Chuck King has always been a collector of things.
As a kid he'd gather rocks. Then he turned his eye to stamps and coins. After that, the objects of his attention morphed into photographs, souvenirs and curios.
"Pretty soon they got bigger and heavier, and I needed trailers and friends to help carry them," he says. Some of the bigger, heavier items include ticket booths and 16-foot-tall signs from area drive-in theaters that projected their last movie decades ago.
Asked about the urge to collect, he reflects for a moment.
"It's because of the memories probably more than anything. Without someone to capture the artifact, those memories do fade, culturally and personally."
King turned his private hobby toward the public sphere back in the early 2000s, when Spokane Valley was looking to get its Heritage Museum off the ground. He would end up helping co-found the museum after making an unannounced house call to its future director, Jayne Singleton. They'd never met until he showed up at her front door, eager to discuss the whys and wherefores of local cultural preservation.
"That was kind of my start with actually doing something with my interest in history," he says.
Later, in another fateful intersection of paths, King would meet local musician and history buff Garrin Hertel.
In 2011, Hertel had bought Nostalgia Magazine, a periodical devoted to chronicling the stories that shaped the Inland Northwest in ways large and small. But after a few years the print magazine found itself facing the challenges of a changing media landscape. Hertel thought that Nostalgia could benefit from someone with King's passion and expertise.
Over lunches at the iconic — and recently fire-ravaged — Skyway Cafe, they hit upon the idea of an edutainment video series called Chuck King's Guide to Spokane History, better known as The King's Guide.
"I remember saying, 'We need to do videos that are less than a minute.' And of course we just couldn't. We'd have at least seven- or eight-minute videos," Hertel says, chuckling. Occasionally the episodes would stretch close to feature length. Neither he nor King could bring themselves to leave out the interesting and unusual details that seemed to accompany every story.
And those stories have been wide-ranging. Since its launch in 2017, The King's Guide has covered everything from landmarks and labor movements to locomotion. Popular episodes have profiled influential but unassuming figures like E.J. Brickell, dubbed Spokane's "forgotten founder," or veered off the beaten path by examining, say, the once thriving bordellos of North Idaho's mining towns.
It's led to The King's Guide taking on a life beyond — and ultimately outlasting — Nostalgia Magazine. Hertel says that part of what keeps it fresh and fun is allowing King to follow his curiosity.
"When I do research, it starts basically with one thing, whether it's an artifact or a story I see in the paper," King says. "If it's a historic building, I want to know who built it, who's the architect, who they bought the property from. As a history buff, you want to go back as far as you can go, to the very beginning."
Each video sees King meeting up with a specialist who typically accompanies him on an outing in a classic car. Hertel, an amateur videographer with the flair of a professional, single-handedly records, edits and produces the videos. He isn't shy about drawing inspiration from the well-received web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Most recently, King hopped into Jess Walter's 1963 Lincoln convertible for a guided tour of the locations that informed the Spokane author's historical novel The Cold Millions.
"Chuck is a treasure," Hertel says. "You might say he has an Indiana Jones kind of personality. He's an academic, but he's also an adventurer. The artifacts are important, but for him, sharing the history is its own reward."
To watch the videos in The King's Guide series and learn more about the people, landmarks and events that they cover, visit kingsguidespokane.com or youtube.com/@thekingsguidespokane.
