After my young brother in law committed suicide on our Skykomish river lot, we could of course no longer keep and enjoy it.

Right at that point we saw an ad in the Seattle Times for a waterfront condominium in Tokeland, WA. The price was an unbelievable $7500.00. It couldn’t be much, but a trip would be enjoyable.

The sale was being handled by a Seattle real estate firm. I remember the name of the lady realtor. She was a Mrs. Blanchard. She explained that the place was owned by a group of Seattle businessmen, who were not really interested in running the motel. We found out that it wasn’t profitable, hence the low price. The only two owners I know the names of are Mr. Benson who serves as an accountant and Alan Pomerory, an attorney who was a former mayor of Seattle.

Mr. Benson had a house adjacent to the condominium so over the years we came to know him and liked him.

Mrs. Blanchard arranged for our free rent for a weekend so we went down to look. Of course we liked what we saw and so we arranged to trade the river lot on the motel unit. Mrs. Blanchard bought the river lot for herself.

The building was of concrete brick with exposed, painted block walks. It was made up of a bedroom, bath, kitchen and separate living dining room.

From the parking lot side one entered the bedroom. It had a fair sized closet. To the right was a sliding pocket door into the bath. This had just the essentials with a shower only.

At the opposite side of the bath was another pocketed door which opened to the living dining room. The kitchen was between the bath and the opposite wall. It was really just a hallway.

At the far end of the living room, which was owned by a brother in law and sister in law. Also, there was a door out onto the walkway that is shown in the adjoining photo. There was a nice sized picture window which looked out over Willipa Bay. It first looked over a nice big patio with beautiful oceanside windswept pines and a horseshoe pit.

There was also a fenced swimming pool including a small wading pool for the little kiddies.

Being in the business I was in, I immediately did some interior upgrading. The one wall that I could cover I used resawn clear cedar paneling with a warm sandalwood stain which was beautiful.

We had only enough space on the living room wall for a love seat size hide-a-bed which we upholstered in a nylon stripe back with the naugahyde seats. We carried this out with a booth in the window where one could eat and look out over the water or sit and just enjoy the view.

We spent many enjoyable weekends and some weeks at the beach.

Our unit was so much more attractive then the others. That everyone who came down wanted our unit. The arrangement was that each unit derived the income that it earned less a fixed cost for cleaning and maintenance, taxes and so forth.

This meant that our room earned from four to five times that of any other. The other owners got together and changed the by-laws so that the income was divided equally. Thus, our little cash cow no longer earned anything to write home about.

We still enjoyed our times there. I remember the New Year’s weekend we were there. A crab boat came in on the New Year’s eve. It was loaded with crab and no one there to buy it. My brother in law, Homer, was down at the dock and was offered a whole gunny sack of crab for $10.00. Did we ever gorge on crab.

It was a lot of fun to go out in the bay just in front of the motel and go clamming. One just took off shoes and socks and went into the shallow water. Every time you stepped on a rock you picked it up. It wasn’t a rock, it was a butter clam. More waterfront feasts.

In December of 1973 there was a combination, high tide and a very high wind. This completely filled the patio with logs as shown in the picture. It even completely covered the parking lot on the opposite side of the building. Strangely, there wasn’t a bit of damage to the building. There was a log about three feet through that came within a foot of one of the units, but the building sat just enough above the patio that it was stopped just short.

We kept the unit until 1989 when my wife was in the hospital having open heart surgery.

My brother in law and sister in law decided to sell. This decided us to sell at the same time.

In the sales agreement I had arranged that we could have a free week every year during the off-season for ten years.

That fall we arranged for a weekend in October. We drove to Tokeland, signed in and went up to the room. We were terribly disappointed with what the new owners had done. They had removed the cedar wall and had removed the breakfast booth. The walls had been painted white like a hospital room.

We turned up the heat and went for about an hour’s walk on the beach. When we came back we discovered that they had replaced the electric heater with a smaller one and the unit was as cold as it had been when we got there.

We sat there in our heavy coats for about twenty minutes. I finally said, “We have a perfectly comfortable home less than two hours from here, let’s go”. That was the end of our wonderful home away from home.