By Gretchen Wing
Special to the Weekly
If Nancy McCoy ever sat on a corner with a cardboard sign, it would read, “will work for scenery.” Over the past four decades, Nancy has built a wildly original resumé, including self-invented jobs, to remain on Lopez.
Over the past four decades, Nancy has built a wildly original resumé, including self-invented jobs, to remain on Lopez.
Growing up in the suburbs north of Seattle in the 1950s, Nancy followed her boyfriend to college in Michigan but hated the flatness, and the icy winters. She transferred to Seattle Pacific University, earning a degree in art education, with a fifth year at University of Washington. For five years, Nancy worked as a substitute art teacher in Seattle, living at one time on a houseboat beneath the Aurora Bridge.
“I barely escaped one night, when it erupted in flames,” Nancy related. She then moved into the burnt-out Moore mansion near Volunteer Park, but, she says, “I suffered a kind of PTSD for some time.”
In the mid-70s, Nancy fell in love with the San Juans after spending New Year’s Eve on Orcas with some friends.
“We stayed a week,” Nancy said, “and within a year, four of us had moved to Lopez.” Without a plan for income or housing, Nancy found what work she could. Over the years, she packed herring, weeded winter spinach, and subbed for Lopez School. She tried fishing, buying an old wooden gillnet boat “that always broke down or began sinking at the wrong moments.”
Eventually, Nancy’s love of Lopez led her to more custom-fitted work. Curious about the island’s history, she volunteered for the historical society, discovering mentors in founding members Eva Higgins and Gertrude Hodgson Lovejoy Boede. They encouraged Nancy to take museum training classes and to write a grant funding her own position for 18 months at the not-yet-opened museum.
“I found it so satisfying,” Nancy said. “Providing information to island descendants, researchers and visitors.”
When the Reagan administration terminated funding, the museum board found a way to pay Nancy $100 a month to work half-time. Renting an ancient farmhouse with cold water and an outhouse for a dollar a day, she was just able to get by.
“I remember someone commenting that I was being paid in ‘scenic dollars,’” she said as she laughed. For the next 24 years, Nancy served as the first Lopez Island Historical Museum Director, writing grants, chairing the annual auction and — her proudest accomplishment — restoring the 1917 Port Stanley Schoolhouse.
Derelict for 60 years, the schoolhouse was near collapse in 2000. In fact, Nancy said, “Glenys Bennett, a board member, fell four feet through the rotten floor.” Having successfully nominated the building to the national register, Nancy scoured the Seattle region for “era-appropriate” salvaged materials.
“I was the salvage queen,” she said. Working with others, she later documented over 70 historic buildings on Lopez for the state register and saved the San Juan County Courthouse from demolition.
Nancy’s personal life itself reflects Lopez color. Married, as she puts it, “for a nanosecond” in the late 70s, she described her May Day wedding at Iceberg Point. Several guests arrived on horseback, and people danced around a maypole carved by Peter Roloff (Shantparv). The late Will Olander managed to transport his harpsichord out to the site to play, accompanied by White Bear and Stanley Greenthal, while Steve Horn photographed.
After decades of moving, Nancy’s housing finally stabilized in 1991. Thanks to the new Lopez Community Land Trust, Nancy was able to build her own cottage at Morgantown in the Village. Her father helped her, squeezing through crawlspaces to pull wiring through all seven Morgantown homes.
“I still so appreciate how the Trust has helped so many on our island,” Nancy said.
2004 was a horrible year. Nancy’s parents passed away one after the other, and she lost her job.
“I was devastated,” she said, expressing her continued appreciation of the Lopez community’s emotional and monetary support. She found respite as interim director of Orcas’ historical museum, and when that job ended, a new one opened at the San Juan Island Historical Society. But when the commute proved too exhausting, she resigned and went back to finding work on Lopez.
She found it — temporarily, she assumed — at a large private estate. Thirteen years later, she’s still enjoying that low-stress job.
“When people ask me why I haven’t retired,” Nancy said. “I reply, ‘I keep buying things.’”
Some of the “things” Nancy buys are travel tickets — her getaway, she jokes, from the “Lopez rat race.”
Her museum job used to sail her on fundraising trips into the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii), 90 miles off the northern B.C. coast. Nowadays Nancy enjoys Victoria, using public transportation, or her feet, to roam the older neighborhoods. Other travels include “ultra-urban” spots like London or New York City, or the history-rich environs of rural Ireland, Scotland and England.
“Come for the scenery, stay for the community” could be the slogan of many a non-native Lopezian. In Nancy McCoy’s case, insert this addition, “and be ready to do whatever it takes to stay here.”
