By DEBERA CARLTON HARRELL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Longtime residents remember quieter days, when the horizon stretched to small farms, not vertical skyscrapers. Memories include picking strawberries in open fields now covered with offices, peas where Vuecrest homes now lie, and blueberries at still-operating Overlake Blueberry Farm.

Some recall gathering at the soda fountain at Meta's Drugstore on Main Street in the 1930s and 1940s. They rode Ferris wheels and gobbled strawberry shortcake during the Strawberry Festival, the town's biggest celebration until it ended during World War II. They shopped at Petram's Dimestore, Newberry's or Frederick & Nelson's, ate at the Crabapple Restaurant and took in movies at the Bel-Vue Theater before Bellevue Square was built in the mid-1940s.

Longtime residents remember ice-skating on a pond that used to be called Midlakes. It's now called Lake Bellevue and is surrounded by condos with waterfront views instead of cattails. Skaters now head to a tented ice rink set up for the holidays in the downtown park near Bellevue Junior High School and Bellevue Elementary School.

Vic Russell, 49, has seen most of Bellevue's changes through the window of his Bellevue Barber Shop on Main Street. So have many of his customers, who leaf through Russell's collection of old Bellevue High School Beacons -- the Wolverine yearbook -- to remind themselves that their memories of a small town are not illusions.

"I've sat in this window all these years, cutting hair. I've had a front-row seat for all the changes," Russell says. "Bellevue was a nice little town, but it is completely different now.

"We have customers that go back several generations, and people talk about the changes -- the traffic, how hard it is to get around," says Russell, who recalls duck hunting with his father at Mercer Slough. "There are too many people now. If I could, I'd move."

It is common for locals to make "used to be" references to their city as if to get a fix on transformed territory: "I'll meet you at Barnes & Noble, you know, where the bowling alley used to be, next to the electronics car store that used to be the John Danz Theater, near where they're putting the Galleria."

Russell's 50-year-old shop, started by his dad and uncle, joins the homey, unpretentious 40-year-old Pancake Corral as long-standing points of reference.

On a recent Saturday, Corral waitresses in purple and gold Husky T-shirts smiled and joked with customers they know by name. Waitress Amy Reigel, carrying blueberry blintzes and omelettes, even noticed a 5-year-old girl's new haircut.

"This place is definitely different from what a lot of people think of as Bellevue," Reigel says. "Everyone knows everyone else; people have been coming here for generations."

Although many older buildings are gone, the city continues to try to keep links to its past. Land recently purchased from Bill Lagen with city, private and county funds will provide one of the city's few waterfront parks on a site at Meydenbauer Bay where whalers and fishing boats once moored before heading to Alaska.

The F.W. Winters House, the only Bellevue landmark on the National Register of Historic Places, was saved, and trails connect it to the 320-acre Mercer Slough. The building also houses the Bellevue Historical Society.

Paul VanderHoek, 82, recalls riding the ferry to Bellevue from Seattle, where he once worked before buying Eastside Glass on Bellevue's Main Street.

The small car ferries that crossed Lake Washington between Leschi, Medina and Meydenbauer Bay were suspended after the first I-90 floating bridge was built in 1946.

"I remember when we had to go all the way around the lake to get to Seattle," says VanderHoek, a member of the Bellevue Historical Society and co-founder of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce. "The freeway (I-90) changed everything. . . . At first, it was a business community, not a city, but we still needed roads, a water district, sewers, street lights.

"We banded together," VanderHoek recalls. "And since then, I don't think Bellevue's done too many things wrong."