Downtown stores are rich with history

By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Many downtown businesses also have roots that reach several generations back.

Gail Scott works in the hardware store founded by her grandfather, Milford Carr, in 1924. The fourth generation -- Scott's two children -- often help out.

Her mother, Darlene Scott, started working there as a high school senior in 1948. The old part of the family store still has the original oiled fir floor, and Scott says she has no plans to change it. The floor, she says, "is almost part of a way of life."

The floor gets fresh oil twice a year, and Scott says the smell of the new oil brings up old memories for many customers. "They'll say, 'Why, this smells just like a store I remember when I was a kid.'"

Around the corner, Kuhnle's Tavern has the immense mahogany back-bar that's been serving Marysville tipplers since the turn of the century. The business is run by Kay and JoAnn Kuhnle.

"My husband's father bought it in 1918," JoAnne Kuhnle says. "It had been a saloon, but during Prohibition it was run as a poolroom." Pool still is a prime attraction, with the tavern team frequently placing first in its league.

The saloon scene now is a lot tamer than it was in Marysville's early days, when eight saloons and a red-light district catered to rowdy loggers, and Saturday-night brawls were the preferred entertainment.

JoAnn DeLazzari, co-owner of The Bookworks, views the lack of turnover in Marysville shops as a key to the business center's future. Customers and business people know each other by name, and it's a refreshing change from the impersonality of a mall, DeLazzari says.

"The mentality of the consumer is changing," she says. "Service is becoming more important, and the small town fills that need."

DeLazzari says she's found her Marysville customers to be "searching and inquisitive -- we're really impressed with the diversity of interests, from New Age to the classics."

DeLazzari and her husband, both New Jersey natives, moved here 27 years ago because of the combination of outdoor recreation and culture. "You can do the symphony in the evening and water ski the next morning," she says.

They also liked Northwesterners' acceptance of diversity. "Here, you're not ostracized if you're racially different or sexually different," she says.

Across the street, there's a business with a name calculated to draw in the curious, Fudge and the Funnies. It sells neither; it's a fabric store.

Ronn Beams, a retired teacher and husband of owner Jeannette Beams, says they thought the name Marysville Fabric Store would have been so generic that people would think of it only as a Marysville fabric store.

Beams, who worked at a print shop as a youngster, remembered the "fudge box" that weekly newspaper printers held open for last-minute news. He puts out the shop's calendar-newsletter, and squeezing information about classes and events into the calendar boxes reminded him of the fudge box. He puts pithy, witty quotes and humor into the blank boxes, which remind him of newspaper funnies pages in the days before there were comic strips.

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• Old-timers, newcomers attracted to this town