A Place To Bond

WAITSBURG - Some time before Coppei Coffee Co. opened on Main Street in August of 2011, Allison Bond and her husband Bruce Donohue had their eyes on a downtown building to start a café just like it. They had the same thought I did when they took one look at the Burg: This place needed a coffee shop.

Now they'll have it, or rather, Bond will have it.

Coppei Coffee Co., Llc., has leased its premises and equipment to Bond's Llc, Bitey Parrot. The papers were signed recently and she officially took over the opera- tion last Monday. The change had been rumored for some time.

"The community has been so very supportive," Bond said about the town's reaction to the planned handover. "I've been given excel- lent ideas, wonderful recipes and even a pie plate."

As our readers will recall, I opened Coppei Coffee Co. with great enthusiasm and energy more than a year ago, but my family's health and personal challenges got in the way, and I couldn't be in town as much as I had planned to nurture the business. A lot of the things I was able to do for the first year - the long daily hours, the weekend entertainment, special outreach and marketing - require an operator's full-time presence and I no longer had the bandwidth. I had to cut our hours to a bare-bones morning schedule, a regrettable decision for those who enjoyed our lunch hours. I was only able to keep the doors open thanks to the tremendous help and support of administrator Tawnya Richards and staffers Robyn Dun- leavy, Debbie Fosnot and Dawna James.

Allison is another story. Not that she has committed to a par- ticular growth plan yet. Rightly, she wants to get her feet on the ground. At the moment, she's gathering ideas and starting with a solid morning operation to build her confidence as an operator.

"This is a coffee shop," she said. "From here, I'll expand out. I want to make a slow start and make sure it's successful."

But aside from the fact that she loves the chemistry, art and creation of coffee and pastries, an incident earlier this year convinced her it was time that she and Bruce start spending the bulk of their time in Waitsburg.

Just one week before I approached Allison about the pos- sibility of taking over the coffee shop, Bruce was walking down the street, minding his own business in a gentrified Seattle neighbor- hood when a gun man in an SUV opened fire into traffic, getting off nearly a dozen rounds before fleeing the scene.

The incident prompted the couple to consider ways to cut back their time in the big city and spend more of it in the quiet, lov- able Burg, where they had bought the historic Lybecker home on Fourth Avenue barely a year and a half earlier.

Suddenly, reviving their previ- ous dream of operating a coffee shop in town sounded "like a good idea," Bond said.

Though Donohue is a more recent transplant to the east, Bond is no stranger to Walla Walla County. She was born in Walla Walla and graduated from Walla Walla High School in 1976. Like other kids her age at the time, she got out of town "as fast as I could," trying her luck at various colleges in the West, dabbling in art, portraiture, math and chemistry but abandoning academic life before completing a degree.

In Seattle, she sold vitamins to athletes for a while and joined a pre-grunge rock band, the Agi- tated Natives, which played all over town in the early 1990s. She jumped into the music scene with a group of former college friends as the keyboard player.

"We did really well," Bond said about her years as a rocker.

Then came love chemistry.

Whilst enjoying a cup of java at a coffee shop in Seattle's Seward Park neighborhood, she met a man who was just as drawn to good coffee and the far-out subject of organic chemistry as she was. They hit if off immediately.

"It was love at first sight," she said.

Before long, she brought the chemist-turned-computer database architect out to her Blue Mountains stomping grounds and he fell in love with it: the soft rolling hills, the charming towns and so on. They bought a piece of property on Biscuit Ridge half a dozen years ago and began to explore ideas for a venture on Waitsburg's Main Street.

Although somebody beat them to the punch with the coffee shop idea, they still embraced the new business and, later, the possibility of running Coppei Coffee.

"We loved coming here in the mornings and bringing our (house) guests," Bond said. "I couldn't stand the idea of someone (operating it and) not doing it right."

The immediate plan is to ex- plore a lot more advice from local patrons, who have supported Cop- pei Coffee from the beginning.

"I hope everyone will continue to offer their suggestions, while we get up to steam, and work to run smoothly," she said. "I really want this to be a place where the community feels welcome - a place they can feel free to gather and discuss the issues, or just "shoot the breeze" with a cup of Joe and a really good pastry."

On a personal note, I want to thank and congratulate Allison for taking on this brave business venture, whose hours and offer- ings haven't been everything they can be. I'm thrilled and excited for the town that she has agreed to take this on, and I hope you will all back her and help her make it a big success. If you haven't stepped through the door in a while, for whatever reason, come back and try the place again now that it's in Bond's much more nurturing hands or, as some of us some- times say, now that it's "Allison's Restaurant."