“My dad was the third Italian to come out here, I think…in fact he worked at Issaquah, putting in roads over in that area. And he had other jobs. But he was a kind of independent person. He wanted to be in his own business. That’s why he started his little store (Salmon Creek Grocery).
But the store was not very profitable. People didn’t have much money in those days. He put a lot of things on credit. My dad had a big heart. He could be an ornery cuss, but he had a big heart. And he loved children. The store was open to them. There was a family that lived close to them, McDaniels, and they had eight or nine kids, and they didn’t have any money. Well Dad couldn’t see them going hungry, so they would ‘put it on the books, put it on the books.’ Well, he put so much on the books…
He started the store in 1919. I can remember, but I was just a little kid (born in 1926). He closed the store in 1930. When they took the street car line out, business dropped off, and then there was the Depression and people couldn’t pay their bills. He did a lot of business on weekends, people came out from the city on the street car. They would get off at the store here. He’d buy five gallons of ice cream and sell ice cream cones. In fact I still have the original ice-cream scoop from the store.
This was not the end of the street-car line, it went down to Seahurst. A lot of people would come out, get off, and go down to the creek here. Salmon Creek went on down to the Sound. As kids we used to walk down there. That would have been in the 30’s about ’33 or ’34. There was an old skid road where they did logging (of course that’s not there any more). They would log the logs and skid them down to the Sound and then they’d barge them away… “