Growing Up in Tacoma — Why I Never Left

Episode 2 — Growing Up in Tacoma: Mellie’s Perspective on the City She Never Left

I’ve lived in Tacoma for almost 40 years. I grew up in a manufactured home in Parkland Spanaway, spent my teenage years driving to Ruston Way just to sit by the water, and told myself I would never go into real estate like my parents. Now I’m eleven years into selling homes in the city I almost left — and I have no plans to go anywhere.

In this episode, Kierstyn and I talk about what Tacoma was actually like growing up in the 90s, the places that are gone now that shaped me, and why this city is nearly impossible to leave once it has you.

We talk about:

 • Growing up in Parkland Spanaway and feeling pulled toward North Tacoma’s older homes
 • Never Never Land at Point Defiance — Tacoma’s forgotten immersive wonderland that I thought I made up as a kid
 • The Black Pearl, teenage depression, and why Ruston Way was my safe place
 • Why I swore I’d never do real estate — and what changed
 • What Tacoma has that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else

This one is personal. It’s also a love letter to a city most people underestimate.

Follow the show for a new episode every week.
Wonder Luxe Real Estate | Tacoma, WA | wonderluxerealestate.com

What is Falling in Love With Tacoma?

Tacoma has been home for nearly 40 years. Grew up here, stayed here, and for the last eleven years have been selling the city’s most characterful homes — the old Craftsmans, the Victorians, the neighborhoods most people don’t know exist until someone shows them.

This podcast is an insider look at a city most people underestimate. Every week pulling back the curtain on the neighborhoods, the history, the homes, and the stories that never make it into a listing description.

This isn’t a real estate podcast. It’s a love letter to Tacoma — and an invitation to fall in love with it too.

Mellie: 00:00

Welcome back to episode two of Falling in Love with Tacoma, the Wonder podcast. If you don't know

Kierstyn: 00:06

who Meli is, she's a Tacoma native. She's been How long have you been

Mellie: 00:10

living in Tacoma? Thirty years. Thirty years. I'm 40 years old. We got here when I was two or three from Japan.

Mellie: 00:17

My dad was Air Force. I was born in Japan. My mom's Korean. My dad was in the Air Force, so I was born in the US Embassy, American Village in Japan And in then we came to Tacoma, which actually we lived in the Spanaway Parkland area most of my life. Since then, I've lived all over Tacoma.

Mellie: 00:39

University Blaze, Point Defiance. I've lived at Hilltop. We live I lived in Midland for a while. Yeah. It is unincorporated Tacoma.

Mellie: 00:49

So definitely all over Tacoma, and I'm still here.

Kierstyn: 00:52

Yes. We are going to be talking about something a little personal. Okay. We're gonna talk about what it means to grow up in a city and then spend your career selling it. Selling the homes in the city.

Kierstyn: 01:04

It's interesting. It's really cool that you grew up in Tacoma because I feel like that's special. You don't always meet a real estate agent who grew up in the city and then knows all the ins and outs. So we're gonna be talking about that. Smiley has a special perspective.

Kierstyn: 01:20

That's not just the market. It's she knows the vibe. So the first question that we're gonna ask Mellie is going back going back to when you were your childhood, what was Tacoma like when you were growing up?

Mellie: 01:34

I well, you're little. You're and I grew up, you know, in the nineties. So Mhmm. Didn't have nineties. Yep.

Mellie: 01:42

Not like I had access to the World Wide Web yet. A lot of it was Parkland Spanaway to me, right? And Spanaway Park, Sprinklr Recreational Center. I grew up a lot around over there. I would say in my pre teens, did not love it.

Mellie: 01:59

I always wanted to move far away. Like, was like, I thought it was crazy when people are like, they living in the same place or they'd be like, I had the same teacher when, you know, back in the 70s and I was just like, why are they still living in the same place? That was crazy to me. You kind of as

Kierstyn: 02:17

a child, you know, you had different opinions but you thought moving around would Then probably be more

Mellie: 02:23

in my teens, once I started driving and I could start exploring more, I remember when I was younger, my mom bought a TV off of didn't have Offer Up, I wanted to say Offer Up, but it was the newspaper. She was on the newspaper clippings and she found a TV in North Slope in Tacoma and I remember driving there and just being in awe of the houses. And I was like, this is where the rich people live. And then we grew up in a manufactured home in a in a really nice park over by Spaniel Bay Lake High School called Winchester Village. And I did love my mobile home park.

Mellie: 02:55

It was my oasis. It was like being tucked away. A lot of people didn't know it was back there, and everyone kept really good care of their homes. But that's, you know, humble means and Yeah. Really just had a draw to the North Slope homes.

Mellie: 03:12

And then once I got my car and my Ship of Freedom, I named it the Pearl because that was when Pirates of Caribbean came out. Oh. I named my car the Black Pearl. Oh, love that. And on bad days, like, was I going through a lot of depression back in my teens and I would drive to Reston and I'd go for a walk or I'd sit on a bench and, that was my happy place.

Mellie: 03:34

Reston Endpoints just was the place where I could be with myself in the waters there and will always have a part

Kierstyn: 03:42

of my heart. Yeah. I love that. So on it a little bit, but how that neighborhood, how does it how did that feel to you growing up? Parkland Spanaway?

Mellie: 03:53

Parkland Spanaway And then we're going

Kierstyn: 03:55

talk about what it looks like now.

Mellie: 03:56

Yeah. Parkland Spanaway was a love hate relationship, mostly because I felt stuck. And I think I wanted I needed creativity, and I didn't know what I needed when I was younger. I just knew that there was something missing. Whereas when I get closer to Tacoma, like Central to Hilltop, North Tacoma, there's this creativity in the older homes.

Mellie: 04:18

There's a different vibe out here that I was drawn to and needed. Now that I'm older, you know, the while where I kind of to the area because it's a great place. There are great pockets of areas to raise your kids. It's affordable. There's some great communities out there.

Mellie: 04:35

I changed my perspective as I got older, but I still feel more drawn to what I call the wing tip of Tacoma, which is, you know, North Tacoma. It looks

Kierstyn: 04:47

like a wing. Yeah.

Mellie: 04:48

I'm an obsession with birds. So

Kierstyn: 04:52

going back, just we're gonna stay here for a second about the difference between when you were a child and then now. We touched on it before we started talking before we hit record and started recording the podcast. But something that you were talking about that's changed in Tacoma that's no longer here was? Never Never Land at Point Of Frights. And I've never heard of it.

Kierstyn: 05:13

So I'm so excited to hear what Never Never Land is.

Mellie: 05:16

Yeah. Remember when I was little. We went to Point Defiance one time. A a lot of times we didn't drive out that far. We kind of sit local.

Mellie: 05:22

But I remember this place, and it was funny because for a long time, I thought I had made it up. And I was just like, nope. I had That's so funny. A wild imagination when I little. I love it.

Mellie: 05:31

So then I was like, oh, only that place doesn't exist because no one knows what I'm talking about. And then finally, one day I saw an article on Never Never Land. I was like, oh my god. It did exist. And if you haven't heard of it, I would definitely Google it.

Mellie: 05:42

But there was all these giant statues of books, of shoes, of like cartoon and very immersive before immersive was a cool word. And it was wonderland.

Kierstyn: 05:56

So Anyone else remember that you saw you made it up? Yeah, it was

Mellie: 05:59

like pizza and pipes. Like, don't know if you've ever heard pizza and pipes. Like that was a cool place out in university place and like the whole place was so creepy. Was like had so many organs and eating pizza. There's a lot of cool places like that in Tacoma that are no longer around.

Mellie: 06:13

Then there's new cool places. Yeah.

Kierstyn: 06:15

It's nostalgic to think about. Yes. And I would be curious to see who else who else remembers Never Never Lands. Yes. Now I want to know when did you decide to sell homes here?

Mellie: 06:26

I was in Running Start, and my I was gonna go in What high school did you go to? Franklin Pierce High School. Uh-huh. And then no one probably really knows me because I was very shy back then, and I didn't start. And I, at that time, was gonna go into nursing.

Mellie: 06:41

I took a break because I was way too much of an overachiever and burnt myself out senior year. And I went to school to I was trying to get my prereqs for nursing. My brother was working at the bank, got me a job at KeyBank, and my career started to grow there. So I stopped school and continued my career in banking. The manager at KeyBank brought me over to Wells Fargo and promoted me to a lead teller, which then I got promoted to banker.

Mellie: 07:10

It was a was a really great experience. There was something kind of missing in my life and, you know, older was that corporate world is a little bit hard for me. It was a great beginning. It gave me good foundations of work ethic. There are some things I needed to iron out within myself of being on time.

Mellie: 07:27

Yeah. And a lot of things that really enhance my skill sets. But after having kids, you know, I needed something that was a little bit more flexible and my parents were in real estate.

Kierstyn: 07:38

It was nine to five. Yes. Yeah.

Mellie: 07:41

And my mom and dad used to be in real estate back in the 90s, early 2000s and I remember being like, I'm never going to do real estate. I hated their job. They always talked about houses. I thought it was super boring. That is so funny.

Mellie: 07:53

And I was just being a teenager who wanted attention, right? So Century twenty one is where I started in real estate. It didn't feel like the right fit for me. I didn't know kind of what my fit was until I found the person that, you know, or helped me realize how to do real estate on my terms and to port an introverted intuitive because I just refused a cold call. Like, no one could force me to do it.

Mellie: 08:23

I was like, I'm gonna quit before I do it. Yep. Doesn't align with me. It my biggest thing I've talked about on the last podcast, I'm gonna talk about it all the time, is do your business is like the golden rule. Do it to others that you want them to do to you.

Mellie: 08:36

And I don't like being cold called. I don't either. I will never probably go with business. I have never in my life gone with business from someone calling me. Me either.

Mellie: 08:46

So it's gonna have to be word-of-mouth or because I found it. And so that's kind of thing. Build a garden and the bees will come. And that's what we're doing with, you know, that's how we do our business is like if you do a good enough job, if you work hard, go the extra mile for your clients. Yeah.

Mellie: 09:04

You know, people take care of us and we take care of them and that's the kind of community that I wanted to build.

Kierstyn: 09:09

Yeah. And that's what we got to build. Yeah. Yeah.

Mellie: 09:12

Only times that we've sold some houses where it's I provide wonder to our clients and sometimes I get provided wonder in return. And there's just so many beautiful streets in Tacoma, beautiful homes. So, do you think in a

Kierstyn: 09:27

couple sentences? What does Tacoma mean to you? If we're wrapping up this episode and talking about that you grew up here, then you decided to start your career here, or your career is still here, you're building business here. Yeah. So, what does Tacoma mean to you?

Kierstyn: 09:43

Yeah.

Mellie: 09:44

So, you know, like I talked about in the beginning is I always wanted to move. I always wanted to leave and, you know, I have a hard time with winter sometimes. You know, every winter, I kind have a hard time. Yeah. Yeah.

Mellie: 09:55

I want to live in sunshine. So I've been called a lot of times to, like, try and go live in sunshine. However Like,

Kierstyn: 10:01

go move to a different state. Go go to a sunny state.

Mellie: 10:04

Yeah. Yeah. However, the hard part for me is that a lot of states, I go visit them, there seems to be, like, one culture or, like, one style of living. And it's hard for me to completely explain other than that. Tacoma has so much variety and so many different, cultures.

Mellie: 10:22

There's so many different pockets of Tacoma. Like, within one part of Tacoma, there's so many different ways to live your life. And I love that variety. I love the different types of people. I love that it's like a big giant melting pot and it's really hard to find that anywhere else.

Mellie: 10:38

And maybe that's just because now I'm I have rooted down here and it's just home to me. So then it's kind of like my mindset of like, okay, and I'm gonna go visit different places and go travel to different places, but this is my home stop. This is where I rejuvenate. This is where I am myself and the people here just I am in love with the people here. The way that we are known as, you know, the grit city because of our it's a hardworking city.

Mellie: 11:09

We have so many artists who are living, you know, like the one who just started the flea market. There's just so many inspiring people here who are living their life's calling and that just more community to the space. And I'm just can't imagine living anywhere else. And I've even researched different places where I could find something like this and it's just, I haven't found it yet.

Kierstyn: 11:37

Yeah. I think that that's what this show is about. It's not just the homes in the market. It's about what it means to actually belong somewhere and what Tacoma means to you. We're trying to share Tacoma with everybody who might be wanting the people here.

Kierstyn: 11:56

It's the home, the homes for anybody who might want to move here, but also just for people who love Tacoma. See you

Mellie: 12:03

on the next one.