DOREEN TAKES HER LANDLINE telephone receiver off the hook so we won’t be interrupted by any spam callers. She says she’s been getting so many calls a day, inquiring with offers to buy her time shares in Mexico. But you can’t really buy a time share, she shakes her head.
It’s early afternoon. She met us at the door of her two-story time capsule of a home in the bridge neighborhood of Tacoma, where she’s lived for half a century. She’s got separate walkers to navigate the stairs and each level of her home. She’s 89 years old. She’s almost retired. The shop she’s run for decades on Callow Avenue in Bremerton closed last month.
It was the final store to close in a small independent, some say iconic, regional chain.
The introduction at her house is slightly uncomfortable. It’s like visiting a stranger’s grandmother’s house. Everything seems stuck in time, valuable and breakable. And you’re not really sure if you’re supposed to be there. But Doreen is smiling. She’s sitting in her easy chair next to a small table holding an ornate ceramic lamp and a digital picture frame that loops through various family photos.
There are an immense amount of birds darting and flittering about well-stocked bird feeders outside the big windows behind her. There’s a wholesome, almost church, vibe to the whole thing. Doreen has that charming old lady presence. She seems happy. She’s got a lot of stories. She’s got a hearty laugh. She says she has an easy day today because she doesn’t have any doctor’s appointments to get to. Her white sneakers say ‘Free Time’ across the top of the tongues as they dangle from her easy chair. After talking timeshares, we talk about her first great, great grandchild who is due in October.
She smiles proudly, with a hint of disbelief, as she says people have been referring to her recently as an icon.
Though it’s not easy to imagine from this setting, she wasn’t always a well-loved person in the community. She and her husband, Elmer, ran Elmo’s Adult Books & Movies, an adult bookstore chain, for more than 50 years.
“All of a sudden, everybody loves me,” she laughs. “I didn’t realize it was that big of a deal. But Bremerton has just bent over backwards…”
Earlier this summer, when news spread through local social media that Elmo’s on Callow was closing, she said she received more than 700 emails wishing her gratitude and good luck in retirement. “It was all… good,” she finishes the thought with a pause that indicates that hasn’t always been the case.
Some fifty years ago, she’d received a different kind of mail.
Iconically, in the summer of 1969, her husband started Elmo’s in what she called the ‘tenderloin’ district of downtown Tacoma. At that time, she’d been working at a small War on Poverty government organization. She thinks it was called ‘Operation Mainstream.’ Her husband worked in janitorial maintenance in Seattle.
Elmer had picked up some extra weekend work from a friend who ran an adult bookstore, and he saw a business opportunity.
“He came home that day and said, ’The first day that I make $100, I’m gonna quit my job,’” Doreen remembers the beginning of the business. “Well, that first day, he made $30 and came home and said, ‘I’m quitting my job!’”
She didn’t mind.
It was his thing.
She said he borrowed $500 to open the first store in downtown Tacoma, “and spent it all before the store was even open,” she laughs.
Elmer had the idea that people didn’t always want to go to the tenderloin district, with all the bars and drugs and stuff, to shop. He wanted to have neighborhood locations. Within the next year, they had opened a second location in the South Tacoma Way neighborhood, shortly before expanding to Pasco and Portland in the early 1970’s. And Doreen would soon quit her job to take on behind-the-scenes business operations and accounting for the store while working from home and raising children.
“When we opened up in Pasco, I put the business license in my name,” Doreen says. “One day, I opened up the mail and it was a subpoena… and, of course, I was outraged!”
She’s smiling and laughing as she recalls the story. She remembers the district attorney in the case telling her, ‘You may look like motherhood and apple pie… but I know who you really are!’ She lets out another big laugh. “Between us, we had nine kids to support,” she says. “I had five, he had four, and I was basically sole support for my children. And, you know, that was a major expense. Even in those days, when you could still get a loaf of bread for a quarter.”
Elmo’s won the first court case in those days with a First Amendment lawyer, she said.
And there would be more to come.
“We were picketed, we had an arsonist, we went through all kinds of hell,” she said. “Court case after court case… I believe we were pioneers, in a lot of ways, with first amendment rights and free speech. Because we believed in it. And we fought hard for it.”
Back in the early days, much of the merchandise at that time were pocket books, Doreen says. Hence the name ‘Elmo’s Books.’ Then came the magazines. Then the movies. Then, before the proliferation of VHS, DVD and long before the internet, came the infamous video booths…
People are more interested in the sign
One of the earliest regulations put on the adult bookstore industry was decided in a 1973 Supreme Court case that clarified the definition of ‘obscenity’ as material that lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
While the cultural idea of pornography probably dates back nearly as long as the existence of man, the arrival of the public American adult bookstore arrives in the 1960s. That same year that Elmer opened his first shop in downtown Tacoma, Denmark became the first country in the world to legalize pornography and Andy Warhol’s seminal erotic film ‘Blue Movie’ was released in public theaters throughout the United States.
A proliferation of adult cinemas followed.
And so did court cases, picketing, demonstrations, and regulations.
Opponents, largely from religious organizations, argued the stores and cinemas were creating a blight, with all the bars and the drugs and stuff, in the community. But by the mid-70s, there are reports of legal burnout over the issue, with the tediousness and inability to find resolution in most cases, oftentimes within a massive case load. Eventually, cities resolved to create districts specific distances away from schools, churches and other public entities to sequester these unsavory activities.
Bremerton’s Callow Avenue was once that kind of area, home to many adult bookstores and cinemas over the years. Even after the closing of Elmo’s, there’s still one adult store left open on the street.
Back in the 1980s, one decade in to what’s now called ‘The Golden Age Of Pornography,’ the infamous northwest-based adult cinema mogul Roger Forbes operated one of his historic-community-cinema-turned-porno-theaters just across the street and a few doors down from Elmo’s in Bremerton. “He followed us everywhere we went and made trouble,” Doreen says. “He moved in right next door to us in Pasco. He was at the top of my list of… not-very-well-liked people.”
I get the feeling Doreen might have reason for a list of not-very-well-liked-people. From the years of picketing, property damage and court cases… to the Boy Scouts rejecting her son from joining the organization due to his parents’ occupation… to her husband’s family ex-communicating him from their religion… to the allegations that they were tied to the Mafia.
But for all the legal cases, for all the personal and community backlash in all the locations where they operated, Bremerton had the least amount of problems, Doreen said. “They tried to keep us out at first, but they didn’t try very hard.”
She laughs.
Shortly after closing their Portland location, she and Elmer opened their Bremerton location in 1973. They picked Bremerton, she says, because there were employed people there with money in their pocket. And it wasn’t far from their home in Tacoma. “And that’s pretty much that part of the story,” she says.
A few years after opening up shop here, they bought the building. Elmer was the face of the business. Doreen was the business behind the scenes. Elmer passed away in 1997 and Doreen and her son have been running the business since.
With the closing of the last remaining Elmo’s in Bremerton, she said they’re hoping to liquidate the remaining inventory through other stores. That, closing out the business’ 401K plan and the sale of Bremerton building are the last things standing between her and retirement.
She says she wants that building out of her life.
She’s looking forward to re-inventing herself.
I ask if she’s had any offers on the building or the business.
“Well… No…,” she says.
“People are more interested in, like, my sign from the front of the building,” she laughs. “And I had never, ever thought that people would be interested in that. I don’t know how many signs we’ve thrown away from my Lakewood building. We never knew anyone would want them.”
She said she’ll be donating the last one to the Charleston District History Museum. // BILL MAN
