The Sunset View arch was a civic project by the local Nitwits club.

During the winter of 1931-32 Walker Tompkins created a poker club with five of his local friends — Les Wilson, Bill Winn, John Morehead, Bob Delay and Henry Edmunds. They called themselves the Nitwits and were joined by their girlfriends and wives — the “S.I.O.” or Six in One. Years later Lucille Wilson could remember all but one of the girls: Alva Slagle, Edith Winn, Nancy and Sharlee Peterson, and herself, Lucille Wickberg.

In the spring of 1932, the Nitwits undertook a big civic project under the leadership of Tompkins. They erected a ‘Sunset Arch’ on the sand ridge where folks went to watch the sun go down. It replaced a skimpy sign which had spanned the road to the beach since the turn of the century.

According to Tompkins’ oft-told tale, “One of the Nitwits, Les Wilson, a lifelong friend, sawed down a 100-foot Douglas fir on his property on the Nahcotta-Ilwaco highway, and hand-sawed it into three lengths, two uprights and a crossbeam.”

“We were just kids with no equipment,” Les would say.

And Walker would continue: “I spent months in the back room of a vacant store in Nahcotta painting a black and white signboard, which read OCEAN PARK on the western side and SUNSET VIEW on the inland side. It took all that spring of 1932 to complete, and it became a civic landmark which stood for over 20 years until the support logs rotted and the county declared the arch a menace to public safety. The logs were replaced with the steel masts of the wrecked ship Arrow.” (This landmark now is gone also.)

“As fate would have it, I wasn’t around the day the community turned out en masse to see the Nitwits dedicate our completed arch,” Walker would continue, and then he’d segue into a story about another, more typical antic of the Nitwits. Like the time they moved Walker’s entire “shack” while he was away and when, in the dead of night he returned, he had to grope around in the deep, dark woods for quite some time to find it.