The Slice: Back when questionable decisions didn’t go viral

Jim McPherson, chairman of the department of communication studies at Whitworth University, saw Monday’s lead-off questions asking, in effect, “What if social media/smartphones had been around when you were young?”

“I tell my students that if those things had existed when I was their age, I probably could not be working at a Christian university today. Incidentally, some of my thankfully unrecorded college activities also provide the answer to your final question: What prompted you to say ‘I’ll never make that mistake again?’ ”

Lunch box memories: Sheila Barnes of Ponderay, Idaho, remembers being exceedingly proud of her pink Barbie lunch box in first grade.

But she was not the only girl in her class who had one. And one day at lunchtime Sheila grabbed the wrong Barbie box. “I opened it to an unfamiliar array of lunch items, but shrugged and figured mom was trying something different. As I bit into a delicious peanut butter and honey sandwich (mom never used honey, which should have been my first clue), I looked up to see a classmate standing there giving me the evil eye. ‘That’s my lunch,’ she said.”

They would become best friends.

Rich Victor, of Moses Lake, remembers liking his Mickey Mouse school bus lunch box well enough. But he was “insanely jealous” of his buddy Vernon’s Evel Knievel lunch box.

Hey, Rich. Did you know that before he was famous Knievel was part owner of a motorcycle shop in Moses Lake?

Miscast: When he was a teenager, Loon Lake’s Bill Scheres was fishing with some friends when he cast his lure. It did not get far because the hook embedded itself in the head of one of his companions.

After sterilizing a knife with a match, they made an incision and removed the hook. “He healed up fine and became a lawyer in California.”

Lance Anderson was at a Boy Scout camp-out in Pend Oreille County in the 1960s when a fellow scout got hooked in the eyebrow. One of the adults drove the unfortunate boy to see a doctor in Ione. “He returned to camp with no lasting damage.”

Warm-up question: Have gender roles changed at all in the last 25 years when it comes to which family member keeps track of relatives’ birthdays?

Today’s Slice question: To what extent did you/would you weigh wildfire danger in choosing where to live?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. In what ways is Spokane like/unlike a Canadian city?