Patty Kautz has a lot of memories from running the Marine Bar the past 43 years, including conducting an auction in 2004, when she put prizes inside balloons and patrons would bid without knowing what they would get. Her husband, Bruce, sat in support as she ran the auction standing on the bar.
When the recently retired Patty Kautz signed her restaurant, Hungry Beaver Pizza and Marine Bar, over to Rolland Wimberley on Feb. 4, it was exactly 43 years to the day since she first leased the establishment in 1981. "I could not believe it," she said. "It was pretty comical."
Though Kautz looks back fondly on her quadragenarian run as owner of Wrangell's oldest pizza parlor, she looks forward with excitement to a retirement full of travel and family time.
"There's been a lot of changes in 43 years," Kautz said. When she first signed the lease, the building was unfinished, with sheetrock on the walls where the restaurant is now. The space underwent a complete remodel before welcoming its first customers.
But Kautz didn't just overhaul the establishment's structure - she overhauled the menu, too. For the first couple years after opening, Hungry Beaver was a steak and seafood spot. Then, around 1983, Kautz brought pizza to Wrangell, where it has become a community staple in the intervening years. When she tried to close the restaurant down due to a staffing shortage in 2021, devoted patrons banded together and convinced her to reopen. "You talked us into it," she wrote in a Facebook post.
Countless other improvements followed. Kautz and local artist Kitty Angerman came up with the idea for the restaurant's personalized ceiling tiles, which range from vast mountain scenes and seascapes to detailed renderings of ships and sea creatures to adorable doodles and bright business logos. The project started around 1985. Community members "take a tile and paint whatever they want on it and bring it down and put it up," said Kautz. "A lot of people paint their own. Kitty Angerman did probably 50% of them."
Before buying the pizza parlor and bar, Kautz had nearly two decades worth of experience in the restaurant business. "At 16, I started washing dishes and making salads," she said in a previous Sentinel interview. "Then they didn't have a waitress one day and I started waitressing. Then, they didn't have a bartender when I turned 21, so I started bartending. It just progressed from there."
But for now, Kautz isn't overly nostalgic about her many years at the Marine. Instead, she's looking forward to her future. After her upcoming hip replacement is complete, she plans to travel the world with her husband, starting with a train tour across the nation. In addition to her stacked travel agenda (after the train trip is complete, her next destination is "everywhere"), she is looking forward to "having company without interruptions" during her retirement years.
On Feb. 4, Kautz hosted a retirement party of more than 50 well-wishers at the Hungry Beaver. She, her husband and her daughter catered the event by themselves, for old times' sake. "We used to do big buffets for the fishermen," she recalled. "And we would have another one when the fishing season was over. I used to stand on the bar and we used to auction off donations for Toys for Tots."
The menu - which included barbecued pork, hot wings, potato salad, shrimp dip, cream puffs, hot beans, smoked salmon sandwiches and more - required three days of preparation.
"It was a good night," she said. She left town for surgery last Saturday.
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