Sep. 23—Rings & Things, an iconic Spokane business and founding member of the cluster of downtown shops known as 2nd City, filed for bankruptcy this month following what owners described as a forced closure caused by a computer-system crash.
According to posts on Facebook, the 50-year-old business suffered an irrevocable computer failure on August 15.
"By noon, we were dead in the water, with no way to even post anything on our website to explain," the post reads. "We made it 50 years, so (we) can be proud of that, although we are very sad at how abruptly we ended."
Calls and messages left at the store and its Facebook site were left unanswered this week.
According to the bankruptcy that was filed on Sept. 1 by company president Polly Jo LaRue, Rings & Things had total assets of about $250,000 of which about $230,000 was in merchandise.
The company listed its liabilities, or the money owed to others, at about $894,000 to a long list of creditors.
Attorney David Gardner, who filed the bankruptcy on behalf of LaRue, did not immediately return a message Thursday seeking comment.
The closing prompted a massive response on social media, with more than 490 people posting mostly positive comments about their long years of patronizing the Spokane store that mostly sold items to make jewelry.
The store, which had a years-long run in River Park Square, had been the creation of the late Russ Nobbs, who died in 2014 at the age of 70.
Raised on a farm in upstate New York, Nobbs was proud to be called a hippie.
Once convinced he wanted to become a physicist, Nobbs was accepted to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but didn't go because of the cost.
After studying engineering at a different school, Nobbs lost interest. "So when an opportunity came to walk out of school and join an anti-nuclear-weapons march, I took it," Nobbs told the newspaper in 2014.
Before founding Rings & Things, Nobbs founded a local commune and published a counterculture newspaper from 1967 to 1970 called The Spokane Natural.
The "hippie," who once was arrested for vagrancy by the Spokane Police, later built his business worth several millions and later served on the Spokane Chamber of Commerce.
"I scared people, but it was intentional," Nobbs told The Spokesman-Review. "People need to be scared in order to wake up and see what was going on."
He eventually started Rings & Things in 1972 with jewelry merchandise leftover from his father-in-law's business at the 1964 New York's Worlds Fair.