Kathy Sims: Of prairie homes and cars that sell

COEUR d’ALENE — The horses were stabled at the Coeur d’Alene Honda dealership for five years. All 20 of them.

That’s because dealership owners Kathy Sims and her daughter, Rita Sims-Snyder along with her husband, Ken Snyder, are huge supporters of the project to return the restored carousel to Coeur d’Alene after a 40-year absence. Rita serves on the Coeur d’Alene Carousel Foundation and she and Kathy are continually brainstorming ways to raise funds for the attraction that operated at Playland Pier from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Today, the horses, including one that Kathy remembers riding as a 6-year-old, are housed in a recently completed pavilion near Memorial Field. They will be back in business on Friday.

The Sims’ community contributions are many, but none perhaps more than as barrier breakers. Kathy and Rita, along with Knudtsen Chevrolet owner Eve Knudtsen, are the only female car dealers in the state.

Kathy, a 75-year-old mother of three and grandmother of four, served on the National Auto Dealers Association board for 10 years, the first female member in 80 years. She also served eight years in the Idaho Legislature and as chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. In her spare time, Sims spent three years almost single-handedly restoring the historic Blackwell House on Sherman Avenue and operating it as a bed-and-breakfast business.

“My mother was a hard-worker,” she said. “I’m sure that’s where the work ethic comes from.”

Sims was born in Spokane and moved when she was 5 to Post Falls with her family — which ultimately would include four siblings — to a small farm her parents bought on the Rathdrum Prairie.

“It was considered out on the tracks. It was not in the town,” she said.

They had chickens, a cow, two pigs and a large garden. During summers, Sims and her friends picked beans for a local farmer and were paid by the pound.

"That’s what we used for school clothes," she said. “There’s no opportunity like that for kids today.”

Coming from a Catholic family, she was sent to St. Thomas School in Coeur d’Alene. The kids would walk more than a mile to Interstate 90 with a dime in their pocket, which got each them to and from the Lake City on a Greyhound bus.

“It didn’t seem like a big deal except in the winter. Our days were short. There were a lot of evenings when I walked home in the dark because there were no street lights back then,” she said. “It was a little scary when you’re in the fourth grade.”

In seventh grade she transferred to Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy, which then was in the Fort Grounds.

“It was so old that the students didn’t change classes. The nuns did because the students wouldn’t all fit in the hallway,” she said.

Sims’ parents divorced when she was in fifth grade. The farm was sold and her mother moved into a 27-foot trailer, which she would move to wherever there was opportunity. At the time, that was State Line Village, where gambling was still legal and casinos were thriving. She went to work as a cook.

“All the casino owners were good to the kids. They put up basketball hoops on the dance floor so we could come in the daytime and play,” she said. “We watched them empty the slot machines into wheelbarrows — nickels and dimes. A lot of money.”

When gambling was prohibited, the family moved to Coeur d’Alene, where Sims learned to drive at age 14 with her best friend, Dixie Lee, whose father owned the Showboat drive-in theater. He gave them a stick-shift truck and turned them loose in the drive-in.

“I don’t know how many speakers we knocked down,” she said.

In Coeur d’Alene she moved from Catholic school to public school and met her future husband, Darrell Sims. They have since divorced but not before forging a future for their family.

Darrell and a partner decided to open a motorcycle shop and bought a Honda dealership in Coeur d’Alene in 1968. They moved the operation to Indiana Avenue.

“We knew nothing about business,” she said, so she went back to school at North Idaho Junior College and studied accounting.

In 1973, they bought the property where the business is now on Seltice Way.

“It was the Humpty Dumpty Egg Ranch. It was a chicken farm,” she said.

The following year, Sims overheard a Honda representative on her phone trying to convince a Spokane dealer to take a car shipment.

“I said to my partners, ‘We need those cars.’”

She applied for a car dealership and was approved, but she needed financing for a new facility. Sims approached a banker in Coeur d’Alene for a loan and was flatly denied because “those little cars will never sell.” So she marched to a bank across the street and was approved.

Sims plans to retire next year from a life well-lived both on the political and business side.

Among the lessons she has learned on the political side is “Government runs government. The legislators are just there as window dressing to make you think it’s the people's government.

“I never went to Boise with the idea of creating laws. I wanted to make sure that bad laws weren’t created,” she said.

On the business side, “Listen to your help. There’s no point in hiring smart people if you don’t pay attention to them and believe them.”

Sims has no immediate plans for retirement other than time with family and maybe more traveling, which she has done extensively. But it will be an adjustment.

“When I leave, it will be hard,” she said.