The Admiral Benbow Inn, West Seattle's home-away-from-home diner and bar for over 50 years, closed during the wee hours of June 1. The closure came two days after the death of its owner, Neysa Nugent Longmire, 80, in a Seattle hospice. Longmire, a former nurse who grew up in Bellingham, married her second husband, Lloyd Longmire, in 1950. (He was a descendant of pioneer settler James Longmire, namesake of the Longmire Museum and base camp at Mt. Rainier National Park.) Lloyd had already started the restaurant on Admiral Way, and Neysa's daughter from her first marriage suggested the name Admiral Benbow, after the roadhouse inn in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. When the Longmires divorced in 1968, Neysa took sole ownership of the business. She was there almost every day, shuttling between the front dining room, the side meeting rooms, and the back Chart Room Lounge, designed like an old Spanish galleon. Longmire once claimed the Benbow was haunted. She told HistoryLink.org what happened one night after closing time: "I came out in the hall and I saw this long skirt. I didn't see a head, but I saw the shoulder. I saw the long skirt, black shoes, just go around the corner. And I thought, 'Well, my goodness, who in the world is that?' So I hurried real fast to look and she had disappeared." The Benbow continued as an anchor of stability in a gentrifying neighborhood. Everyone from garden clubs to the Seafair Pirates regularly met there. Charlie Chong planned his political campaigns in the meeting rooms. The glorious Chart Room was the site of a Mudhoney music video. Longmire was diagnosed with cancer in early 2000. She continued to work until this April, when she entered the hospice. Her family decided around that time to give up the building's lease and shut down. The Benbow's final night of business was "quite the unofficial block party," according to schoolteacher and attendee Maurice Regnier. "Even Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and his wife Sharon paid homage by joining the crowd that overflowed out the Benbow's side alley door and out onto the sidewalk." Presiding over the night was Jo (the only name by which most regulars knew her), the Chart Room's chief barmaid since the mid '60s. The evening included the auctioning of the Benbow's fixtures and equipment, as well as many vocal tributes to Longmire.

John L. Voorhees, 48, owned Honest Al's (later Honest John's) record store, first on University Way and later near the Moore Theatre downtown, from 1975 to 1985. He moved the store out of the U-District after newspapers reported he'd tried to sponsor white-supremacist campus groups. He retired from retailing when psychiatric issues kept him from continuing. Voorhees died May 16 of a diabetes-influenced heart attack.

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