Remember when a ticket to the movie cost a quarter? When a dime bought two Coca-Colas? When penny candies were actually three for a penny?

Edie Edmundson does, and she’s happy to share her recollections of mid-20th century Burlington on a historical walking tour she gives every other Tuesday through August.

Edmundson, 71, relies heavily on her own past experiences during the 2-mile tours, which wind from the new City Hall on Cedar Street to historic Fairhaven Avenue.

One of her favorite stops is the El Gitano Mexican restaurant on Fairhaven. In the 1940s the place was a burger joint called The White Spot, frequented by Burlington’s youth.

“This is where my heart is, because this is where my first date was,” Edmundson said during one of her recent tours. “Only I was in first grade.”

Christ the King Church on the same block was once the Rio Grande Theater, known simply as the “Rio.” Edmundson would spend her weekends there while her older sister worked as an usher or ticket-taker.

To this day, Edmundson is an expert on cinema from the late 1940s and early ’50s. In a typical day back then, she’d watch the same movie three times.

“I never complained. I loved going to movies,” Edmundson said.

The Burlington of Edmundson’s youth had heaping measures of both reverence and irreverence, as the tour guide described it. She spoke highly of the town’s volunteer firefighters, whom she credited for the strawberry parade that has survived from the 1930s, and for the steel cross erected on Burlington Hill in the 1960s. Longtime residents still associate the cross, which is now almost lost among cell towers, with young Mark Beaton. The boy’s tragic accidental death spurred the fundraising for the cross.

“Every time the cross was lit, it would be in memory of Mark,” Edmundson said.

But there’s plenty of levity on the tour. Early on, after the tour leaves City Hall, Edmundson talks about the old Darigold plant, which stood where the fire hall is today. After Darigold left town, a wholesale candy maker moved in, sometime in the 1980s.

Not all of the sugar coming into the building was used to make candy, as Edmundson tells it. The proprietor also ran a clandestine still. Once word got to the authorities, Burlington firefighters raided the place and demolished the still with their axes, Edmundson said.

The proprietor never spent a day in jail, the story goes. (In stories like this one, Edmundson is careful to leave out the real names.) But in a stroke of karma, the man lost his tavern after putting the business in his wife’s name. He was trying to keep that business out of the hands of authorities who wanted to seize it. The problem? His wife divorced him.

This story went over well during a tour Edmundson gave July 10 for the Burlington chapter of the Red Hat Society.

Red Hat member Lynne Hower said she hadn’t known about the still inside the old Darigold building.

“I really want to know who it was, to see if it was a friend of my father’s, as I suspect,” Hower said.

Many of those in the 50-and-over women’s group grew up in Burlington themselves and were able to share their own stories during the tour.

One of the Red Hatters said her Burlington High senior class was responsible for hanging a doctor’s office skeleton out the window of the burned-out Knutzen Building, sometime in the 1950s.

Neither Edmundson nor her generational peers in the Red Hat Society could pinpoint the year the Knutzen Building burned. Edmundson had sharper memories of the building’s life as the heart of old downtown.

“Knutzen General Store was our little mall,” Edmundson said, in an oblique reference to the modern-day retail core along Burlington Boulevard.

Hub City

Like much of the rest of Skagit Valley, Burlington’s story begins with timber. The town site was virgin forest and marsh when white pioneers settled there in 1890. The town was built around loggers’ shanties and a shingle mill, and it grew with the arrival of a second major railroad line that intersected the first on Fairhaven Avenue.

The arrival of the railroads bestowed Burlington — named for the town in Vermont, not the railroad company — with its moniker, “Hub City.”

The town’s prominence was such that its leaders pushed to have the county seat moved there from Mount Vernon around 1909. The great flood that submerged the town that year put an end to that idea.

These details of Burlington’s history and many more can be found on the Web at http://www.skagitriverjournal.com.

Edmundson touches lightly on the earliest days of Burlington’s history, although she lingers at Burlington’s first church, Faith Baptist Church on Anacortes Street and Rio Vista Avenue. The church, which originally belonged to the Methodists, still evokes every bit of the New England charm that went into it.

In case anyone forgot just how rural Skagit cities were in the early days, Edmundson told of how the wide doors to the church basement were kept open for ventilation on Sundays, so wide that parishioners would need to chase the cows out after the service.

Burlington’s status as Hub City has stuck with it over the decades, from the railroad days to the era when it was an agricultural processing center, to the city’s more recent history as a retail destination.

The city’s future — at least as city leaders would have it — is in restoring part of its early identity.

Railroad Park, now a triangular patch of grass bordered by Fairhaven and two sets of railroad tracks, will be home to a new visitors center that will be built to resemble the town’s original train depot. The city is taking care to recreate the depot as much as possible. The building alone will cost more than $1 million, said Edmundson, who is a City Council member. The park also will be used as a space for outdoor performances and art displays.

“Eventually, that’s going to become the center of town,” Edmundson said.

Edmundson will continue the tours next year, despite mixed success drawing interest this summer. She intends to combine art and history lessons on next years’ tours, now that Burlington has begun to establish itself as a city with public art. The city’s first art displays were installed two years ago at the new library.

The tour has primarily drawn people with a curiosity about history, even those who aren’t locals. Richard Ellison, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Bay View recently, took the tour twice in July. Half the reason was the exercise it provides, he said. But he also came for the memories the tour stirred.

“Everywhere you go, it’s the same,” Ellison said. “You reminisce about the movie theater.”

n Ralph Schwartz can be reached at 360-416-2138 or .