PORT ANGELES — Wedding chapel, children’s nursery, tavern, place of morning starshine: Odyssey Bookshop has played plenty of roles over the past 40 years.
And the store — now jam-packed with CDs, cards, toys and other goodies besides used and new books — will be the place for a birthday bash Tuesday, complete with cake, party favors and prizes randomly handed out.
Odyssey Bookshop is that rare animal: an independently owned bookstore that is doing fine, thank you, four decades after a 23-year-old from Bremerton became the owner.
It was Craig Whalley who bought the tiny shop at 114 W. Front St. for $2,850 in March 1971. Later in the decade, he inherited some money and bought the building that housed Odyssey; during the mid-1980s, he expanded into the former M&C Tavern space next door.
Today, the proprietor is April Bellerud, who went from hanging out and helping out at the store to the person who bought the business from Whalley in September 2009.
Setting for weddings
Bellerud said about 20 people have been married, with Whalley as officiant, amid the books.
Whalley, you see, is a Universal Life minister, and once word got around town that he could lawfully wed people, the couples starting coming in.
“Twenty is a very conservative estimate of the number of marriages done at the store,” Whalley said last week from his new home in Berkeley, Calif.
“I’d grab a couple of customers for witnesses if necessary, stand the couple up in the romance section, and the whole thing would take five or 10 minutes,” he said.
“I’d charge $5 for those and feel like I was robbing them, although they were always very happy.”
Then, there were the kids.
Four grew up at Odyssey, at their mothers’ sides: Bellerud’s daughter, Porter Funston, now 10; longtime employee Daphne Evans’ daughter, Alex, now 19; and former staffer Susan Chadd’s sons, Jake and Alex Haverfield, now 29 and 33, respectively.
“They were tiny babies,” Bellerud said. “Susan brought them to work in a Moses basket,” and one Christmas, Whalley named the young Alex Haverfield employee of the year.
How was it that Whalley was such a progressive employer, permitting his workers to bring their kids?
“Much of that came from being such a pushover,” for assertive women, he said.
After selling the store to Bellerud, Whalley took some time off, then moved to Berkeley to become the executive director of www.Lifering.org, an online community for recovering alcoholics.
He recalls his Odyssey days with fondness and said Port Angeles welcomed him and the bookstore with its laid-back atmosphere, “not quite hippie but with some of that vibe.”
In recent years, Bellerud has expanded the shop’s merchandise to include things like the Starlightz that shine out the front window.
She and Evans also added children’s toys and gifts, since they couldn’t find much of that around town when their kids were little.
There are people who tell her: “This isn’t a bookstore.”
Variety part of charm
Bellerud apologizes to them — but believes Odyssey’s variety is part of its charm.
“I think when people go into a bookstore, they should find surprises,” she said.
Bellerud hopes to someday expand further, toward the rear of the building, and even give Odyssey its own solar panels.
When asked why the store has prospered, Bellerud answered with something she called “a cliche,” but true: “We have a relaxed family atmosphere,” she said.
“Every single day,” she added, “I have a person come in and say, ‘I just love it here.’”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
