It has been 52 years since Pat Butler lived at 228 Seattle Street in Port Orchard and worked one year as an elementary teacher.

But it was the cover of a Debbie Macomber book, that caught her eye.

“Where I lived then is now the Cedar Cove Inn,” said Butler, who resides in Renton.

She rented the third floor of the inn while serving as a second-grade teacher at Orchard Heights Elementary School during the 1962-63 school year.

Last week, Butler and her daughter, Lisa White, came to Port Orchard and stayed at Cedar Cove Inn and had lunch with Macomber.

Butler, 74,  purchased “The Inn at Rose Harbor” in the fall of 2013 and noticed that the house on the cover reminded her of the place she lived for nine months while working in Port Orchard.

“There’s one place in the book, it mentions a guy looking out the window and seeing that view,” she said. “That is the same exact view.”

She said the paperback version of the book has a clear view of the inn while the hardback is “kind of blurry.”

“I looked at the picture and it looked like the house,” said Butler.

She wrote a letter to Macomber on Sept. 19, 2013. Macomber received it on Sept. 23 and forwarded it to Gil and Kathy Michael, owners of the Cedar Cove Inn.

In the letter, Butler said while reading the book it “stirred up memories of living in the third-floor apartment.”

“I have a lot of memories in that house,” she said.

“The breakfast was really good and the couple who owns the inn were very nice to us,” Butler said. “They invited us to stay there for free when they called me last year.”

The two women met Macomber for lunch on Sept. 25, but also found time to eat at Port Orchard’s Lighthouse and MoonDogs, Too.

“Debbie was cute, nice and a lot shorter than we thought she would be,” Butler said. “I didn’t know she was from Yakima.”

Butler said she has watched Macomber’s “Cedar Cove” television series on Netflix.

“I’ve finished watching the first season,” she said.

She told Macomber she had a roommate from Yakima while she was living in Alaska.

Butler, who was raised in Ephrata, graduated from Central Washington University in the summer of 1962 and accepted a job in the South Kitsap School District.

“That was my first and only teaching job,” she said. “And I rented the whole third floor.”

She remembers having a beautiful view of the bay and seeing several battleships anchored across the Sinclair Inlet.

“I hadn’t been around the water because I grew up in Eastern Washington,” Butler said.

She said the owner of the house — an elderly woman — sold it while she was living there.

“She lived on the second floor and leased the first and third floors,” Butler recalled. “The woman who rented the first floor was a county auditor. They were both really nice to me. Both were good cooks.”

Butler said the owner would invite her to dinner sometimes after a hard day a school.

But she remembers the Columbus Day Storm on Oct. 12, 1962.

“I went down to stay with the landlord because the power was out. I stayed in her extra bedroom,” Butler recalled. “The next day we all went out to eat breakfast. The power was only out at our place for about a day.”

After teaching just one year in Port Orchard, Butler went to Fairbanks, Alaska. While in Alaska, she worked as a school librarian on Andrews Air Force Base. She also met and married her husband, Marshal, who was serving in the Air Force.

“That was the end of my teaching career,” she said, laughing. “I just raised a family and never did work again.”

The couple had two children but as a military family then moved around.

After her husband left the military, he went to work for Boeing and moved to Renton before some layoffs took place. The next nine years, the family moved around before settling back in Renton.

“We have been here in the same home for 34 years,” Butler noted.

Butler said her brother has a camp on Mason Lake and many times pass the exit signs to Port Orchard.

“I’ve often wonder how much downtown has changed since I lived there,” she said. “It’s changed a lot since then.”