By GORDY HOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Bremerton resident Art Olney crosses the Tacoma Narrows Bridge daily to his job in SeaTac, but doesn't mind the hour commute. He likes it here.

Olney and his 7-year-old son, Michael, were among the shoppers who showed up at the Kitsap Mall one recent weekday afternoon. As his father spoke to a reporter, Michael dug his heels into the ribs of a mechanical horse.

"Da-a-a-d, WATCH!'' he yelled.

Olney was surprised to see so many people at the mall "on what is this, a Wednesday?" But he and his family are content with the pace of life here.

"It's a lot slower than Seattle," he said

Native son Robert Rawlings, too, remains enthusiastic about Kitsap's second-gear pace. He grew up in Port Orchard but now is a Silverdale resident and businessman, a former big-city hairdresser who returned to his Kitsap County roots to become a partner with three others in a new-tech enterprise.

Called Budster's Computers Inc., the company was launched last year, and operates from a little white house on Strawberry Creek in what's left of old Silverdale.

Budster's builds custom computer systems and provides a toll-free Internet connection, budsters.com. Owing to its location in the center of Kitsap County, he said, budsters.com connects users in an area that ranges from the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula to Hoquiam in Grays Harbor County.

"The big city ..." he said. "I never wanted to go there in the first place. People out here in the sticks are more friendly, more open, not so much into stereotypes, I guess. I like it here.

"But before the Kitsap Mall came, Silverdale didn't really exist. We only came up for the Kitsap County Fair."

In another white house across the street and down the block, Karen Jennings was presiding over her shop, Country House and Garden, where windsocks waved from the porch as a cellular phone jingled at her desk.

Jennings raised four sons in Kitsap County, likes the friendly environment and sees Old Town Silverdale as "extremely neighborly."

"It's a kind of a Beaver Cleaver neighborhood," she said. "You always see people arm and arm or holding hands. They walk all over. It's the kind of place where people look you in the eye and say, 'How are you doing?' Everybody down here says hello."

Jennings said the Old Town business community is just now getting organized to promote itself. Formed this year, the Silverdale Old Town Association "is so new we don't even have bylaws yet.

"But this is a great place to spend the day," she said, "and most of us are open on Sunday."