Document text
Night eye on the coast Photos by Bob Pennell Bill Cady maintains his five-bulb light in the lighthouse atop his home overlooking the Port of Brookings/Harbor. Cady, a former Medford resident, grew up in lighthouses where his father worked. Retiree's front-room lighthouse gives boaters another way to feel good By BILL VARBLE Bill Cady looks out over the flat, gray Pacific from a glassed-in octagon perched 141 feet above sea level on a bluff overlooking the bustling Port of Brookings/Harbor. "I always wanted to have a lighthouse of my own," says Cady, a slim, 75-year-old retiree wearing a baseball cap. Bingo. Bill Cady's lighthouse, built onto the top of his home, sits above Brookings/Harbor. Here at the only official lighthouse between Trinidad Head to the south and Cape Blanco to the north, the light came on at 11:02 p.m. July 4 above the marina, a beachfront motel and an RV camp. When Cady says you can't miss it, believe him. It's the only Cape Cod-style home hereabouts with a 10-foot turret rising 35 feet above the lot and a giant eye piercing the gloom 18 miles out to sea. Just don't look at it. We're not talking some cutesy, subdivision faux-lighthouse theme thing here, but a bona fide, working, U.S. Coast Guard-approved beacon. To Cady and his wife, Jo Ann Townes Cady, it's home. "When he first started talking about it, I didn't take it too seriously," Jo Ann says. Then she laughs. The talk started years ago. Then, in 1990, a local builder added the tower to the Cady's two-bedroom cottage. In 1997 the couple moved the house to its present home. On June 29 came final approval from the feds. On the Fourth of July it was time to let there be light. Housed in its glass nest and circled by a widow's walk, the acrylic light fixture is blocked out in back to avoid crisping the eyeballs of passing motorists. "You got to be careful not to look at it," Cady says, turning it on. By day it throws an eerie vertical slit of rainbow light on one of the turret panes. The $3,000 fixture was made by Automatic Power of Houston, Texas. It runs on household current. Should any of its five lamps fail, it would be instantly replaced by a built-in changer. Cady must report any problem to the Coast Guard immediately. "They're very finicky," he says. The only beacon between Cape Blanco and Trinidad (Jim Gibbs' private Cleft of the Rock lighthouse is up at Yachats) comes on at dusk and goes off at dawn, blinking three times -- one-and-a-half seconds on, two seconds off -- then going dark for 20 seconds. Cady comes by his love of lighthouses honestly. His father spent 37 years with the U.S. Lighthouse Service. His framed 1903 appointment as third assistant lighthouse keeper at Point Arena, Calif., at $500 a year, hangs in the place of honor among the pictures of fishing vessels on the wall. Cady grew up in lighthouses at Point Loma, near San Diego, Cape Mendocino and Trinidad. He remembers Point Loma as "choice." At Mendocino the wind would blow you away if you weren't careful. One of the lighthouse keeper's duties was painting the traditional picket fence. Cady has pickets here. He painted them white. "Four hundred twenty-three of them," he says. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1947, Cady worked as a movie projectionist in Medford theaters -- the old Craterian, the Holly, the Rialto (a furniture store now), the Esquire (an espresso shop). He worked movie and burlesque houses in Portland for years, then moved back to Medford and worked for the U.S. Postal Service. Jo Ann managed the Rogue Federal Credit Union's Ashland branch. The couple moved five years ago to the coast, which they call "the greatest place there is." By then Cady had long been collecting lighthouse books and plans, and the couple had toured lighthouses from Maine to Florida. Cady approached a local builder, Paul Viale, about building a two-story cupola. "I didn't think you really wanted a lighthouse," Viale said later. There followed bureaucratic hoops with local government ("We went round and round with the county," Jo Ann Townes Cady says) and the Coast Guard. Port of Brookings/Harbor Harbormaster Dan Thompson helped. "I don't think we could've done it without Dan," Cady says. The couple moved the house a half-mile down Oceanview Drive to 15970 Short Way in the summer of 1997 after their view of the sea was cut by a home known locally as The Castle. A mover cut the house in two. Movers and local utilities mounted a military-style combined operation. The climax was a 60-degree turn onto the narrow lot, where the house-cum-cupola was plunked down on its new foundation. Professional fishermen say the light is no big deal. They use satellite-aided Global Positioning System devices these days. But pleasure-boat skippers like it. "When they're way out, they like to see a light," Cady says. "It's just a good feeling." Get him going on lighthouses and he reaches for words like "romance" and "mystique." Jo Ann laughs, but she has to admit, "There's something about a lighthouse." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA