“The building itself doesn’t change. What changes are the cars outside,” says Kelly Cannon-Miller, executive director of the Des Chutes Historical Museum. She’s seated at a computer in the museum’s library, calling up vintage images of Pine Tavern restaurant, a fixture in downtown Bend since 1936.

The restaurant, nestled above Mirror Pond at 967 N.W. Brooks St., will turn 75 this fall.

It’s Bend’s oldest eatery, and its current owners, along with some help from Deschutes Historical Society, will celebrate the restaurant’s long history in Bend beginning at lunchtime Friday, when its half-pound burger will be served for just 75 cents from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. (Some restrictions, such as dine-in only, apply.)

From 5 p.m. to close Saturday, the restaurant will hold its 75th anniversary dinner, providing a special menu and a raffle to benefit the museum, which is providing historical displays for the occasion.

And during the dinner hour on Sunday, diners need pay just 75 percent of their bill, the restaurant’s way of thanking Bend for its longtime patronage.

A brief history of Pine

Sit down with a museum copy of Joyce Gribskov’s 1980 book, “Pioneer Spirits of Bend,” and you’ll begin to see a different Bend, a simpler, slower small town of bachelor mill workers and the establishments that served them.

Pine Tavern’s antecedent was the O.I.C. Cafeteria — as in “oh, I see” — opened in 1919 by eventual Pine Tavern co-owner Maren Gribskov and her first partner, Martha Bechen.

“They found an old restaurant available on Bond Street, across from Aune’s Livery Stable,” writes Joyce Gribskov, a Bend resident whose deceased husband, Les Gribskov, was Maren’s nephew. The cafeteria, she continues, “became the meeting place of bachelors and single teachers. One year, 13 teachers resigned to marry men they had met at the cafeteria.”

As the years went on, the O.I.C. Cafeteria, the first local establishment of that type, according to Les Joslin, a member of Des Chutes Historical Society’s board of directors, moved to a number of locations over time.

Once partner Bechen married and headed off to mill camps with her husband, Maren Gribskov was left to run the cafeteria herself. In the early 1930s, Gribskov and Martha Bechen’s sister, Eleanor Bechen, pooled their resources, borrowed money despite the Depression, and began building a new restaurant on the river.

“Maren had been admiring the spot for some time and felt that this place would be a lovely setting for a restaurant,” according to “Pioneer Spirits of Bend,” which says they chose the name Pine Tavern “because of the friendliness of English taverns.”

The restaurant soon developed a strong reputation and ardent following, according to Gribskov’s book, and during World War II soldiers from Camp Abbot in Sunriver, along with their families, “filled the place to capacity.”

In the early days, the restaurant staff was all-female, as the many existing photos of its staff posed shoulder to shoulder out front attest.

Bechen and Gribskov ran the restaurant for decades, eventually selling in 1967. According to Justine Bender Bennett, current owner along with her mother, Chris Bender, the restaurant has had relatively few owners, including her father, Bert Bender, who bought the Pine Tavern in 1982 with partner Joe Cenarussa.

According to Joslin, the restaurant struggled during the 1980s, lean years of transitioning from a timber-based economy to a tourist-based one. During the boom time ’90s, Bender and Cenarussa redesigned the restaurant’s garden and patio.

When Cenarussa died in a 1997 plane crash, his widow, Jean Cenarussa, carried on as the partner of Bender, who died in 2009.

Bennett was 8 when her father bought the restaurant. She grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, but says she “spent a ton of summers” staying at her father’s three-bedroom apartment above the restaurant.

“I would go down to Drake Park and crawdad fish, and much to everyone’s chagrin, back in the ’80s, feed the ducks,” she recalls. And when she was in the tavern, “I (learned) relatively quickly to say ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Comin’ through,’ and all those things as a little one, because they definitely never saw me coming, especially when I was coming for the cobbler.”

Since buying out the remaining owners, including a former manager who had ownership interest, nearly a year ago, the two have made changes to the interior, including opening up the lounge by removing a large booth. However, one of two ponderosa pines in its garden room still pokes through the ceiling; the other tree fell victim to pine beetles and was topped several years ago.

A favorite haunt

Old Bend still resonates at the long-standing institution, which (possibly) has a resident ghost. As the story goes, Gretchen may have been the wife of the shortest-term owners, a man named “Tex” who bought the restaurant in 1967 and sold it to Winifred Roley in the 1970s.

“A guy went down to the basement — we have a dry-storage — and said, ‘What’s with the old lady down there?’ It turns out that he had seen Gretchen. They went downstairs to see if somebody actually was there, and nobody was there,” says Bennett. “As a kid, I would always try seances upstairs, trying to Gretchen to come. Never happened for me.”

Gail Moulton worked for Bennett’s father in Sun Valley and came to Bend in 1982, working at the restaurant until 2010. She never had a Gretchen sighting, in the basement or otherwise.

“I have gone down there at midnight and have called out to Gretchen to say, ‘Hey, I’d love to see you. Come see me.’ No response,” she says, chuckling.

‘I have seen generations’

Moulton now works as food and beverage manager at the Restaurant at Awbrey Glen, but says Pine Tavern “was literally my home away from home for many, many years.” She met her husband at the restaurant and practically raised her daughters there, she says.

“They both wound up hostessing and waitressing,” she says, often using the pronoun “we” and the present tense when speaking of the restaurant where she worked for 28 years.

“One of my favorite things is the fact that over the years I have … seen generations. I’ve talked to people who came there as children, who came there for their high school prom and graduation. They’re back with their own children, and then they’re coming in with their grandchildren and sometimes their great grandchildren, and creating this family history of memories.”

In recent years, the restaurant has arguably become a stronger destination for visitors than locals. Even as co-owner Bennett recognizes the past — noting that Pine Tavern’s been owned by her family 29 years, almost as long as Gribskov and Bechen’s 31 years — she’s made connecting with the current community a goal.

“I think the Pine Tavern really had a tourist draw, and it’s benefited from that greatly,” particularly in the summertime, she says. “You learn relatively quickly in a small community that if you don’t have the local (support) to keep you standing, then you don’t really have a whole lot.

“It didn’t get dropped, but it just wasn’t a focus. And that’s my main focus, making sure the community knows that we care about Bend and the people in it.”

Former manager Moulton sees the Pine Tavern as carrying on a tradition started by Gribskov and Bechen.

“They treated customers as guests in their own home,” Moulton says. “We’ve — they’ve — continued that tradition of inviting people in to have a wonderful experience and making friends with them.”

She recalls meeting Gribskov before her death in 1984.

“She was, from my recollection, just a wonderful, bright woman. I could just picture her as a young entrepreneur, doing the unthinkable, which was getting a loan to get that restaurant built from the ground up.

“Those women were remarkable — and way ahead of their time.”