Feature Story
How to Succeed in Business
This month we feature four local businesses ranging in age from zero to one hundred. We asked their owners to tell us about the hard work it took to get started and the dedication and perseverance required to succeed in the long run. Here are their stories.
- McCann Manor: Dayton's Newest Bed & Breakfast
- City Lumber: Entering it's Second Century
- State Farm: A Good Neighbor for Nearly 30 Years
- Jacci’s Yarn Basket: A Knitter's Paradise
McCann Manor:
Dayton’s Newest Bed & Breakfast
Ann and Jeff McCann
When Ann McCann was a young girl, she dreamed of being an innkeeper. “I loved to help my mother and grandmother in the kitchen,” she says, “and I knew I wanted to do something where I took care of people and prepared meals for them.”
Jeff McCann was halfway through his 21-year career in the U.S. Marines when he and Ann married. For most of that time he was a combat engineer. “We built all kinds of stuff out of wood,” says Jeff. “Bunkers and many kinds of buildings. It was all ‘quick and dirty’, but I really got to love working with wood.”
Walking through the newly restored Victorian home in Dayton that is now McCann Manor, there’s nothing “quick and dirty” in sight. Ann and Jeff have combined their passions to create Dayton’s newest bed and breakfast establishment. Craftsmanship and attention to detail are evident throughout.
Jeff says that his woodworking background in the Marines has been put to good use over the last six years, as he has slowly brought the home back to life. “But most of the work I’ve done on this house is ‘OJT’,” he says. (For the acronym-challenged, that means “on-the-job training”.) “The detailed finish work was all new to me. And there’s a lot of it, as you can see.”
When Jeff was approaching his retirement from the Marines, he and Ann were living in Yuma, Arizona, where he was stationed. “We had the plan to buy an old house and restore it into a bed-and-breakfast,” says Ann. “And I had been collecting furniture and furnishings for years. But we had no idea where we’d go.”
Ann and Jeff looked at several areas of the country, including Illinois, Arizona and western Washington. Ann’s niece lived in the Seattle area and had visited Dayton a few times. She suggested that Jeff and Ann check it out. So on a trip to the Northwest, the McCanns came to Dayton, and here they saw the large Victorian home next to the post office. “We thought that would be the perfect place for us, but it wasn’t for sale,” says Ann. A few months later Ann was looking at a real estate web site showing Dayton properties for sale, and there was the house they had seen. “We flew up and looked at the house the next week and made an offer,” says Ann. “By the time we had flown home again, our offer had been accepted. We had our house!”
The McCanns moved to Dayton in August 2003. Jeff had received his teaching degree while in the Marines and he began substitute teaching regularly in Dayton, Waitsburg and Prescott. He has held full-time positions in Prescott and Dayton Middle schools, and is currently teaching in Dayton.
For more than six years, Jeff and Ann have spent their free time creating McCann Manor. “I’ve done everything from moving walls to plumbing to spending many hours on finish work,” says Jeff. Ann put her design and decorating skills to work on the three guest rooms in the reconfigured upstairs. Downstairs, the parlor, library and entry are nearly complete and will be open for guests this spring. The McCanns plan to spend the next several months completing a downstairs guest room, the kitchen and dining rooms and an office and pantry.
Each of McCann Manor’s three upstairs guest rooms is decorated with a different historical theme:
• The Madame de Pompadour Room: The largest of the guest rooms has a separate sitting room and a double whirlpool bath.
• The Marco Polo Room: Influences of Persia, India and China give this room an exotic flavor.
• The John J. Audubon Room: Audubon’s famous bird illustrations are the highlight of this room, which overlooks the willow tree garden.
“We’ve been getting many calls from people who’ve heard about the Manor or seen it on our web site,” says Ann. “I’ve been calling them all back, and we’re starting to fill up rooms for the spring.”
Very soon, Ann’s childhood dream will come to life.
McCann Manor, 212 S. 2nd Street, Dayton
Phone: (509) 382-8967, Email: Innkeeper@McCannManor.com
Web Site: McCannManor.com
The Marco Polo Room at the McCann Manor
City Lumber:
Entering its Second Century
In 1910, Dayton was a growing young town. New homes and commercial buildings were being built at a brisk pace. Most of those buildings were heated with coal. In March of that year, an abandoned horse barn at the corner of Third and Commercial Streets was converted to an outlet for newly milled lumber to build those buildings and coal to heat them. This month, City Lumber and Coal Yard celebrates its 100th anniversary.
After horses and carriages, the main form of transportation in 1910 was the railroads. For its first fifty years, City Lumber received most of its lumber and coal shipments by rail. “Back in the early days there were a lot more employees here,” says City Lumber Manager Brad Hatfield. “They didn’t have forklifts, so the train cars had to be unloaded by hand.”
For many years, City Lumber ran its own sawmills. According to newspaper records from the 1920s and 30s, mills were operated by City Lumber in various locations in Columbia County, including Eckler Mountain and near the Tucannon River. Several competing mills were in operation in the county as well. For many years, City Lumber operated a large mill on South Fourth Street, near the current city limits. That mill burned in 1941, which ended the company’s sawmill business.
In the early 1930s, Brad’s grandfather, Lonnie Hatfield, was bookkeeper for City Lumber, which was one of several lumber companies in eastern Oregon and Washington owned by the Van Patten family. Lonnie later became City Lumber’s manager, and when the Van Pattens put the firm up for sale, Lonnie made a deal to purchase it.
In the mid-1930s, City Lumber became an active home builder in Dayton. “Lonnie bought property on Syndicate Hill and built several homes there,” says Brad. In a 1939 newspaper advertisement, City Lumber offered to construct a new home – a small 3-room structure – for a very reasonable price. “Why pay rent when you can have this home with no down payment and own it in seven years for only $14.73 per month,” the ad said.
Throughout the 20th century, City Lumber sold coal to heat many of the homes and commercial buildings in Dayton. In fact, City Lumber didn’t stop selling coal until 2000. “A couple of years before that I started telling customers they were going to need to convert their furnaces to something else,” says Brad.
In the 1960s, Lonnie Hatfield purchased the Potlach Lumber Company property across the railroad tracks from the City Lumber yard. “That was the first property we owned,” says Brad. Until the 1970s, the Hatfields leased the property between 3rd and 4th along the north side of the tracks. “The rent was so cheap that there was no reason to buy it,” Brad says. “But the rent was going up and rumors were going around that the railroad was pulling out, so my grandfather finally negotiated to buy it.”
Brad Hatfield helped with the firm’s home construction during the 1970s. “I remember going up after school and sweeping out the houses after the workers were done for the day,” he says. After High School, Brad worked in construction in Portland, as well as in Dayton. “I didn’t have much to do with the company in those days,” he says, “and I didn’t really plan to.”
After Lonnie died in 1983, Brad’s parents, Don and Nancy Hatfield, took over ownership of City Lumber. Don was an active local real estate broker at the time, so when the family needed a new manager in the early 1990s, Brad agreed to step in and help out for awhile.
Since the mid-1990s, City Lumber has been the only source in the Touchet Valley for most building materials. Brad attributes part of the company’s success to the broad range of products it offers. “Our contractor business is cyclical, and like everywhere, it’s down right now,” says Brad. “But our homeowner business has remained strong. Yard and garden, and landscaping materials, have become a very big part of our business in recent years, and those areas have also remained strong.”
“The thing I appreciate most is how loyal most of our customers are,” Brad says. “I’ve gotten to know many of them well, and we wouldn’t be here without them.”
City Lumber & Coal Yard, 200 N. 3rd Street, Dayton
Phone: (509) 382-4211
State Farm: A Good Neighbor for Nearly 30 Years
Angie Black, Kim Seney, Diane Ashley and Bette Lou Crothers
In mid-February we visited Bette Lou Crothers in her State Farm Insurance office on Dayton’s Main Street to talk about her insurance career. She and her husband Gene had just returned from their annual two-week vacation in Hawaii, so we asked her about that first.
“During the first week in Maui, we went whale-watching,” says Bette Lou. “The whales swam all around us and I watched one swim right under the boat.” She says that each year, thanks to preservation efforts, whale and dolphin populations have grown significantly. “This was our best whale-watching year ever,” she says.
Next year, Bette Lou will celebrate her thirtieth anniversary with State Farm, so she certainly deserved her vacation. They had a wonderful time, she told us, but she was very glad to be back at work. Really!
Bette Lou is only Dayton’s second State Farm agent, and she doesn’t even hold the record. Floyd McCauley, who still resides in Dayton, sold insurance for State Farm for more than 35 years, before retiring in 1980. He began selling insurance for State Farm from a desk in the back of his Dayton radio and TV repair shop in the early 1940s. “Back in those days, State Farm hired mostly part-time agents who ran other businesses,” says Bette Lou.
Bette Lou came to Dayton in the 1960s when her father worked on the construction of Little Goose Dam. She met Gene in high school and they were married shortly after. In the mid-1970s, after both of their daughters had entered school, Bette Lou began working for the Leonard-Roe-Wallace agency in Dayton. “I knew nothing about insurance,” she says. “But I learned fast, and I really enjoyed it.
“When Floyd retired, State Farm began looking for a good stable family man to become their new Dayton agent,” says Bette Lou, laughing. “Their regional manager started asking around town about possible prospects, and one of the names that came up was Gene. He told him, ‘you need to talk to my wife’.” Soon Bette Lou had passed all of her aptitude and licensing tests and she was in business for herself.
For several years, State Farm shared an office with Blue Mountain Realty in the building where the Dayton Chamber of Commerce is now located. Then, in 1991, with business growing steadily, Bette Lou decided the agency needed a building of its own. She and Gene purchased the former Seattle First National Bank building at First and Main that had most recently housed a Sears Catalog store.
State Farm Building at 201 E. Main Street, Dayton
As the business grew, Bette Lou began adding staff. Her daughter, Kim Seney, began working in the office while she was still in high school and now has more than 20 years experience. Diane Ashley has been working in Bette Lou’s office since 1991. Angie Black came to work in her office in March 2008, but has been a State Farm agent since 1986.
Bette Lou has been a very active participant in the Dayton community since she started her insurance career. She served on the Dayton City Council for six years in the 1980s. She was an original board member of the Dayton Development Task Force and a key player in the revitalization of Main Street in the early 1990s. She has also been a member of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors for more than twenty years.
In 1995, after a consultant told the Chamber of Commerce it needed to sponsor more local events to draw visitors, Bette Lou suggested holding a car show. She was put in charge. “Gene and I have a couple of classic cars, and we knew how popular the car shows are,” she says. That first show was a success and All Wheels Weekend, held each Fathers’ Day weekend, has become Dayton’s biggest event. Bette Lou and her committee will put on their 16th annual show this year.
When Bette Lou started her insurance career there were at least five insurance agencies in Dayton. Now hers is the only dedicated insurance office remaining. “We offer a wide range of products to our policy holders,” she says. “And we’ve worked hard to provide the best service we can.”
State Farm Insurance, 201 E. Main Street, Dayton
Phone: (509) 382-4444
Jacci’s Yarn Basket: A Knitter's Paradise
Jacci Wooten knits a pair of socks simultaneously.
When Jacci Wooten was in high school in Southern California, it was customary for the girls to knit argyle socks for their boyfriends. “It took a long time to knit those socks,” she says. “So if he was still around when you were done, you knew he was special.” Jacci says that her husband Tom still has the first pair of socks she gave him all those years ago. “People tell me I should hang them in the shop. Maybe I will.”
“The shop” is Jacci’s Yarn Basket on Dayton’s Main Street. Jacci carries a huge selection of yarn from around the world. She pointed out some examples to an amazed non-knitter. “We have wool yarns from Oregon and Montana, and from Norway, Uruguay and Peru,” she says. “Alpaca and angora are very popular now, and we’re getting in a new line of camel hair blends.” Jacci carries a large selection of sock yarns, which are multicolored and create patterns in the socks automatically as you knit.
As an expert knitter, Jacci is happy to teach beginners how to get started knitting and to help solve problems for her customers. “Sometimes someone will bring in a hand-knit sweater that’s been damaged, and I’ll do the best I can to repair it,” she says.
After working as a librarian in Whitefish, Montana and Moscow, Idaho for several years, Jacci became an entrepreneur in her 40s. “I went to Cosmetology School and then started working in a salon on the WSU campus in Pullman,” she says. “Two years later the owner wanted to sell the salon, so I bought it.” Jacci and her family were living 9 miles east in Moscow, and many of her Moscow friends were her customers. “I decided to open another salon there,” she says. Within five years, Jacci owned three salons in Pullman and Moscow and had as many as nine stylists working for her. “The WSU salon was very successful,” she says. “But it was so much work that I finally sold that salon and ended up working in my salon in Moscow, just by myself.”
From high school on, Jacci remained an avid knitter. She was a regular customer of a yarn shop in Moscow, and when that shop merged with a quilt shop and its inventory was reduced, Jacci decided to start selling a few lines of yarn in her Moscow salon. “Many of my customers were knitters and it really took off,” she says.
When Tom retired in 2005, Jacci sold her last Moscow salon, and she and Tom were ready to find a new home town with a milder climate. They passed through Dayton on a trip to Walla Walla, and “we thought this would be the perfect place.” Jacci knew she wanted to open a yarn shop in her new home town, so she rented the storefront across from the Weinhard Hotel and was in business again.
“I’ve been very fortunate that the shop has been so well received,” says Jacci. Since there is no longer a dedicated yarn shop in Walla Walla, Jacci says she has many customers who make the 30 mile drive to Dayton to shop in her store. “I have customers who drive up and shop here and then go to lunch,” she says. “I often see them walking around enjoying our Main Street.” Jacci says that she has some customers from Western Washington who stop in Dayton on a regular basis while traveling east. “I even have a few customers from back east who discovered my shop while visiting Dayton and call in phone orders,” she says.
“I especially enjoy helping people get started who have never knitted before,” says Jacci. So if you’re ready to give something special to your boyfriend (or girlfriend), how about knitting them a pair of socks? Jacci is ready to show you how.
Jacci's Yarn Basket, 242 E. Main Street, Dayton
Phone: (509) 382-2526