Cecil Glenn was the real deal, a La Conner original

By Maggie Wilder

Not many of La Conner’s unique features were ever the result of a conscious effort to attract visitors, much in the same way a person does not add to their character by attempting to be noteworthy.

I first came to La Conner in the fall of 1966, playing hooky with my high school art teacher, who used to spend summers at the Planter Hotel for a dollar a day. He thought creativity was an ever-present opportunity and paying attention was far more important that how you put paint on canvas.

Every fall he told us stories about his time in La Conner, including installments about a fictional local oyster-shucker, his summer paramour. (He was actually gay. People have been making stuff up about La Conner for a long time!)

One look around and I got it. No, the love affair was not with a person, but something more mysterious.

Wandering down First Street I saw working boats, a café, a tiny art studio with a famous artist practicing inside and a few shops. One in particular had curtains hanging outside the window, shedding a gentle rain. The sign said, “Den of Antiquity.” Irresistible! Inside there was an elderly woman bent over a heap of miscellany on the floor. She seemed to pay us no mind. There were wares displayed, but no discernible theme. There were some strange odors. When my teacher wandered into an area where the bent woman did not want him to go, she began to sing softly, the lyrics telling him that he was out of bounds. We left her with a kind word but without a sale.

Later I learned the shop-keeper’s name was Cecil Glenn. She lived within sight of her store, just above on Second Street, in a house that imitated a riverboat steamer. I stopped into the Den of Antiquity whenever I was in town.

One Mother’s Day, my sisters and I drove our mom to La Conner. We liked to imagine that the seafood lunch we were about to have at the Lighthouse Inn was caught in the waters just below our table. (Not knowing that in those days, raw sewage was being spewed directly into those waters!) Afterwards, we stopped in to see Cecil, promising mom we’d treat her to something at “The Den.” She dutifully found a pair of candlestick holders.

By now we were regulars and Cecil, wanting to treat us right, began polishing what we thought was my mother’s silver gift. The metallic paint rubbed right off, exposing pale pink plastic. Mom loved them none-the-less. And we loved Cecil, for making our day. That surprise, the resulting story, was worth far more than what we paid.

Sometimes Cecil could be found watering plastic flowers in a planter box. She once mistook a local attorney for a valet and demanded that he park her car while she dined at the Planter. She was most often referred to as “colorful.”

In the late seventies, the man who became our first wastewater treatment plant manager, Dale Carlson, a guy who helped solve our sewage problem, rented the small place next door to Cecil Glenn. He was there to notice when Cecil went beyond colorful to something more vivid. Eventually he bought that small house and fixed it up like the boat hull design you see at the top of the staircase, just as Cecil would have liked. And he cared for her until he could no more.

Both Dale and Cecil are gone now. I wonder sometimes what else we’ve lost. Would a Cecil Glenn be embraced by La Conner in 2022? Some would say that Cecil was not playing with a full deck. Are we? Would Cecil Glenn be warehoused in some institution far from our view, in favor of a more sanitized kind of tourist attraction?

A reminder to us all: a full deck includes the The Fool, The Magician and The King of Cups. Cecil Glenn was the real deal, an attraction found nowhere else on earth.