Sequim: Part Miracle, Part Myth -- At First Glance, It Doesn't Fit The Vision Of A Retirement Mecca...

CUTLINE: THE OPPORTUNITY FOR AN ACTIVE RETIREMENT DREW BETTY APPLEGATE AND HER HUSBAND TO THIS FARM IN SEQUIM. SHE BICYCLES TO TOWN AND SWIMS REGULARLY, AND HIKES AND SKIS IN THE NEARBY OLYMPICS.

CUTLINE: SEQUIM'S ORIGINAL DAIRY FARMS HAVE GIVEN WAY TO A FRENZY OF NEW HOME BUILDING FOLLOWING THE ``DISCOVERY'' BY RETIREES. A COLLECTION OF USED SIGNS BEHIND A REAL-ESTATE OFFICE ENCROACHES ON A NEIGHBORING PASTURE.

CUTLINE: RUBY MANTLE AND HER LATE HUSBAND WENT PROFITABLY FROM DAIRY FARMING TO REAL ESTATE. WINTERS AT HER BEACH-FRONT HOME ON THREE CRABS ROAD CAN BE CHILLY, BUT SHE SWEARS ``WE SEE THE SUN EVERY DAY,'' EVEN IF IT'S JUST FOR A LITTLE WHILE IN THE MORNING OR EVENING.

CUTLINE: THE VIEW FROM BELL HILL INCLUDES NEW HOMES, THE TOWN OF SEQUIM, AND THE LIGHTHOUSE ON DUNGENESS SPIT ON THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA.

CUTLINE: A HABLIP GREW UP IN A PIONEER FAMILY THAT KNEW SEQUIM BEFORE THERE WERE ANY ROADS, AND KEPT THE NAME GIVEN TO HER BY PENINSULA NATIVE AMERICANS WHO FOUND ``ELSA SCHMIDT'' DIFFICULT TO PRONOUNCE. NOW 70, SHE AND HER COMPANION, ECHO, ARE NOT FOND OF THE KNOT OF TRAFFIC IN HER TOWN ON HIGHWAY 101.

CUTLINE: ABOVE - CHUCK APPLEGATE RELISHES LIFE IN HIS RETIREMENT HOME. ``I WENT FROM A SWIVEL CHAIR IN THE BANK TO SHOVELING MANURE,'' HE SAYS, ``AND YET THESE LAST 12 YEARS ARE THE FINEST A MAN COULD EVER HAVE.''

CUTLINE: RIGHT - THE ADULT SWIM TIME AT SEQUIM'S NEW RECREATION CENTER TYPICALLY DRAWS A CROWD OF RETIREES FOR AQUAROBICS AND SOCIALIZING.

CUTLINE: FROM HIS HOME ALONG THE 16TH FAIRWAY AT SUNLAND, DON LESLIE CAN WATCH THE DEER THAT ROUTINELY GRAZE ON THE GRASS AND OCCASIONALLY GET INTO HIS APPLE TREES. HE AND HIS WIFE, BLOSSOM, CAME FROM KANSAS CITY. ``NO PLACE IS UTOPIA,'' HE SAYS, ``BUT IF WE WERE TO GO SOMEWHERE ELSE, I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE HECK IT WOULD BE.'

Don and Eve Armstrong spent five years in a travel trailer, crossing the country in search of the perfect place to retire. They'd settled for a time in Bend, Ore., but it proved too hot, too cold, too dusty. ``One year, on the Fourth of July, shards of ice came out the end of the garden hose,'' says Don. ``It didn't do much for the tomatoes, or us.''

At the same time, Carl and Edith Spongberg had retired in Florida, a natural and normal choice for hard-working folks from Minnesota. They loved golf and had spent warm winters there. What they found, however, were insufferably long, hot summers, too many insects and retired people, and rising crime and house prices, not exactly what they wanted to fill their final years.

``Even before we moved to Florida,'' Carl says, ``we had made our hobby studying places to retire. You know, Florida; San Diego; Pinehurst, N.C.; the Gulf Coast; Arizona.

``But it was Sequim that had what we were looking for: A moderate climate and a small-town atmosphere. There's nothing like it. Believe me, I looked.''

Scattered across a valley so far from Arizona and Florida that it lies north of Maine are legions of Armstrongs and Spongbergs, happy as the clams spouting along the pebbly shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, as silver-topped as the nearby Olympic Mountains.

They stand at attention, hands on their gardening tools and golf clubs and fishing rods, dogs at their sides, ready to lay down their reputations that Sequim is not only where a person would want to spend his or her final years, but where a person can afford to spend them.

The 1980 census found Sequim's median age to be 58.9, nearly double that of the state as a whole. It is widely reported that half the people in the town of 3,000 and surrounding area of another 15,000 are retired.

At first glance Sequim doesn't fit the vision of a retirement mecca - it isn't cute or quaint, and lacks even the character of nearby Port Townsend. In the summer, in fact, the main street is little more than a tacky tourniquet of traffic for the millions of visitors who annually head up Highway 101 and use Sequim as a gateway to the Olympic National Park.

But take another look. Perhaps if you're older and wiser, you have both the time and the vision to see beyond Burger King to snowy, alpine peaks on your left, and to your right the calm waters of the strait with a view on to Victoria. To see a flat, open kind of country, with brown grass and red-barked madrona trees, a landscape that looks and feels of Northern California, not the Northwest.

Sequim is, of course, part miracle and part myth. Weather statistics label it some sort of Northwest San Diego, but in reality it's a valley of ``dry gray,'' cool and cloudy like Seattle, but with half the rain.

There is little question the retirees are drawn to Sequim initially because of its reputation for a mild, dry climate. ``Take today,'' says Carl Spongberg, who lives at Sunland, a golf-course development clearly the critical mass for the retired community. ``It's cool and cloudy out, but you pull a sweater on, and play golf without the crowds or hassles elsewhere.''

There are those who feel misled by all this banana-belt business, who think mild is 80 degrees and exercise is lifting up a drink by the edge of the pool. Who head south with the ducks and geese.

What is left - and their numbers increase every day - is a younger, healthier, better educated, clearly more active group of retirees playing golf, fishing, climbing, volunteering at the schools, helping in community-service work, invigorated by the cool weather instead of bothered by it.

Despite half the town being retired, school levies pass with resounding majorities, even one last year for the building of a second elementary school. The school superintendent, Ken Anderson, says precincts with the highest number of senior citizens also report the highest number of yes votes.

There is a group of seniors - a couple of former university professors coupled with ex-business executives - who've formed a group to help foster science in the schools.

Like most areas, Sequim has its pluses and minuses. There is a new community swimming complex - first-class in every way - a modern library, and the John Wayne Marina for 200 boats.

But there is also no real hope now for state money to build a Highway 101 bypass around the town, alleviating the suffocating traffic, a burden for tourist and townee alike. And then there is the concern for both the environment and the ambiance. Just how many wells and septic tanks and retirees can one valley handle? Or want?

First, the phenomenon: Pilots call it the ``blue hole,'' a discernable break in the clouds over Sequim. Indeed, there are many retired pilots in Sequim offering testimony that the hole exists.

As Highway 101 turns round Discovery Bay and heads toward Sequim Bay, at almost precisely the moment you hit the sign for the state park, the rain slackens, the sky brightens.

Jack Sallee runs Coastal Airlines at the Sequim Airport west of town. He says there are few days that, even without instrument landings, you can't get an airplane in or out of Sequim. ``The rule of thumb around here,'' he says, ``is that for every mile you get away from the center of Sequim - where we are - you get one additional inch of rain.''

Not only does Sequim get less than half the rain of Seattle - an average of 16 inches compared with Seattle's 39 - it also gets less than any city on the West Coast north of Santa Barbara. In 1989, Sequim's yearly total of 13.52 was less than the average for downtown Los Angeles.

Because it sits under the lip of the Olympic Mountains, the rain most Western Washington cities get is benevolently short-stopped before reaching Sequim. Seventy-five miles away, in Forks, the rainfall is 10 times as much.

According to legend, cactuses have grown in Sequim. But look on a sandy, south-facing slope near the Dungeness River where the old-timers say they remember them growing, and instead, symbolical-ly, you'll find a small field of waving, yellow California poppies.

There is no question, however, that for Western Washington Sequim is a veritable desert. For verification, you need look no further than the irrigation ditches lacing the valley. Just before the turn of the century, Sequim's farmers had abandoned most of the land in the valley except that near the Dungeness River. Just too dry to grow anything.

But one D.R. Callen - called at first ``Crazy Callen'' but ultimately ``the visionary Callen'' - convinced farmers the prairie could be irrigated. A year after the ditch digging began, in 1896, water was flowing the length and width of the valley, nurturing plants and hopes.

Each May, the community gathers to remember and celebrate the digging of the ditches and the lush valley that stretches westward from Sequim Bay to almost Port Angeles. The Sequim Irrigation Festival is not only one of a kind for Western Washington, but the oldest continuous community festival in the state.

The valley was named both by the Klallam Indians - who called it Such-e-kwai-ing, for ``quiet water'' - and by explorer Capt. George Vancouver, who called it ``New Dungeness'' because it resembled the low, sandy lands of his native Dungeness on the English Channel.

The Sequim (pronounced ``skwim'') message - which is now a gray carpet rolled worldwide - began with Vancouver, who wrote in his diary, dated May 2, 1792, ``the delightful serenity of the weather greatly aided the beautiful scenery that was not presented; the surface of the sea was perfectly smooth, and the the country before us exhibited everything that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view. I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.''

The beauty and the beast of Sequim is that it was not planned as a retirement area - not like Sun City, Ariz., was planned - but rather developed simply because of the demand for a retirement area in a climate benevolent both to people and their pocketbooks.

When the first rush of retirees hit in the mid-1960s, the area was woefully short of doctors and clinics. Sequim was changing from an area dependent on agrarian business for survival - basically dairy farms - to the business of geriatrics, real estate instead of semiconductor chips, golf courses instead of aluminum plants.

Ruby Mantle and her late husband operated one of Sequim's many dairy farms in the 1940s and '50s, a time when wooden barns and silos and happy cows made the area look not unlike Switzerland at best, and Wisconsin at worst.

Today, the dairy farms are giving way to one and two-acre subdivisions, ranchettes for retired folks, where they can garden and have a few animals, be retired but active, enjoying the privacy of their own land but the community of others interested in similar things.

``I'm not as nostalgic as you might think when I see things changing,'' says Mantle, who along with a lot of people went from selling milk to real estate and has realized a bonanza never possible before. ``I think those of us who were there then could see the handwriting on the wall. And we all feel pretty fortunate how things turned out.''

The dairy farms weren't making much money, not for the work involved, and the Sequim kids saw their future elsewhere, in Seattle, where one could work less and earn more.

For a while, farmers tried catching up with a new market for freezer foods, growing peas and other cold crops. But when all else failed, they began selling off their land, small pieces with sloping views to either the water or back at the mountains.

According to Mantle, a farmer named Harry Peterson was first. Then came Jess Taylor, who dedicated his farm for what would be Sunland, one of two golf courses.

Mantle thinks the area would have been an economic disaster without the retirees, who don't need jobs, but create them. Whose pension checks clog the post office each month. Who for the most part provide a slow-moving, friendly, clean and even renewable industry, maturing faster than trees do.

When it comes to understanding the migration north, not south, just why the retirees began flocking to Sequim to replace the cows as prime residents, a finger is pointed at an amateur weatherman named Alexander Lindsay.

Earl Clark of Port Angeles has become a Sequim spokesman of sorts; indeed, he is part of the puzzle unlocking the fascination of the area elsewhere.

Last summer, Clark wrote an article for the Retired Officer Magazine, whose worldwide circulation hits just the market Sequim's favorite industry savors. ``The request for information - climate, medical facilities recreation and housing costs - has come in nonstop since the article,'' says Don Campbell, himself a retired naval officer, and the new director of the city's Chamber of Commerce.

Campbell holds a stack of requests the depth of a big-city telephone book. They come from warm places, cold places, from as near as Bremerton and as far as Europe, and from some of this country's great retirement addresses: Carmel Valley, San Diego, Fallbrook, Solvang, Carefree, Scottsdale.

``Whether it is real or perceived,'' continues Campbell, ``people are writing about Sequim as a great place to retire. From what we see, there is almost a reverse sun-belt trend. People are moving here from Arizona and California. It's too hot, too long there. You don't have to have air-conditioning here, there is clean water and clear air. They don't see any bugs, and Sequim is affordable by sun-belt standards.''

It is an old message, really. Clark's research for the Retired Officer Magazine article turned up Lindsay, who was so enamored with Sequim's qualities that he was easily provoked by a syndicated column in 1966 whose pessimistic thesis suggested that Americans looking for an ideal retirement haven had nowhere to go to escape unpleasant, even violent, weather or natural disturbances.

``Did you ever hear of Sequim, Wash.?'' Lindsay wrote in retort.

Lindsay talked about a level land with sunshine and flowers but without mosquitoes and flies. With little rainfall but bounteous water, rushing clean and unfettered from the Olympic Mountains.

Clark says Lindsay's passionate plea was carried by every newspaper that carried the offending column, 52 across the country. The reaction was immediate and profound among readers, according to Clark. More than 10,000 inquiries arrived in the next months, and they were from every state.

The rush of retirees subsided in the early 1980s as the Northwest economy ebbed and the Hood Canal Bridge was out of service. In a way, it gave Sequim a time to grow into its role as the Northwest's prime retirement area.

Now, across from the new pool is a medical center with 29 doctors at last count, plus an adjacent residential home for retired people needing medical care. Doctors and real-estate agents seem to be the area's most prolific professionals.

Chuck Applegate, a retired bank executive from Portland, and his wife Betty were walking a beach in Costa Rica, looking at areas for their retirement, when they heard about Sequim in casual conversation.

``I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live in that rain belt,'' Chuck says, ``but I had a boat and I like to climb (mountains) and Sequim offered opportunities for both.''

The Applegates bought 50 acres of Dungeness Valley land - they can see the Olympics from the living room of their house - and became farmers.

Now, every morning, Chuck heads down to Crazy Eric's restaurant on the town's main street for a cup of coffee and a bowl of conversation with other retirees. They talk weather, hobbies, work, and about how happy they are to be here and together, even if the latter isn't mentioned out loud.

Chuck has more than a dozen cows now, and last year made enough on the operation to pay his taxes. He fell out of a tree last year doing some pruning, but, shoot, that's just part of life on the farm.

``I went from a swivel chair in the bank to shoveling manure,'' he says, ``and yet these last 12 years are the finest a man could ever have.''

When the cows are fed and dusted for lice, Applegate falls back on his boardroom knowledge, working as a prime fund-raiser for valley charities. Betty, who is still active in the fashion industry, organizing fashion shows from Port Angeles to Seattle, rides her bike a mile to the swimming complex for a workout, and then finds backpacking in the nearby Olympics possible and enjoyable in summertime.

But if you think a good time is more than chasing the cows, you'll have some traveling to do. Major shopping is at least as far away as the new mall in Silverdale. Seattle, with its cultural activities and shopping, remains two hours away, if ferries to and from the Kitsap Peninsula cooperate.

And while there are still houses to purchase for under $100,000, lots for under $15,000 and dairy farms left to divide, the pressure from abroad is driving up prices in Sequim just as it is in Seattle.

``The realtors tell me they don't have anything to sell right now,'' says Shirley Larmore, editor of Peninsula Magazine. ``Just in the past few months the market has gone berserk.''

At Sunland, a year ago there were 80 lots for sale. At the end of January, there were two. Brenda Clark, the sales manager for Sunland real estate, says prices had increased 40 to 50 percent in the past year, leaving the two remaining lots at $44,500 and $57,500, and the homes available for sale ranging from $99,000 to $275,000. Up on Bell Hill, overlooking the strait, houses start at $200,000.

And the best, or worst, may be yet to come. Mitsubishi Corp. holds an option on land to build a resort near neighboring Discovery Bay, and last month there was a preliminary proposal for a third golf course development on the east side of Sequim itself.

Don Leslie stands on the deck of his home along the 16th fairway at Sunland. He moved here with his wife, Blossom, from Kansas City. They thought first about Arizona and California, but were willing to trade peace and quiet for sunshine and shopping.

``You wake up in the morning and the sun is often shinning,'' says Blossom. ``There is snow on the mountains. The air seems good enough to eat, there are deer on the fairways. I don't even know why they thought about those hot, dry places.''

Don smiled, nodding in agreement.

``No place is utopia,'' he says, ``but if we were to go somewhere else, I don't know where the heck it would be.'''

BLAINE NEWNHAM IS A SEATTLE TIMES ASSOCIATE EDITOR.