Sue Myers: Robin Hood lives on from her past

COEUR d’ALENE — Sue Myers is in the business of making memories.

As a real estate agent, she plants people in homes where good memories are all part of this place.

But none quite like her own. Myers is a Coeur d’Alene native and a lifer.

Consequently, her memories run the gamut, like draping herself over a log boom to watch the Diamond Cup’s thunder boats roar by seemingly within an arm’s reach, or raising a pet duck that behaved like a loyal family dog.

Then there was the serious stuff, like helping at a young age to sustain the family livelihood and a Lake City landmark.

Her parents, John and Dee Fullwiler, bought Bert’s Cabin Campground in 1957 at the corner of River Avenue and the former Lincoln Way and changed the name to the Robin Hood Campground.

It was hard to miss. At the time, Highway 95 crossed Blackwell Island and a bridge that led directly to River Avenue. You couldn’t get to town without passing the Fullwilers’ picturesque piece of the Fort Grounds.

Myers was just 2 years old when they acquired the property — about an acre — which became a full-time family project. The initial job her fastidious father gave her was to gather pine cones at a penny apiece. She would later help, along with her three siblings, with maintaining a dozen cabins and the grounds.

In 1965, the Fullwilers built Coeur d’Alene’s first swimming pool, the Krystal Plunge, with a second-story restaurant across River Avenue. The restaurant was later converted into an exercise room before the facility was sold to the YMCA five years later.

“He was about 20 years ahead of his time for a health club,” Myers said.

Her father also built a single-chair barber shop on Lincoln, which he operated for years.

“My dad was the eternal optimist and a busy man. He just couldn’t sit still. He just had to have something going on,” she said. “I don’t know how they ran the campground, the barbershop, the pool and the restaurant with four kids running around. But they were hard workers.”

Early on, Myers’ world was River Avenue. It extended from the old bridge where the kids would fish, ride their bikes across the river and swing from the rafters of the boat slips on Blackwell Island.

From there, it was the stud mill where they walked the log booms.

“How dangerous. But we were kids. We’d go out there and walk all over those things,” she said. “If our parents ever knew that...”

Farther down was Charlie Brown’s Bar (now the Fort Ground Grill), and which had an adjoining grocery store where they would buy penny candy.

Their house was in the middle of the Robin Hood. In addition to a family of six, it was occupied by a duck named Daffy.

One of her brothers won Daffy as a duckling at the Playland Pier on the Fourth of July, brought it home and built a heated shelter.

“Daffy just stuck around. She was just part of the family. A great duck. She would do tricks for catalpa,” Myers said of the flowering plant. “My mom said she always knew when to turn on the burner on the stove because Daffy knew when the kids were about due to walk home from school for lunch and she’d get up on a snowbank and squawk and squawk and flap.”

Daffy’s demise was from excessive, annoying egg-laying in a tourist facility. She was relocated to a farm with other ducks on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

As Myers got older, her life spilled off of River Avenue into the rest of the Fort Grounds and into town. She remembers the Playland Pier, boating on the lake, crashing corporate picnics at City Park, riding the ski bus to Lookout Pass and Schweitzer and the thrill of the hydroplanes.

“The air would just vibrate as they went by. We’d hang out all day watching the boats,” she said. “We had all those freedoms down there. Everything that was happening was happening down there. So we spent a lot of time on our bikes.”

And on motorcycles.

“We would tear around up and down alleys and try to avoid police. And ride down and race around Bums Jungle,” she said. “We just had a ball on those. You could go wherever you wanted. You couldn’t do that today.”

Or in their cars.

“We used to complain that there was nothing to do — but looking back, we always found something to do,” she said. “If you were looking for your friends you cruised Sherman, then you found something to do.”

Parties at the beach on the Spokane River were frequent.

“But the police never bothered us,” she said. “It was a different time.”

Myers, now a 62-year-old mother of three, graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School in 1973 where she met her future husband, Jim, now a geologist for Hecla Mining Co. They dated once at CHS then met again 15 years later at the Fourth of July fireworks in Coeur d’Alene. They were married in 1986.

Sue earned her real estate license at North Idaho College in 1998 and has worked almost 20 years for Century 21 Beutler and Associates.

She plans to stick with it “as long as it’s still fun.”

“I like to help people look at houses and they make up their own mind,” she said. “It’s not about selling anybody anything. It’s helping them make it happen.”

And she has no plans to leave Coeur d’Alene.

“People here are still really friendly. When I’m out and about, I try to engage people I don’t know,” she said. “You find out they’re just as friendly and nice as you want them to be. That is still here like it used to be.”

Still, Myers has to reflect when she and her husband are riding bikes along River Avenue by the old Robin Hood Campground.

“Every time we go by there I tell Jim I want to stop and position myself,” she said.