At the Fremont Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Awards Ceremony March 26, 2006, the chamber presented the Local Hero Award to a recipient who wasn’t there to receive it.
Victor Odermat, the Marine Corps veteran who founded Brown Bear Car Wash in 1957, passed away on Veterans Day 2025 at age 95. His son, Brown Bear President Lance Odermat, accepted the award on his behalf.
“For over 60 years, Vic has led Brown Bear Car Wash with integrity, hard work, and deep community commitment,” the chamber said. “Their headquarters on Leary is a Fremont fixture, and Vic’s leadership and legacy will be felt for generations.”
Neighbors traveling past the headquarters at 3977 NW Leary Way may not realize it’s the hub for all of the car wash company’s operations. Service technicians are out the door by 4 a.m. to reach locations across the state before traffic hits. Up to 50 or 60 employees work out of the headquarters on any given day.
Brown Bear has operated there since the 1980s, when it outgrew its previous space on 8th Avenue NW.
Lance recently sat down for an interview and spoke about his father, the history of the company, and where it stands today.
He started by recalling childhood memories of accompanying his father to work. “I was involved with the company from the time I could walk because my dad took me everywhere,” he said. “We were always out visiting car washes or delivering product to car washes, or doing something around our car washes. I rode with him everywhere.”
He also grew up riding his bike around the neighborhood. “I remember Fremont being sleepy. This area had a real industrial feel,” he said. Lance soon went off to college and at that point he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go into the family business.
While Lance was at college and eventually practicing law, Brown Bear continued to evolve. Victor leased Brown Bear’s operations to the Tosco Corporation in 1995, while retaining ownership of all the real estate.
Tosco was eventually acquired by ConocoPhillips, which had no interest in running car washes and approached Victor about exiting the lease. He agreed to take back control of the car washes.
Lance said that the properties they handed back were a disaster, with millions of dollars in deferred maintenance. It took the better part of a decade to fully recover. By the time things were feeling stable again, Lance had returned to the family business.
“When I first came back to the company, I just did primarily legal work,” Lance said. “Years passed, I got more involved on the operational side, and gradually took over running the company.”
Another aspect of the Brown Bear story that may resonate with Fremonsters is the company’s environmentalism. They were among the first to make the push for commercial car washing as an environmentally friendly alternative to home car washes.
It started in the 1990s after a city inspector cited a Brown Bear attendant at a Ballard location for hosing down the parking lot with clean water. Only rainwater is allowed into storm drains, the inspector said. Victor’s reaction, Lance recalled, was immediate: if they were being cited for that, what about everyone washing their cars at home and sending soap and grease straight into the storm system?
That question led to the creation of the company’s Wash Green® program. Brown Bear uses an average of 25 gallons of fresh water per car, filters and recycles a large percentage of that water, and disposes of more than 500 tons of potentially hazardous sludge each year. Those are the oils, heavy metals, and antifreeze that build up on cars and, if washed off in a driveway, can flow untreated into Puget Sound and local waterways.
Brown Bear’s environmental mission and its community giving have often worked in tandem. The company’s charity car wash program lets nonprofits buy discounted tickets and resell them, keeping the profit. It has raised millions for local causes, while also steering fundraisers away from environmentally harmful parking lot car washes.
Through it all, Victor never entertained the idea of retiring. He was still commuting in from Bainbridge Island two days a week when he died. “Two or three weeks before he passed, he was asking me about something on a spreadsheet – where did that number come from – and I didn’t know the answer,” Lance said. “I’m like, how does he pick up on this? He was 95, supercharged, super sharp still. I miss being challenged like that.”
Looking toward the future, Lance plans to keep the company in Washington. Despite opportunities to expand to Oregon, Idaho, or California, he wants to stay rooted where his father started.
“This just feels like home here in Fremont,” Lance said. “The fact that we’ve been a Seattle company since 1957 gives us some street cred within the Fremont community. People here value local businesses and independence. We fit squarely within that.”
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