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On a Summer’s Afternoon

How the Bed & Breakfast Began

How I Arrived in Chelan

Let’s Dig to China and Have Tea

On a Summer’s Afternoon

by Mary Kay Addis

In 1910 Chelan was a new and exciting little Frontier Town. The natural rugged beauty, clear clean water and maybe gold in the high country was a beacon to every old and young adventurous soul in this country.

You had an opportunity to have a livable life style here if you had a usable trade. Using a lot of ingenuity, a bit of cash or trading your services to someone else for their goods or services, life could be comfortable. Everyone had to depend on other members of the community for food, fuel, doctorin’ and Sunday afternoon entertainment.

Whether it was a Sunday Supper at the church with home-grown music and a poetry readin' or a baseball ball game at the ball diamond northeast of town, fun could be had. Resourceful ball players could always find a scuffed-up ball, a pretty straight bat, and a glove or two.

Buckboards lined up under the trees; horses tethered; a picnic basket full of fried chicken and potato salad in the back, waiting for the inning to be over. Pretty girls with their long curls swinging around their shoulders, shyly glancing as they checked out the boys in knickers, sweat rivulets on the boys dusty faces as they slid into home plate, a one-moment hero to the cheering crowd.

Everyone was there. Grandma Mary Ann with her Apple Pie and Homemade Ice Cream. Her Grandson Peter had cranked it by hand in the old wooden ice cream freezer she had brought from “Back East” when she left her old home, wanting one thing to make this new place her home. Peter used the last of the ice from the Craig Ice House.

Aunt Millie watching with her new baby shaded by her sunbonnet, the rest of her six kids pummeling each other, rolling around on the ground under their old green wagon. The Sheriff Richardson tipping his hat and checking the crowd for any white lighting that might have just shown up by mistake, always mindful that elections are in the fall! Father Henry Gurr from St Andrews Episcopal Church was there to cheer his titleer boys on. Mildred Whaley talking to the girls and boys that would soon be all washed and scrubbed; back in her fall Sunday School class.

Last January the ice had been sawed from the frozen lake, loaded on the sled, and pulled back to town with a team to be packed down in Wtitleer Craig’s Ice House. They used sawdust from the Woodin Nichols Saw Mill to insulate it. The Ice House’s thick walls, also full of saw dust, kept the ice from melting until August.

Wtitleer Craig delivered ice to people’s homes for their ice boxes. When it was hot the kids would run along side of his truck and he’d give them little chips of ice to cool their tongues. Miss Myrtle’s family oak ice box was still on the Whaley Mansion’s back porch when I arrived in 1955. Before she gave me my own key, she hid one for me in the ice box. The Creamery made ice cream they scooped into cylinder tin cans to send up lake packed with ice and stitle in special tall thick wooden barrels, to the Hotels on the Belle or Stekekin Steamers.

The simplest things were wonderful. When the summer heat was pushing 100 degrees, the height of ecstasy was to scoop up a big bite of Vanilla Ice Cream. The cold would make your new teeth hurt and give you a brain freeze. You’d hold it in your mouth as long as you could, then tip back you head, letting the smooth, cold elixir slowly slide down your throat. The ice cream was made from Grandpa’s milk cow, Bessie’ cream, and eggs from the hen house from behind their old farm house up in the Boyd District. The hen house was out near the purple lilac bushes that were planted round their outdoor privy. And last but not least a packet of white sugar from Whaley’s Mercantile Store and a few precious drops of vanilla from the little dark brown bottle from Mundt’s Drug Store.

Now, if you had just made a home run and the little yeller haired girl had jumped up and down, her braids flying in the breeze? Well, heaven was right here and now. Moments like this will be some of the dearest things you will still remember when most else has fled.

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How the Bed and Breakfast Began

by Mary Kay Addis

1984. The morning sun is shining in my bedroom window. Stretching, as I watch the sunbeams playing with the roses on the wallpapered ceiling of my bedroom’s sitting room, it seemed so strange to be single for the first time in 31 years.

My Mom, who had been living with me since Daddy lost his argument with his heart valve, has skipped on down the road to find him again. The house is quiet for the first time in years. Well, if I am going to keep this lovely old home, it has to feed us both.

Bed and Breakfasts were something kind of new in the US in 1984. Europe has had them for years. I love having company! I was always going to the front door to find people, with their dogs, cats, kids and canaries, wondering if they could sleep on my living room floor when there were no rooms left in town. These are the same people who never even sent me a Christmas Card.

With my six big bedrooms, they knew no one was going to sleep on the living room floor. They came for two nights and stayed two weeks. They figured if I could afford to live in the Whaley Mansion, then I could afford their food bill and their bar bill. And that I would love to make up their beds, cook their meals with my food and look after their kids. Well, their kids are always the best part of the deal.

That doesn’t even address my relatives that came for two months and took the whole third floor. When they found out if they came the next year they would have to pay, they didn’t speak to me for five years. Now what is the downside of that? Because I love company, I am my own worst enemy. I thought, lets’ throw the Freeloaders out and hang out my vacancy sign.

In Europe, sharing baths is cute and quaint. In America, it is just obnoxious. I gathered in all of my markers, borrowed a bit of cash and started putting a bath in every bedroom. Then an INDOOR Sprinkler system, a fire alarm system and a beautiful fire escape with fancy white iron from New Orleans. The State Fire Marshall and I got very chummy. He’d say, “Hey, did I tell you that you need to …” and I’d say, “Oh, I am so pleased you thought of one more $20,000 thing I get to DO!”

I was so excited when my first guests arrived, I almost licked their faces like a little warm puppy. Then, they paid me! People gave me money to make new friends and play all day. I had fallen right into a Mary Kay Heaven.

In 1986, my dear friend Carol Addison came to spend two weeks with me until we could find her an apartment. That was 23 years ago. Don’t invite her over for the weekend, she never goes home She was a banker and liked to pay bills and make the bank statement come out even. Now, how strange is that?

Oh, did I say she is a fabulous Chef? Carol has her own cookbook CD called The Whaley Mansion High Cholesterol - Happy Heart Attach Cook Book. She might make you a copy! Be very nice to her, she has custody of our Belgium Chocolate! We are two ex-husband's nightmares. Success is the always the best revenge.

We were the first bed and breakfast listed in a AAA book. Oh well, so what if they did put us in back of the book with the State Parks that first year? They didn’t have listings for Bed and Breakfasts back then. For nine or ten years we were AAA's first 4 Diamond award for Bed and Breakfasts nationwide.

We have been in the New York Times, London Times, Sunset Magazine, Bristol Evening News, Travel and Leisure, the National Geographic Travel Magazine and many Bed and Breakfast books. We were the center fold in Just Desserts Magazine and I didn’t have to take off my clothes! Probably a good thing.

We have also been featured in travel programs on TV. So many publications, I should have just written them all down. We have had rich and poor, famous and infamous, and all put their feet between our sheets. No matter who they are or whose wife they have with them, it is a great way to spend your life.

Shhhhh There goes the doorbell and I have to run. My new best friends have just come calling and I haven’t even met them yet. See you soon!

- Mary Kay

Post Script. One last thing! We were just voted the best Bed and Breakfast in Chelan, WA . We received 74% of the 127 votes! The coffee pot is on, come on down, bring your friends, lets have some fun!

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How I Arrived in Chelan

by Mary Kay Addis

The place I want to spend the rest of my life.
Arizona in the winter? I’ve already had summer.
Bring on the Diamonds and Ermine in our trees in the Winter!
I love it to be so cold that when you sniff your nose sticks together!

I arrived in Chelan with my husband Ken Addis and our 20 month old daughter Mary Ann on November 2, 1955. I remember the day because it was my father’s 57th Birthday.

It was very cold with several inches of snow on the ground. Everything we owned was in a tiny one car garage. The city had turned the water on to our little house. The water pipes for the hot water tank in the garage froze up. The PUD then turned on the electricity and thawed out the broken hot water tank pipes. I opened the garage door and found hot water and steam spraying over everything we owned. What did I do next? Well, of course. I called my Mom and Dad who came and kissed it and made it better.

I was born and raised in Wenatchee. My husband’s job brought us 35 miles north of home and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Another best thing was going to St Andrews Episcopal Log Church two weeks later.

That lovely Sunday morning I met Miss Myrtle Whaley. She and Arthur Campbell had played on the pile of logs while they dried, before they made them into the church in 1898. Miss Myrtle and I became best friends for the next 20 years. I was 21 and she was 70. She took me everywhere with her. I drove and she and her big old dog Stub rode.

Stub was deaf as a post and always followed Miss Myrtle to church at St Andrews. He would sneak in and throw himself down on the floor in the back of the Church by the Baptismal! Within minutes he was snoring and dreaming he was young again and chasing rabbits, his feet flaying around in the air.. No one ever seemed to notice. He was usually more interesting than the sermon.

This “Grand Dame” opened every door in town for me. If Miss Myrtle said you were fine that was enough for everybody. Charlie, his very pregnant wife Rosa and Miss Myrtle arrived in Chelan in the Spring of 1890. Miss Myrtle was just 4 years old. The Whaley family came west to put in the first grocery store and dry goods store in the area. Because of her, I met and enjoyed the company of so many of the first movers and shakers of Chelan.

Arthur Campbell Sr. came here in 1890 as a 2 year old. He and I often shared a cup of coffee in the early morning at the front desk of the Campbell Resort. He was such a “Grand Gentleman”. I will always treasure my time with him.

I knew the St. Louis brothers, Raff (Raphael) and Mike (Michelangelo). Raff’s house had a paper cardboard roof. I have pictures to prove it. The family came here to make bricks to build Chelan and make it safer. Wish they had baked them longer! Raff tried to blow the front porch off his brother’s house one cold night over a family squabble. See, all the excitement isn’t on Memorial Day Weekend!

Art Mathers drove the stagecoach that brought the Flatlanders up from the steamboats that landed at Chelan Station. In the latter part of his life he lived at the Lake Chelan Saddle Club up by the Rodeo Corral, where so many folks here did and still do keep their horses. The old Chelan Falls road is still there. Still, just sand and silt, just as dangerous! You can see old fruit trees by the road that were planted by some hopeful newcomer; some times there is an apricot or two. Some of the stagecoach drivers would stop at the scariest place to collect the fares. It was 500 feet straight down. The road was very narrow, the wheels practically hung off the edge. One woman said that, “If that is the only way back to the Steamers on the Columbia River, she would live and die in Chelan,” and did.

These are just a very few of my dear old friends. We will share more of them as we go along. My family is full of history that was shared around our dinner table.

When I came to Chelan, I was immediately drawn to its history and the great folks that made it, and were still making it. I would love to share the wonderful old photos with you. I have scads of apple labels that also tell the history of the orchards in their hay day. If what I remember, and what I received, often second-hand, is incorrect, please call and chat. When people see something in print they believe it to be true forever! SO….. I will have it corrected immediately. If you have old photos that you would like to share, please call me and I will see that everyone reading my column will get to enjoy them with your name on them. I will scan them and return the photos immediately. So, let us stroll down memory lane together. The best is yet to come.

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Let’s Dig to China and Have Tea

by Mary Kay Addis

When Miss Myrtle Whaley arrived in 1890 as a four year old and Arthur Campbell as a two year old, the water used for drinking and bathing was brought up from the lake each day in fifty gallon barrels on wagons or sleds in the wintertime. Sometimes folks had to break the ice in the winter to fill the wood barrels.

As we were having tea one day Miss Myrtle said, “On one hot summer day, Arthur Campbell and I were bored spitless! I was about eight and Arthur about six, we were tired of building wagon roads in the dirt pile in Arthur’s back yard and all of a sudden one of us had this bright idea; let’s dig a deep hole to China in Arthur’s back yard! We wanted to see if we could find some little Chinese kids to play with. So we dug and dug and dug!

I don’t remember who came up with the next bright idea, but by pure accident we managed to dump the last of the Campbell’s barrel of drinking water into our big hole. From then on things seemed to get a little fuzzy. Maybe it was the loud thump of the barrel when it tumbled, splashing off the wagon and putting a whack in it’s side that got his Mother so riled up. Or maybe the part about someone might fall in the hole and drown. Who knows? If I could have drowned Arthur it would have happened long ago!”

Caroline Campbell stormed out their back door, in full sail, screen door slamming behind her and grabbed Arthur by the arm! As she was about to give him what for, Caroline said to me, “Do you want yours here or when you get home?” Whew, I thought, that’s a no brainier, “At home of course!”, and scooted out the gate of the white picket fence, ran around the corner and down the street home. I knew by the time Mother found out at the store, (Caroline always told on me, sometimes everyday and there was always something to tell! Usually because I had climbed up the Campbell’s Apricot tree and you could see my step-ins) (At least she had them on!) Oh, well, when Mom gets home from the store to fix dinner, put it on the table, get my little sister Mildred ready for bed with a story, and then finally sitting down to look at the Chelan Leader as she dosed off, the whole thing would be forgotten or she would be simply be too tired to give me a lick’en. Any way it was the Campbell water barrel wasn’t it, not ours? Too bad, I thought, “We’ll have to dig a little deeper next time before we pour the water in the hole!”

As Miss Myrtle said, “Sometimes things don’t work out quite the way you expected!” But she really did want to see those little Chinese kids!

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