Like a bitter windstorm, the recession walloped Port Angeles in late 2008, just in time for Adam and Christy Parent to open their business.
But the business had something else going for it. This place at Peabody and Eighth streets was once a drive-through pharmacy; later it was the Latte Lodge — and then it became a love nest.
Last week, Adam and Christy celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary and took some time out to talk about the business they have built: the Blackbird, a pie-and-coffee shop that is, in a word, thriving.
And despite a rough start and long hours, the Parents — along with their four children — are doing that too.
They’re also planning their next venture as entrepreneurs. After almost four years of running the Blackbird, Christy and Adam have put the place up for sale, even as it grows increasingly prosperous.
In this month’s issue of Sunset magazine, for example, a roundup article about Port Angeles and the Elwha River restoration includes the Blackbird as an essential stop. The piece notes how long it takes to get here from Seattle, gives the location of the Elwha, mentions the nearby rain forest, recommends shopping at the “upscale” Sunny Farms — and anoints the Blackbird’s latte as the best around.
The beverage, however, is just one of the Parents’ creations.
“Adam is an idea factory,” Christy says, so when the pair settles on a particular idea, “we dialogue it out.”
They have been dialoguing, though not always in perfect balance, since 1996. That fall, both were students at Northland International University in Wisconsin. Adam was a freshman from Port Angeles while Christy was a senior from Indianapolis. One day, he saw her across the library and was struck by romantic lightning.
Adam didn’t stay at Northland. He ran out of money and returned to the North Olympic Peninsula, some 1,865 miles away, but that didn’t hinder his wooing of Christy.
For two years, while Adam worked in a bank here and Christy taught high school English in South Bend, Ind., they had an old-school long-distance courtship. We’re talking AOL Instant Messenger. Land-line phone bills that soared skyward like supercharged lovebirds. And the pièces de résistance, actual handwritten letters.
Back when Adam was first sending her these romantic missives, Christy was repeatedly astonished at how well he knew her likes and dislikes. He would send her the perfect card with the perfect photo on it.
“That was unnerving,” she says.
Her friends, seeing this unfolding, weren’t cautious. Their assessment of him could be summed up, Christy recalls, as “Yes. Of course. Yes.”
After several months of writing and talking on the phone, Adam invited Christy to spend the summer in Port Angeles.
“She declined. I was devastated,” he remembers.
“I had already made commitments for the summer,” she explains.
The couple did spend New Year’s Eve 1998 together. That night Adam proposed. They married July 16, 1999, in Indianapolis where her family lives, and then came to live in Port Angeles.
They started their family here a year and a half later; Olivia, their firstborn, is 11 now. She’s big sister to Elias, who will be 10 this week; Addison, 8, and Ava, 4.
Olivia learned to crawl while her mom and dad were growing their first business together: Oak and Willow. Despite the name, this was a lavender-product enterprise that began with lavender-and-flaxseed pillows.
Adam worked in a bank and Christy as a private tutor as they manufactured the fragrant pillows, and sold them first at the Sequim Open Aire Market and then at the Lavender Festival.
This was back in the early 2000s when, Adam said, there weren’t a lot of lavender pillows lying around. So he and Christy made hundreds and hundreds of them; they later expanded to lotions and other goods.
They moved to Portland, Ore., where Adam worked toward a degree in theology and education at Multnomah University; he and Christy continued to run Oak and Willow while raising their first three children, all of whom were younger than age 6.
Then Adam’s mother, Sue Parent, became ill with cancer. In summer 2008, he brought his family back home to Port Angeles, got a job as a laborer on a construction site and hoped for the best.
For some time preceding this move, Adam and Christy had talked with friends about how they would like to try another kind of business. They envisioned a cafe, a clean, well-lighted place where people could come for good coffee and conversation.
One day, two of those friends told the Parents about a Craigslist.com posting about a coffee shop for sale in Port Angeles. Adam and Christy found the place, then the Latte Lodge, and knew “it was totally us,” Christy recalls.
Trouble was, the economic downturn had been visited upon Port Angeles; things did not bode well for a Mom and Pop business.
Yet Mom and Pop Parent believed in themselves. They believed just as strongly that Port Angeles needed a new, bright spot.
So they made an offer and asked the owners of the Latte Lodge to carry a contract for the purchase.
The owners said no. Then they closed their doors.
Adam emailed again, making the same offer and asking if they would consider it one more time.
On that second try, “they agreed,” he says, “to take a chance on us.” The sale was finalized Oct. 30, 2008, as Christy and Adam shifted into high remodeling gear.
At the same time, Adam’s mother’s health worsened. He and Christy worked on their shop during the day, with their kids scampering around; at night, they visited Sue in the hospital.
She and Adam’s father, artist Doug Parent, gave Adam and Christy their unflagging support as they prepared to open the Blackbird.
Sue died just before Thanksgiving 2008. Those were dark days, Adam remembers, but they were also hopeful ones.
Adam and Christy knew, with their whole hearts, that they had found the right business at the right time — although many of their patrons didn’t help them hold that attitude.
When they opened on the first of December — amid snow, ice and long, dark nights — people would come in and say things like “Hmm, don’t know if you’re going to make it,” Adam recalls. And that kept on, just like the recession.
“For the first couple years, there was this onslaught of negativity,” says Adam.
So he and Christy made another major decision together: They vowed to stay positive, no matter what kind of day they were having. They decided to talk not about how bad the economy was, but instead about how to best nurture their business.
They were, as the Lennon-McCartney song goes, blackbirds singing in the dead of night.
Amazing things began to happen. The Parents got busy — and busier, baking pies and making soups.
Among the most popular to this day are Adam’s salted caramel pecan pie and his triple berry — marionberry, blueberry and raspberry filling — with orange-ginger streusel.
In the Blackbird’s first month, the Parents also introduced their bread pudding, which is still a beloved treat and a secret recipe people try to wheedle out of them.
Adam likes to get creative with the savories too: Tuscan tuna salad, Caribbean pumpkin-black bean soup.
As the Blackbird bustled, Christy was the barista with a baby in her backpack: Ava, her youngest, came to work with her mom every day.
The older children had helped choose the coffeehouse’s name, inspired not by the Beatles song but by “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.” Note to youngsters who wonder: The bird is just in the name, not in any dish.
While Adam still makes the soups, salads and pies from scratch each day, Christy has returned to teaching.
She home-schools the kids, filling the mornings with lessons and the afternoons with field trips, swimming at the William Shore Memorial Pool, activities at the Port Angeles Library and music and dance classes at the Ballet Workshop and Sequim’s Aspire Academy.
At the Blackbird, “we’ve grown every month since we opened,” Adam reports. The cafe has enjoyed record sales volumes in recent months, he adds, along with an increase in tourist business.
It’s time, though, for the next phase of the family’s life.
“The dream for this place was to build it,” Adam says, “and sell it and move on to something else.”
The building part is done: “We quadrupled the gross,” he adds. “We’ve never worked so hard, never learned so much in our lives.
“It takes a while in a small town to be embraced,” Adam says. “But we feel that we have been embraced.”
The Blackbird has become that old-fashioned thing, a Mom and Pop shop where the food and drink support a young family.
The Parents hope to sell their cafe to someone with the same values: of providing a positive space where people from all walks of life can be comfortable.
And when the Blackbird does go into new hands, Christy and Adam will embark on their next project. They’re not ready to disclose what it is, but they do say it will involve travel across the United States and continued home-schooling of their kids.
“We want to have our kids as close to us as possible,” says Adam.
“It’s bittersweet. But we’re ready for a new adventure.”
So the Parents will be leaving Port Angeles, but it seems appropriate to quote yet another song by another pair.
It’s very clear, as Ira and George Gershwin would say, their love is here to stay.
Locking eyes with her man, Christy puts a finer point on it.
“We love working together,” she says.
“We know each other so well; it’s intuitive.”