Campbell's resort at Lake Chelan celebrates its 100th anniversary
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LAKE CHELAN - Not much - and everything - has changed since 1957, when Shiro and Louise Kashino first arrived at Campbell's Resort and then decided to spend every summer vacation at Lake Chelan.
Three generations of Kashinos and 43 sun-drenched Julys at the lake are recorded in nearly a dozen thick photo albums stacked high on the coffee table at the Kashinos' Seattle home.
The Kashino girls morph from diapers to bikinis before your eyes. Shiro "Kash" Kashino's hair grows more silver with a turn of the pages.
A boyfriend with a peach-fuzz mustache appears one year as a guest of the family and disappears the next to make room for a more lasting love. There are funerals and weddings and new babies. And another cycle begins, calling for another album.
Campbell's Resort has been serving up summer tradition to families such as the Kashinos for the past 100 years.
They come to spend time in the shadow of sand-colored mountains that spill into turquoise water and to watch their children play on sugar-sand beaches and, in the words of Louise Kashino, to "just do nothing, relax."
Run by family, for families
In 1901, when Clinton C. Campbell built his hotel here for prospectors, frontier soldiers and travelers, this was just a scrubby knoll at the south end of Central Washington's Lake Chelan. A newspaper reporter who chronicled the hotel's construction from foundation to finish called it "elegant," and it provided a nucleus for the town of Chelan to grow up around.
But Campbell's has never been about elegance. It's always been about family. Some families, including the Kashinos and their friends, Charles and Olivette Abraham of Vancouver, B.C., have come every summer for more than four decades. And Clinton C. Campbell's descendants still run the place - great-grandson Art Campbell is president and general manager, while his cousin Clint is marketing director.
Their three sisters have more minor roles in the operation, and a fifth generation is growing up and beginning to cast about for parts to play in the family business.
Judge Campbell, as early-day neighbors in Chelan called him, would approve.
'Sold a sand dune to a sucker'
He had been a magistrate in Sioux City, Iowa, leaving his wife and baby behind in 1889 to find a new life in the West because, according to family lore, his life had been threatened one time too many by the miscreants he'd jailed. He rode the Washington Central Railway line to the end at Wilbur, some 60 miles east of Lake Chelan as the crow flies, walking the rest of the way to the community that was growing up around the lakeshore.
Chelan had been a lakeside settlement since the early 1800s, and there was a military garrison nearby.
By the time Campbell got there, the town was a booming crossroads for settlers, soldiers, adventurers and miners hoping the surrounding hills were riddled with ore. Campbell stayed because "he saw a need" for an inn for transients and newcomers, great-grandson Art said.
Campbell's wife, Caroline, and baby Arthur arrived in 1890, along with a houseful of early American furniture from her father's factory in Iowa.
Eleven years later, Judge Campbell borrowed money to build a $5,000 hotel on land he'd bought for $400. The seller bragged to friends afterward that he had "sold a sand dune to a sucker."
When the hotel opened, rooms rented for 50 cents a night; dinner was also 50 cents.
Arthur, the judge's son, became one of the first graduates from Chelan High School and went on to get a law degree at the University of Washington. His career on the UW crew is memorialized by photosandother artifacts in the hotel.It was Arthur who planted apples on the hillside above the resort in the 1920s - the orchards kept the hotel alive during the Great Depression, when people couldn't afford vacations.
Faithful guests
The Kashinos and Abrahams don't see any end to their vacations at Campbell's.
Kash Kashino had discovered Campbell's while on a business trip to Eastern Washington. He'd been a World War II hero who'd volunteered for service from Minidoka, an internment camp in southern Idaho where Japanese Americans were detained during the war as possible "enemies." Louise had waited for him, and when he came home he began a long career selling cars.
Campbell's offered just the kind of summer vacation Kash needed to wind down from the stress of business, Louise says, and the rest of the family loved the place as much as he did.
As the three Kashino girls grew up, they brought friends along on their Chelan vacations. Then husbands, and, finally, children. And Kash and Louise rented larger units or more rooms as the family grew.
The Kashinos kept the tradition even in 1997, after Kash passed away after a battle with cancer.
"We thought about it and decided he would have wanted us to go," Louise said recently, "so we bravely went and met our friends there again."
Campbell's remains a constant in the lives of the Abrahams' three children as well.
Their son, Brent, met his wife, Kristin, there at the resort. He was 15 and she was 11 - too young to make much of an impression on him.
Brent finally took notice nine summers later. Kristin was sunning at the beach, in a bikini.
"He was impressed because I was reading the latest copy of Sports Illustrated, and he hadn't gotten his copy yet," Kristin jokes. "Essentially we just started talking. I thought he was cute, and we went out to dinner a couple of nights later."
Now Brent and Kristin's children, 3-year-old Jackson and 2-year-old Tara, are regulars.
'We've found our paradise'
The Kashinos and Abrahams still find the view from the hotel as breathtaking as Judge Campbell must have when he strolled into town 50 years before their discovery.
Olive-hued mountains lord it over rocky bluffs that give way to rolling green hills studded with groves of cottonwood trees and orchards that seem ready to tumble into the turquoise lake. The hotel is still pretty much as Campbell built it, too, although most people would consider its architecture more odd than elegant these days. The hill was shaved off early on, creating a new lower floor for a dining room and putting the hotel level with the bridge that leads travelers onto Chelan's main street. Most of the cabins the Campbells added along the lakefront in the 1940s have been replaced by architecturally inelegant motel-style accommodations.
But the family's orchards are still there, about a half-mile away up on the hillside overlooking the resort. And apples are a kind of fruit-flavored mascot for the place. Apples from the orchard are kept in a box in the lobby, free for guests. There are apple decals on the sliding doors to each unit's lanai. There are apples in the pancakes served up in the coffee shop and, if you want, apples in omelets.
For the most part, the Kashinos and Abrahams passed up the recreational activities that have mushroomed around the south end of the lake in recent years - the boat trips up the 55-mile length of the lake, the shops that rent personal watercraft and kayaks, the fishing charters and tours of the Campbells' orchard.
They prefer a vacation that's mostly sunning, no sightseeing.
"We don't really do anything when we're there except catch up on the news of our friends," Louise Kashino shrugs. "At first, we just came to relax, and we loved it, so we kept coming."
Olivette Abraham feels the same way.
"We have friends who say, 'You must be out of your minds to go to the same place year after year when there's so much of the world to see.'
"We just say, 'We've found our paradise. Why should we go somewhere else?' "
Sally Macdonald is a former Seattle Times reporter and free-lance writer.