Kids with cancer may not want a white and gray wig, but Wayne Rogers’ donation to Locks of Love is given in a sweet spirit.
Locks of Love provides morale-boosting wigs to low-income children and teens suffering from long-term medical hair loss.
Rogers, 69, is one of those lucky sorts who has handsome tresses that are hardly thinning. When he gets enough to chop off, at least 6 inches, his donation may be sold to help offset the manufacturing costs of hairpieces, said Lauren Kukkamaa, communications director for Locks of Love.
We’ve written many Locks of Love stories, but they are usually about children donating their hair for other children.
It’s nice to meet a man who’s never had kids but who wants to help those who are sick. He manages The Strand on Colby Avenue, where monthly rentals for a room is $310 to $420.
For $360 per month, you get a bathroom.
“Tenants have had the hardest of luck,” Rogers said. “It’s not an easy world these days.”
He moved to The Strand a dozen years ago and has managed it for seven years.
Opened in 1915, The Strand was a 40-room enterprise built by a 57-year-old entrepreneur named Charles Strand, Everett Library historian David Dilgard said. Born in New Zealand to a Swedish sea captain and an English lady, Strand came to Everett about 1899 to work for the Great Northern Railway as a bridge builder.
The Strand was billed as “The Commercial Men’s Headquarters” and “The Traveler’s Home.”
Strand was in charge of his hotel for only a year or so before moving on to other business ventures that fared badly, Dilgard said.
Despondent, deeply in debt, he poisoned himself in a Seattle hotel room in June 1922. He’s buried in Evergreen Cemetery near the Karas family, part of Everett’s Greek community who were wiped out in a multiple homicide the following spring.
“Everett bibliophile and small-press publisher Edward Fox became night manager of The Strand just one month before Pearl Harbor, and he worked there for 20 years,” Dilgard said. The man’s “voluminous correspondence with friends documents life in The Strand, especially vividly depicting the war years.”
By that time, the late-night revelries of men in uniform and their lady friends comprised the lion’s share of the narrative, Dilgard said.
Wayne Rogers served in the U.S. Navy. Raised on Long Island, N.Y., he was adopted at age 3 by a family of little means. He worked retail from age 13. He’s sold shoes and clothing and waited tables.
He said he drifted away from whatever family he knew. Rogers lived in California after he got out of the Navy, but jobs were scarce. A friend in Marysville moved him here and he got a job within days at Sam’s Western Wear on Hewitt Avenue in Everett.
“I stumbled into it,” Rogers said. “I passed the store in Marysville, stopped in, they said they were hiring downtown.”
This is a person who understands the hum of downtown Everett life. If he ran the city, he would make many changes in infrastructure.
“I’m disappointed in Everett,” Rogers said. “Pay some jail people to sweep streets. Ten dollars to park for a concert? And I don’t like the skateboarders.”
He would take the old casket company, the Collins Building, and make it a Hell’s Kitchen affair. Give poor folks a place to live and work.
Don’t get him started about the need to coordinate service between Everett and Community transit, the bus rider said.
He isn’t an old codger. This is an easy-smiling fellow, comfortably clad in a T-shirt and shorts, wearing four rings, two bracelets and a Strand building vest.
Rogers sticks up for his tenants, with a full house of 40 right now, acknowledging their poverty but praising their humanity.
“I’ve had a good batch of good tenants,” he said. “It’s a clean, quiet, safe place to live.”
The country western music lover would have loved to see Martina McBride, who recently performed in Everett, but money is an issue for the manager. His spare change is spent playing pool at pubs downtown.
And if you hear a good Roy Orbison song at an open mike night, the performer may be Rogers, who has always loved to sing.
By day you might find him holding court on the sidewalk outside The Strand, chatting with the new owners of Royal Boutique or Neal McEntire from Neal’s Barbershop. He fields telephone calls every day from potential tenants.
“We screen them,” Rogers said. “We make sure everything is up to snuff.”
For those with a blemish on their records, Rogers is a big believer in second chances, he said.
And there are side benefits for those who score a room. He cooks big turkey dinners for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everybody should get a hot meal and have a place to go, Rogers said.
“Anytime you do for anybody,” Rogers said, “it makes you feel good.”
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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