It was the place to go. Whether for the morning’s first cup of coffee or that last drink before closing time, regulars had a home away from home at Taylor’s Landing.
A Mukilteo institution, the restaurant at 710 Front Street was sold to Ivar’s in 1991. It’s been gone almost 24 years but will always be Taylor’s Landing in the memories of many who worked there.
“It was one of those places that if you worked there you could work anywhere,” said Vicki Smith Mitchell, a former bartender at the waterfront restaurant and nightspot. “It was so busy. It was a big family, really.”
Mitchell and other former workers will get together Saturday to rekindle friendships and share stories at a Taylor’s Landing reunion. It’s scheduled for 4 to 10 p.m. Saturday at the Mukilteo Boys &Club, and donations made at the event will benefit the club. Longtime Taylor’s customers are welcome, too.
For Mitchell, it was more than a workplace. The 64-year-old Snohomish woman started at Taylor’s in 1973. She worked there for three years, then left, but returned to work until the mid-1980s.
“Back in the day, we’d get off at 2 a.m. The tide would be up, we’d turn on floodlights and all go swimming,” she said. “Sometimes we’d sit there with the Taylors and sing all night long. Tim Taylor would go cook us pancakes for breakfast. I’ve got tears in my eyes thinking about it.”
It wasn’t Taylor’s Landing from the start. In the 1920s, it was the Ferry Lunch Room, a little lunch counter that also sold fishing tackle and bait. Edgar Taylor Sr. and Mildred Leo Taylor were the proprietors. Their sons, Dick and Ed Taylor, later co-owned Taylor’s Landing. It was remodeled in the late 1960s after the Boeing Co. came to Everett.
Dick Taylor, who died in 2005 at age 86, served on Mukilteo’s first City Council and was a two-term mayor before being elected in 1960 to the state House of Representatives. Mitchell remembers the kindness of Dick Taylor’s son, Stephen Taylor, her former boss, who died in a boating accident in 1981.
“I was 25 or 26 and wanted braces on my teeth,” she said. “I went to Steve Taylor and said, ‘I need a loan, you can take it out of my paycheck.’ I paid for about six months, but then it wasn’t coming out of my check anymore. He just said, ‘Oh, I got that for you.’ That’s the kind of place it was.”
Tim Taylor, Ed Taylor’s son, was running the restaurant when it was sold to Ivar’s.
“The reunion will be such a cool event. Most of us haven’t seen each other since those days,” said Peter Cattle, a former night manager at Taylor’s Landing. The Everett man is now in the real estate business. “I grew up with Tim Taylor. That whole era of working at Taylor’s Landing, it was all like family,” he said.
Annette Mogensen Richards organized the reunion, starting with a Facebook page, along with Mitchell, Patti Ross, Michael Lines and Becky King Woeppel.
Richards, 54, was 18 when she started as a Taylor’s waitress. Working summers and vacations, she earned enough to pay her way through Washington State University.
Restaurant regulars would get off the ferry and be at the door before it opened. “They had their first cup of coffee or breakfast before going up the hill to Boeing,” Richards said.
Mitchell remembers lunch and dinner hours “packed with Boeing people.”
“We had a lot of dignitaries come to Boeing to buy planes, and they’d be in the banquet room,” she said.
On weekends, there was entertainment. The house act was the late Glen Larson, a singer and self-deprecating guitar player nicknamed the “Swedish Fox.” After the 83-year-old performer died in 2003, Tim Taylor joked in The Herald that Larson “couldn’t sing, he couldn’t play the guitar, and he never finished a song that I can remember. But he just packed them in.”
Customers and co-workers alike grew as close as family. “We’d get invited to their houses and their parties. It was amazing,” Cattle said.
Richards agrees. “Fun times — you don’t find that anymore,” she said.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Taylor’s Landing reunion
A reunion of former Taylor’s Landing workers will be held from 4 to 10 p.m. Saturday at the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club, 1134 Second St., Mukilteo. The event will include chowder, salad and beverages, a slide show and live music. Longtime restaurant customers also welcome. Donations will benefit the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club.
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