Today marks the beginning of the end for The Observatory, a downtown Juneau bookstore and landmark of 27 years.
The store — which has been temporarily closed since owner Dee Longenbaugh, 82, fell ill in January — is open again for 10-day clearance sale before it shuts down for good.
With the help of her family, Longenbaugh recently made the difficult decision to close The Observatory. Though health problems have prevented her from running the shop for the past 10 months, Longenbaugh said it still hasn’t been easy to separate herself from the store that has shaped her life during the past five decades.
Longenbaugh opened The Observatory in Sitka in 1977 after the youngest of her four children entered high school. According to her daughter Betsy, Longenbaugh was a “full-time mom” whose volunteer work was instrumental in establishing mental health services in Sitka.
Still, Sitka is “a little town,” Longenbaugh recalled Tuesday morning, and with all her children in high school, she wanted something to keep her busy.
“I was looking for something to do because I was very bored, and I had done all the good nonprofit work in town, or at least I thought,” Longenbaugh said. “I thought I would see how it worked out, and if it didn’t, OK.”
Nearly 40 years later, its safe to say that Longenbaugh’s once uncertain venture has worked out about as well as it could’ve. The Observatory has been mentioned in several national publications, including the New York Times. Longenbaugh even won an award from the Alaska Legislature a few years back for “a lifetime of outstanding citizenship and her contributions to Alaska history.”
The Observatory has quite the history of its own. Like Longenbaugh, the bookstore has moved around several times during its life. It has been located in two different state capitals and five different locations over the years.
Longenbaugh isn’t originally from Southeast Alaska, but she has been here long enough that she calls Alaska home. She moved to Sitka from New Mexico in the early ‘60s. Her husband was a physician in the Public Health Service at the time, and he relocated his family when he was appointed to a post in Mount Edgecumbe.
About 10 years after Longenbaugh started The Observatory, her husband died, and she moved back to New Mexico, where she lived in Santa Fe. She took her bookstore with her. Even in Santa Fe, she still primarily sold books about Alaska, a trait for which The Observatory is known.
Perhaps it was the fact that she had surrounded herself with books, maps and images of Alaska; perhaps it was the fact that she had three young grandchildren in Juneau at the time. Either way, she didn’t stay in Santa Fe long.
“I got so homesick there it was ridiculous,” she said. “I though ‘I’ve got to get back; that’s all there is to it.’”
Two years after moving to New Mexico’s capital, she packed her books and headed north, to Alaska’s capital.
When she arrived in Juneau in 1989, Longenbaugh established The Observatory in the Alaska Electric Light & Power Company building downtown. After a while, rent got too high there, and Longenbaugh moved her bookstore across the street to the suite where High Tide Tattoos is currently located.
Finally, for reasons she can’t remember, Longenbaugh moved The Observatory to its current location at the corner of Franklin and Second streets. There — and at every other location the bookstore occupied — Longenbaugh said she was continually reminded of the reason she loved selling books.
“Running a bookstore, you meet other people who are booklovers,” she said. “It’s a matter of chatting and discovering what other people are interested in. You can get more information than you give. It’s really a two-way street.”
Over the years, Longenbaugh made an impression on countless Juneau residents and passersby who happened into her store while exploring downtown. Longenbaugh’s daughter Betsy said she is constantly discovering just how many people her mother has befriended through The Observatory.
The other day, Betsy Longenbaugh had just stepped out of her car at Sandy Beach when a woman whom she didn’t know approached her and asked how her mother is doing.
“That sort of stuff happens all the time I had no idea how many lives she touched; it’s been very moving,” she said. “She genuinely engaged and cared for the customers in her shop.”
Dee Longenbaugh hopes to make it to The Observatory at some point during the closing sale, so that she can make a few last bookstore friendships. If she can impart even a “modicum of the love” she has for books on a final visitor or two, she’ll be happy.
Longenbaugh will likely only make a couple of appearances, if that, in the next 10 days. Still, Betsy Longenbaugh, who will be helping her brother John manage the sale, encourages all longtime friends of the Observatory to drop by. There will be a guest book in which visitors can write messages to Dee, and Betsy and John will hand out postcards with Dee’s address for anybody interested in writing to her.
It’s easy to tell that Longenbaugh will miss The Observatory. She would break eye contact and stare off into the distance to avoid crying when asked what she’ll miss most about the shop.
“Everything,” she said after returning from a brief but intense silence. “I loved it all. I wouldn’t have been doing it all these years if I hadn’t loved it all.”
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
