Passions, hopes of Soap Lake on display in TV special

Program hits KSPS airwaves with 'good timing'

SOAP LAKE — Don't be surprised this month if you're flipping channels and a familiar-looking town graces your TV screen.

Spokane's KSPS Channel 7 is airing a half-hour program about Soap Lake throughout the month of November as part of its Northwest Profiles series. The program will then run as filler on and off throughout next year.

KSPS producer-director Scott McKinnon explained that he used to live in Warden, and would drive by the Soap Lake while traveling. A conversation about the lake spurred his interest, and he found Soap Lake resident Kathy Kiefer's name online.

Kiefer served as location support and was interviewed for the program.

"(I) wanted to take more of a historical bent on it," McKinnon said of the program. "The catch was not just the history, but it was about the thing that small towns all seem to be going through, the viability of small towns."

Most small towns are trying to keep afloat, McKinnon said, and he found that to be an interesting aspect for the program.

"You're looking at the historical perspective of what this place was, and what it's trying to do to keep itself viable," he said. "Plus, not only that, but the lava lamp was a nice little hook."

When McKinnon first contacted Kiefer, she told him one of the things he should look at was her own documentary, "Dirt Roads, Beachscapes, Bygone Days: A Window to Soap Lake's Past."

"Whenever a producer is going to come to an area, ideally they'll have a person they can work with to just do local support," Kiefer explained. "They came with a cameraman for one day and a half, and they needed footage of other things that happened around here — mud bathing, swimming on the lake, foam on the lake, suds on the lake, so I taped for them."

McKinnon said he was able to use some of Kiefer's footage, and she had already done all the legwork on some black and white stills.

"(We were) able to take advantage of a lot of work she had done," he said.

"Filmmaking is my passion, and I believe in this town and I support my local community through the work that I do," Kiefer said.

Kiefer is presently working on redoing her documentary, adding new historic photographs, changing the soundtrack and putting to use the things she has learned about her craft, she said. The new "Dirt Roads" will be released on DVD, she said, adding that all 250 VHS copies have sold out.

Kiefer also co-designed and provided content for a new Soap Lake Web site, www.soaplakewa.com, which launched last week. Kiefer said that a lot of her research is included on the site, including a PDF file of McKay Healthcare's original administrator and research physician T. J. Fatherree's American Heart Journal article about the healing results of Soap Lake's waters on Buerger's Disease.

The file is something that "people have talked about for as long as I've lived here, and nobody ever has been able to come up with it," Kiefer said, who found the article at the University of Washington medical center library.

The Web site also includes frequently asked questions and testimonials from people back in 1916 and the 1930s who used the waters of the lake.

Kiefer is also the director of "Boobalogues," a documentary of women's relationships with their breasts.

Brent Blake, president and CEO of the Soap Lake Giant Lava Lamp Project, Inc., was the other Soap Lake resident whose interview appeared during the program.

Blake said he talked about the lava lamp project and the interest it would generate for Soap Lake.

The program could allow for and develop good projects for the town's future, Blake said. It may attract "people who may want to invest in the community, move here, buy a piece of property or do a good thing to provide assistance to a city that needs those things. That's a good thing that can come from it, and keep a positive feeling in the community, for more good things to happen."

"It's not the first time Soap Lake's been spotlighted by a program like that, but it's been a while and it's good timing for the town," Kiefer said of the KSPS program. "Because they're really picking themselves up by the bootstraps, so to speak, and elevating their interest, elevating their heart to the story they want to tell."

The Soap Lake program is scheduled to air Saturday at 3 p.m., Sunday at 1:30 p.m. and Nov. 27 at 7 p.m.