Personalities get bigger the closer they get to saltwater. It’s one of the things that makes being an editor on the coast so goshdarn entertaining.

Decades ago, I knew I had found a new home here on the western edge of Pacific County when I met a gravelly voiced woman of advanced years wearing a short skirt and fishnet stockings in the Long Beach Post Office.

Mary Lou Mandel was the legendary proprietor of Mary Lou’s Tavern in downtown Long Beach. She was famed for many things besides her fashion sense, including delectable hamburgers. One of my reporters vividly recalled sitting at the bar in the late 1980s as Mary Lou tended to a crusty stovetop, an ever-lengthening gray ash quivering at the end of her cigarette as she bent over burger patties frying in a puddle of well-tempered grease.

Mary Lou’s was a cultural and culinary landmark on the outer coast for a generation or more before being purchased by Russell Maize and Chris Summerer around December 2006. They undertook major remodeling on the way to reopening it as Castaways Seafood Grille. In the past few weeks I’ve watched as an even bigger rebuild takes place, including complete replacement of the ground-level south-facing wall — the side that bears the brunt of our pounding winter storms and which always goes to hell first. I mused that workmen must encounter archaeological deposits of grease and cigarette ash inside that old wall, and perhaps even the faintest whiff of Mary Lou’s perfume.

In an interview 20 years ago, another of my reporters spoke to retired Big Band leader Elmer Ramsey, who in 1947 began performing at the Long Beach Pavilion located directly behind Mary Lou’s. “You went up the steps right behind the tavern,” Ramsey recalled. “The Pavilion was used as a roller-skating rink during the week and there was a dance every weekend during the summer. I would bring my band of between 11 and 17 members and we would play for anywhere from 300 to 400 people.”

He said of Long Beach summer weekends immediately following World War II, “They were pretty wild. The entire main street would be packed with people and there would be some drinking and carrying on.” Ramsey remembered the Gypsy Tours motorcycle group that used to descend on Long Beach. “Once one of the Gypsy Tours guys rode a motorcycle right into the dance hall and did several laps around the floor during our performance.”

Long after the war, Mary Lou’s remained a late-night hot spot. Here are a couple Dispatch Report items from the early 1980s:

• Long Beach Officer Thornton “adjusted” a situation involving a fight in front of Mary Lou’s.

• Two men, one from Warrenton and the other from Nahcotta, reported they parked a green 1963 Studebaker somewhere between Long Beach Realty and Mary Lou’s Tavern and were unable to locate the vehicle at this time. Both subjects were extremely intoxicated.

Not myself being a tavern patron, I certainly don’t condone over-serving. And “adjusting,” in a law enforcement context, makes me a little uncomfortable. But viewed through the lens of time, I have nothing but affection for Mary Lou’s, and optimism for its next incarnation here on the wild west edge of America.

If you don’t already, please subscribe to the Chinook Observer. The weekly Dispatch Reports remain among our most popular items.