Ray Stewart Lobb

Born October 10, 1921 in Bellingham, Whatcom County, Washington. He married January 31, 1982, in Hood River, Oregon and worked as us navy. He died June 17, 2011 in Portland, Oregon.

• One of his first jobs was as janitor for the Congregational Church in Ferndale, Washington.
• A physician — Cathy assisted in his office for years.

A Ferndale Boyhood

Ray Stewart Lobb was born on October 10, 1921, in Bellingham, Washington — his parents had been expecting a girl and planning to name her after his father's sister Raye, and switched to “Ray” when he arrived instead. As an infant he was gravely ill with pyloric stenosis and was expected to die, until his aunt Dord had the idea of feeding him condensed milk, which he was able to keep down. He grew up in Ferndale, the son of Harry Lobb and Gladys Kipp, playing in his grandfather Thomas Lobb's blacksmith shop, building a raft with a friend that carried them out to sea on the Nooksack River, and once accidentally chopping off the tip of his own thumb with a woodcutting axe. He was a serious piano student through his school years, performing in recitals from age nine, and graduated from Ferndale High School in 1940 ranked sixth of fifty-two students.

War in the Pacific

Ray enlisted in the Navy's V-7 officer program in 1942 while at Washington State College, trained at Northwestern University's Midshipmen's School in Chicago, and was commissioned an ensign in May 1944. Assigned to the landing craft LCI-733 in Hawaii, he served as gunnery, navigation, and commissary officer during the ship's run through the Solomon Islands and, that September, the invasion of Angaur in the Battle of Peleliu — a landing he later described vividly: “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.” LCI-733 spent the following year on salvage, patrol, and mail-running duty around Palau, sinking floating mines and firing on an enemy supply barge, before sailing on to occupation duty in China after Japan's surrender — six weeks based across the river from Shanghai, where Ray became close to a Russian dancer named Valia he'd met at a nightclub, and later arranged for his uncle, a Seattle physician, to send her medicine for a parasitic infection. His commanding officers' fitness reports called him “cool-headed and courageous” under combat conditions and rated him consistently in the top ranks of officers his grade. He was released from active duty in 1946.

Medical School and Marriage

Back at Washington State College and then Western Washington College of Education, Ray met Patricia Jane Loomis in the college library in May 1946; their first date was tennis and ice cream sundaes, and Patricia won at tennis. He entered medical school at the University of Louisville in Kentucky in December 1946 — deciding on medicine in part because his mother had been a nurse and his older brother Allan a doctor — married Patricia, and interned at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bremerton, Washington, followed by an internal-medicine residency at the Veterans Hospital in Portland.

A Career in Medicine

Ray received his Oregon medical license in 1952 and ran a private internal medicine practice in Portland from 1954, moving his office to the Lloyd Center a decade later, before relocating to Gresham in 1969. In 1976 he successfully fought an IRS demand for “all books and records” related to his practice, arguing the request threatened patient confidentiality; an appeals court agreed with him. From 1980 he ran a rural clinic in Boardman, Oregon, and from the mid-1980s worked as a locum tenens physician, taking short-term assignments at clinics and hospitals across Kentucky, Kansas, West Virginia, Delaware, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Georgia — including a period treating prison populations — before settling back into primary care practice around Portland through the mid-1990s.

Family and Later Years

Ray and Patricia's marriage ended in divorce in the early 1960s; he later married Ruth and then Pearl. He remained close to his children and grandchildren, including a granddaughter, Jean, who settled in Sweden — Ray and his later wives made repeated trips to visit her family in Hultsfred and Oskarshamn, and he was remembered by his Swedish grandchildren for his energy and love of the outdoors well into his seventies. In his final years his health declined — he had pacemakers implanted in 1993 and again in 2005 — and his political and religious views grew increasingly extreme, including espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories in his correspondence and reading; family members also noted signs of cognitive decline in his last months.

Death

On June 17, 2011, Ray collapsed during a Bible study lunch in Beaverton, Oregon, and died before reaching St. Vincent Medical Center. He was buried following a service at Finley Sunset Hills Chapel in Portland.