MEET THE CDA BUNKERS

This could be the story of a local World Series hero.

It could also be a story of Coeur d’Alene’s most famous steamboat builder, the man who gave us our famous shoreline, along with the tale of his gigantic, custom-built house.

It could be the story of a current downtown resident who once rebuilt houses on Whidbey Island, accidentally ran into the Northwest tech boom and wound up living across the street from the mayor of Seattle.

It could be the story of craft fairs, fridge magnets and amazing children’s books, all featuring a local couple who carved out such a startling niche that an entire posh region of the South Carolina coastlands named them “Artists-in-Residence.”

It even could be the story of someone seeing Coeur d’Alene for the very first time and buying a house on Indiana Street three hours later.

Unbelievably, it could be ALL of these things, but more than events and accomplishments and timing...

It’s really a love story.

MEET THE Bunkers, Wally and Kathy, who think of themselves now mainly as your neighbors.

They don’t feel fancy or famous — even though they managed, created or remain an intimate part of everything you just read to begin this story.

Backing up for just a moment...

They went to different high schools a few miles apart in the suburbs of San Francisco, and only met because Kathy Wild’s cousin dragged her to what they both laughingly called a “sock hop.”

Kathy was petite, blonde and gorgeous. Wally was a handsome, strapping kid who could throw a baseball very, very fast and effectively.

They hit it off, these two, and now might tell you that current generations are missing something special without regular sock hops.

The future Mr. and Mrs. Bunker were married in a church that, if you kind of tilt the map a couple of blocks, sits about halfway between their rival high schools.

In another life, this hometown couple might have stayed around and raised a family near their folks.

But the thing about Wally throwing a baseball was that he not only flung pitches with serious velocity, they never stayed straight.

“From as far back as I could remember,” Wally said, “my fastball had a natural sink to it. I didn’t have a special grip or anything. It just happened.”

A batter once said: “You could break your back trying to hit (Bunker’s) sinker.”

That quote came from Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees.

Thus the first chapter of the Bunkers’ half-century marriage was preordained: Wally would become a pro baseball pitcher, signed immediately after graduation from Capuchino High.

The Baltimore Orioles gave him a bonus, left him just one year in minors (playing for Stockton during the 1963 season in the low-level California League, barely an hour from home), then astonishingly summoned him to the major leagues at the age of 19.

In the summer of 1964, one of the Orioles’ regular pitchers got hurt and Bunker was given a starting assignment.

He threw a one-hitter for the first of 19 victories in a stunning rookie season.

On June 17 of that year, Baltimore Mayor Theodore McKeldin staged a little pregame ceremony and proclaimed the mound at Memorial Stadium as “Bunker Hill” — even tossing down some dirt from the real Bunker Hill in Massachusetts to seal the deal.

Wasn’t it all a bit overwhelming for a kid just a year out of high school?

“Not as much as you’d think,” Bunker said. “I was just playing a game I’d played for fun all my life, but when you get to the big leagues, you grow up pretty fast.

“I never felt really out of place, but there still were a few times when it would sink in. I remember getting goosebumps the first time we went to Yankee Stadium — I mean, you’re on the field and you think: Babe Ruth played here.

“It was really pretty cool.”

Unfortunately, cool sometimes can become actual cold, and on a freezing night in Cleveland the following year, Bunker released a pitch and felt “...like I’d been shot by a sniper.”

He’d torn something in his shoulder, and to compensate for the pain, he altered his motion and ultimately injured his elbow.

“There was no fancy surgery back then like they have now,” he said. “When you were injured, you tried to play through it. And when you couldn’t do it anymore, you were gone.”

Ultimately, that was the fate of Wallace Edward Bunker, forced out of baseball at age 26.

But before he threw his last big-league pitch in 1971, Wally managed to create two terrific pieces of history.

For several seasons after his initial injury, he was a part-time starter — baseball lingo meaning that when the pain subsided enough that he could throw the ball effectively, he did.

Thus in the 1966 World Series, Wally Bunker joined some very elite company by pitching a six-hit shutout to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 1-0 — part of a four-game sweep on the way to Baltimore’s first World Series championship.

“It was just as exciting, just as much of a dream as you’d expect,” Bunker said. “Every kid who plays ball imagines doing something like that, and after all the arm trouble, to have it happen then was amazing.”

But there was more pain the following couple of years, so after the ’68 season, Wally was not protected on the Orioles roster during an expansion draft to stock two new teams in the American League: the Kansas City Royals and the Seattle Pilots (who later became the Milwaukee Brewers).

Bunker was selected by Kansas City, felt relatively healthy during spring training in 1969, and thus — on April 8 of that year — he started the season opener at home against Minnesota and logged another baseball milestone as the first person ever to throw a pitch for the Royals.

DESPITE a good year for the newborn Royals in 1969 (he won 12 games), Bunker’s arm trouble persisted and he was released in May 1971.

You could fill a library with stories of athletes whose careers ended far too soon and — especially in Bunker’s era when there really was little money in the game — disappeared into obscurity or worse, fell into wretched lives as they clung to bitterness about the unfairness of it all.

That never happened to Wally Bunker, partly (or maybe mostly) because he understood the sport for what it was and besides, he was married to the neatest person he’d ever known.

In fact, those seasons as a big-league pitcher — however dramatic — turned out to be just one highlight of a life that has been a non-stop adventure for Wally and Kathy Bunker.

Everything you read at the beginning of this tale happened in the Bunkers’ “real life,” during the 45 years since his final pitch for the Kansas City Royals.

And truthfully, SO many fantastic things occurred post-baseball that being a World Series hero almost seems like a footnote in this story — which truly is a remarkable statement.

Endless details of what all the couple has done since 1971 are more suited to a book than a single newspaper account, but it’s surely worth touching the highlights.

First of all, Kathy inherited natural artistic talent from her grandmother, and after the Bunkers returned to Seattle because much of Wally’s family lived there, their “adult” life just took off.

(Here’s perhaps the first of many wonderful gambles they took, heading for Seattle despite the fact that they loved Kansas City and had hoped to settle down there. You’re going to see this trend again...over and over.)

It’s hard to keep track of everything the Bunkers did, except they always picked something they’d enjoy. For instance...

They opened a craft-type store.

They built a business selling refrigerator magnets that caught on nationally (Kathy’s artistic style, which she taught to Wally, can best be described to everyday folk as “Alice in Wonderland dreamscapes”).

They earned a living with Wally buying, refurbishing and selling houses, starting on Whidbey Island near Seattle — at the perfect time when Bill Gates and the tech era completely changed the city and made property more expensive to the point of silliness.

“Our timing for whatever we were doing, even running around to craft shows or whatever, always seemed to turn out just right,” Kathy said. “We’ve been so blessed that way.”

IN 1991, the Bunkers trekked east on I-90 to visit their son, who was a student at Washington State.

“We got to a hotel in Spokane,” Wally said, “and the manager there told us that if we had a little time, we should drive over and see this place called Coeur d’Alene. He said it was a neat town.

“Honestly, I’m not even sure we’d heard of it before then (Kathy nodded her head with a big smile as she listened to that statement). But we drove into town and both of us immediately thought it was one of the most fantastic places we’d ever been.

“It was like we knew immediately it was the place for us, and within three hours of reaching town, we’d made an offer and completed a deal for a house — the place on Indiana (Street) that we still own and rent out.”

Over to Kathy: “I guess we’re both the sort of people who know right away when something or some opportunity suits us. And we always feel it together, more or less, which is really wonderful.”

The couple lived three years in that house, but then set off on new journeys — the most spectacular of which landed them in the South Carolina low country near the resort village of Hilton Head.

“My sister, Sherry, lived down there and thought it would be a great place for us,” Kathy said. “It was, and we loved it.”

It was the inspiration of the sea and marshes of that area that brought their art into the limelight.

Together they wrote and illustrated children’s books, featuring a cute little seabird hero named Wal-de-Mar Wiggins — named after Wally’s granddad Wal-de-Mar Bach.

They were officially named “Artists in Residence” in the region, and little Wal-de-Mar began starring in further fun stories (including “The Birth of Baseball,” in which it turns out that Wal-de-Mar Wiggins invents the National Pastime using a ball made out of seaweed, with oysters as bases).

“Whatever we’ve done, and some of it seemed a little crazy, it’s been fun and we’ve been in it right together,” Kathy said. “The only time we couldn’t partner on something, it was pitching for the Orioles — but even then, I was a pretty involved cheerleader.”

(The only reason Wally claimed to know for certain that Baltimore had local TV coverage of the Orioles games during the 1960s was that he recalled Kathy being able to see him pitch in road games.)

After several years in the Hilton Head area, the Bunkers decided they missed the Northwest, and so they came up with a plan to live in Coeur d’Alene — which they missed desperately — and maybe spend some winter months in South Carolina.

AND SO, four years ago, they returned to the house on Indiana.

But typically for this let’s-go-for-it couple, plans are always subject to change.

For one thing, they were getting tired of moving across the country lock, stock and barrel.

“We had pets, all of our painting and drawing stuff, just all those things that become part of your life,” Wally said. “So we started thinking about staying in Coeur d’Alene full-time.”

Naturally, taking that course promptly paid off again, because the Bunkers had eyed a nearby house that utterly fascinated them.

As it turned out, the massive (6,539 square feet) home at 622 Coeur d’Alene Ave. was built in 1911, specifically to the design of Peter W. Johnson, a Norwegian refugee who changed the city forever as a steamboat builder who also filled in the shoreline where the Coeur d’Alene Resort now stands.

But the house wasn’t even for sale.

Wally and Kathy are nothing if not relentlessly optimistic, however, and ultimately they closed a deal on the house simply because they hoped for something that was exactly what the previous owner wanted...someone who might modernize a few vital things, but who wanted to love the house almost precisely as it was.

“We think it’s fabulous, with the fantastic features and feel of the original design,” Kathy said. “Maybe some people would want to change some of the older things in the house, but not us. This is exactly the place for us.”

So there they are, working most days in a basement they’ve converted into an art studio, and coming up with mixtures of old and new ideas.

“We’re pretty sure Wal-de-Mar Wiggins is destined for more adventures,” Wally said. “In the meantime, we’re right where we want to be here in Coeur d’Alene, meeting new friends and neighbors, really just settled in, you know?”

Even when a media member putting their lifetime journey into perspective asked if they would pose for a few photos, a remarkable thing happened.

Inside the house or on the porch, holding paintings or displaying some other treasures (like a fridge magnet with a wild design and the words “Life is a Dance”), they instinctively come together, side by side, for whatever pictures were requested.

And it’s just so clear that they wouldn’t have it any other way.