Return of The Chronicle

Employees for the two newspapers, combined in 1983, recalled a professionally respectful competition between the two newspapers that would publish at different times of the day.

The true story of the Chronicle, which lasted from that first four-page edition in 1881 that announced the arrival of the Northern Pacific railway in Spokane, to August 1992, is intertwined with its sister publication, the Spokesman-Review, and competition between the two. It's also a story of buttercups and criminals, cute babies and roving afternoon paperboys.

Every afternoon for decades, young men (and sometimes women) slung canvas bags over their shoulders after class and slung Chronicle papers onto porches across the Inland Empire. Several responded to a recent call by The Spokesman-Review for memories of those formative years, including the occasional dodgy subscriber, vicious dog and, of course, the spoils of their paychecks.