The 77-year-old Beacon Hill resident, artist and retired art director for Seafirst Corporation has just had his third book published in the past six years: "B Street: The Notorious Playground of Grand Coulee Dam."
Reyes is a Native American with some compelling stories to tell.
His first book, "White Grizzly Bear's Legacy: Learning to Be Indian," chronicled his upbringing in eastern Washington and the devastating effect Grand Coulee Dam had on his people. In that bittersweet book his little brother, Bernie Whitebear, occupied a minor role. Reyes's second book, "Bernie Whitebear: An Urban Indian's Quest for Justice" placed his late brother front and center as an Indian activist and founder of United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.
In "B Street" Reyes brings returns the focus to Grand Coulee Dam, which flooded the sacred fishing grounds at Kettle Falls and his hometown of Inchelium and devastated the salmon runs. An immemorial way of life had ended.
B Street, just above the dam construction site, was the notorious place where Depression-era workers from all over the country found relief from the day's labors. In the proud, free marketplace tradition of the West, taverns and whore houses seemed to spring up overnight. Reyes's parents decided a Chinese restaurant was just the thing B Street needed. They called it the Woo Dip, a made-up name Reyes's mother wanted because it sounded nice. Neither knew anything about Chinese food and Reyes's father had never distinguished himself in the kitchen anyway. Things didn't go terribly well until they hired Harry Wong out of Spokane, who had worked as a cook in a Chinese restaurant there.
Wong took control of the kitchen and business hummed. Reyes presents Wong as a kind, somewhat wistful figure who wrote articles for his hometown newspaper about his life in the States and fed Natives who were hungry and broke.
"Harry was probably the most generous man I've known in my life," Reyes said in a phone interview. "I don't think he ever took a vacation."
With such a picaresque story, there is plenty of room for humor, in the dry way Steinbeck or Dickens might have employed. Reyes recounts how a rowboat with would-be-lifeguards was deployed at night beneath the catwalks above the river between B Street and the worker's cabins. Too many, after B street, were unsteady on their feet and fell in.
Writing of one native who wanted to return home, Reyes puts it this way: "He was weary of the thousands of people. It seemed that workingmen were always drunk and fighting over women. He could not see the wisdom of fighting over women....He began to wonder about the priorities of white men."
Reyes is building up a highly readable body of work essential to Northwest history. He is currently working on his fourth book, which will cover the Indian fishing rights battles on the Puyallup River. Both Reyes brothers were there.
Meanwhile, B Street is mostly sagebrush. And the Columbia River, whose rushing waters Reyes heard as he fell asleep at night as a child, is, as once put it in a previous interview, "a dead lake." Once again, Reyes has added a precious dimension to our official history, and reminds us there is more than one voice that should do the telling.
"B Street: The Notorious Playground of Grand Coulee Dam," by Lawney Reyes, University of Washington Press. $18.95 paper, 184 pages, 32 illustrations.
Lawney Reyes will read from his new book Sept. 10, 7 p.m. at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way N.E.
Mike Dillon may be reached via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.0[[In-content Ad]]