PORT TOWNSEND — The joint was once called “The Speakeasy,” and it was loaded with colorful characters.
Soon, this crowd will turn an otherwise plain building into “The Speakeasier,” the scene of activities sordid and, well, high-spirited.
The doors to this lair will open at 5 p.m. both Dec. 6 and 7, as the crew stages this murder mystery play, buffet dinner — and a farewell from the people who started the whole tradition one night in 2006.
Bob Logue is the leader of this group, but he’s not your typical theater auteur.
He’s manager of RSVP, the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program that matches elders with local nonprofit organizations in need.
RSVP dates to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, Logue said; it was part of the War on Poverty and aimed to address local problems by sending in seniors armed with life experience.
Since Logue came to RSVP, part of the Olympic Community Action Programs office in Port Townsend, he’s brought hundreds of seniors, ages 55 to 90-something, into volunteer positions.
They work in local food banks, hospitals and libraries, and tutor children in public schools across the North Olympic Peninsula.
Even as he recruited and matched his volunteers, Logue also had to raise money for RSVP and for an added program called VetConnect.
“Mostly, we do referrals,” he said, for veterans needing counseling, help finding housing and information about college and other retraining.
There have been times, though, when Logue was the direct connection between a vet and a necessity.
He got a call from an 89-year-old man on the outskirts of Port Townsend. The water line from his well had broken, so the man was carrying water across his yard and into his house.
“He was hauling buckets,” Logue recalled. But “he could hardly walk.”
He smiled at the memory of how he got that veteran’s water line repaired with some assistance money from Jefferson County.
When it came to raising money to keep RSVP and VetConnect afloat from year to year, Logue knew he needed something more than bake sales, car washes and auctions.
So he and his wife, Kathleen, invited Ramon Dailey, a creative friend of theirs, over for dinner.
Together, they cooked up the “dinner and a murder” idea, an affair that would mix a gracious meal, a play and opportunities for the audience to be detectives for a night.
Logue purchased a murder-mystery script and Dailey directed it: “Death in Them Thar Hills” was the first show.
But ever since, Dailey has served as the playwright, penning tales such as “Next Stop, Murder” and 2010’s “Till Death,” which had an extra twist: Dailey and his fiancee Tiela Short were married during the play.
Jim Guthrie, Port Townsend High School’s shop teacher and an ordained minister, performed the ceremony.
That year and each year, the costumes and sets are elaborate and the camaraderie sweet, Logue said.
His mate Kathleen designed the poster for “The Speakeasier” and, on the eve of the show, she’ll lead the decorating crew at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds’ Oscar Erickson Building.
“We share many laughs and creative moments,” said Jan Boutilier, a dinner-and-a-murder cast member since the beginning.
The shows are “a highlight of each fall for me: intense rehearsals, lines to memorize and costumes
to plan.”
Logue and Boutilier have known each other since they were children growing up in the same Port Townsend neighborhood.
“He is like a brother to me,” Boutilier said, adding that she’s felt honored to be part of the group effort for RSVP and VetConnect.
Before joining the OlyCAP programs, Logue taught school for 30 years here.
He mostly taught fifth grade at Mountain View Elementary School, now the Mountain View Commons where the Jefferson County YMCA, Port Townsend Food Bank and other agencies reside.
Logue was a Mountain View student there himself back in the 1950s and ’60s.
He and Kathleen have also raised their four children in Port Townsend. And when Logue retired from teaching at just 52, he started a new job at the now-shuttered Swain’s garden center in Sequim.
But a congenital disease dogged him, necessitating leg surgeries that led to severe infections. He had one leg amputated and now walks with a prosthesis.
That ended his work at the store and cut back his home gardening, but it did not keep Logue down.
He’s held the OlyCAP job for eight years now. But keeping pace with federal regulations — a lot of accountability paperwork for relatively sparse funding, he said — has been a challenge.
At 64, Logue is ready to retire and to lay the dinner-and-a-murder to rest at last.
After Logue’s official last day Dec. 20, Sheila Ramsey, who helped him run the RSVP program as an AmeriCorps volunteer, will be his successor.
And as it turns out, Logue won’t step away entirely from this kind of service. He’s planning to offer a veterans’ assistance program outside OlyCAP, using his community resource list.
Logue is a manager who cares deeply about his clients, said Carolyn Anderson, OlyCAP’s community services director.
“He has been tied in to the community for a long time,” she said.
