By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The Stillaguamish Senior Center overseeing an expanding campus of subsidized apartments for low-income seniors.

There's a 12- to 18-month wait for its 141 units, and the center plans to add more soon.

Tenant Hazel Ryan, who has lived in the area since 1936, said she and others living on Social Security couldn't have stayed in Smokey Point without the subsidized housing.

"This is my home," says Ryan, 86, the first person to move into the complex in 1980.

Just a few steps from the quiet housing complex, the calm gives way to a whirl of ceramics and silversmithing, pool games and bingo, computer classes and dances and meals at the senior center. It's been a hit since the day it opened in 1973.

"We could never get a building like this now," says Myrtle Ruckert, one of the center's original planners and still a regular. That's because the seniors conceived, planned and eventually built the center on their own, says fellow planner Edith Roal.

They hired two carpenters and did the rest of the work themselves, from pouring concrete to laying tiles, say members Bill and Rae Hobbs.

It didn't take long for their work to make a difference.

Cordice Dinger, who moved to Smokey Point from Denver in the early 1970s, had planned to move back to Colorado until the center opened. "I didn't know anyone," says the retired fashion consultant.

She signed on as the center's first cook, drawing on her childhood on a farm to figure out how to feed the 250 seniors who came for meals from the start.

After retiring, Dinger stayed on as a board member and as a regular volunteer in the center office, greeting the old regulars and the lonely newcomers of today.

The area is especially welcoming to seniors because of the concentration of shops and services, which has grown beyond off-ramp supplies into a commercial district more typical of a midsized town.