‘One of a kind’ raconteur ran a popular Everett eatery

Published 12:01 am Sunday, May 8, 2011

Jack Sherin was a restaurateur and raconteur, a businessman whose work at his downtown Everett eatery was also his hobby.

“It was a hangout for all the professional people in Everett — the lawyers, doctors, politicians, he saw them all,” Marilyn Sherin said of Jack’s Bar and Grill. Her father ran the Hewitt Avenue restaurant and cocktail lounge for many years.

The restaurant at 1307 Hewitt Ave., which had been sold but kept the Jack’s name, closed in 2009. Before Sherin had that location, he operated The Turf at a spot east of his later location and across the street on Hewitt. Everett old-timers remember The Turf as being across from the old Sport Center Cafe.

Always, Jack’s was the place to be for a clientele that centered around local politics and business.

“You needed to be seen at Jack’s,” former County Councilman Bruce Agnew said in a story in The Herald in 2009 when the restaurant closed. “It was almost a courthouse away from the courthouse,” Agnew said in the article.

John “Jack” Sherin died April 11 at his home in Dayton in eastern Washington, where he had moved with his second wife, Glory Perry Sherin, about a year ago. He was 87.

Sherin married his first wife, Helen Dix Sherin, in 1942. They were married 49 years. After she died, he married Glory about 18 years ago, Marilyn Sherin said.

Sherin spent much of his life in Snohomish County running his restaurants. He dabbled in politics and was a longtime lobbyist in Olympia for the gambling industry. He worked to liberalize gambling laws in Washington state. Through the years he lived in Marysville, Everett and Lake Stevens. He served 11 years on the Lake Stevens Sewer Commission.

He ran for an Everett City Council seat and for a county leadership position, but wasn’t elected, according to Joe Brinster, a retired Everett attorney.

“Jack was one of a kind,” said Brinster, a friend of Sherin’s for 55 years. “If he cared about you, it was like he was your father or your closest brother. He held nothing back.

“Basically, he lived his life that way,” Brinster said. “He could be thick-headed. He had both sides — the devil and the Lord thrown in, the best of each. That’s who he became.”

Brinster called Sherin “a wonderful raconteur and a magnificent person.” His friend also had hard-living habits. “He smoked to the end,” Brinster said. Sherin also bristled at rules he didn’t agree with. “He had problems with people in authority telling him what he couldn’t do,” Brinster said.

Along with his wife, Glory, Sherin is survived by his brother, David Sherin; sister, Marion Nichols; three daughters, Marilyn Sherin, JoAnn Rollins and Shirley King; four stepchildren, Sherman Perry, Michael Perry, Rick Toussaint and Robin Helland; nine grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews.

Marilyn Sherin said she didn’t want to “sugarcoat” her father’s life. More businessman than family man, Sherin loved spending time at his restaurant, his daughter said.

“That was his life. He loved it down there,” said Marilyn Sherin, who was a cashier for her father about 10 years before her long career at the Snohomish County Assessor’s office. “I used to tell him, ‘Dad, get a hobby.’ That was his hobby,” she said.

“The guys, he’d buy them all a drink. And they’d buy him one. There was mutual admiration,” she said.

Sherin was born in Bellingham on April 3, 1924, to John and Christine Sherin. He grew up in Deming, a town in Whatcom County. During World War II, he served in the Navy aboard the light aircraft carrier USS Cowpens.

Marilyn Sherin said her father began working in the building industry, but soon became a tavern owner. Before moving to Snohomish County, she said, he owned a Seattle tavern called the Silver Moon. Later, he had one in Auburn, the Red Rooster.

When he came to Everett in about 1955, he took over Dickson’s Cigar Store on Hewitt. “It was mostly a men’s store with a cardroom downstairs,” Marilyn Sherin said. That business became The Turf, and later Jack’s Bar and Grill.

“In some ways it was good, in some ways it was bad,” Marilyn Sherin said of the bar business. “He met some interesting people.”

She remembers many regulars at her father’s establishments, including former Democratic state Sen. Larry Vognild and the late U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson. “And Scoop (Sen. Henry M.) Jackson,” Marilyn Sherin said. “Dad knew them all.”

“He had so many wonderful stories,” said Brinster, sharing a memory of a time that Sherin had fired a cook. “It was a Saturday night, and another cook didn’t show up. So Jack called the cook he had fired. The guy came in and put on an apron,” Brinster said. “About an hour later, the cook came out and said, ‘I’m leaving. You fired me, now I’m quitting. We’re even.’

“Jack didn’t take offense. He’d just tell it as a funny story,” Brinster said.

Marilyn Sherin said her father played host to the well-known and the powerful, but never gossiped about them.

“They could say what they wanted, and it never went anywhere,” she said. “Some wild things happened there, but they trusted him that it wouldn’t go any further.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; muhlstein@heraldnet.com.