Ray Stewart Lobb

1920s

Born 10 October 1921 in Bellingham, Washington, and raised in Ferndale. As a newborn he survived a life-threatening illness thanks to a spoonful of condensed milk.

1930s

Grew up in Ferndale: piano recitals, Boy Scouts, fullback on the football team, and student body president. Graduated sixth of fifty-two from Ferndale High School in 1940.

1940s

Studied at Washington State College and the University of Washington. Commissioned a Navy ensign in 1944 and served on a landing craft at Peleliu and in China. Entered medical school at the University of Louisville in 1947 and married Patricia Jane Loomis.

1950s–1970s

Graduated MD in 1950, trained in Bremerton and Portland, and practiced internal medicine in Portland and then Gresham, Oregon.

1980s–1990s

Ran a rural clinic in Boardman, Oregon, worked as a traveling locum tenens physician, and practiced in the Portland area until the mid-1990s.

2010s

Died 17 June 2011 in Portland, Oregon.

A Ferndale Boyhood

Ray Stewart Lobb was born at three in the morning on October 10, 1921, in Bellingham, Washington, the son of Harry Lobb and Gladys Kipp. His parents had been expecting a girl, to be named after Harry's sister Raye, and switched to "Ray" when a boy arrived instead. The middle name Stewart was picked more or less at random, and Gladys, a royalist, liked its echo of the House of Stuart. The doctor wrote October 9 on the birth certificate by mistake, so for the rest of his life Ray's government papers carried the wrong birthday. As a newborn he had a narrowing of the gut, recorded as hypertrophic duodenal stenosis, and could keep nothing down, and he was not expected to live. That Christmas, at his Kipp grandparents' house in Chilliwack, his aunt Dord had the idea of trying a spoonful of Eagle Brand condensed milk. He kept it down and survived.

He grew up in Ferndale, first in a house on the banks of the Nooksack River that his mother called the VanOstrin house (as a toddler he once wandered off and was found standing on the riverbank), and from about 1925 in the family home at Sterling and Mount Baker Avenues. He stuttered as he learned to talk, walked to school alone and barefoot except in winter, and in first grade got sprayed in the face with nitric acid from a bottle he found in a ditch. With his brother Allan he built a tree house in the woods behind the house, where they once trapped their tagalong sister Eleanor for a whole day. He tried to fly off the garage roof using a door as a wing, and later, chopping wood in the morning because he had skipped the chore the night before, nearly took off the tip of his left thumb; it took nine months to heal. He and his friend Bob Moles built a raft from old sawmill timbers, floated it down the Nooksack past Marietta, through the delta islands, and right out to sea, and then had a hard time wading, swimming, and paddling on logs to get back to shore.

Growing Up Between Two Countries

Canada was never far away. On visits to Rosedale, Ray and Allan played in their grandfather Thomas Lobb's blacksmith shop, helping shoe horses and make wagon-wheel rims, and at Christmas the family drove the long snowy road around Sumas Lake, before it was drained, in their cloth-topped Buick to the Kipp grandparents' house. Summers brought stays at Cultus Lake with his aunts and uncles, where he explored the roadless end of the lake in a borrowed rowboat. In 1936 he went up the Cariboo Trail as far as Barkerville and Prince George with his mother, his sister Eleanor, and his grandfather Ed Kipp. Once he rode his bicycle all the way from Ferndale to Chilliwack.

School was a mixed success. His mother started him a year early. He loved hearing the teacher read aloud after lunch, but in fifth grade the teacher he and his sister Katie remembered as a "crabby battle ax" pegged him as the ringleader of the troublemakers, and he was held back a year. He studied piano seriously from about age nine, playing in recitals in Ferndale and Bellingham, and later played clarinet in the high school band. He earned his Tenderfoot and First Class badges in the Boy Scouts and teamed with Bob Moles in Morse code at the county rally. At Ferndale High School he was a fullback on the football team, whom the local paper called possibly "the fastest man on the squad at any distance up to 300 yards," as well as student body president in 1939 and a member of the Torch Honor Society. He graduated in June 1940, sixth in a class of fifty-two.

Money was tight and fun was homemade. The family owned no deck of cards, only a Monopoly set, and one New Year's Eve Ray and Katie played it until two in the morning. His first car was his brother's broken-down Model T, painted in the school colors of bright yellow with a blue checkered back panel, which Allan sold him for five dollars. Ray put a new head on it and drove it all over Puget Sound and out onto the sand dunes. Around 1938, on a pre-dawn road trip to Seattle that unknowingly slipped past a roadblock the boys' parents had set up, he took his first airplane ride, in a two-seat open-cockpit plane from Everett to Tacoma and back. One of his first jobs was as janitor of the Ferndale Congregational Church, and he spent summers as a farmhand and at the Carnation milk plant in Mount Vernon.

College and the Navy

Ray left Ferndale in September 1940 for Washington State College in Pullman, starting out in civil engineering. He made the honor roll, was elected vice-president of his dormitory, and in 1942 fought his way into the finals of the intramural boxing tournament at 165 pounds. In July 1942 he enlisted in the Navy's V-7 officer program, with letters of recommendation from Ferndale's school superintendents and minister praising his character and his family. He moved to the University of Washington that fall, where he studied political science and then law, and in October 1943 he finished a Bachelor of Arts with just enough credits to graduate. He then went on to pre-midshipman training in Norfolk, Virginia, where recruits were treated "like privates in the army," and to the Navy's "ninety-day wonder" Midshipmen's School at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he was commissioned an ensign on May 10, 1944.

War in the Pacific

In Hawaii Ray was assigned to LCI-733, a 150-foot landing craft that looked nothing like the stately Navy of the recruiting pictures. The war-hardened crew laughed when the new ensign saluted the flag. He served as gunnery, navigation, and commissary officer all at once, crossed the Equator in the traditional "Neptunus Rex" initiation, ran mail around the Solomon Islands, and saw the acres of graves left on Tulagi. That September his ship took part in the invasion of Angaur during the Battle of Peleliu, which he later described: "At the crack of dawn all hell broke loose as our battleships, planes, and cruisers started pounding the beaches... The battle went on for three days before the island was secured. Hundreds of marines were killed when they hit the beaches. Some of their bodies floated out to us."

For the next year LCI-733 worked salvage, patrol, and mail runs around Palau. It set an enemy supply barge ablaze, sank floating mines with its 20-millimeter guns, and later kept night-long searchlight watches for downed airmen. His commanding officer called him "cool-headed and courageous" in the face of the enemy and consistently rated him among the top officers of his grade. He sent his sister Katie a bracelet made from the aluminum of a downed Japanese plane. After Japan's surrender he went on to occupation duty in China, now aboard LCI-735, and spent about six weeks moored across the river from Shanghai. There he fell for Valia, a Russian dancer at the Club Cicero, whom he would walk home at night. When she told him she was suffering from an amoebic infection, he had his uncle Duke, a Seattle physician, send her medicine; he never heard from her again. Stationed in the Marianas that winter, he got word that the girl he loved back home was marrying a returning marine, and he threw all her letters into the bay. He also survived one embarrassing night when he and another officer shared a bottle of wine, the wind snapped the anchor line, and the ship ran aground; there was talk of a court-martial, but it never came to anything. Promoted to lieutenant junior grade, he came home in the spring of 1946.

Medical School and Marriage

Back at his parents' house in Ferndale after his discharge, Ray met Patricia Jane Loomis in the library of Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham in May 1946. He was just off work in a suit and tie, she wanted to play tennis, and she beat him before they went for sundaes. That summer and fall he took pre-medical courses at the University of Washington and drove up to Bellingham on weekends to see her. He had long thought about medicine, since his mother had been a nurse and his older brother Allan was a doctor, and with the GI Bill he applied to schools across the country. After Christmas 1946 in Ferndale he left for the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where classes began on January 3, 1947, and where he lived at first in a single room with no running water in the Phi Beta Pi fraternity house. He and Patricia married, spent the summer of 1948 at his parents' home in Ferndale, and by the time he graduated in June 1950, a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society, they had a daughter. Harry and Gladys came to Kentucky for the ceremony and rode home with them.

A Career in Medicine

Ray interned at the Naval Hospital in Bremerton, where he treated frostbitten soldiers sent home from Korea, then did an internal-medicine residency at the Veterans Hospital in Portland and received his Oregon license in 1952. From 1954 he ran a private internal-medicine practice in Portland, moving it to the Lloyd Center in 1964 and to Gresham in 1969. He also served as educational director of medical services at Emanuel Hospital, was a charter member of the Oregon Society of Internal Medicine, and was medical director of the Reynolds Metals plant in Troutdale. In 1976 he fought an IRS demand for "all books and records" of his practice, arguing that it threatened patient confidentiality, and the appeals court sided with him.

In December 1980 he took over a rural clinic in Boardman, in eastern Oregon, where he also wrote a health article for the local paper urging readers to walk half an hour a day. From 1984 to 1986 he worked as a traveling locum tenens physician, filling in at clinics and hospitals in Kentucky, Kansas, West Virginia, Delaware, Wisconsin, and Ohio. He then returned to primary care around Portland until 1994 and finished his career with short-term posts that took him to Georgia, where his last job was caring for inmates at three prisons.

Family and Later Years

Ray and Patricia divorced in the early 1960s; he then married Ruth, and later Pearl. He kept up with his children and grandchildren, including a daughter who settled in Sweden. He and his wives made repeated trips to see her family in Hultsfred and Oskarshamn, where his son-in-law opened a can of fermented Baltic herring underwater in the basement before serving it. His grandchildren remembered a grandfather who pretended to nap while they combed his hair into outrageous styles, was lifting weights in the garage at seventy, outpaced them climbing over rocks on the trail to Oneonta Falls in the Columbia Gorge, was the first person they knew with a home computer, and cooked a gray lunch of leftovers he called "slum gully." In 2008 he went up to Chilliwack to visit his aunt Minnie, and in January 2010 he went back to Canada for her hundredth birthday.

In his last years his health declined. He had pacemakers implanted in 1993 and 2005, and his political and religious views grew increasingly extreme, including antisemitic conspiracy theories that appear in his correspondence and reading. Family members also saw signs of dementia in his final months.

Death

On June 17, 2011, Ray collapsed while talking with friends at a Bible study lunch in Beaverton, Oregon. An ambulance reached him within minutes and took him to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, where he was pronounced dead at 12:29 in the afternoon of sudden cardiac arrest, the result of coronary artery disease and heart failure. His funeral at Finley Sunset Hills Chapel in Portland ended, at his request, with the hymn "In the Garden." His ashes were spread on James Meacher's property along the Bull Run River, where it passes under a bridge, and at Dodge Park.