By JUDD SLIVKA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Jean Klahn starts working at 4:30 a.m. each day, getting the soup simmering, the meats sliced, the pies baked, all visible through the gabled windows of the former St. Luke's Episcopal Church.

Klahn, owner of Jean's Deli, has been in the old church just off East Washington for three years. Before that she made her sandwiches and pies in the back room of a service station a mile or so outside the city limits.

Her restaurant is a popular lunch spot, always packed, with patrons using their fingers to scoop up the last little bits of pie filling.

She came 15 years ago when the city was a real small town, before the traffic became unmanageable, before the recent growth boom.

"I don't think Sequim's lost its small-town charms," Klahn says. "I hope it doesn't."

It was different 15 years ago when she and her husband moved from Forks.

"We didn't have any fast food restaurants," Klahn says. "No Costco."

Less traffic, too, she says.

Of the new Washington 101 bypass, she says, "I think that bypass will be a good idea." But, she adds in a stage whisper, "all the locals drive the side streets anyway."

Let the record show that the side streets are not very busy: two weekday hours spent on a street corner one block from East Washington Avenue's traffic mess recorded 14 cars.