Their Work and Play House

Olga Buckley, 89

Jim Buckley, 84

Cambria

We own and operate the Pewter Plough Playhouse in Cambria. Olga is the managing director and Jim is the artistic director. There is no separation between our work life and our social life since all our activities center on the theater--developing support from the community, attending theatrical events and enjoying the friendships that result from our neighbors’ involvement in the theater’s activities.

Our putting together a playhouse makes sense, if you consider our previous careers. Olga was a stylist in the Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue window display department and then became a shopper for the movie studios and costume designers Irene and Karinska. Jim was an art director at NBC-TV, Disneyland, the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park and the Wrather Corp.

But it happened quite by accident, really. We moved up here to Cambria after Jim retired, and we were going to take it easy, but we had a lot of large antiques and no place to park them here. So we bought a piece of property that had a store up front and a house in the back and set up an antique shop. After a couple of years of being told that we had a little Hearst Castle, we decided to turn the shop into a museum. When we got it finished, though, it looked too much like a little theater so we decided to forget the museum and started our playhouse.

That was 21 years ago. Now we have a lovely little 60-seat theater, and people come from as far away as Los Angeles to see our performances. Running the playhouse is a big job, but it’s our fountain of youth. Even our doctor keeps asking, “Are you sure you two are in your 80s?”