By GARRET JAROS/Lincoln Chronicle
YACHATS – Friday marks the final day for beloved central coast restaurant LeRoy’s Blue Whale whose owners – after 45 years to the day – have decided to hang up their aprons and embrace retirement.
The diner-style restaurant which serves classic American fare has become a Yachats’ institution that attracts repeat customers from near and far.
“I can’t even count how many repeat customers we get,” said Keri Fields, who has been waiting tables at the Whale for 12 years. “They come from all over the world too. We have people from Italy that show up, and Denmark – we get them once a year. Lots of people from the East Coast. It’s just tremendous.”
They come for everything, Fields said Thursday, the food and good service, the consistency – “the recipes haven’t changed in 45 years.”
When Fields arrived in Waldport from Washington 15 years ago, she says she was a “rough-around-the-edges kind-of adult.” She credits the Blue Whale with changing that.
“I grew up here, became an adult here,” she said. “I got friends here. My customers, great co-workers and great bosses. I mean it’s the trifecta of a job.”
Closing will feel “like my parents are divorcing,” Fields said. “It’s gonna be hard – real hard. There won’t be a dry eye in the house tomorrow.”
LeRoy’s front door had little time to rest Thursday as word of the closure spread and locals stopped in to express their gratitude and well wishes or exchange hugs with co-owner Angie Lindsey who came out from working the grill to greet people.
Origin story
counter at the restaurant’s original location in the former Dairy Queen building now occupied by Green Salmon Coffee Company.
Don Lindsey was fresh out of the Navy and preparing to go to college when his chef stepfather LeRoy Phillips approached him with the idea of opening a restaurant together.
The old Dairy Queen building in Yachats – now the Green Salmon Coffee Company – was available and so the men agreed to have a look.
“And we said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it’,” Lindsey said as he sat Thursday in one of the Blue Whale’s high-backed booth seats. “So, LeRoy borrowed $2,000 from one of his tenants at the Blue Whale Trailer Park. He was a rough old guy but he loaned him the money to start the business.”
Batter-dipped fish and chips cost $3.50 when the restaurant opened in 1980. Clam chowder and chili were $1.75. A cup of coffee cost 35 cents and the doughnuts – like everything else – were homemade.
Lindsey agreed to work weekends while he attended community college in Eugene where he also reconnected with a friend he had grown up with in Springfield – a young woman named Angie who in a matter of months would become his wife. The couple were married in 1982 and in 1983 LeRoy Phillips asked them if they would be willing to partner with him and run the Yachats location while he opened and ran another in Waldport. They agreed.
“So we threw in our van as collateral so our partnership would be equal right,” Don Lindsey said and laughed. “And then he ran Waldport and I ran Yachats.”
The Waldport location, which also derived its name from the Blue Whale Trailer Park, was called LeRoy’s Blue Whale Too. But in 1995 Philips suffered a heart attack and a stroke and could no longer work. Don and Angie managed to keep the Waldport restaurant open until 2001 “but it just wasn’t panning out without LeRoy there because that was where everyone liked to go to see LeRoy,” Don Lindsey said.
The Yachats restaurant would stay at its original location until the price of the lease tripled and they moved to the current location just up the road in 1985. The couple juggled operating both restaurants that summer until the lease at the original location expired.
“That was pretty hectic,” Lindsey said.
An arson fire in September 1990 — the culprit never found — shut down the restaurant. The fire spared the front of the building and Lindsey made plans to rebuild the back himself, but was then told by the building department that it was too old and that the building would need to be razed and built anew.
They reopened nine months later and never looked back. Both their daughters were practically raised at the restaurant. The youngest working for a time as a prep cook, the oldest — Heather Lee who still works there — began waiting tables barely out of grade school.
Saying goodbye
Lindsey grows quiet and tears gather in his eyes when he ponders what kept the couple running the restaurant for so long.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I designed and built this. I built all those cabinets in my shop and put in that floor.”
He moved from behind the grill 20 years ago. Despite his insistence that the menu was a collaboration between he and Angie, she says it was mostly him.
“He’s creative,” she will later say during a quick break from cooking. While she was responsible for making the cream pies, Angie said, “everything else is basically his.”
The building and land have been sold but not the restaurant or its recipes, so the couple think they may someday write a cookbook.
The new owners, Crystall and Rob Morigeau, moved to Yachats from Polson, Mont. this winter, and have offered jobs to all Blue Whale employees who want to stay on when they reopen around May 6 as the Yachats Pub and Whale Tail Diner. They plan to maintain a similar feel and menu, although reduced a bit, Rob Morigeau said.
“And then in the evening — coming soon — we’ll try to do more of a pub feel with smaller plates and a little different menu” he said.
The last few days
Customers have been reaching out to the Lindseys in person, over the phone and on social media about the closure.
“There are a lot of sad people,” he says. “And kids who think their lives are going to stop because they can’t get our pancakes. I’m getting emails wanting the pancake recipe.”
Don Lindsey says he’s not sure what he will miss the most — the customers, the employees which he says he’s been lucky with — one working for them for 32 years and another for 22 years.
“Forty-five years of doing this and I just don’t know what it’s going to be like you know,” he says. He lifts his glasses to wipe back tears. “But I think it’s going to be pretty good.”
Angie walks past and says “Want me to get you a tissue dear?” He nods.
“I just want to say thanks to the people for supporting us all this time,” he adds. “I’m gonna miss everybody.”
With her apron still firmly affixed at the waist, Angie replaces Don in the blue vinyl booth and says her favorite memories over the years come from the “old-timers that just keep coming and wanting the same food and having their stories for the day.”
A lot of them have “been here and gone on” she says. She remembers a group of locals that used to come in when they first opened.
“There was this one old fart, Dick Ough,” Angie said. “He had his coffee cup that he used every day, every day. The locals had their own coffee cups and he did not want his coffee cup washed because he said it would take away the flavor of the coffee. Don washed it one day. And Dick kind of held it against him for a week or so.”
The 45 years have gone too fast.
“Started off in good health with lots of energy and now I’m winding down and just can’t really do it anymore,” she said. “It’s very physical. It’s demanding.”
After they retire the couple plan to travel across the country in a camper van. They have a map at home with pins in it of all the places — including national parks that they want to visit while they still have their health.
She does not hesitate when asked what the secret is to having a marriage so successful that you can work for decades side by side.
“Patience, a lot of love, respect, having the Lord in my life, and forgiveness — having a lot of forgiveness,” she said. “We know each other’s faults and good things and accept them for what they are. And I’m not going to say we never go to bed mad because sometimes we do, I mean it just happens.
“But it’s for the long haul, it’s not just a short period,” she added. “It’s kind of like stocks and bonds, you’ve got to take it over the decades.”
Her message to all their customers is simple.
“I would like to thank ‘em all for keeping us in business and putting up with us and being a part of our establishment and our family growing up,” she said. “It’s been a nice 45 years that they helped support us.”
- Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for the Lincoln Chronicle, formerly YachatsNews, and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
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