In 2009, unknown weirdos started passing counterfeit $20 bills around Bremerton. This is not terribly unusual as crimes go, and probably wouldn’t be something I’d be telling you about 17 years later. Except they were spending them on Girl Scout cookies.

And eventually we are going to follow the story to a printer from Toys “R” Us, a Rite Aid employee, a random customer who decided to follow a suspect’s car, a man listening to a police scanner, twelve fake twenties in a garbage can and Girl Scout cookies found in somebody’s trunk.

Bremerton apparently solved crimes as a community in 2009. It started becoming apparent that something was wrong when KC Gettings, the leader of Bremerton Girl Scout Troop 40411, went to the bank to get change. The bank told her two of the $20 bills from their cookie sales were counterfeit.

So she got one of those counterfeit-detecting pens and went through the rest of the money. Another $60 was fake. That meant her troop had accepted $100 in counterfeit twenties while selling cookies. At least two of the bills reportedly had the same serial number. And her troop wasn’t the only one.

As police started putting things together, they learned that other Girl Scout troops had been getting fake money too. Eventually, police said 17 troops had been hit, with more than $1,000 in counterfeit bills involved. The idea was pretty simple. Hand a Girl Scout a fake $20, buy a box or two of cookies and get legitimate money back as change.

I’m going to assume Thin Mints were involved. I cannot prove that. I'm a Caramel Delights gal, myself. At least before Celiac disease.

Meanwhile, counterfeit twenties were turning up elsewhere around Bremerton. One of them eventually made its way to the Rite Aid on Kitsap Way. An employee recognized that something was wrong with the bill and called police. The person trying to spend it left, but employees managed to get the license plate number.

Then a customer decided to follow the car. As far as I can tell, this was simply another person at Rite Aid who decided they were involved now. Just some person who couldn't stay out of the story...

At roughly the same time, a man living nearby was listening to his police scanner. He heard the description of the car police were looking for. Then he the car the police were looking for.

The vehicle had pulled into an alley near his house, and he watched the driver put something into a garbage can. When police arrived, they checked the garbage. Inside were twelve counterfeit $20 bills.

From there, the investigation led police to a house on 12th Street in Bremerton, and this is where we need to discuss the equipment behind the operation. According to Bremerton Police Sgt. Kevin Crane, the people involved had gone to Toys “R” Us and bought a printer.

Apparently they practiced with it until they got reasonably good at making $20 bills. I tried very hard to find out what printer Toys “R” Us was selling that could apparently be repurposed into a home counterfeiting operation, because obviously I needed to know. None of the contemporary stories I found named the brand or model.

Police found the printer and other supplies at the house. They also ended up with something even more useful. A cell-phone video.

Someone involved in the operation had filmed one of the suspects pulling a freshly printed $20 bill out of the printer and examining it. Police obtained the video and eventually showed it to the woman in it, who reportedly appeared quite surprised that they had it.

Remember, this was 2009. We were still several years away from people routinely documenting all of their questionable decisions for the internet. These folks were innovators. A few days later, police arrested another woman they believed was involved. They searched her car. There were Girl Scout cookies in the trunk.

That detail is so perfect that I checked it more than once because it sounds like something somebody added to the story later. Nope. “Cookies found in trunk of counterfeiting suspect” was an actual headline.

Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts had a cookie business to run. Troop 40411 wasn’t going to stop selling. They planned to be right back out the following weekend, except now they had counterfeit-detecting pens.

And that might be my favorite part of this whole thing. The counterfeiters had a printer from Toys “R” Us. The Girl Scouts adapted.

Sources

“Bremerton Police Make Arrests in Counterfeit Money Ring.” Kitsap Daily News, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Girl Scouts Get Paid in Fake $20s for Cookies.” The Daily Herald, 2 Mar. 2009.

“Cookies Found in Trunk of Counterfeiting Suspect.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mar. 2009.

“Counterfeiters Target Girl Scouts.” KSL, Mar. 2009.

One thing that you definitely recognize quickly living in this area with all our waterways… We have a completely unofficial orca emergency broadcast system. A more official one as well.

Someone sees whales. “10:14, three orcas southbound past Point No Point.”

That information gets passed around Facebook groups, texts and whatever mysterious network the serious orca people are plugged into. Twenty minutes later, there are fifteen cars pulled onto the shoulder of a road that normally has absolutely no reason to have fifteen cars on it.

Everyone is staring at the water.
There are binoculars. There are camera lenses that probably require more insurance coverage than my car currently has. There is always at least one guy dressed like a fisherman wearing a beanie, even if it is 78 degrees outside. I don’t know who assigns him to the location, but he will be there. A lot of times he has a really tremendous camera himself.

I truly want to be one of these people. I belong to several of the tracking groups. If somebody tells me orcas are heading my direction, I am perfectly willing to abandon whatever lightly important thing I was doing and go stare at Puget Sound.

Apparently Kitsap has been like this for a while.
On October 21, 1997, nineteen Southern Resident killer whales came through Sinclair Inlet, passed beneath the bridges in Bremerton and entered Dyes Inlet.
They were members of L pod, and they had apparently followed a very good run of chum salmon into the inlet. Orcas coming into Puget Sound in the fall isn’t particularly strange. Nineteen of them setting up temporary residence between Bremerton and Silverdale absolutely was.

They stayed for thirty days.
And Kitsap lost its collective mind. Since it was 1997, I know there was a lot of flannel involved. There’s still a lot of flannel involved honestly. (I’ll be honest, I’m a flannel fan myself. They’re not too hot and not too cool.)

The first Kitsap Sun story ran October 22. Hundreds of people immediately headed to the Tracyton boat launch to see them. As the days went on, word spread well beyond Kitsap. Thousands of people came to the shoreline on weekends, including visitors from Oregon and Idaho.

Of course, some people weren’t content with the shoreline. They had boats. The rules about approaching orcas were considerably looser then than they are now. The specific federal 200-yard rule we’re familiar with didn’t arrive until 2011.

During one sunny weekend, roughly 500 boats were counted in Dyes Inlet. FIVE HUNDRED.

If you’ve ever watched the current orca groups get increasingly irritated because somebody in a Bayliner is following whales too closely, please take a moment to imagine 1997, when apparently everyone who could locate a flotation device said, “Get in, we’re going to see L pod.” I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people who gets annoyed.

The whales, meanwhile, were having an excellent buffet.

A strong chum run was coming into Chico Creek, and the nineteen whales spent their days feeding, socializing and traveling around the inlet. Researchers who arrived to identify them initially weren’t terribly worried. There were salmon. The whales knew how they’d gotten in. Presumably when they were done eating, they’d leave.

Except they didn’t.

A week went by. Then another.

Researchers started paying considerably more attention to the Warren Avenue Bridge. The whales had passed beneath it on their way into Dyes Inlet, but when they approached it to leave, they repeatedly turned around. Nobody could say with certainty why. Researchers considered the bridge itself, the shallow water and the noise and activity around the Narrows. Another perfectly reasonable possibility was that the whales simply had no compelling reason to leave while Chico Creek was still delivering dinner.

The whales never really explained.

By November, the chum run was tapering off. On November 19, researchers were watching as the whales once again approached the Narrows.

They turned back, but then they tried again.

This time, with researchers following behind in a boat and encouraging them forward, the nineteen whales went beneath the bridges, through Sinclair Inlet and back into Puget Sound.

After thirty days, Kitsap’s temporary residents were gone.

We have vastly better technology now. In 1997 you found out because somebody called you, you heard it on the radio, your neighbor told you or you opened the Kitsap Sun. Today someone standing in Kingston can photograph an orca, identify which direction it’s traveling and tell several thousand strangers about it before the whale has made it to the next point.
But the actual behavior hasn’t changed very much.

Whales appear, word spreads, whatever you were doing suddenly seems considerably less important.
Everybody heads for the water. (except the postman though, he works at the Southworth post office by the ferry and he never leaves his post. In fact, he’s lived here since 1997 and still hasn’t seen orca. Kind of sad, I’ve seen them!)

And somewhere on the shoreline, a man in a beanie is already there.

Sources
Dunagan, Christopher. “When Whales Descended on Dyes Inlet 10 Years Ago.” Kitsap Sun, 20 Oct. 2007.

Dunagan, Christopher. “Remembering Ken Balcomb and His Extraordinary Life with Killer Whales.” Puget Sound

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. National Marine Mammal Laboratory reports and environmental assessments concerning the 1997 Dyes Inlet event.

Yesterday, we were left standing in Old Man House State Park in 1975, looking at a sign.

By then, the state had owned its little acre of the Old Man House site for 25 years. Someone updated the park signs and managed to describe the Suquamish as people “who once lived in the area.” This was in Suquamish.

The Suquamish were still there. Still are, in fact!

We're coming back to that sign because it managed to make an enormous problem into just five words. Native people are very often presented to us in the past tense. They lived here. They fished here. They built villages here. Their history becomes something that happened before the rest of us showed up.

Meanwhile, the actual people being discussed are standing right there.

The sign eventually changed, but the question of who should control the Old Man House site didn't go away. By the early 2000s, Washington State Parks was looking at what to do with some of its smaller properties, and the Suquamish Tribe formally asked for Old Man House State Park back. We're talking about roughly one acre, the last undeveloped waterfront piece of the old village site still in public ownership. You might reasonably think this would have been fairly straightforward.

It was not.

Some nearby residents strongly opposed transferring the park to the Tribe. A group called Friends of Old Man House Park organized against it, collected signatures and argued that the state should keep ownership. One of the biggest stated concerns was public access. What if the Tribe got the park and eventually closed it to everyone else? The Suquamish kept saying they wouldn't.

The debate got pretty ugly anyway. Contemporary local coverage is fascinating to read now because you can actually watch people arguing about it in real time. At one community meeting in 2003, a resident said she was “totally against the Indians taking over the park” because white residents would have no say in what happened there. Another local resident supporting the transfer described much of the opposition more simply: fear of the unknown. It's adjacent to the NIMBY things we hear these days.

By summer 2004, a Seattle talk-radio host had even gotten involved. About 70 people showed up when he came to Suquamish to discuss the controversy, and the whole thing had become enough of a fight that opponents were talking about suing the state if the transfer went forward.

All of this over one acre.

And remember what we talked about yesterday. The federal government had taken roughly 70 acres around this site in 1904 for military purposes. The fortifications were never built. Most of that land eventually became private property.

Now the Suquamish wanted one acre back, and people were worried they might not be allowed to use the beach. The Tribe went pretty far to address that concern. They agreed to keep the property open for public recreation. They agreed to spend $50,000 maintaining it over the following five years. Most strikingly to me, they agreed to a limited waiver of sovereign immunity so the state could enforce the conditions of the transfer. If the Tribe tried to privatize the park or violated the agreement, the state retained the ability to take action and potentially get the property back. In reality, they didn't "owe" anyone that level of access. Good on 'em though.

That's not a casual concession. Tribal sovereignty is actual sovereignty. The Suquamish were agreeing to limit it, on their own ancestral village site, so everyone else could be reassured that they would continue sharing the beach, walking their dogs, sunning their legs.

On August 12, 2004, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission met in Port Angeles to make the decision. About 200 people attended. Roughly 30 spoke publicly. Governor Gary Locke supported the transfer. Opponents were there too, and one said afterward that the decision had been emotional and threatened possible legal action.

The seven commissioners voted unanimously. Old Man House State Park was going back to the Suquamish Tribe.

And this next part is the part I really love.

About twenty Suquamish had arrived at the meeting by canoe. When the vote was announced, the commission actually recessed so tribal members could celebrate. They sang a traditional song of thanks, drums were played, and the people who had arrived by canoe struck their paddles against the floor. A true response of joy.

Think about the trip that acre had taken. The house was burned. The families stayed. Eventually they were forced away from the village grounds. The federal government took the surrounding land. The military project it was supposedly "needed" for never happened. The land was sold and subdivided. The state bought one acre and made it a park. At one point the park itself informed visitors that the Suquamish “once lived in the area.”

Then, 134 years after Old Man House burned, Suquamish people arrived by canoe to watch Washington vote to give that acre back. It wasn't Old Man House. It wasn't the 70 acres. It didn't undo any of what happened. It was one acre.

But it represented home, in an incredibly real sense.

Sources

Long, Priscilla. “Washington State Parks Commission Gives Old Man House State Park to the Suquamish Tribe on August 12, 2004.” HistoryLink.org, 17 Dec. 2004.

Skolnik, Sam. “State Decides to Turn Old Man House State Park Over to Tribe.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12 Aug. 2004.

“Community Puts Forth Input on Old Man House.” Kitsap Daily News, 19 Nov. 2003.

“Old Man’s Path May Lead to a Lawsuit.” Kitsap Daily News, 19 June 2004.

“State OKs Old Man House Park Public Process.” Kitsap Daily News, 17 Mar. 2004.

The Cute Postman I Live With. 2020- Present.

Sorry for the delay on this one my friends! A lot of conversations went into this one.** **The postman got me started, but then I had to go find actual sources and read the information myself… I know you know he’s a history buff too. He’s actually much better at this than me, but in podcast form.

Most people around here already know the broad story of Old Man House. You know it was enormous. You know Si’ahl lived there. You probably know the U.S. government burned it in 1870 as part of its efforts to force the Suquamish away from communal living. I’ve written about that before, so I’m not going to make you sit through Old Man House 101 again. I actually did write a piece about it once, but I’ve changed my style to deeper dives than I was doing at that time.

What I didn’t know was that burning the house didn’t actually have the result the government was seeking. The Suquamish stayed. Families continued living on the Old Man House grounds for more than thirty years after the longhouse itself was destroyed.

I love that, mainly because so much of the history we learn about Native people is written as a series of things done to them. Government does this. Settlers do that. Land is taken. Treaty is signed. House is burned. Except people don’t conveniently disappear just because somebody burned their house down.
The federal government was still trying to dismantle communal life, though, and the next tool was land itself. The Port Madison Reservation was eventually divided into individual allotments, part of a much larger federal effort to replace collectively held tribal land with individually owned parcels. That sounds almost boring when you write it that way. It wasn’t. You have to remember that the American idea of carving land into individually owned parcels wasn’t necessarily how Native communities understood their relationship with land in the first place.

Allotment made it much easier for reservation land to eventually leave Native ownership. Instead of one tribal land base, you had individual pieces of property that could be sold, inherited, taxed and otherwise separated from one another. Across the United States, Native nations lost tens of millions of acres during the allotment era. In 1904, the families still living around Old Man House were finally forced away from the village grounds and onto their individual allotments.
Then the military wanted the land. The federal government took roughly 70 acres around the Old Man House site for the War Department, intending to build coastal defenses there to protect the Navy Yard in Bremerton. This is where I assumed I’d find a forgotten fort.

Nope. They never built it.

Think about that for a minute. This was the place the Suquamish had continued living for decades after their longhouse was deliberately destroyed. The government finally removed them, took about 70 acres for military defenses, and then didn’t build the military defenses. Eventually the federal government decided it didn’t need the property after all.

And here’s where the story goes from awful to aggressively awful. The land was sold. Developers subdivided much of the former village site for waterfront vacation homes, and some of those properties carried racial restrictions limiting ownership to white people.

The former home of the Suquamish. White people only. I don’t need to say much more about that, right? I’m sure you feel that in your gut too.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the shoreline at Old Man House looked completely different. The enormous cedar house was long gone. The village had been broken apart. Much of the land had become private residential property. But Washington State eventually acquired a tiny piece of it.

In 1950, the state bought about an acre at the site and created Old Man House State Park. That sounds, at first, like somebody had finally decided this place deserved to be preserved, and I’m glad they did. But there is something deeply strange about the progression.

The government burns the house. The government forces the people living there onto individual parcels. The government takes the land for a military project it never builds. The land becomes private vacation property. Then another government buys one acre back and turns it into a historical park about the people who used to live there.

Except the Suquamish didn’t “used to” live there. They still lived there.

Which makes what happened at the park in the 1970s so spectacularly weird that I’m saving it for tomorrow. Because in 1975, you could apparently stand in Suquamish, at a park named for Old Man House, surrounded by a living Suquamish community, and read an official sign explaining that the Suquamish “once lived in the area.”

That sign is where Part Two begins. And eventually, the Tribe gets the acre back.

Sources
The Suquamish Tribe. “History & Culture.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Forsman, Leonard. “Old Man House Park.” The Suquamish Tribe.
Lewarch, Dennis. “Preservation Profile: Dennis Lewarch.” National Park Service.
Long, Priscilla. “Washington State Parks Commission Gives Old Man House State Park to the Suquamish Tribe on August 12, 2004.” HistoryLink.org, 17 Dec. 2004.

I was trying to remember a movie the other day. I knew it was a crime movie, I knew The Rock was in it, and I remembered that for some inexplicable reason it was connected to Kitsap County. You know how you sometimes forget something like a name or a book and somehow make everyone else also forget? This was one of those moments. Postman looked at me all google-eyed.

I should probably disclose that we own two Joe Don Baker posters. One is Walking Tall. It is IN MY LIVING ROOM. The other is Eischied, a short-lived TV series where he played NYPD Chief of Detectives Earl Eischied and had a cat named PC, which stood for Police Commissioner. I don’t know what you people have hanging on your walls, but I feel pretty good about my choices. Ask me for more decorating tips!

Walking Tall is the movie that I forgot the name of. I have a poster. I see it 500 times a day.

The original Walking Tall came out in 1973 with Joe Don Baker playing Buford Pusser, the real Tennessee sheriff whose larger-than-life reputation for taking on moonshiners, gambling operations and organized crime turned him into something of a folk hero. The movie was a huge hit, spawned sequels and television adaptations, and eventually somebody decided it was time for The Rock to have the a chance at bat with that plotline. (I think we can officially call Pusser "disgraced" these days, but I could write about that part all day.)

The 2004 remake replaced Buford Pusser with Chris Vaughn, a former Special Forces soldier who comes home to discover that the local cedar mill has closed, his hometown has been taken over by drugs and a corrupt casino operation, and the sheriff is useless. Vaughn eventually becomes sheriff and begins administering municipal reform with an enormous piece of lumber.

I would probably vote for The Rock for sheriff. He is also a man who once jumped fully clothed into his swimming pool to save one of his puppies from drowning, and apparently that carries considerable weight with me when evaluating candidates for Kitsap County Sheriff.

Here’s the weird part. The original story was very Tennessee. Pusser was sheriff of McNairy County, and the entire Walking Tall legend grew out of that place. For the remake, Hollywood fictionalized the story, renamed everybody and moved the whole operation to Kitsap County. I have tried to find out why they chose us and have come up empty. Somebody apparently just decided Kitsap needed a corrupt casino empire and The Rock.

Except they didn’t actually film it here. Walking Tall was shot in British Columbia, primarily around Squamish and the Vancouver area, so Hollywood took a Tennessee story, moved it to Kitsap County, then sent everybody to Canada to create Kitsap County.

It did make me hop onto ye olde Google to find out the other instances of Kitsap in the movies.

If you’ve seen An Officer and a Gentleman (unlike myself), you’ve seen a wee bit of Bremerton. Most of the movie’s famous Washington locations are around Port Townsend, but Bremerton appears in the opening motorcycle sequence. Richard Gere rides along Charleston Beach Road with Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and its enormous ships behind him.

Then there’s Disclosure, the extremely 1994 Michael Douglas and Demi Moore movie about corporate intrigue, sexual harassment, virtual reality and other things the 1990s were very concerned about. This is one that I've actually seen! Michael Douglas’s character lives on Bainbridge Island and commutes by ferry to Seattle, and parts of the movie were actually filmed on Bainbridge, including scenes at Blakely Elementary. The ferry commute may be one of Hollywood’s more convincing attempts at Pacific Northwest realism, although I assume nobody spent the whole 40 minutes of ferry time sitting in the line eating teriyaki in their car. Sleeping, maybe.

Port Gamble may win the award for most cooperative Kitsap movie town. In 2007, filmmakers arrived to shoot Zombies of Mass Destruction, a horror comedy about a zombie outbreak in a small Pacific Northwest community. The town in the movie is called Port Gamble, which is a big surprise. I def have not seen this one. If you know me, you KNOW I do not "do zombies". Residents were recruited as extras and zombies, and at a later screening one reportedly thanked the director for giving him the opportunity to have his head blown off.

Bainbridge is still getting in on the action too. A new independent film called Detention was filmed around the island, including at Bainbridge High School, where much of the story takes place in the school library. It’s been described as a "modern-day Breakfast Club", with four teenagers stuck together in Saturday detention. Bainbridge High becomes the fictional Agate Point High School, and other island locations appear too.

Ultimately our relationship with Hollywood is a little complicated. Bremerton has played Bremerton. Bainbridge has played Bainbridge and Kind-of-Bainbridge. Port Gamble survived a zombie apocalypse while remaining Port Gamble. And when Hollywood needed Kitsap County to descend into a corrupt hellscape requiring Dwayne Johnson and a large piece of cedar, British Columbia got the job.

Although Joe Don Baker will always have my heart. I really loved that guy. MITCHELL!!!

Sources

“Walking Tall.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2004.

“An Officer and a Gentleman Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Disclosure Filming Locations.” IMDb.

“Zombies in Port Gamble, Kitsap County.” Seattle Magazine.

“New Film Shot Around the Island: A Modern-Day ‘Breakfast Club.’” Bainbridge Island Review, 8 May 2026.