By Lianne Thompson
We’ve lost two notable community icons so far in 2025: Chuck McLaughlin and Bob Tarr. Writing about them daunts anyone who doesn’t use AI, either in part or in whole. Writing from the lived and soulful experience of shared Coastal life and culture demands full immersion into the joy and grief of committed relationships.
Let’s look at a more personal story than the specific details of their lives, Come, gather around and listen for a spell. Do you have a fondness for rascals? I’m talking about people with a twinkle in their eye, a sense of adventure that can cross into mischief that’s a little risky but not hurtful, a different perspective on what can and should be done.
Both Chuck and Bob fit that description. Hanging out with them brought both innocence and timeless wisdom. Why bother breaking the rules if you hadn’t already learned the rules and decided there was a better version of reality to be developed?
They demonstrated how to love your people and your place with passion, patient devotion, and a profound relatedness.
They were artists, intellectuals, musicians, workers, teachers, husbands, and fathers. They were friends of the highest level of loyalty and truth-telling. If you were in their circle of loved ones, you were blessed. If you were wife to them, you were loved beyond measure. Same for family, and still true as friends, and even so as community members.
How did a boy from Bakersfield settle into a 47-year marriage with his fourth and final wife, maintaining vigor in his long and happy life? Ask someone who knew Chuck.
How did it happen that a self-described “yard ape doing monkey business” in Portland become a treasured math teacher at Neahkahnie High School and a greeter at St. Catherine’s Episcopal Church in Manzanita? Ask someone who knew Bob.
And why should you or anyone else care about them, their lives and deaths? Because they’re the bones of community. They expressed their commitments over time in actions that loved and sustained their people and place.
Because day after day, year after year, they perceived the beautiful and the ugly and dealt with all of it. Starting with themselves and rippling outward, they improved their environment. They played the long game of doing good and keeping it real.
The memorial celebrations of life shared their stories and food for both body and soul. Their inspiration lives on, informing our focus on our own humanity.
Like the loss of any loved one, joy at remembering and reliving shared experience tempers the grief at losing them in physical form. I have mementos: Bob’s photos of Arch Cape hang in a room at 820 Exchange St. in Astoria to ground me in Nature’s beauty. Chuck blessed me with a book that describes the physics involved in building the Egyptian pyramids. I don’t claim to understand it yet, but it’s Chuck’s way of reminding me about the complexity of creating one of the Wonders of the World.
Thank you and bless you, dear friends. Your example lives on.
Reprinted with permission of the Astorian.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you Lianne for memorializing these two amazing community members.
Here is a page devoted to Chuck McLaughlin’s many submissions to the Pioneer – https://www.tillamookcountypioneer.net/chuck-mclaughlin/