Richard “Dick” Kent Mastain

Published 3:15 pm Thursday, May 4, 2023

October 12, 1925 – April 4, 2023

On April 4, 2023, our dear dad, Dick Mastain, passed away in his Ashland home with family by his side. He died of congestive heart failure at the age of 97. During the weeks before his death, he said his formal good-byes to family and friends and was grateful to all who reached out to him. A celebration of Dick’s life will be held next spring.

Although his body was failing, he had his extraordinary mental faculties up to the end. In the week before he died, he played 16 hands of bridge, recited two poems in their entirety – “How Do I Love Thee?” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” – and continued to tell stories of his life.

“The world is robed in sadness An’ is draped in sombre black; But joy must reign in Heaven now That Dick Mastain’s comin’ back.”

– Edgar Guest, modified

Dick leaves behind his four children: Juliann Mastain (Roger) of Ashland, Mardi Mastain (Robin) of Ashland; Rick Mastain (Annie) of Midway, UT, and Carey Mastain (Liviu) of Sacramento, CA; his four grandchildren: Courtenay Mastain, Schuyler Mastain (Summer), Hank Mastain, and Jossie Ivanov (Kenny);
his four great grandchildren: Isla Gushiken, Maverick Gushiken, Laurel Mary Leftin and Maia Leftin; and family friend, Roxanne Comacho.

The second of Jack and Margaret Mastain’s three children, Dick grew up in Compton, California. His was a charmed, all-American childhood of full-time outdoor play, before the days when TV and computers kept children inside. He was enterprising from the get-go – using his little red wagon at the age of 4 to collect and sell used magazines among his neighbors (“buy free, sell low”) and then at the age of 7, selling eggs from the same wagon, every Saturday, to 30 neighborhood families. The camaraderie among his neighbors and nearby relatives gave him a boyhood where he was known and loved by people from all walks of life. Until the final days of his life, Dick could recall the first and last names of his neighbors, their addresses, and stories about their lives.

In the neighborhood’s vacant lot, Dick and his six best friends played football and baseball, dug tunnels, built forts, slid into mud baths, high jumped into sawdust, and made up their own games. They created a rope swing that made a 40-foot arc across the street, over the moving cars of astonished drivers. Dick loved his mom’s cooking, riding waves at the beach with his dad, telling and hearing a good joke, growing popcorn, playing croquet, and churning homemade ice cream, which is an activity he shared with hundreds of people throughout his life, including, most recently, his great grandchildren.

In the summer of 1936, the craze was Hi-Li paddle ball – a rubber ball attached by a rubber band to a wooden paddle. Dick practiced Hi-Li all summer long, showing an early example of his drive to excel in whatever he put his mind to. In the fall, during the intermission of a Saturday matinee, Dick was a finalist in Compton’s Hi-Li contest. Before the contest, Dick’s record had been 10 minutes. But on that day, a high point of his childhood, he paddled 1 hour and 15 minutes without a miss and won a brand new, red and white balloon-tire Schwinn bicycle. It was his first bike, and he rode it until he left for the service.

During grammar and high school, Dick excelled at math, track, basketball, baseball, speech-giving, and poetry reciting. He worked delivering newspapers, picking oranges, growing onions, and sacking 100-pound bags of barley at a feed store.

After graduating from Compton High in 1943, Dick attended Navy Officer training at Peru State in Nebraska, where he ran the mile in 4:35. He was transferred to Northwestern University, where he learned to play bridge, a lifelong passion, and earned a B.S. in Navigational Science. It was 1946, and the war was over, but Dick stayed in the Navy to serve as navigator and anti-sub warfare officer on the USS Compton in the Mediterranean. Although he did enjoy attending Italian operas, Dick was seasick for the entire year and decided the navy was not for him.

In 1947, Dick enrolled at Whittier College, and that is where he first met Mary Lou Steele, who became the love of his life. “She was beautiful, with a wonderful smile, and I asked her out on a date,” Dick later told his kids. Mary, however, was dating someone else, so it was several months before she consented to date Dick. Suffice it to say, they finally dated, then fell in love, and were married… for 70 years. Dick often told his children, “Being married to your mom was my greatest pride and joy. I was the luckiest man in the world!”

Dick and Mary earned their teaching credentials and began their careers in education. In 1950, Dick started out as a 4th grade teacher in Brea, CA and, at the age of 29, became a principal and later a curriculum coordinator in the Lowell Joint School District. He was a dedicated educator who challenged his students and taught them well.

In 1960, Dick and his middle school staff developed a year-long seventh grade curriculum based on the Model United Nations program. While it proved to be a valuable learning experience for students, members of the local John Birch Society criticized Dick and his staff so strongly that the program was put under investigation. The Orange County District Attorney’s office commended the program while the Los Angeles County Grand Jury found no wrongdoing, but one jury member made slanderous comments to the press, causing great stress to the staff. Eventually the frenzy died down, but these lines from Kipling’s poem “IF” took on new meaning to Dick during this time:

“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you… If you can wait and not be tired of waiting / Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies..”

Meanwhile, Dick and Mary were raising four healthy, active children (3 girls and a boy) on an acre of land in Brea, where Dick built the best backyard in town – with swings, monkey bars, climbing trees, a huge bike path, a playhouse/theater, a treehouse, a garden, a doughboy pool, a basketball court, a baseball field, a bucking bronco, a merry-go-round, dogs, cats, chickens, and donkeys. The family also went on many road trips, including a month-long trip around the United States and many shorter trips to Mt. Baldy and Quincy, CA. Singing songs on car trips was a family tradition.

In between parenting and working as a public school administrator, Dick earned his master’s degree at Claremont Graduate School and, in 1964, his doctorate in education from the University of Southern California. He and Mary then decided it was time for a new adventure and began looking for an opportunity.

They found one in 1965, when Dick accepted a job as a consultant with the Peace Corps in Enugu, Nigeria. He explained his decision to the local newspaper: “I feel it will broaden my teaching experience while offering our children the experience of living and growing up in a different culture.” The 22-month adventure in Enugu was a positive, culturally eye-opening experience for all six family members. Dick supported the Peace Corps volunteers with teaching advice, workshops, and by visiting them in remote locations, often accompanied by Mary and their four children.

When Eastern Nigeria seceded to become Biafra in May, 1967, evacuation of foreigners began. Mary and daughters Carey, Juli, and Mardi flew to Switzerland, where son Rick was in boarding school. Dick drove thousands of miles around the Eastern Region of Nigeria to inform the Peace Corps volunteers that war was imminent. He left the region with the last group of volunteers and arrived in Zurich one day after the war broke out. Despite evacuation and political turmoil, the Mastain family loved Enugu and the Nigerian way of life.

Back in the United States, Dick continued his work as an educator: training Peace Corps volunteers at the Education Development Center in Massachusetts and then heading an effort by Yale to improve the public schools in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1973, after six years on the east coast, Mary and Dick decided to return to their roots in California, this time in Sacramento, where Dick worked as a consultant and then director of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. He loved working for the commission, which was responsible for the evaluation and approval of the 70-plus teacher preparation programs in California as well as the certification and discipline of California’s educators. During that time, he also edited the annual manual for the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Credentialing that described the teaching requirements for certification in each of the 50 states. He retired in 1989.

In 1993, Dick and Mary moved to Ashland, OR, where they lived happily for the rest of their lives. Retirement from their careers in education found Mary doing lots of volunteer work and Dick playing tennis, bridge and croquet. They loved socializing with their friends and family and became involved with the First United Methodist Church of Ashland. Dick became a scholar of family history and world history and joined two men’s groups: the 4th Wednesday Book Club and Gallimaufry. He was always busy with different projects, including curing olives, pickling homegrown cucumbers, gardening, making root beer, and writing. He wrote a book, The Old Lady of Vine Street, about the fight to keep the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper independent, and a TV script called “The Dewey Principle,” which dramatized the heroic efforts of a public school community to meet the needs of their students in compassionate and creative ways. Dick and Mary traveled to six continents, participated in dozens of Elder Hostel trips, visited children in New York, China, New Zealand, and Nicaragua, and attended 15 Super Bowls. In their retirement years they found just the right balance of adventure and being at home.

When Dick’s beloved Mary died suddenly in 2020, he was devastated. It is a testament to his tenacity and love for his family that he managed to keep going, to finish his many projects, to write his memoirs, and to deal with health issues that included being completely deaf and nearly blind. At the age of 89, when most doctors told him he was too old, Dick insisted on receiving a cochlear implant, which was successful and allowed him to remain part of the hearing world.

“The leader of our clan was tired His body had grown old
But his love flows in our hearts His poetry in our souls.”

To his last days, Dick was deeply curious about the world, loved having a project, and loved memorizing and reciting poetry. Some of his favorites were “Casey at the Bat,” Casey’s Revenge,” “Gunga Din,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” He could recall unusual bridge hands decades after they’d been played, and he never forgot his friends nor the details of their lives. He was grateful for his family and friends and, especially, for Mary. Dick’s last words to us were these: “I’ve had a wonderful life.”