Sarah Brown
When Henry Wolthuis retired from his dentistry practice in Sweet Home in 2014, he found himself waking up with little to do.
“I probably did a lot of sitting around,” he said, as if recalling a former life.
Wolthuis kept himself busy with his two tree farms –”a fun project,” he said – but his enterprising mind set eyes on the local laundromat that had been for sale for years.
He was most interested in the potential of the building, not so much the laundromat itself, but Wolthuis learned quickly that the laundry facility was serving a big need in town, so it stayed.
After purchasing the Cascade Laundry at 1030 Long St. in 2018, Wolthuis discovered that some of his laundry machines got little use. So, acting on a “wild idea at two o’clock in the morning,” he removed them to turn the space into the Fire Haus Ice Cream Shop.
“I grew up on a dairy farm, so I’ve always been a little intrigued with ice cream, and I love ice cream,” he said.
Being Dutch himself, and inspired by a visit to Germany, he peppered the business with Bavarian design.
He carved two traditional nutcrackers, and his wife Mollie – a product of Hawaii, he noted – helped paint the dolls.
The ice cream shop opened in November 2018 and has served up sweet treats since then.
Most recently, the 83-year-old finished renovating the second floor of the laundromat building, which he described as formerly “a big gymnasium.” He turned the space into two brand new apartments, and listed them through East Linn Realty only two weeks ago.
He opened up a binder filled with sketches and photographs, research he’d done when considering Bavarian design for the staircase leading up to the second-floor apartments.
Now that the apartments are complete, he has more time to give attention to surrounding properties and his work as a member on the city Planning Commission.
Through conversation on the subject, one can see Wolthuis has a passion for city design in Sweet Home. He has ideas for traffic calming, sidewalk design, and business facade improvements.
A quick search online pulls up information about renovations made in Brownsville, Texas, which inspires Wolthuis’ imagination. He envisions the alleyways behind businesses from Key Bank to the Rio Theatre transformed into attractive pedestrian traffic areas.
“Make the back doors the front doors, so you have a pedestrian-friendly alley. All the parking is over there,” he said, then pointed to before and after pictures from Brownsville. “You could easily go from that to that. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”
But he realizes he’s no longer a “spring chicken,” and change will mostly have to come from the property owners. Still, he sits in his office at the laundromat and tinkers with ideas.
“I sit here and I sketch things out with my pencil and my little ruler. I’ve been fooling with the idea of getting some enclosure for our garbage can,” he said.
In addition to dishing out ice cream in the Fire Haus shop, Wolthuis will play the accordion – one of his other talents – while donning a traditional Tyrolean hat.
“I started playing the accordion when I was 6. At about 12, I started taking organ lessons and took them for several years, including some in college; so I’ve played the organ as my primary favorite instrument all my life.”
The organ as an instrument has lost popularity over the past few decades. The American Guild of Organists reported that membership has dropped by 4,000 during a span of 10 years. With approximately 14,000 members remaining, that averages to less than one organist per city in the United States. A few churches in Sweet Home, inclucing Wolthuis’ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, still have traditional organs.
But Wolthuis finds young people who take an interest in learning the instrument, and he passes the knowledge on to them.
Wolthuis was born and raised on a dairy farm in Ogden, Utah.
“I milked cows twice a day at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m.,” he said. “That was just life. I loved it. It was hard work, but we always had plenty of work to do.”
In 1962, he graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in zoology, working part-time at the BYU dairy as a student. He graduated in 1966 from a school of dentistry in Chicago. From there, Wolthuis moved to Portland to take an internship at the VA hospital, which is how he learned about the opportunity in Sweet Home.
“A fellow worker there was acquainted with Dr. Jack McCain (who) practiced dentistry over the top of Molly’s Bakery for years,” he said.
McCain died after a hunting accident, leaving his practice in need of a new owner.
“Based on this fellow classmate’s recommendation, I came down and investigated it,” Wolthuis said.
He recalled there was not much to the “humble little town” but loggers and an A&W in those days.
For a time, Wolthuis worked weekends in Sweet Home, and remained at the hospital during the weekdays. By then, he and his wife had the first of their four (surviving) children.
“The life was pretty demanding on both ends, and we had to make a decision,” he said.
He knew whichever decision he made, it would be the career he stayed with the rest of his working life, he said.
Today, Wolthuis’ son, Ivan, runs the dentistry. His daughter Caryn stays busy as a mother, and his other daughter, Andra, is a “unique individual” who likes chainsaws and fishing, he said.
The two oldest sisters, Renee and Carmen, are accomplished pianists.
Wolthuis pulled up multiple videos of Carmen Hall and her students playing piano. He showed one with Hall, who recently completed a doctorate of musical arts degree from Utah State University, playing a complicated piece from memory when she found a piano in the middle of the Botanical Gardens at San Francisco.
Another showed her performing in Utah State’s annual Monster Concert, with more than a dozen costumed pianists playing together in an ensemble, and another that gives him a little chuckle, an image of his daughter – months away from getting her doctorate – still being dramatically schooled by her professor.
Wolthuis is proud of his children.
“I’m gonna conclude with the thought that whatever you do, you need to pass it on to the next generation.”