Rosie Woods moves from table to table at Rosie’s Restaurant, greeting regulars and first-time customers alike, sometimes pausing to straighten one of her many paintings on the wall. For nearly 40 years, the Woodland restaurant has been both her workplace and her gallery.
Rosie opened the first Rosie’s Restaurant in 1985 and eventually operated four locations, including three in Vancouver, before consolidating operations at Woodland’s single location. It is owned by her daughter, Carol, while Rosie continues to manage day-to-day operations and help with supplies. The walls tell their own story, lined with Rosie’s landscape paintings and photographs taken by her husband, LeRoy Woods, including images of Mount St. Helens erupting in 1980.
Rosie and LeRoy have been married 69 years, having married in 1957, two months after meeting. They met by chance in Roseburg, Oregon, a meeting Rosie still recalls with humor.
“By accident, by accident,” she laughed. I worked at the boarding house where his aunt owned, and I come in one morning, and he was in the kitchen talking to a Mrs. Brown, flirting with her, but she was old. And so I walked by, and he looked dow,n and he said, ‘Well, hello there.’ Oh yeah, and then he started looking for me all day.”
While Rosie ran Rosie’s Restaurant, LeRoy spent years in the trucking industry, later helping transform the Woodland restaurant building, once a car shop, using carpentry skills he picked up along the way. He is also an artist in his own right and earned a blue ribbon at the Clark County Fair for a painting in the late 1980s.
Running a restaurant for 40 years has meant adapting to constant change, especially in costs and labor. Rosie has seen the business shift dramatically since the mid-1980s.
“When I bought this one, I was making $3.35 an hour,” she said regarding the Woodland building. “My first job $1 an hour. Oh yeah, prices have gone up. Way up. Wages went up.”
Even with the challenges, Rosie says the people keep her coming back every day. She still makes a point of visiting every table, especially welcoming new customers who are discovering the restaurant for the first time.
“I love the people. I just go through talking to all of them. I go around and talk to everybody and thank them for coming in,” she said.
Beyond the kitchen, Rosie has spent decades at an easel. She began painting in 1970 and gravitated toward landscapes, wildlife and religious imagery. Many of her works hang throughout the restaurant. Painting, she said, offers a kind of calm that balances the noise of a busy dining room.
“It’s relaxing. You just get in that world when you’re painting whatever you’re painting. You’re just there. It’s so happy,” she said.
One of her most memorable moments as an artist came during a painting session interrupted by Mother Nature. While working on a portrait of Jesus Christ, Mount St. Helens began to rumble.
“I was painting it when it had an earthquake there. I was on the easel and it was shaking and I run to the door. I said, ‘Honey, what’s that?’ And he said, ‘Just an earthquake.’ Well, I was scared. I said, ‘maybe I shouldn’t be painting this,’” she laughed.
That painting, like many others, now shares space with LeRoy’s photographs of the eruption, blending their lives, work and art into a single room. For Rosie, the restaurant walls have not just decor, but a record of a life spent creating, serving and welcoming people in.
“I truly love my family a lot … We have had a good life,” she said.
