Re-Runs: Selling The Used To Help Seniors

In bygone days an assembly of apple warehouses and packing sheds dating from the 1940s, a café, a fish hatchery and several homes made up the little community of Chelan Station, where packed fruit was loaded onto railroad cars for shipment.

- Vicki Olson Carr

When larger fruit co-ops took the apple industry away, this little spot by the train tracks along the Columbia River became a quiet, lonely place of empty warehouses with only a train running nonstop through it now and then.

This scene changed several years ago when Highway 97 was re-routed along the east side of the Columbia River from Wenatchee and Beebe Bridge brought traffic into the area.

Now Chelan Station is a beehive of activity from winemaking and bottling to boat and RV storage, and home to a fruit packing supplier, a freight company, a U-Haul outlet and a second-hand store called ReRuns.

Re-Runs keeps expanding as donations come flooding in from people who are downsizing, relocating or redecorating.

Local and transplanted retired members of the senior center were the ones who planned and opened the second-hand store to earn funds to support the Chelan Senior Center at 534 East Trow Avenue in Chelan.

Barbara Brouner managed the store for six years. She enjoyed encouraging others to join in the job of sorting, cleaning, dusting and pricing donations to sell.