A Busy-Bee Retiree
Diverse Interests Keep Award-winner Griffin Happy

by Dyas A. Lawson

Walk into Brian Griffin’s workshop/office and be prepared for bombardment — and not by the bees he’s semifamous for keeping. No, what hits you between the eyes in Griffin’s environment is evidence of his many personas and how they manage to make a harmonious whole.

Griffin, this year’s winner of Business Pulse’s Lifetime Business Achievement Award, presented March 28 at Resort Semiahmoo in Blaine, has so many facets it’s almost bewildering to contemplate. Rather than sitting back in retirement, he’s living a life possibly busier than it was during his working years.

Retired about 10 years ago from The Unity Group, Griffin was born in Bellingham and has lived here all his life. In 1956, he joined his father Earle’s insurance agency and became involved in civic life shortly thereafter. He spent two years as president of the Samish Council of Campfire Girls when his daughters, Lisa and Erin, were involved with the group in the early 1960s. He calls himself a member of Bellingham Rotary Club “forever,” and as such has been involved in some notable community projects.

Bellingham has its downtown parking garage thanks to Griffin, who chuckles that some people still call it “Griffin’s Folly.”

“I was asked to chair the Chamber of Commerce’s civic-affairs committee and I refused because I didn’t think they ever did anything. The (nominator) challenged me to do something I wanted to do and the Parkade was a good idea, so I made it happen,” he recalls.

 

Preserving parkland

Those who enjoy the walk and view around Boulevard Park have, in part, Griffin to thank. Bellingham’s then-Mayor Ken Hertz recalls that the park project began in the early 1970s when the county bought some land and the railroad trestle, now the bridge. Later, the city acquired more property.

At one point, Griffin says, “The word was out that some people were going to build condos where Boulevard Park is. I talked with a number of people who were upset about that. During (a small, informal meeting with fellow Rotarians), we discussed what Rotary ought to be doing about that.

“A number of the landowners were Rotarians. We thought we ought to option the land, present it to the city for a park and preserve the view. The full body of Rotary accepted the idea,” Griffin remembers. He saw a perfect opportunity to option the waterfront property, too. “I feel very good about accomplishing that,” he says.

“Brian headed up the effort on the part of Rotary to work with the city in getting funding for the development of the park and Rotary kicked in some money for the process,” Hertz adds, adding that many people were involved in the park project over the years.

As a downtown-business advocate, Griffin “led the loyal opposition” as president of the newly formed downtown development association when noises about Bellis Fair mall began. Although its effort to attract a mall to the downtown area failed, Griffin headed up a local improvement district involving sidewalks, trees and other things that still add to Bellingham’s downtown character.

 

The Unity Group

Meanwhile, he was a busy and active insurance agent — though his public activities sometimes tended to anger and alienate people, he says. He and his dad, who was involved in the business until 1970, merged with Sorenson, Garrett & Johanson Insurance to form a firm with the admittedly unwieldy name of Griffin, Garrett, Johanson & Schacht.

“Despite the name, it worked,” Griffin says with a chuckle. Later, the firm merged with Ireland & Bellingar and about 10 years ago simplified the name to The Unity Group.

Griffin himself retired in 1991, at 58.

“It was the best thing I ever did,” he avers. “Thirty-five years peddling insurance is long enough. Doing anything for 35 years is long enough!”

Griffin has (or has had) a number of passions over the years. In fact, colleague and friend Ken Culver calls Griffin “the closest thing I know to a true Renaissance man, and I don’t say that lightly,” and says he was a great insurance agent, too.

A big passion was sailing, and photos of him and his wife Marya and/or various family permutations are prominent on his office walls. He was the first general chairman of the PITCH Regatta, which has changed name and format but is still sailed each year. His quarter-century before the mast left him “a pretty good sailor” and at one point he even tried an Atlantic Ocean crossing.

“I sailed across the Atlantic on a friend’s boat. You try to time these things to miss bad weather, but we got into the first tropical storm of the year and had five ugly days. It was a great experience; and it taught me not to do that again,” he says, laughing.

Another passion, though he downplays his abilities, is painting. Walls (especially the bathroom “galleries”) in his lovely, comfortable South Hill home are covered with watercolors, many of them his. One of 10 couples who co-own an old Dutch canal boat in Europe, the Griffins travel to Europe each year for a boat trip. The trips provide ample opportunity for Brian to sketch and paint the interesting buildings in villages and towns — so different from American architecture, and so very much older.

 

Painting on brochure

“The antiquity there is impressive,” he says. “The (recent) earthquake could’ve wiped out all our oldest history, and that only goes back a hundred years.”

He may deprecate his skills, but the Mt. Baker Theatre membership brochure this year sports a reproduction of Griffin’s painting of the theater. He keeps his skills sharp with a group of fellow painters who gather weekly in his workshop to paint.

Another passion is obvious the instant you set foot in his workshop. The scents of sawdust and well-oiled machinery, sight of gnarled tree burls, the many sizes of hand planes on shelves speak of his love for woodworking and carving.

“I still turn a bowl once in a while,” he says, picking up a stack of four big nesting bowls. On the bottom, he’s burned in the tree they’re made from; the bowls are smooth, nicely curved and comfortable in the hands. A few bits of his carving interest sit around the workshop, but more, including a loon and a beady-eyed rooster, rest in the house.

Another thing Griffin says he’s done “forever,” woodworking gives him great pleasure. “Carving is more fun, I guess; it’s maybe more creative and allows a little freer expression.”

The most prominent presence in Griffin’s workshop and its upstairs office is bees, which Ken Culver calls a serendipitous interest. Bees, bee houses, cans full of bee nesting tubes. As proprietor of Knox Cellars — which actually refers to the cellar below the workshop where he makes wine each year — Griffin has almost single-handedly raised the nation’s consciousness about orchard mason bees.

 

‘The bee man’

“Everything we know about bees we know about honeybees,” Griffin explains, adding that as a longtime gardener he became interested in bees after he retired. “But there are 4,000 kinds of bees in North America. Most of them are solitary, not social; they’re just bugs that lay eggs in a hole. Six to eight weeks later they come out, eat and pollinate, repeat the cycle and die.”

The orchard mason bees fall under that “solitary” category. They’re little guys, black, with characteristic elliptical bee eyes, four wings and distinct “fur” across their backs; but at first glance, most of us would probably mistake them for flies. They live in little holes, roughly the size of a pencil, in wood, laying their eggs in them and sealing them off until the larvae hatch and grow.

“To my knowledge, no one had marketed them and science hadn’t succeeded in popularizing them. So I drilled holes in a block of wood and hung it outside on the wall. That afternoon I had two little black bees nesting in them,” Griffin recalls.

He talked to an entomologist who’d studied the bees for three decades. His little “houses” worked wonderfully, and as time passed his bee populations grew, his fruit crops burgeoned and soon he had more bees than room.

What does a guy do with too many bees? One year, Griffin built about 20 bee houses and gave them away at Christmas, along with bee eggs for the coming season.

“All 20 worked,” he says, with a big smile. So the entrepreneur kicked in; he thought he might someday sell them. After retirement a couple of years later, Griffin made a foray into selling them at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle and discovered this was a singular economic opportunity.

Now, in addition to the wooden bee houses, Knox Cellars offers cardboard-tube bee nests lined with straw-like paper tubes. The bees fill each with eggs, which can be refrigerated or placed in an unheated outbuilding until next season. When the new baby bees hatch out, the paper liners can be discarded and replaced with fresh ones for the next generation.

 

Writing a book

Realizing that the information he gave people about the bees was a valuable commodity, Griffin then used old college literature-major skills to write The Orchard Mason Bee. It’s sold 25,000 copies so far and he just had another 5,000 printed. A subsequent book, Humblebee Bumblebee, is on the social bumblebees we all know.

“This has become big enough that now we have competitors,” adds Griffin, whose products can be found in about any gardening catalog. “This year we’re selling three kinds of bees; nesting holes in a great variety of ways; and the only bumblebee houses that are available, to my knowledge.”

These consist of a pine box with two internal chambers. The smaller chamber acts as an easily defensible foyer; the larger serves as home. The piece de resistance is the plastic “ceiling” beneath the wooden roof; when you remove the roof, you can observe the bees through the clear plastic.

Griffin has displays for Knox Cellars in 107 retail stores (in Bellingham, they’re at Village Books and Bakerview Nursery). He ships bees all over the continent and nesting supplies even to England, where a similar bee exists.

“This (venture) has led me down some interesting roads,” Griffin says.

Griffin’s refrigerator, like those of all proud parents, sports lots of photos of daughters and sons-in-law Erin and Robert Christie and Lisa (who is a partner with him in the bee business) and Chadd Novich, along with the six grandchildren.

“I’m glad I was able to do some cool things for the town,” Griffin reflects. “And I’m happy I have the ability to look forward and act on that; it’s been useful. I never drive by Boulevard Park without feeling very good. It’s been a good run; I hope it lasts a lot longer.”