Category Archives: Newport

Love – A Newport Interlude

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Love. It permeates everything at the Lightkeeper’s Inn Bed and Breakfast in the coastal town of Newport, Oregon. It’s in the design of the home, the family history that adorns the walls of the guest wing, the little touches in each guest suite, the wonderful breakfasts, and the snacks waiting in guest rooms at night. Most of all though, it’s in the warmth that goes beyond coastal friendliness of innkeepers Cheryl and Bill Lalack.

As I’ve written, Newport is a special place for me. My wife, Lisa, has been on the receiving end of much nostalgia: I lived here, the radio station was located there, our studio moved here later, that used to be a gas station, I remember when they built this hotel, that used to be a terrible restaurant, etc. She’s always been a good sport about it, but for Christmas last year she found an interesting way to change the paradigm a bit. Lisa, through some work connections, discovered the Lightkeeper’s Inn — a place that did not exist when I lived on the coast — and booked an extended weekend stay. She also made restaurant reservations at places I’d never been. This added up to a unique experience in familiar territory when we visited last weekend.

I used to love driving along the Newport Bayfront, but I didn’t get to see it much from a higher elevation when I lived in town. The Lightkeeper’s Inn changed that. The home features a panoramic view of Yaquina Bay from the outdoor decks, the entry level dining area and the two guest suites. The YouTube video from their website posted above gives a glimpse of the inn’s charm.

Cheryl and Bill’s salubrious home, which is only a few years old, sits on a bluff on the west side of the bayfront. Cheryl’s great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper, which inspired the name of the inn. Directly across the bay from their home is the Port of Newport, NOAA headquarters and the South Beach Marina. Fishing boats come and go at all hours. The bay at night is beautiful with all the lights, and the sound of sea lions barking in the distance is both relaxing…and comical.

The location is great and has such a tremendous view, but the food is spectacular. This is where Cheryl is truly in her element: sour cream scrambled eggs, oven-baked bacon, French toast with a maple pecan glaze or homemade berry syrup, seafood benedict, and cinnamon rolls with raspberry jelly filling. That’s just some of what we had artistically presented to us each morning. She even packed a cooler for us one day when we had to leave early to go crabbing, and she made extra food for the friend we were meeting!

Julia Child would be proud that Cheryl uses both butter and cream in her food preparation. That being said, she caters to guests that have dietary restrictions and the results are wonderful. I’m still thinking about those raspberry cinnamon rolls, though. I asked one day if there were any left. There were not, but Cheryl added a raspberry glaze to some regular cinnamon rolls she had also baked and those showed up for us one night. One evening we even had German chocolate brownies waiting in our room.

The accommodations, view and food would have sufficed for an excellent experience, but there was something I found quite moving in the way that Cheryl related and catered to us. While that’s good business, it’s also genuine and flows from a natural desire to connect with guests. Had we wanted absolute privacy, it would have been granted. We chose to engage more than we would anywhere else. We talked about the town and shared stories. Turns out her grandmother and I lived in the same Newport apartment complex. Cheryl always checked to see how our dinners and shopping trips turned out. She even offered to cook the crab from our crabbing trip. If only we had caught more than one!

Other little touches were endearing. There was a magazine left in our room featuring an article on crabbing that Cheryl had specifically laid out for us. The afternoon following our crabbing trip we returned from lunch to find the gas fireplace on, drying out our jackets and gloves. She also dug up several Newport history books that had belonged to her grandmother, which were fun to browse.

Everything Cheryl did was rooted in love, or fussing, as she put it. She was genuinely interested in us and our experience. When we left, I was sad because it felt like we were leaving a good friend’s home. Coastal folks are friendly, but this was warmth that went beyond that. Her kindness was remarkable, and we can’t recommend the Lightkeeper’s Inn strongly enough to friends and family who want an enjoyable, relaxing and special experience. Apparently, we’re not alone.

Cheryl and Bill, it was a joy getting to know you and sharing your home. Thank you. We’ll be back.

A few pictures from the inn and our travels:

Newport Tales – Part XV

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Our original group went through changes quickly at KSND after signing on in March 1995. (Quick refresher on the originals and their roles: Jack [owner-general manager], Keith [owner-operations manager], Bonnie [reception-traffic], Corey [sales], Paul [sales], Clarke [weeknight studio engineer], Cindy [weekend studio engineer].)

Before long, Cindy moved from weekends to full-time days, and we hired a couple of kids younger than me a short time later. Summer joined our staff while going to school, hosting a program we designed called Sunday Morning Coffee. The music was smooth jazz and laid the foundation for what would later be a costly misstep in our station’s programming. Gary joined us as a weekend overnighter.

Other staff changes also took place. Paul abruptly left his sales position to go back to running the Sandbar and Grill with his wife. Being a well-liked and valuable member of the team, that was both a surprise and a disappointment. Not too long after he left, though, Cheryl joined our staff. She had worked in the market for quite a while and brought an established client list with her, which we hadn’t had up to that point.

If I didn’t make it clear in my previous posts, working overnights was an unpleasant experience, but I was off that shift by early 1996, taking a promotion to production director — the creative force behind our commercials and on-air promotional material. I had made Keith proud during December of 1995, picking up the slack on production that needed to be taken care of for our first huge on-air contesting event.

The promotion was called, A K-Sound Christmas. We stockpiled a boatload of CDs in the prize vault to be given away over a two-week period. Whenever a contest sounder was played, the first five callers each won a CD from a particular artist. We ran the contests several times a day. My job was producing those sounders, which included snippets from hit singles on each CD we were giving away. The sounders invited listeners to call and win…NOW!

I had fun with the production. We still had a limited sound effects library and little production music. I was making a lot of the sound effects on the fly with whatever I could find in the building. Santa coming down the chimney with a big bag of CDs was me grunting in front of a microphone and scraping Styrofoam blocks over a ski jacket I was wearing. It worked! As I recall, Santa had an accident flying down the chimney too fast and landed with a big crash in the fireplace. Theater of the mind.

This work really helped launch me into the new 3:00 am to 11:00 am shift as production director, which might not sound great, but I loved it. I lived just a few blocks away, so I could get up late, take a long afternoon nap, and then go to bed late. It gave me plenty of free time and more importantly, a life. The change made a huge difference in my mental state and allowed me to meet people and socialize.

The vacated weekday overnight shift was offered to Kiera, who had worked for one of our competitors. I believe she may have been part-time on the weekends for us, but going full-time meant she would get health insurance. We were the only station in town that offered that to employees — fully paid.

As much as things were looking up as we began growing, the station was in some trouble. We were deep in debt from start-up costs and hadn’t reached the point of being able to pay monthly operating expenses. Frankly, we weren’t even close. We had to rely on the silent third owner who had paid most of the bills up to that point. A major incident in late summer of 1995 turned everything on its head in that regard. That’s when we all met Will.

More to come in Part XVI…

Newport Tales – Part XIV

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I wrote about my job as an overnight studio engineer in Part XIII. Living the life of an overnighter — a brutal existence — is today’s topic.

There is a certain antisocial nature to working overnights in radio. Most, if not all of the gig, is worked alone. To an extent, a person starts getting used to that. At home during the day, one sleeps while the world awakes and goes about its activities. In my experience, it’s not a healthy existence. Social contact is important, but it is so limited for an overnighter. As a colleague of mine once said, overnights is a single man’s game. I actually knew of people whose marriages suffered because of the spouse’s graveyard job.

There’s also the complete disruption of circadian rhythms that takes place, which has been linked to obesity, diabetes and depression. I certainly had some struggles with the latter: I worked in a small town where I didn’t know anyone other than my co-workers, and there were few opportunities to meet new people. Gray, dark, rainy and windy were the seasons, and when there was sunshine I slept through it. No fun!

I employed various strategies to improve how I felt. I purchased a full spectrum light bulb that mimicked the sun. Unfortunately it was expensive and a poor substitute for natural light. I tried staying up a little while after getting home in the morning and also attempted going to bed as soon as possible after arriving home — getting to sleep before it got too light outside. Ultimately, the latter worked better. Finally, I reversed my meals, having dinner food when I got home from work in the morning and breakfast food at night. That didn’t work at all! Cheerios before bed in the morning was a lot better than pot roast prior to a daylong snooze.

A problem overnighters face during those day sleeps is the rest of the world working. The biggest irritations I had were apartment inspectors coming in during the day to check appliances and fire detection equipment and maintenance workers sawing through drywall in the common hallway to work on plumbing — noise that could wake the dead. Never mind the sign on my door reading, “Day sleeper. Please don’t disturb.”

I worked the overnight job from March 1995 until early 1996. There was one week in August where temperatures got into the 90s during an extraordinary Oregon Coast heat wave. The average temperature that time of year is 58 degrees, with the high average being 65. It made sleeping in a stuffy apartment difficult, and the high humidity didn’t help. One thing I did enjoy, though, was going to the beach after work. I liked standing in tide pools because they were so warm. That’s unheard of on the coast.

The truth is that I never really adjusted to graveyard. I tried lots of trickery, but my body knew what was going on. I just slipped into an existence of perpetual jet lag and was alone most of the time. My friend and colleague, Cindy, implored me to get involved in the community when I wasn’t sleeping. I loved lighthouses, and became a member of the Oregon Chapter of the United States Lighthouse Society. The problem was that I was the youngest member by at least a decade or more.

The best thing that happened to me was getting promoted to production director, which came about in a sad way that I’ll detail in a later post. The promotion with improved hours certainly changed my disposition and kickstarted my upward career trajectory at KSND.

More to come in Part XV…