the hospital as well. The hospital also offers the women free T-shirts and lunch in support of the women and breast cancer awareness.

The four women refer to themselves as the “Germans from Russia.” I asked them what brought them to this small rural town. Their response was simple: farming. 

Over the years, the women have created life in Endicott with the support of each other. The four women help create the housewarming welcome of the community, constantly dishing out hospitality to those outside and within the community, facilitating annual auctions and holiday dinners for the community as well. 

An upcoming event includes Christmas in Endicott, which is at the local community center on the first Saturday of December. There, the women decorate the community center with Christmas decorations and help prepare Santa Claus for the children. At the end of my interview with the women of Endicott, the women invited our group to return for Christmas in Endicott, a prime example of how the women show warm hearts with much hospitality to share. 

— Written by Jasmine Brown