Anne Buck, outspoken ‘rebel’ and local go-to for exotic spices, dies
Anne Buck, the outspoken seller of spices and a fixture in Olympia’s small business community for decades, died Monday. She was 94.
Buck’s Fifth Avenue has long been a must-go for devoted home cooks and professional chefs on the hunt for spices, herbs and teas. Hundreds of them line the shelves of the small storefront, stored in Mason jars with handwritten labels.
Everything in there was once a customer request, said Scott Smith, who took over running the store when Buck stepped down late last year, though she was still coming in most days until a few weeks ago.
Buck is said to have tried every spice she carried, recommending things like berbere and za’atar as a pizza topper.
“Whatever I cook at home is whatever I can cook the fastest. I come home so hungry talking about food all day long, I could eat down the front door,” Buck told The Olympian in 2010. “You can have the same food every night of the week and put different spices on it and you’d never know it’s the same food.”
On the civic side, Buck was an advocate for downtown businesses. In 2017, she caused a stir when, frustrated with people sleeping, littering and defecating in the entryway of her store, she had a wood lattice wall installed across the alcove. That caught the attention of the city, which ordered it to come down since she didn’t have a permit. (It is not clear what happened next, but the wall is still there.)
Meanwhile, she raised thousands of dollars to help pay for a public restroom installed down the street.
She also got involved with the Carnegie Group, activists who weighed in on issues around development and growth, and wound up hosting their meetings, said her son Beau Buck. And she was among the plaintiffs in a 2007 lawsuit against the Port of Olympia over environmental concerns related to its construction projects.
What about Buck the businesswoman?
In a 2010 profile in The Olympian, she balked at that title; she simply saw needs in the community that needed filling.
Smith said she often told this story of moving to Olympia in the late 1960s from the Midwest:
“She asked for tea in a restaurant and they didn’t know what she was talking about, so she opened a tea room,” he said.
She also had a restaurant, an antiques store, a children’s clothing store, a parcel drop-off business, a dog biscuit bakery — most of them housed in the Fifth Avenue building she eventually bought. The spice store, the only one still there, started as a garden and housewares store, said Beau Buck.
What she enjoyed most was the people who came to chat; at his suggestion, she left the register in the back for a table in the middle to be closer to customers.
“It was really a social center. As the foodie movement happened, people would come in, swap recipes and talk about what they were going to prepare,” he said.
Smith described Buck as candid and blunt, but also sweet, loyal and giving. She maintained the Beatty Memorial Park, a small clump of grass in a crack in the sidewalk outside the store in honor of her friend and former bookkeeper, Mary Lou Beatty.
Audrey Henley of the Olympia Film Society worked across the street from Buck for 15 years. She said a service is in the works to celebrate Buck’s life, big party at OFS’s Capitol Theater with a New Orleans-style procession — all Buck’s idea.
“To be neighbors with her, she was inspiring, she was a rebel, always thinking outside the box, and she was unpredictable,” Henley said. “She was so cool.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
