By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

You can tell a lot about small towns and rural communities by their festivals. Skagit Valley celebrates its tulips. Puyallup Valley promotes its daffodils. In Shelton, they shuck great quantities of oysters at the county fairgrounds.

But on Pierce County's Key Peninsula the big attraction at the fall festival is a simple little cider press.

Residents eagerly line up for the chance to dump their home-grown apples into the beautifully restored antique press and take a turn cranking the handle to squeeze every last bit of juice out of their fruit.

Fred Ramsdell, a 62-year-old lifelong resident of the peninsula between Carr and Case inlets southwest of Gig Harbor, is happy to explain the Cider Fest rules.

First, participants have to use their own muscle power to crank the handle. Second, it's one load of apples and then back to the end of the line.

"The year before last we had a guy come in with a truckload of apples from Eastern Washington and he monopolized the whole thing," says Ramsdell, who helps hose down the wood cider press between each load of apples.

Ramsdell lovingly rebuilt Ruth Bramhall's cider press so it could be used during the festival that is held every fall in the business district along the Key Peninsula Highway in Key Center.

"Last year we had a lot of new people show up with their kids. And that is what it is all supposed to be about -- having the kids see how it used to be done," Ramsdell, a former fire chief, added.

Residents of the Key Peninsula, which includes Lakebay, Vaughn, Home, Longbranch, Key Center and a lot of largely undeveloped land around those unincorporated towns, like their links to the past.

Larry and Luciann Nadeau understand that.

They run a bed-and-breakfast in the Olde Glencove Hotel, which was built in 1896 as a resort hotel above quiet Carr Inlet cove on the northern end of the peninsula.

Tacoma residents came by steamboat to spend quiet weekends at the Victorian hotel and enjoy Agnes Peterson's cooking when it opened.

The hotel went out of business in 1930 and served as a private residence after that. The Nadeaus reopened it for weddings, tours and as a bed-and-breakfast a few years ago.

"It has been a ball," Luciann Nadeau says. "We had some people here from Indiana this week. Last week, it was people from Florida. And this weekend we have a childbirth class coming for their last romantic weekend before the babies come," she says.

"We just have this place out in the woods and all these people come to us. And they are all so fascinating. I love it."

It is a lot different from what she used to do for a living.

"I was with the Tacoma public schools in a program working with behaviorally disabled students. And I mean seriously behaviorally disabled. I did that for six years," she says.

"When you're working in education you never know whether you were successful, not until later when you read about the students in the paper when they do something good or -- God forbid -- something bad," she says.

"Running a bed-and-breakfast, you know right away. They sign the guest book telling you how nice their experience was."

When the Nadeaus aren't restoring the hotel or entertaining guests, they write songs. "Larry and I started writing songs three years ago. And we have started collecting rejection slips," she says.

They talked of moving to Nashville to further that career, but decided against it. "There's just no place we would rather be than here," she says.