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After settling in the Hanaford Valley in 1869, Charles Perry Anderson, a Kentucky native who grew up in Missouri, cut down an oak tree on Waunch Prairie north of Centerville to create handles and beams for a huge horse plow.
“He could make anything out of wood,” his great-great-grandson, 87-year-old Dan Duffy, said during a Memories of Historic Centralia presentation at McMenamins Olympic Club last month. “He had a little workshop by the road. He made furniture for the other settlers — beds, tables, spinning wheels, little wooden chairs.”
The story of his ancestor is only one of many shared by the longtime Centralia florist during his presentation to a packed crowd on May 19. Duffy, who ran Duffy’s Florist for 42 years with his wife, Nancy, shared some of nearly 700 photos collected through the Main Street Program, which since 1984 has helped communities statewide spruce up downtown commercial districts while retaining historical attributes. Duffy received an award from the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation for his work as co-chair of the Centralia Main Street Program. The citation describes his committee’s work as a blueprint in historic preservation for other small towns to follow.
“When we started the Main Street program, we had a call out to the community for people to save pictures of historic Centralia downtown businesses,” Duffy said. “And when they sent the pictures, we put them all into book form.”
We owe Duffy and his cohorts gratitude for the historic Centralia downtown we enjoy today and its hub as a center for antiques. His knowledge of local history, and the plethora of historic photos he has collected, are a community treasure. He is, too. Duffy also has given many guided tours of Centralia, and he treated the McMenamins’ audience to a taste of those as he shared priceless memories while showing photographs.
I love old photos, but the stories Duffy shared endeared him to his audience.
Take the Historic Centralia Fox Theatre, which with 1,200 seats was the largest theater between Portland and Tacoma when it opened Sept. 10, 1930, on Tower Avenue.
As a teenager, Duffy and a friend answered a newspaper ad for girls to take tickets. His friend said they should apply, but Dan said, “Wait a minute. It says girls wanted for work.” But his friend, who stood six-foot-three, said they’d need boys, too. They applied, and his friend was hired but quit two weeks later, so then they hired Dan.
“The manager of the theater was sort of one of these guys that was very impressed with firing people in the spirit of the moment, just because he wanted to impress somebody,” Duffy recalled. “I had no reason whatsoever to be fired. I was doing everything like I was supposed to, and one evening, he fired me in front of a bunch of people. I thought, okay, we’ll see about this. So, after the place closed, I knocked on the door to the office. ‘You said you were going to fire me today, but I want to tell you, you’re not.’ ‘What do you mean ‘you’re not’?’ ‘Well, would you like me to call the corporate office in Seattle and tell them about the after-hour parties you’re having here, feeding liquor to underage children?’ I did not lose my job.”
He spoke of his love for the Fox and urged people to financially support its restoration and preservation.
“I think it’s a very important part of our community,” he said.
He cleared up local lore about him playing the Fox’s pipe organ.
“I haven’t the slightest idea how to play a pipe organ,” he said. “I knew how to turn it on and banged a few beats on it, and it was so loud that it rang into the building next door to me, and the manager of the theater lived in the building, so I had to get off of that right away.”
He urged people to pick up a copy of “Centralia: The First Fifty Years, 1845–1900” by Centralia High School teacher Herndon Smith. Noting the dates in the title, Duffy quipped, “This lady did not teach math.” He urged everyone to read a copy of the 354-page book with 28 chapters containing stories based on interviews conducted by Smith’s high school English students.
“We have a lot of information there that wouldn’t be anyplace else, and it’s quite interesting to read,” Duffy said.
After thanking his wife and three sons for their support during the years, Duffy shared how he met Nancy on a blind date. She was running for Miss Lewis County and needed an escort to an event, so he agreed to do it.
“I knocked on the door, and here’s Nancy, and we got along very well,” he said. “And one month later, I asked her to marry me. Four months later, we were married. Now it’s 59 years later.”
An avid roller skater, Duffy was escorting a group to Bellingham during the Miss Lewis County pageant, so he called to ask how it went. “She said, ‘Well, I lost the event.’ I said, ‘What did you think about marrying me?’ ‘I’m going to marry you.’ So I felt like I’m a booby prize.”
Duffy said his mother attended Edison School. So did he, his three sons, and his grandchildren. He even taught there. And one of his ancestors hauled lumber to build the first school in Centralia.
“We’ve been around the area for a long, long time,” he said.
Duffy showed a photo of the 1912 Centralia High School, where he recalled taking conversational Latin.
“Can you imagine that?” he asked rhetorically. “Conversational Latin.”
His teacher kept calling him Clinton, his father’s name. His Spanish teacher assigned him the name Alvaro. When he asked why, she said it referred to a great Latin American lover. “At that point, I turned absolutely bright red,” he said.
One student placed a bullfrog in the bottom drawer of the teacher’s desk. When it croaked loudly, she ordered the students to “get that out of here.” So they did.
“They threw it out the window from the third floor to the concrete sidewalk,” Duffy recalled. “She was not pleased with the class.”
Construction of Interstate 5 diverted traffic away from downtown, he said. Renovations and fires changed the city’s landscape of buildings, and the April 1949 earthquake toppled chimneys and steeples. It knocked concrete off the Matz building, where Dr. Rice had parked his car. Bricks from the façade killed a pedestrian, 69-year-old Mark Cuvric, who was walking on Tower Avenue near Main Street.
It also destroyed Washington Elementary School, which had to be torn down and rebuilt.
But at that time, Duffy was living in California with his grandparents, which also produced an entertaining story. He liked to visit a horse stable not far away where children took riding lessons. He couldn’t afford the lessons but hung around with the kids there.
“The people that ran the place had little jobs for me to do once in a while,” he recalled. “And then one time, he says, ‘Dan, how’d you like to go for a ride?’ Because some other kid who was paying for the job didn’t come. I said, ‘Sure.’ ‘Well, we got a little work for you before you do that.’ ‘And what is that?’ He says, ‘Well, here’s a big shovel. I want you to go in the horse’s place and clean out all that poop.’ So anyway, the poop I cleaned out was for Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger. You guys have ever scooped poop for Trigger?”
Duffy showed a photo of the Veterans Memorial Pearl Street Pool, which was built in 1950 and closed in 2011. “That was a very controversial close for many of us, but perhaps it was the right thing to do,” he said.
As part of the Main Street Program, Duffy said, “I was really fussy on windows being clean and having stuff in the right spot.”
Several times, people broke into Duffy’s Florist, although he sounded baffled about what they expected to steal.
As a business owner, he sometimes had trouble collecting debts. He asked the owner of Harriet’s Corset Shop how she handled outstanding debts. “I just go to their house and take something,” she said. Once, she showed up at home on Gold Street, knocked on the door, told the residents they owed her money, then walked inside, unplugged a lamp, and started out the door with it. They paid what they owed her.
He showed photos of the 1913 Centralia Carnegie Library and talked about a ribbon-cutting for a George Washington plaque where he let his son, Eric, who was out from school sick, cut the ribbon. “When I got home, my other two sons said, ‘You’re not supposed to let him go out when he’s home from school because he’s sick.’”
He discussed the Sentinel statue erected in Washington Park by the American Legion to honor the four soldiers killed during the Centralia Tragedy in November 1919 — one of them his dad’s cousin — and the controversial 1996 mural across the street depicting the union perspective of the conflict.
“A nasty time,” he said when describing the Elks Lodge on the top floor of the Union and Trust building. “There was supposed to be kind of a mock trial up there.”
His sons attended Vacation Bible School at the Centralia Bible Chapel, and one evening, he sat in the front row during a meeting but started to feel ill with chest pains. He needed to leave, but he’d have to walk in front of the speaker and everyone else, so he did.
“I walked out the front door, went down and laid on the grass behind the building, and had a heart attack.” He shrugged. “That’s just the way it goes. So it was better that I was outside rather than sitting inside the building.”
Directly behind the chapel, though, was Newell-Hoerling’s Mortuary. Duffy said he wants to make sure he’s “really gone” before he goes there.
The old Daily Chronicle building grew in size, taking over the Centralia Rollerdrome’s parking lot where, years ago, people could park and see inside the skating rink, he said.
Frank McNitt erected the building in 1904 as the McNitt Dance Hall.
“It was converted into a skating rink in 1907 or 1909, I don’t remember, but this is the second oldest skating rink in the United States,” he said. The oldest, Oaks Park Roller Rink in Portland, opened in 1905.
Duffy pointed to a photo showing a row of kids and identified himself as the third one over on the bottom row. Beside the photo on the screen was a poster showing Duffy as a U.S. champion skater.
“I’ve had a great deal of fun roller skating all through all the years,” he said. “I started working there when I was in the sixth grade.”
While at the rink to skate, “Pop” Anderson asked if he’d like to hand out skates because the boy hired for the job hadn’t shown up. He told Duffy what to do, and he did it — all for 50 cents an hour.
His family lived on Buckner Street on the other side of the railroad tracks and, when the rink closed at 10 p.m., he sometimes found a train sitting on the tracks, blocking his way. So, he’d duck quickly beneath it to cross the tracks.
He showed a photo of Salewsky’s Jewelry’s brown 1880s street clock, which has graced downtown Centralia since 1945.
When the Duffys wanted to purchase a building to expand into selling antiques, they sought a bank loan. Without experience selling antiques, the bank officer said they weren’t likely to receive a loan, but he promised to check with headquarters in Seattle. Three days later, he called back. “He says, ‘Dan, they’re going to loan you the money.’ And I said, ‘You’re kidding me. Tell me about it.’ He says, ‘Well, I called and told them a florist wanted to buy that building, but he doesn’t have much experience selling antiques. Would you want to consider him?’”
The head honcho in Seattle responded, “Well, we would do that if it was Dan Duffy.”
He asked for more details and discovered the banker was one of the Hillyer family of Centralia.
“I happened to be a pall bearer for both of his grandparents’ funerals, and he taught me how to drive,” Duffy said. “I sort of had a little in with the bank, I think, on that one.”
Duffy said early buildings faced the railroad tracks on Front Street near the Centralia train depot, where 44 passenger trains passed through each day. That’s how Centralia earned the nickname the Hub City. “This was one of the major terminals between Portland and Seattle,” he said.
An elephant marched through downtown Centralia to the train depot during a Barnum and Bailey Circus parade. Duffy recalled riding atop one of the elephants when they performed in a big tent in front of the depot.
Duffy commended Rebecca Staebler for the historic renovation of the Hubbub building and described Rectangle Art Gallery as “one of the major draws for our community.”
He noted the Park Hotel stood at the corner of Fifth and Pearl for only seven years before it burned down. The Centralia Hotel housed the bus station. The Lewis and Clark originally had more than a hundred rooms but was divided into apartments.
“My grandmother lived there for seven years,” Duffy said. “They did a nice job on it.”
The Eastern Railway and Lumber Co. employed many workers in Centralia, and a shake mill that shipped throughout the United States until it burned down.
And, on Sept. 19, 1996, when President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, visited Centralia, they enjoyed lunch at the restaurant inside Duffy’s store.
“They decided to come into our store, so we all had a Secret Service clearance,” Duffy recalled. “The Clintons and the Gores came in, and they fed also 300 in Secret Service at that time. So it was a rather major event.”
Duffy spoke about a prowler breaking into the home of a woman who lived in a beautiful home at First and Pearl. She told Duffy, “I woke up in the middle of the night, and I was sound asleep: there was a man standing at the end of my bed.”
“And I says, ‘Lorraine, what did you do?’
“She says, ‘I said, get the hell out of here.’ And you know he left.”
Several years later, she told Duffy the prowler knocked on her door to apologize for breaking into her house.
Duffy spoke of the Borst Blockhouse, Seminary Hill, people climbing the outside wall of the Lewis and Clark Hotel, and local hospitals, including the room where he and two of his sons were born.
He also noted the city of Centralia uses yellow paint to cover graffiti on the Centralia train depot rather than a mix of red that would blend into the bricks. He had a gallon of brick-colored mixed paint donated by Greg of Ace Hardware and offered it to any city officials. “That’s my only criticism of the city through this program,” he said.
When he finished his presentation, Duffy asked his granddaughters to distribute historic photographs to everyone who attended and said, “Enjoy your life, and thanks for coming.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
