4A • May 27, 2016 • Seaside Signal • seasidesignal.com
SignalViewpoints
Missing the days
of the election
polling place
I
SEASIDE SIGNAL/SUBMITTED PHOTO
Once upon a time at Seaside Golf Course.
Time to ‘Par-Tee’ once again
at the Seaside Golf Course
O
ne of the city’s historic properties is getting a save.
Like others who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s,
Seaside’s Phil Warmbrodt and Cassie Sweeney had fond
memories of the Seaside Golf Course and its famed restaurant, the
Par-Tee Dining Room.
“The three premier dinner houses in the 1950s and 1960s were
the Par-Tee Room, the Crab Broiler, and Harrah’s downtown,”
Warmbrodt said. “They
had wedding, recep-
tions, prom dinners —
SEEN FROM SEASIDE
this was the spot.”
R.J. MARX
Warmbrodt and
Sweeney, who also
own Borland Electric in
Gearhart, are the new
owners of the Par-Tee and its 125 acres, including the nine-hole
Seaside Golf Course.
“Our goal is to revive the course because it had gone downhill
so bad in the last 10 years,” Warmbrodt said. “The fi rst two weeks
we’ve done nothing but clean. We just took out 18 dump trucks
full of trash. Six big 30-foot containers.”
Sweeney said she plans to revive the breakfast and lunch busi-
ness, open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the restaurant with the bar
open until 9 in the summer. “We’re expanding the bar with more
seating, and patio with outside seating,” she said. “We have a big
clientele for Sunday brunch.”
Warmbrodt, 64 and Sweeney, 63, are both Seaside High
School grads. They’ve owned Borland Electric in Gearhart for 23
years.
They both love golf and take golf vacations when they can.
But what they really want to share is the rich history of the
golf course and its property.
The ‘last word in elegance’
Oregon Coast historian Ellis Lucia described Ben Holladay’s
Seaside House as “the last word in elegance.”
Holladay, a Portland land developer and railroad builder
known as the “giant of the Old West,” bought the property in
1870 and designed an Italian villa with “some 50 luxurious guest
rooms, thickly-carpeted Victorian parlors, bars and lounges, game
rooms and a splendid dining hall serving the fi nest cuisine in all
the West.”
In its heyday, the resort boasted a race track, stable of race
horses, groves of trees, vast lawns and a stream with a wooden
bridge.
According to Lucia, “the nation’s elite —Wall Street bankers,
Comstock nabobs, tycoons, congressmen, legislators fl ocked to
Seaside House,” transporting them to the hotel over a road paved
with clamshells.
But by the 1900s Seaside House was empty. The former grand
hotel was converted to a medical facility during the war.
After the war, Seaside House was dismantled, making way
for the Seaside Golf Course in 1923. The course was designed
by a celebrity of his day, Chandler Egan, the last summer games
Olympic gold-medal winner for golf, held in 1904 in St. Louis.
Egan went on to settle in the Pacifi c Northwest, where he
designed golf courses from Pebble Beach to Seattle, including
Seaside’s.
On opening day, Oregon’s state champion Clare Griswold and
Rudolph Wilhelm, both of the Portland Golf Club, defeated O.F.
R.J. MARX/SEASIDE SIGNAL
Cassie Sweeney and Phil Warmbrodt, new owners of Seaside
Golf Course.
Willing of Waverly Country Club and John Rebstock of Portland
“1-up.”
“Some very good golf was played,” reported the July 5, 1923,
Seaside Signal, “with four birdies negotiated and a number of
holes brilliantly played.”
Charlie Cartwright II bought the place in 1931. Cartwright
was the grandson of Charles Morrison Cartwright, one of the
“pioneers of 1853,” a state legislator and namesake for Seaside’s
Cartwright Park.
Charlie Cartwright II maintained the golf course and built the
Par-Tee Room and Lounge extension in 1954.
“This place was hopping, it was alive,” Sweeney said. “This
was the place to go. It was the best dinner house in Seaside.”
Charlie Cartwright, who died in 2003 at age 94, sold the golf
course to Fred Fulmer Jr. in 1971.
New owners
After Fulmers’ sons Wayne and Fred III died, Fulmer’s daugh-
ter Vickie sold it to the Warmbrodts this spring in a deal brokered
by Cascade Sotheby’s International, Farzan Kamali and Sally
Conrad. In acquiring the 125-acre property, they also acquired the
old Fulmer house next door.
“We were able to commandeer this with a unique deal,”
Warmbrodt said. “We bought the corporation intact, which won’t
take place until around June 1.”
The bones of the building are “excellent,” Warmbrodt said.
“It’s very sound.”
Plans for the upstairs remain uncertain. “We want to get the
breakfast and lunch clientele built up before we open upstairs in
the Par-Tee room,” he said.
Meanwhile, the couple is moving next door with the former
Cartwright house next to the putting green.
“It kind of just happened,” Sweeney said. “We were just
getting ready to go to Tucson. We’re a little tired, but we’re loving
it.”
“It’s way more than what we anticipated, but we brought
Borland’s back to success,” Warmbrodt said.
“We want to make it alive again,” Sweeney added. “For peo-
ple to enjoy it. To make it hopping.”
had a stimulating conversation one Friday with Alex
Dennon. It turns out he was the son of my once
neighbor and babysitter, Jean Raitanen Dennon whom
many people know as their favorite hairdresser. Alex had
discovered a few things in my book, which he wanted to
know more about and that’s always fl attering. We seemed
to have a lot in
common (I thought)
and he gave me a
SCENE & HEARD
couple of his books CLAIRE LOVELL
to read — one quite
a daunting 1070
pages. Yikes! Talk
about homework.
Alex also fi gured out several more ways the nines were
signifi cant in my life. I’ll have to ask him to write them
down.
As one who has always been interested in spelling,
grammar and English usage, I’m usually on the lookout for
mistakes in the written word. Especially in books, maga-
zines, newspapers or signs in the workplace. Recently I saw
one that said “Whole Karnal Corn.” Could that be a dirty
joke? My kids are especially aware of the use of the apos-
trophe. There are many times, visible around town when the
sign says “it’s” although a possessive is implied. (Yes, “it’s”
means “it is.”) Most often the apostrophe should be left out.
Around my neighborhood while work continues on
Holladay, there’s often
the smell of natural
gas. Ugh. The gas
man can’t fi nd it on
his meter, which he
says, is thousands of
something-or-other
more sensitive than my
nose, but I don’t buy it.
He can’t get a reading.
Ah, well. A stink by
any other name would
smell the same.
Wouldn’t it be nice
to have a voter’s pamphlet before a person gets their ballot?
It’s almost impossible to know who’s available for commit-
tee person or even to fi gure a choice among candidates for
judge, but it would be great to have a mini-bio instead of
the eeny-meeny-miney-mo method of selection. I hate vote
by mail. I like the idea of going to the polls and getting a
sticker for having done my duty. Yes, it probably costs more
but lots of places still do it. It’s one more piece of America
we’ve tossed by the wayside.
My visiting nephew Mike Wharton from California
left me a message to pass on. He spent two or three days
digging clams on the low tides early in the morning. At that
time, he said around 5:30 to 6:30 a.m., the restrooms at the
beach were not unlocked and ready for visitors. I would
think that on his early rounds, whoever’s job it is to make
the restrooms available — a police offi cer or city employee
— should do it early enough that visitors will not be incon-
venienced. Men sometimes fi nd the waiting more diffi cult.
How disappointing to learn that the Seaside High School
centennial celebration had come and gone without my being
aware of it. I was waiting for an announcement sometime in
the future if there was one, I missed it. As a member of the
Class of ’37, I may not have been able to go, age having its
imponderables, but I would have loved the idea of consider-
ing it since my kind no longer has class reunions. Life does
throw us its little curves.
Wouldn’t it be nice
to have a voter’s
pamphlet before a
person gets their
ballot?
Laugh Lines:
Q: What kind of a dinosaur has an extensive vocabulary?
A: A Thesaurus. (Courtesy of Dana Perino)
First verse of a poem “To Whom it May Concern.”
“You goofy guys without your ties
have prompted my confessing;
you think it’s smart
but I impart
you left home without dressing.”
Final thoughts next week.
Big improvements in county’s library system
L
ibraries in Clatsop County have
been in the news quite a bit
lately. The City of Warrenton
just discovered that their library has
structural issues, and the Astoria Public
Library has been working on a plan for
their new or renovated building over
the past year and a half. Personally, I
am very excited that these are times
where the Warrenton and Astoria
libraries can plan toward even better
libraries than what they currently offer.
The opportunities before the city of
Astoria and the city of Warrenton are
bigger and better, to build new library
community centers that have lasting
impact for future generations.
It is amazing the myth that contin-
ues to circulate that libraries are dying
in America. If you were in charge of a
fast food place and you sold 135,000
burgers every year for a population
of 6,500 people, would you say your
restaurants was obsolete and in danger
of being replaced? The Seaside Public
Library checks out 135,000 items an-
nually, and the door count on our main
doors is over 200,000 per year, yet I
constantly get asked when libraries are
PUBLISHER
EDITOR
Steve Forrester
R.J. Marx
BETWEEN
THE COVERS
ESTHER MOBERG
going away. I think the problem may
be that non-library users equate librar-
ies with dusty books sitting in a dim
building where a starched librarian on
a tall stool peers over her glasses at
you. This is the opposite of the Seaside
Library. Today, we had four classes
from local schools visit the library
and participate in story times. We had
events in our community room includ-
ing government assistance programs.
About 50 people used our computer
center, looking up job resources and
checking their e-mail. People helped
themselves to the paperback exchange
or browsed the library bookstore. Last
week we had a large group learning to
use the ukulele at a library program,
and on June 2 we will have a very
special presentation on World War II
that will tie in with an exhibit hosted
in the main part of the Seaside Public
Library. Personal fl ags carried by Japa-
nese soldiers in world war two will be
returned to their families in Japan as
part of the process of healing wounds
from World War II. This is just a small
sampling of the range of programs, ex-
periences, and resources to be found in
your local library that are unmatched
by any other program or center.
I thought fi ve years ago that by
2020 most books would no longer
be available in paper form, but now
I think it’s going to take a couple
decades, if ever. The truth is, constant
screen time on e-readers is not some-
thing the majority of people enjoy,
even in the younger generations. Typ-
ically the use of E-Readers continues
to be seen as a lightweight alternative
to lugging around a library of books.
Most people who have E-Readers or
read on their smartphone also have a
collection of books in paper as well.
Reading is the main thing, not the for-
mat. When e-books fi rst came out over
a decade ago, most librarians were
prepared to see book usage steadily
decline while digital books increased.
We have seen a huge increase in digital
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book use, and in the fi rst few years
digital book usage grew astronomi-
cally, but paper format has not gone
away as was expected and if anything,
continues to be in demand.
Teaching kids to read on e-readers
means increased screen time and chil-
dren will be less likely to connect with
the books they are reading because of
the detachment from the paper form,
while young developing eyes will be
under more strain from screen time. In
fact, e-readers and tablets have been
demonstrated to add to distraction that
learning using a paper form textbook
does not. Students in college have
actually found that using textbooks on
a tablet or laptop leads to less focused
time studying and most prefer a paper
textbook still, even in a generation that
hasn’t known life before e-readers.
Of course, there is no simple solu-
tion and no one answer to the complex
questions of libraries and the perfect
service models. The wisest thing we
can do is to continue to look at each
individual community to make sure
we provide for as many of the needs as
budget and staffi ng allow.
Seaside Signal
Letter policy
The Seaside Signal
is published every
other week by
EO Media Group,
1555 N. Roosevelt,
Seaside, OR 97138.
503-738-5561
seasidesignal.com
The Seaside Signal welcomes letters to the
editor. The deadline is noon Monday prior to
publication. Letters must be 400 words or less
and must be signed by the author and include a
phone number for verifi cation. We also request
that submissions be limited to one letter per
month. Send to 1555 N. Roosevelt Drive,
Seaside, OR 97138, drop them off at 1555 N.
Roosevelt Drive or fax to 503-738-9285.
Or email rmarx@seasidesignal.com
At your local library, you can
check out 20-50 books a week, and
return them for free. If you checked
out 25-50 books, movies, and CDS,
every 2 weeks and read them, you
would have had access to a library of
1,250 items in a year, with a value of
about $18,750. You wouldn’t have had
to store them in your house, and you
could browse many other books, CDs,
and DVDs while selecting the ones
you preferred. The piece people don’t
seem to get that don’t use the library is
how much is available to them at little
or no personal cost in a library. They
get full internet access, resources,
databases, music, movies, eBooks, and
audiobooks and they aren’t expected
to pay thousands of dollars in return.
Your piece of supporting the library is
a small amount in return on the value
you actually receive. The Seaside, As-
toria, and Warrenton Libraries are well
used and well-loved. Use your library,
send people to the library, and discover
for yourself that libraries are still the
best place to get the best value in items
and resources for everyone from one
month to 100 years old.
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