This is the third of a five-part series about Chambers Corner and the two Bob Chambers who operated the gas station and convenience store that still serves customers just north of Enumclaw where Highway 169 meets S.E. 416th Street. The business began in 1925 and for 54 of its 100 years, it belonged to the Chambers family. Today it’s owned by Nick and Serene Dhami and operated as Stop-N-Shop from a 3,600-sf building painted light blue with red and white trim.
For simplicity’s sake, the two Bob Chambers will be referred to as Sr. and Jr. even though they didn’t share the same middle name. Bob Sr. started the business in 1925, two decades after the first filling station, later called gas stations, was built in St. Louis in 1905. The second was constructed in 1907 by Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) in Seattle at what’s now Pier 32. During the Chambers family’s five decades of operation, the station sold Chevron gas.
Bob Sr. and his first wife Maybelle (Embree) had four children. The second, named Robert Elmer Chambers was born in 1904 in Greenwood, British Columbia. Maybelle died when Bob Jr. was a boy. At age 13, he and two siblings ran away from home, but rejoined his father in Enumclaw at age 23, two years after Bob Sr. opened the business. Bob Sr.’s youngest daughter, Lottie ran the store while he attended to filling and servicing vehicles. Bob Jr. learned how to service and repair gas pumps which he did throughout the area.
In 1932, some twenty years after his first wife died, Bob Sr. married Margaret (Pressly) Elliot. At the time, Margaret had four children from her first marriage, all under the age of 18. Bob Jr. soon moved to Seattle. When Bob Sr. decided to sell the half-acre property and business, he first placed an ad in the Seattle P-I offering it for $4,000 on a contract. Bob Jr. snatched it up and moved back to Enumclaw. After the sale, Bob Sr. and his wife Margaret moved to southern California and retired. Robert John Chambers, Bob Sr. died in Bell Gardens on Aug. 10, 1958, at age 84.
When Bob Jr. purchased the business in 1947, he was 45 years old, never married, and had been nearly blinded when a battery blew up in his face. Doctors talked of removing one eye, but Bob pursued a home remedy by applying tobacco juice and castor oil to the wound. Three days later he began to see again. Another time when digging a well, Bob Jr. fell onto a two-by-four plank impaling his lower body with a wooden splinter. After the accident, his doctor told him he could never have children.
Shortly after returning to Enumclaw, Bob Jr. ran into Betty Jean (Hubbell) Saari at a dance in the nearby Wabash Grange Hall. Betty vaguely knew him as from waitressing at Fanny’s Café, while Bob notice her while pumping her gas at his station. Upon discovering another guy had his eyes on Betty, he promptly gave her a ring. The couple married on December 23, 1948. For their honeymoon, Bob and Betty drove to Seattle to see a movie, with Betty’s two children from her first marriage, Dale and Barbara Saari.
Spoiler alert! Bob Jr.’s doctors were wrong about him never having kids. Bob and Betty’s marriage produced five children, Robert, Richard, Marilyn, Eloise, and Bruce.
In next week’s column, we’ll learn more about how Bob and Betty Chambers built their business into a local landmark with one of the best-equipped mechanic shops in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Genealogical information about the Chambers family comes courtesy of Donna Brathovde, a Ravensdale historian. Stories about Bob Jr. come from a 1984 school project by Penny (Reich) Harp, daughter of Peggy (Reich) Chambers who in the 8th grade wrote her grandfather’s biography. This Aug. 13, 1951 photo by the King County Assessor was provided by Puget Sound Regional Archives in Eastgate. Photo enhancements were undertaken by Boomer Burnham, a Tahoma High School teacher and entrepreneur dba: www.BoomersPhotography.com
