The Buzzer Rings For Longtime Bellevue Bakery

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Tears have come to some eyes. One man wore a black arm band, and a woman drove from Eastern Washington to pay her last respects.

What were they mourning? The planned closing, on April 2, of Arthur's Bakery, a source of fragrant breads, cinnamon rolls, festive cakes and other treats for 37 years in downtown Bellevue.

"We're devastated that they're closing," says Geri Metzger, an Arthur's customer since the bakery opened in 1956. "Every Saturday I stop in and buy my sweet rolls and my bread."

Still, she adds, "he deserves to retire," after years of bringing pleasure to so many. "He" is Arthur Wilk, 73, who will retire next month.

Wilk, a tall man with gray hair and an expansive manner, still rises around 2:15 a.m. six days a week to head for the shop and bake bread. Not one to stay only in the back rooms, he emerges often to chat with customers or offer free bread sticks to kids.

"We're really going to miss him" and the nice women at the counter - plus those soft bread sticks, says Kevin Cooney, who remembers munching on them as a child in the mid-1960s, when his mother, Betty Cooney, shopped at Arthur's (she still does). Now his own children love them.

Four generations of fans

Exceeding the Cooneys, at least one family is into its fourth generation as Arthur's customers.

Louise Hastie, a customer for 31 years, says Wilk reminds her before every Valentine's Day that it's time to send a box of cookies to her daughter in Scotland.

Hastie's favorite Arthur's treat is the strawberry custard pie, and she loves the chocolate eclairs "because they're filled all the way." She's making space in her freezer so she can stash away some goodies from Arthur's.

Like his customers, Wilk has plenty of memories, some a little offbeat. He says one customer regularly buys blueberry muffins for her pet parrot, and another buys bread sticks for her dog.

Then there was the huge cake the bakery made to serve 4,000 people. It measured 8 feet by 14 feet and was shaped like Bellevue Square to celebrate its opening as an enclosed mall. Over the years, countless birthdays have been marked with a special cake from Arthur's.

"Bellevue has been very, very good to my family. We've had the best of everything," Wilk says.

Even as a child in Buffalo, N.Y., he wanted to be a baker. His best friend's parents owned a bakery, and to free his pal for playing baseball, young Arthur sometimes helped out there - and liked it.

Military service brought Wilk to the Northwest, where he met his wife, Elaine, and started the bakery. It had two previous Bellevue locations before moving to the present site at 138 107th N.E.

Wilk remembers Bellevue in those early days as a small townwhere "everybody knew everybody." He thinks people were more quality conscious then. Today, he says, convenience rules.

Quality still reigns at Arthur's, say his customers. He credits his wife, a professional artist and the bakery's bookkeeper, with inspiring him to settle for nothing but the best.

The bakery wouldn't have to close. The Wilks' daughter, Kasia, an experienced baker, is Arthur's manager and cake decorator. She could keep the business going, but fears her dad would be there whenever a problem came up - and she'd rather see him enjoying retirement with her mother. She's still deciding her future.

Also in the baking world is the Wilks' son, Steve, research and development chief for Price/Costco Bakeries.

Arthur isn't sure what retirement will bring, beyond a chance to sleep in. He says he's not sad. "I've had my place in the sun."

His customers are another story. Wonders one: "How will we survive?"