‘Pirate Pete’ offers historical trinkets and tales

EDITOR’S NOTE: An abridged version of this feature will appear in the upcoming Winter edition of Washington Coast Magazine, as a sidebar to writer Callie White’s guided tour of the Coast’s best antique shops. The magazine will be released the first week of December.

By David Haerle

Grays Harbor News Group

There are collectors, and then there are Collectors — with a capital C.

Pete Darrah, known as “Pirate Pete,” is the latter.

The 84-year-old Marine Corps veteran has made his mark on the small community of Raymond with his story-telling and his vast collections.

The most noticeable place to find the bounty of his almost eight decades of gathering is Pirate Pete’s Antiques, which shares a bright-yellow building with the Canary Cottage antique store, on Highway 101 between Raymond and South Bend. Be prepared to listen to all kinds of stories as you shop there; Pete is a veritable treasure trove of historical trivia, and he loves to share it.

But if you really want to be impressed by his antiquing efforts, check out the Willapa Seaport Museum, tucked next to the Willapa River on Alder Street in quaint downtown Raymond. (More on that later.)

Pete was born at Fort Monroe, Virginia, in 1935, the son of a high-ranking U.S. Army officer. As a military family prior to and during World War II, they were on the move a lot. Pete recalls collecting military items he found at the various Army installations where his father was stationed as early as 6 years old — things like surplus cannonballs, bayonets and military pins.

Pete recounted how, when he was young, he was the most helpful among his siblings when it came time for the military family to make another move.

He had his reasons.

“I was always helping pack those boxes, and I was the first to unpack them in the new place,” he said with a wry smile. That’s because his parents weren’t keen about carting around the fledgling collector’s loads of military items from base to base. So young Pete would furtively pack his collection spread out among the boxes holding the family’s various household items. “I created my own code, so I knew what I put in each box,” he said.

“When we’d get to a new place, I’d be the first to unpack all the boxes, because I didn’t want to get blamed if a cannon ball or bayonet ruined something of my mom’s during the trip,” he chuckled.

Pete’s father and brother graduated from West Point, but he took a different route, joining the Marine Corps. “I enlisted two days out of high school in 1954,” he said.

When he left the service, he settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he first earned a college degree and then sought a job as a public school teacher. He taught English there for three years before he and his family decided to move west.

His dad, by then retired from the Army, was living in Steilacoom and Pete took his pop’s advice about the livability of Western Washington. He packed up his family in their Opel Kadett and their belongings in a tractor-trailer rig, and they all headed out West.

Speaking to how cheap real estate was back in those days, he said the semi-truck’s owner drove a hard bargain: “He gave me his tractor and I gave him my house,” chuckled Pete.

He landed jobs teaching at Ann Wright Academy — a private boarding school for girls — in Tacoma and taught some night school at Fort Lewis for the University of Puget Sound. Eventually, the family found its way to Gig Harbor, “where I traded that tractor-trailer rig for a small waterfront home.”

“I’d never owned a house with a fireplace and never lived in a house on the water,” he said. “It had a daylight basement. You could do things with it.”

He spent the next 30 years there, working as a substitute teacher and opening collectible and maritime shops in Gig Harbor and Tacoma.

“I’ve always had a shop. I’ve had all kinds of shops,” said Pete.

But Gig Harbor was gentrifying quickly in the mid-1990s, turning from a port town into a bedroom community. “It was getting really fancy, so I came down here,” he said of Raymond, where he has lived for 24 years.

And when he found a suitable house, you know it had to be something with some history to it: a 110-year-old Craftsman-style home that is now packed with his most personal memorabilia.

Soon after arriving on the Willapa Harbor, he set up a shop there called Pirate Pete’s. It shares a building with the Canary Cottage antiques store at 2500 Highway 101 in Raymond, though Pete is not there much these days.

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have the store down there,” he said, acknowledging that it was time to slow down a bit in his sunset years.

On top of that, he was able to procure a spot on the banks of the Willapa River to hold and display his still-growing collection of maritime and military memorabilia. That became the Willapa Seaport Museum, which boasts a pretty impressive collection.

How much of the museum’s displays came from Pete? “All of it, just about,” he says matter-of-factly, noting that getting it all down from Gig Harbor took “about 30 trips in a box truck.”

But he points out there have been other local contributors since the museum’s opening: “People are always bringing stuff in here from the local shipbuilding operations” that dominated the Raymond waterfront for many years.

Pete and other volunteers built and put together all of the museum’s display areas, which range from highly educational to whimsical. Military memorabilia include items from as far back as the War of 1812. There are also displays that cover commercial fishing, sport fishing, logging, pirates, Native American tribes of the region and longshoremen — just to name a few.

The museum pays no rent for the large building that houses it at 310 Alder St. in Raymond, but keeping it open has still been a challenge, according to Pete. The daily staffing is handled by volunteers, including himself on most Tuesdays.

“The state owns the land and the city owns the building, but we struggle moneywise just to keep the damn place open,” he said. “The electricity bill is about $3,000 a year — electricity costs a lot of money these days.”

Pete is hoping a deep-pocketed patron might discover the museum someday.

“There’s money out there. We just don’t know how to get it very well,” he said with a shrug.