Table for One, 85 y.o. adoptee's story

Juanita Wilson was a daily regular at Charlie's on Broadway. (Joshua Trujillo / P-I File)
 

No Parking Anytime: Table for one filled with memories

By KERY MURAKAMI
P-I REPORTER

Juanita Wilson was one of those familiar faces who become associated with a place.

In her case, it was a Capitol Hill restaurant, Charlie's on Broadway, where she showed up for lunch every day for more than a decade.

Wilson, 85, would take a cab there, with the same driver each time, restaurant owner Ken Bauer recalled last week. She wouldn't come on Gay Pride day each year, when the streets are packed.

"Charlie's is open 365 days a year, so she would come here 364 days a year," Bauer said.

She'd sit each time at Table 22, except around the holidays, when her usual

L-shaped booth would be moved from the middle of the dining room to make way for a Christmas tree.

Then it was Table 20 for Christmas and every day until Table 22 was back in place. She was a creature of habit, one might say.

A couple of weeks ago, Bauer spent an afternoon decorating the tree, stringing it with red and gold ribbons. In years past, he said, "Juanita would be there for a couple of hours, because coming here was a social thing for her," but this year she wasn't.

Then the 64-year-old former naval officer, stopped to collect himself. "There was just something missing," he said.

The familiar face also won't be at Table 20 on Christmas. Wilson passed away Nov. 9 at Swedish Medical Center.

Charlie's has been around since 1974. At night it's filled with young hipsters. In the day -- Wilson's time -- it is quiet. Jazz plays in the background. Designed by a movie-set creator in a 1920s theme, it has black and white photographs of flappers on the wall. Wilson must have found some familiarity there, Bauer said.

In a Seattle P-I article two years ago, Wilson, who never married or had children, said she came to Charlie's each Christmas Day, because, "I have no family" in Seattle.

Except for the one she'd adopted there.

Wilson was adopted herself as a baby in Moscow, Idaho, she said. And her first 41 Christmases passed without knowing her birth mother. She lived those years working in Seattle as a typist for a rail-freight company, and she'd been a Rosie the Riveter during World War II, Bauer said.

Then Wilson decided to track down her birth mother, and called directory assistance in Moscow to get listings for Wilsons. It was a story the staff at the restaurant heard many times over the years.

A man answered at the first number she called. "I didn't tell him who I was," she told the P-I. "He told me he was (her biological mother's) brother and he gave me her address."

"She always hoped I'd find her when I became of age," Wilson said.

They spent the next 21 Christmases together. Wilson would take the Greyhound to her mother's small home in Clarkston, Idaho, where they'd share a turkey.

But in 1986, her mother died of breast cancer. It has been Christmas at Charlie's the past 10 or 15 years, Bauer said.

She was part of the rhythm of the place, in the way that the chiming from a distant church clock marks the hours.

Around 11:30 a.m. each day, Bauer said, whoever was working her table would set it, pour her water and make sure the decaf coffee was brewed.

She was a devout woman, who occasionally liked a grasshopper, Bauer said. On Wednesdays, the Elks Club meets at Charlie's. One member is blind and uses a nickname, "Blind Bill," that only friends can get away using.

"Every week, Juanita would say, 'Good seeing you, Bill.' Bill would say, 'Good seeing you, Juanita.' Then they'd both start laughing. She got a kick out of that every week," general manager Jess Welling, 55, said last week.

Wilson would always call the same person, cab driver and painter Fasika Moges, for a ride. And every day, Moges would arrive with Wilson.

"She was a very loyal person," said Moges, who is from Ethiopia. "She always went to the same hairstylist. She went to the same doctor for 40 years."

Their relationship was sort of like the one in the movie "Driving Miss Daisy," Bauer said.

In the last few months of her life, Wilson was too weak to come to Charlie's, but someone from the restaurant would call her to find out what she wanted for lunch, and Moges would pick it up and bring it to her.

When Wilson fell at her home, she called Moges for help. Wilson didn't want to go to the hospital, Moges said. "She wanted to die at home," he recalled.

But she went to Swedish Medical Center, and though her relatives weren't able to get to the hospital, Bauer and Moges were there in her last days.

The restaurant reserved Table 22 with a bouquet of flowers in her memory for a couple of weeks.

Dwayne Jones, 36, one of her regular servers, struggled to find the words when asked about Christmas without her at Table 20.

Welling jumped in: "Juanita will still be with us."

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P-I reporter Kery Murakami can be reached at 206-448-8131 or kerymurakami@seattlepi.com.

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