On a February day in 1960, the air in downtown Spokane carried a sharp chill as John F. Kennedy stood before a crowd of Inland Northwest residents. He was a presidential candidate then, in a city that still felt comfortably insulated from the world’s brewing storms.
To look at Spokane at the time was to see a community resting in the quietude of the postwar era, largely unaware of the gathering upheaval. But the 1960s were not just a series of events that happened “out there” in the jungles of Vietnam or on the blood-stained streets of Selma, they were a force that fundamentally rewired the soul of the region, including the Spokane Valley.
When visiting the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum today, you aren’t just looking at objects inside glass display cases. The museum’s newest exhibit, “1960s: Change, Chaos & Culture” feels less like a dry history lesson and more like a long-overdue conversation with our own reflection. The air inside the museum smells faintly of incense, a deliberate sensory choice by its curators to pull visitors out of the present and back into a decade defined by a restless, haunting cycle of what now?…