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Dozens of attendees, including several former Yard Birds employees, filled the McMenamins Olympic Club theater in downtown Centralia on Tuesday, July 15, for a Yard Birds Shopping Center History Pub presentation by Lewis County Historical Museum Executive Director Jason Mattson.
Along with being born and raised in Centralia and frequenting the old shopping mall for Star Wars action figures and other toys as a child, Mattson also worked at Yard Birds for several years.
The history of Yard Birds goes all the way back to 1947, when childhood friends Bill Jones and Rich Gillingham started a military surplus story in Centralia.
They bought a building on National Avenue, and Two Yard Birds Surplus was born. The original location is now Chehalis Outfitters, formerly known as the Sunbird Shopping Center.
Jones and Gillingham also created two “sad sack” bird characters as store mascots, named “skinny” and “fatty,” to help with marketing.
“In the latter part of the 60s, they dropped the ‘Two,’ and it was just known as Yard Birds,” Mattson said.
At one point, they even had an official Yard Birds transit system featuring custom-painted buses which, along with making stops back and forth in the Twin Cities, had a stop at the mall.
“Good business move there,” Mattson added.
During this time, Lee Hobbs created the first Yard Birds statue. Other statues were also built by Bing Orr and Paul Downing throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The business continued to grow to include clothing, sporting goods and more on top of military surplus, and eventually outgrew the first National Avenue location.
“What looked like a marshy wetland to some, looked like an opportunity to the founders of Yard Birds,” Mattson said.
Located less than a quarter-mile north of the original location, Jones and Gillingham purchased and dredged the plot of land between North National and Northeast Kresky avenues. There, they constructed the 305,000-square-foot, two-story building now known as Chehalis Yard Birds.
“Opening in 1971, the 7-acre building was completely constructed with a talented crew from Yard Birds, and it boasted the world’s largest (at the time) concrete parking lot,” Mattson said.
Along with covering every shopping need a customer could think of from automotive to pharmaceutical, the massive mall even had a petting zoo, dance studio and arcade in it at one point, Mattson added. The parking lot had spaces for 1,500 cars.
Along with getting their shopping done all at one place, customers would occasionally come home with a new best friend as many locals who had dogs with litters of puppies would give the puppies away at Yard Birds, with the mall even frequently advertising free puppies.
Eventually, two other Yard Birds locations were opened, one in Shelton and one at the former location of Sea Mart in Olympia.
During this time, Yard Birds gained international notoriety as well as the Olympia-based punk rock band Fitz of Depression released their third studio album titled “Swing,” which featured the Yard Birds mascot on the album cover in 1996.
“They didn’t really ask permission, but they used the Yard Bird anyway for the front of their album,” Mattson said.
The album’s inner fold was also made to look like a Yard Birds newspaper coupon listing advertisement.
“I got reports of it being seen in Japan,” Mattson said.
Currently on discogs.com, six vinyl LPs are available for sale including two from sellers in Japan, one in Australia and one in Germany.
Eventually, as shopping malls began dying nationwide during the rise of online shopping in the 1990s and early 2000s, both the Shelton and Olympia Yard Birds closed, and eventually the Chehalis one closed in 1995.
The Chehalis Yard Birds was reopened in 1998 when Darris McDaniel, who had opened up a Shop’n Kart location inside Yard Birds already in 1990, bought the entire mall hoping to rejuvenate.
“He did his best with keeping things lively around the store. It kind of morphed into the Yard Birds Mall, which was kind of a flea market,” Mattson said.
Effects from losing sales to online shopping were only exacerbated by the 2008 economic recession. Multiple floods also took their toll on the property and McDaniel’s efforts, and the property began to fall into disrepair.
In 2017, the Shop’n Kart inside Yard Birds was closed, though the other businesses inside .
The Yard Birds building has been permanently closed since August 2022 after the building failed a Washington state Labor & Industries inspection and mounting unpaid utility bills led to the power in the building being cut — up-ending the businesses which were still leasing space inside at the time.
After nearly two years of looking for a buyer, the property was finally sold to Douglas LeMay for $2.4 million in July 2024.
“(He’s) the son of the LeMay empire. He’s currently looking for tenants but doing a lot of improvements on the building,” Mattson said. “It’s got a beautiful white new roof … and there’s talk of refurbishing the rooftop sign.”
Mattson added LeMay has shown interest in preserving the one remaining Yard Birds statue on the property’s west edge, which Mattson has already helped restore in the past.
“Here it is after Dave and I spent 24 hours straight fiberglassing it, I’m still pretty sure I’m suffering brain damage from all the residue,” Mattson said jokingly.
Mattson also curates a large collection of Yard Birds memorabilia at the Lewis County Historical Museum, along with another smaller fiberglass Yard Bird statue he saved.
“To this day, people bring me things with Yard Birds price tags and things that they find hiding away in their storage, it’s awesome,” Mattson said.
The museum is located at 599 NW Front St. in downtown Chehalis.
For a full history of Yard Birds and more information about the old shopping mall, visit https://www.yardbirdshistory.com/timeline/.
