Several months ago, I had the most fascinating conversation with Clark Cundy. I learned just the tip of the iceberg about what it was like to grow up here, and especially what it was like to grow up inside The Orcas Hotel. I asked Clark if he would recount some of those memories for you to read. Enjoy!…
1. How many years have you lived on Orcas Island, and how did your family end up living here?
First of all I’d like to thank you for this opportunity to share memories. I think that’s important to document a lifestyle that many may not have experienced or understand.
I have been a full-time resident about 20 years off and on. My family (Dick Cundy and Shirley Cundy and myself) moved to Orcas August 1, 1968, on that day we took over ownership of The Orcas Hotel. We had a white 28’ Trojan wooden power boat with flying bridge named Dick’s Fifth, and they would come to the San Juans in the summer for vacation for two weeks, hitting all the normal stops – Blakely, Fisherman’s Bay, Roche, etc. Normally, as far north as they would get was Salt Spring Island.
Along with us there were two other boating families with their own boats – Bob and Georgia Nelson and George and Eleanor Lyons. These three families got together weekly and were very close. In 1967, all three loved the San Juan Islands and wanted to figure out a way to move there. In late 1967, if memory serves, they made a sort of pact, in that all three were going to purchaseand run a business on Orcas Island. During that year or after, two out of the three had made commitments. Not sure as to the exact timing, but Bob and Georgia purchased Eastsound Dry Goods, and George and Eleanor purchased the Olga Store. We were the only ones out of the group that hadn’t found what we were looking for. Finally one day the realtor called and said the Bungalow Restaurant was for sale in Eastsound. The Bungalow was what is now the White Horse Pub. Dick made the call and we came up the following weekend. I was 12 and it seemed like the meeting was taking forever. I went for a walk around the village checking the place out, and when I came back I saw on their faces things probably hadn’t worked out, and I was right.
A long, quiet ride back to the ferry line ensued. In those days the ferry line was just the right hand shoulder of Orcas Road, and we pulled up just above the Island Vista and next to the Cottage Gift Shop. I was looking out the backseat window toward the larger white building. Dick and Shirley were pretty disappointed in how the day went and were commiserating.
There was a pause in the action and I told Dick, “Hey, did you see that ‘for sale’ sign in the window over there?” In a small window on that larger white building a plastic ‘for sale by owner’ sign was taped there. Like the ones you would see on a used car on a vacant street corner somewhere. They both looked at each other, shrugged, and headed across the street. I went for another walk to check the place out. The white building, as it turned out, was called The Orcas Hotel. Kind of a cool old place. Really needed some work though.
The ferry was at Shaw and blew its horn telling everyone on Orcas to go find their cars. That trip usually took fifteen or twenty minutes. I went back to the car and waited. Just as the ferry was unloading, here came Dick and Shirley with very changed expressions on their faces – hopeful, jubilant even. They announced that we were coming back up in two days for further discussions. Worked for me! That got me out of school for a couple days. We stayed at The Orcas Hotel next time up. I got my own room and wondered which one I’d get after we moved up, as the owner apartment only had one bedroom. Room 14 on the third floor as it turns out, a view off the back parking lot. Not quite what I had in mind. Just in the summer, though I was promised room 17 right after the Labor Day weekend was over. Big room on the third floor with a view of the ferry landing and Blind Island and Bay over by Shaw Island. After the two days were over, arrangements had been made and the banker contacted for the cash out. The deal consisted of 1 ¼ acres, an old tennis court that had two paying renters living in trailers on it, a cabin, back parking lot, 17 rooms to rent, and a café for $40,000. There was a beer and wine license but no ‘H’ license to sell hard liquor. I took the plastic sign out of the window, leaving the tape. There was an H license the next month. The rest is Orcas history.
2. What was Orcas Island like when you were a kid?
In a word, freedom! We moved up from Edmonds, and I was a suburb kid used to streets and sidewalks, riding Sting Ray bikes with slick tires and banana seats, watching movies, and playing and hanging out with my friends – playing within the neighborhood rules, rights of privacy, that sort of thing. Our house was small on a small lot, and right next to the next house – lots of young families with kids. So when we moved to Orcas, the key phrase was ‘a suburb kid.’ The nearest kid my age on Orcas was ‘up the road’ – a mile! My bike had no gears to change, just straight pumping. Lots of hills for the ride to that house. This wasn’t the ‘burbs at all, and I had the wrong kind of bike.
This was a rural place, where you found your own entertainment. We had moved the boat up to Bay Head Marina just down the road from the hotel and moored it there. It had an 8’ El Toro sailing dinghy with oarlocks, which sat on the back transom of Dick’s Fifth.
We moved up in August and it didn’t take me too long to figure out the potential for adventure and exploring a month before school started. Out in the sailboat I’d go, yes, with a life jacket (per Mom’s request), and go sailing. I got to know the folks down on the docks and they were very encouraging about my sailing. Since we were new to the hotel there was a lot of work to do just to get the place going for my mom and dad, so sailing was squeezed in between that. Somedays I would get a whole day, and off I’d go, and maybe I’d forget to tell Mom I was leaving. I’d head to my sailboat. A couple of times when I got home in the late afternoon, my mom would be a little pale, worried about my all-day absence.
That was the water side. On the land side there was Woolard Hill. As far as I could tell, there were only two property owners on that entire mountain. An elderly man had come to the hotel for a meal and invited me up to his ranch. He had horses, rabbits to hunt, and had a lot of stuff I hadn’t had any experience with. Being curious, I wanted to have a look, which made getting into trouble pretty easy, but he was relaxed and let me explore. He owned and trained the horses himself and let me ride up on Mt. Woolard alone after a couple how-to’s, as he put it. I did get bucked off one time when the horse spooked because a deer took off out of nowhere. Being a suburb kid, I was used to looking out for cars, not crazy deer jumping away through the brush. I was amazed at how high and fast they could go. I walked back to the barn. He hadn’t seen the horse come back by itself, so I was relieved since I enjoyed my exploring on horseback.
School was a bit different too. In Edmonds there were six grades, then junior high, then high school. I had finished my grade school and had one year of junior high, changing classrooms and going to different teachers like high school. On Orcas, though, there were eight grades at Nellie S. Milton Grade School and four years at Orcas High School. So now I was back in grade school. One of the high school girls got me on the bus the first day. The driver blew the air horn all the way from Bay Head to make sure the riders were at the stop by the Orcas Store when he got there. I wondered how the late-rising neighbors liked all the noise, but decided that there weren’t or couldn’t be any late risers as long as this was going on. He told me “No rough-housing and stay in your seat.” So there I was, sitting alone on a mostly empty bus, being watched closely by the other kids, air horn blaring for the next stop. The driver was watching too in the mirror above his seat. I found out later he was the principal. I also found out that my 8th grade class was split, with 7th and 8th graders in one room. Eighth grade had two teachers a day – one of them for one subject and the other one for the rest of the subjects. I also found out that my class had 15 or so students (depending on who you talk to). My Edmonds class was around 300, so it was down-sized a bit. Most of the kids seemed nice enough and it wasn’t long before my guard came down. They did have their own brand of humor, though, and it took a while to get used to that. The next four years, our class was a tight-knit bunch and we did everything together, because if we didn’t, nothing got done. So most of us did all of it – played sports, sang in the choir, played in the band, did theatre, etc. We all knew each other’s buttons and were more brother and sister in the end, plus all the drama.
3. Growing up in The Orcas Hotel must have been quite an experience. What was it like to live in a place where people were coming and going all the time from all over the place, and where some of the only nightlife was right there in your “house”?
Where to begin. Dick and Shirley decided early on that they were going to cater to the islanders versus the tourists. That meant the prices would remain affordable for food and drink. One result of that decision was longer hours to achieve the same income. Dick and Shirley had a restaurant prior in Mountlake Terrace with a loyal following, and people would drive all the way up for the day to have one of their Super Burgers and other delectables. It wasn’t like they hadn’t had any experience with a successful restaurant business.
When we first took over the hotel, it wasn’t in any condition to attract tourists anyway unless there was some sort of emergency. The rooms rented for no more than $20 for the best rooms. When you think about it, any owner probably wouldn’t want the tourists those rates would attract either. They did rent rooms, though, and frequently. The rooms were ready for a facelift, but that came later. There were no bathrooms in any of the rooms, and they were down the hall on the second floor – three bathrooms, sort of. One full bathroom had a shower, one full bathroom had a bathtub, and one was just a toilet with no sink or anything else for the 17 rooms. For me, I had to go down one floor to the back of the building. You can imagine the bathroom line-up in the morning if the rooms were full. People lined up down the hall for the shower. This problem wasn’t any different for Dick and Shirley, as they had no bathroom in their apartment. One guy remarked to Dick, whom he didn’t know was the owner one morning, complaining about the owner making his customers do this. Dick informed the guy he was the owner and that was the end of that conversation. None of the rooms had a formal light fixture in the bare tongue-and-groove ceilings of varied colors, mostly faded pink. There must have been some kind of paint sale for that color, which resembled Pepto Bismol.
There was a bare light bulb in a white porcelain fixture in the center of the ceiling in each room, with a single string tied to the small chain that hung down from the fixture. In the more expensive rooms, the string was extended to the door so when you opened the door it was easy to turn the light on with a small tug. In the cheaper rooms, the string just hung straight down from the light. If it was after dark you had to go into those rooms and wave your arm around until it hit the string when showing the room. Sometimes a bat flew out.
When we first took over the hotel, the rooms were full of Luke and Crews construction workers from Bellingham, building the Kaiser Estate in West Sound. There were up to 50 workers staying all week long during some of the weeks, more than two to a room sometimes. They were there for all three meals. That means my parents and I were up at 5 a.m. My job was to fill the 50 thermoses with coffee before they left. There wasn’t an automated coffee machine. There were Silex brewers. What that meant was a glass coffee pot on top of a stove element brought to a boil, then a Silex brewer on top with coffee.The brewer was an aluminum bowl-shaped thing on top with a filter inside, a tube out the bottom, and a rubber washer that would seal against the inside of the hot coffee pot. The boiling water would then suck up the tube, through the filter into the bowl above, then as the mixture cooled the coffee would drain back into the pot. This process took two hours every morning during the week to fill all those thermoses. I really looked forward to the weekend.
I was completely glad when the automated coffee maker was installed.(Working in that first kitchen was like taking a step back in time to the 40s.The kitchen was overhauled when our mainland restaurant sold. We brought up much of that brand new equipment, Char broiler, big deep fryers, and large grill and exhaust fan system.) While I was doing that, Dick and Shirley were fixing at times 50 breakfasts (no less than 20) and packing lunches. The menus were changed weekly for variety for all three meals. That was morning. Most days Dick and Shirley did all three shifts. They hired some waitress help and a maid to come three weekdays for the bathrooms, and then again over the weekend to change out all of the linen in the rooms for the workers the next week.
In the evening things would liven up. Where the dining room is now was an unused part of the building. We cleared that area of the junk and put in two pool tables, some arcade games, (pinball and Battleship) and a shuffleboard (which was old-fashioned on a wooden block, and you slid the colored steel pucks on a granulated waxed surface; not the kind on the floor), and a jukebox (it’s still in the hotel). All that equipment was serviced by a guy everyone called Jukebox George, and he came up from Seattle once a month to reap the rewards in coins. Most games were a quarter. Three songs for a quarter in the jukebox. With all that in place in the first couple months, there was now entertainment, pool tournaments, and card games. I was in the middle of all of those. No more suburb kid. I played my first pool tournaments in the 8th grade. The prize was a two-piece, custom-made pool cue, of which I won one that first year. I spent a lot of time on the pool table, learning its nuances. I also learned Orcas Pitch, the card game – a modified game that was pure Orcas that had originated with people from Arkansas, et al, that moved up to this area during the Dust Bowl. It was a bidding game with five points potentially per hand. High, low, jack, off-jack, and the game. One more point could be added if you used the joker. Games were to 11. The games’ finances were usually $1 a game, a dime a set, and a quarter a moon set. This all kept my evenings more than filled with things to do. We very rarely ever watched the TV. Those first two months of my conversion from a suburb kid to an Orcas Hotel kid were really amazing, and I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. My world vision had expanded exponentially. At least my young mind thought so.
Click here to read the rest on my column on theOrcasonian.com…
Photos provided by Clark Cundy
