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Wally’s was a pillar of Des Moines, a marina town of 30,000 whose popularity among retirees made it more conservative than Seattle, 15 miles north.
Locals came to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. Tourists came for fresh Northwest salmon and Dungeness crab.
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Greeting customers at the door was Mike Nordean, who had dedicated his life to the restaurant business. He got his start in high school busing tables at a local DoubleTree Inn, quickly working his way up to bartender and catering manager.
He was fresh out of college in 1979
when his first wife died in a car accident. Even after he remarried, he remained close to his first wife’s parents, and in 1991 he joined them to buy a drive-in restaurant in Buckley, Wash., a logging town southeast of Seattle. Two years later they opened Wally’s.