A Local Prophet’s Wild Vision of 1940s Kennewick
In a satirical speech to the Woman's Club, A. R. Gardner imagined a future where Kennewick harnessed its notorious windstorms and turned river sand into a global glass empire.
In 1940, a young man who once munched a crust for his school lunch will startle the world with an invention that marks him as the master genius of the day. Working upon the theory of stored energy, he will harness a Kennewick windstorm. He will pull the fangs out of that same old blast and store it for use at will. Stored wind will become the motive force of the world, supplanting the dynamo and the gasoline engine. Cities the world over will try to snatch from Kennewick the control of the world’s wind output, but every attempt will end in failure because they lack the wind. A young lady will also discover that Columbia River sands are glass in the rough, turning the city into the glass center of the world and making our sand-blown eye-sores the treasure houses of the age.
“The wind bloweth where it listeth; we know not whence it comes nor whither it goeth.”
A. R. Gardner’s 1915 satirical prophecy uncannily mirrors the modern Pacific Northwest's real-life shift toward wind energy, albeit with much less glass-making and significantly fewer whisker-factory jokes. While his civic boosterism was meant as a spoof, he identified exactly what would become the region's defining natural and economic assets.
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