Richard Glenn Strawn
1932 ~ 2025
This page is in honor of my father, Richard Glenn "Dick" Strawn, age 93, of Carbondale, Illinois, passed on November 5, 2025.
He was born on October 8, 1932 in Boise, Idaho, the second of three sons of Milton Rozelle and Irma Bell Strawn. Dick's early years in Idaho with his younger brother, Dan, and his older brother, Mel, are fondly described below by Dan.
Dick began studying music on the violin at the age of nine, and was such a marvel that Milton and Irma later moved the family to southern California so Dick could study violin with the renown Josef Gingold.
As a young man, Dick enlisted in the United States Air Force, and returned home from Japan married to a pianist, "Cecelia" Akiko Maniwa. They literally made beautiful music together, and had three children -- Peter, Colleen and Mark. Meanwhile, Dick excelled as a concert violinist, college professor and symphony conductor. He loved fly-fishing and horses – Arabians in particular. Dick and Cecelia divorced in 1973.
On his birthday in 1974, Dick married Charlotte "Anne" Owen and enlarged his family with two step-daughters, Cathy and Jennifer. Anne shared Dick's love of horses and they spent years in Colorado raising them like house pets, only outdoors. When asked how the horses were doing, Dick used to say for a chuckle, "They're outstanding in their field." After retiring, Dick and Anne tried living in Arkansas, then moved back to Carbondale, Illinois. Instead of horses, they enjoyed smaller pets. In Dick's last years he usually had a faithful dog warming his lap.
Dick with his wife of 52 years, Charlotte "Anne" Strawn, who passed on October 21, 2025.
~ Early and Professional Life ~
(slide show)
Pondering
Listening by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Orchestrating life again
Who knew
Why the gift came to you
Flowing music through you
Swimming deep then surfacing
Holding the nuance
Like a tree who holds its leaves
Then lets the beauty go
Feeling the tension
Like a violin its strings
To sing beyond the bow
Waiting
Anesthetized but staying
A final movement playing
Themes repeating endlessly
Dreaming
Sitting by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Now orchestrating your release
Bearing the tension
Like a violin its strings
To let the beauty go
Holding the memories
Like a heart holds every tear
To love beyond the bow
Love beyond the bow
Pondering
Listening by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Orchestrating life again
copyright © 2026, a song for my beloved Dad
Colleen Akiko, [email protected]
Listening by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Orchestrating life again
Who knew
Why the gift came to you
Flowing music through you
Swimming deep then surfacing
Holding the nuance
Like a tree who holds its leaves
Then lets the beauty go
Feeling the tension
Like a violin its strings
To sing beyond the bow
Waiting
Anesthetized but staying
A final movement playing
Themes repeating endlessly
Dreaming
Sitting by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Now orchestrating your release
Bearing the tension
Like a violin its strings
To let the beauty go
Holding the memories
Like a heart holds every tear
To love beyond the bow
Love beyond the bow
Pondering
Listening by a trout stream
Hearing mountains breathing
Orchestrating life again
copyright © 2026, a song for my beloved Dad
Colleen Akiko, [email protected]
Memories of My Brother
by Dan Strawn
(as shared in the Celebration of Richard Strawn's Life Gathering)
It is a good thing that we chose this day to come together and honor my brother Dick. As it is with me, each of you are here to commune with those who knew, respected, and loved him.
In the few months since Dick left us, I have spent hours wondering what I could say that you don't already know about my brother.
Well, I am the only one left who knew him in his youth, so I am going to do my best to touch on the highlights of growing up with him.
When I think of Dick, this is the picture that most often fills my mind:
In the few months since Dick left us, I have spent hours wondering what I could say that you don't already know about my brother.
Well, I am the only one left who knew him in his youth, so I am going to do my best to touch on the highlights of growing up with him.
When I think of Dick, this is the picture that most often fills my mind:
He sits beside a tempting trout stream somewhere in the West--
The Sawtooths,
Stanley Basin,
Clear Creek on the ranch where Dad
was born,
or some other likely stream in Idaho,
or
other pristine, non-Idaho sites out West--
The High Sierras in California
The Northern reaches of Utah's Wasatch Range
a forty minute drive from Utah State University,
Dick's first job after
earning his master’s degree from
The University of Indiana
or
Wyoming's Marble Wilderness
a couple of hours from another musical
stint at the University of Wyoming
and, finally
Colorado's Rockies
where he landed and stayed at Fort Lewis College in Durango
My memories of growing up with Dick:
The Sawtooths,
Stanley Basin,
Clear Creek on the ranch where Dad
was born,
or some other likely stream in Idaho,
or
other pristine, non-Idaho sites out West--
The High Sierras in California
The Northern reaches of Utah's Wasatch Range
a forty minute drive from Utah State University,
Dick's first job after
earning his master’s degree from
The University of Indiana
or
Wyoming's Marble Wilderness
a couple of hours from another musical
stint at the University of Wyoming
and, finally
Colorado's Rockies
where he landed and stayed at Fort Lewis College in Durango
My memories of growing up with Dick:
I was born in August of 1938.
Forty-eight days later, Dick celebrated his sixth birthday.
I'm sure he remembered me in my infancy, but I didn't remember anything about him, anyone or anything else until one day in 1942 or 43.
Spring was in the air the day my memory woke up. I don't know where Dick was that morning, but Dad was standing by a tree, holding a wedge and a heavy hammer, and giving orders to Mel to stop traffic because the tree was about to come down.
Neither then, nor now do I recall the tree coming down. What I remember is walking over to the stump and sitting on it while I watched Mel and Dad trim branches off the trunk.
What I didn't know was the stump was already occupied by a bee! It was the bee's sting that woke up my memory.
From that day forward, Mel, Dick, Mom, Dad, and the whole world filled my mind.
That little house on Irene Street was not very big by today's standards. Mom and Dad slept upstairs, and we three boys shared the bedroom in the basement. What I remember was how Dick loved to pull practical jokes on me in our basement bedroom. Other than those unsavory shenanigans, I have only one other memory about him and me in that short time we lived in the house Dad built in downtown Boise.
I know what you have to be thinking:
"He's going to tell me something about Dick and playing the violin." To the contrary, my earliest memory has nothing to do with him playing the violin and everything to do with Dick bird-dogging for Mel when they went pheasant hunting down by the Boise River.
I don't remember if Mel shot any pheasants, but, like remembering the bee that stung me when I sat on the stump, my memory is clear about Dick coming down with poison ivy.
I'm guessing it was in the afternoon of the next day that I found him sitting on the back porch steps and crying. I felt his misery, sat next to him and matched him tear for tear.
His crying made me sad, so my four or five-year old self cried with him. I learned later about poison Ivy and had no idea why my brother was crying.
For me, that first moment of shared misery was when Dick and I took up our earthly roles as brothers. Regardless of what went on in the world at large, it was our personal mishaps or triumphs that built memories—good and not so good, and yes, sometimes tears, be they the progeny of either distress or delight.
I don't recall anything about Dick between the poison Ivy event and when we moved from Boise to Pocatello because of Dad's work. I know I wasn't in school. There were no kindergartens in 1940's Idaho, so I guess I was five going on six.
Dad's job took us to Pocatello from sometime in the fall, through winter, and back to Boise in the spring. I remember four events in Pocatello as if they happened yesterday:
(1) Grandma Higgins moved to Pocatello with us; (2) Dad was attacked by a cocker spaniel who ripped his suit pant’s back pocket off when Dad was hopping over the backyard fence of a house for rent. When Dad landed on our side of the fence, the spaniel was latched onto his rear pocket. Grandma was sitting in the back of the car with me. She laughed so hard she wet her pants; (3) Mel went skiing with his Boy Scout troop, and one of the boy scouts died in a skiing accident, and (4) Dick had an alcoholic Bannock Indian as a violin teacher until we moved back to Boise.
That was my first memory of Dick with his violin.
In the early spring of 1944, I was five, Dick was eleven, and Mel was fourteen when we moved to a four or five acre farm. It was just big enough for a garden, chickens, a dog, a cat who hung around in the barn, and three or four milk cows, and a momma pig and her babies.
Dick loved living on a farm, and so did I. Despite the duties we all shared, he and I spent lots of time playing in the outbuildings or the pastures.
Despite our gap in years, we were boys who loved the outdoors. In the winter it was making snowmen and snowball fights as well as doing our chores. In the spring, summer, and fall, it was, doing our chores and all kinds of shenanigans Dick would dream up or just plain silly adventures that boys invent.
You might wonder where Mel was. He was there, but he viewed milking cows and feeding chicken as dull distractions from where his budding artist's mind wanted to be. For him, life on the farm was barely bearable.
A pickup pulling a stock trailer pulled into the driveway one weekend late in our first spring on the farm. A man in a straw hat and coveralls got out, and Dad helped him back a grey mare out of the trailer.
The horse was for Dick. He rode that horse maybe half a dozen times. He got bucked off every time he tried to ride over the wooden bridge that spanned a creek on the dirt road we lived on.
Dad decided that mare was more than Dick could handle and sold it before summer had barely started.
Nevertheless, his brief experience with a horse when we were boys, set the stage for the last of four life-long obsessions Dick acquired before we left Idaho for California in the spring of 1946.
The first, was no doubt music—an in-utero DNA gift from our Mom; the second was fly fishing, something he learned with Mel and Dad on our Uncle Glen's ranch in Long Valley, Idaho; the third was pulling well designed practical jokes on the rest of the family; and the fourth was his brief encounter with his own horse in the spring of 1945.
Of course, he had other interests. As adults, he loved squaring up with Mel in the horseshoe pit. In our youth, croquet in our California backyard was a game we all played, including Mom. In the few times we had bad weather and Dick wasn't preoccupied by his music, he'd play cribbage with me or Dad or read a good book.
Most of all, you should know having Dick around with his dry sense of humor and his penchant for dreaming up a new spoof to catch us unawares, made life in the late forties and fifties a happy one.
A lot happened with our lives in those eventful days between coming to California in 1946 and this day in 2026, more than I can cover on this special day; however, I want to tell you about a few youthful events that demonstrate how early Dick acquired the character traits that made him successful in his adult life
For starters, you need to know that Mel and I agreed that Dick had the advantage over us when it came to his natural gifts of the mind. Here's a couple of things that prove our consensus:
Dick could write his full name--Richard Strawn— upside down and backwards--nwartS drahciR—and as fast as Mel or I could write ours forward and right side up. When he turned it upright and held it the bathroom mirror, his penmanship matched his normally written signature.
In the early fifties, I was straddling childhood and adolescence when Dick was a sophomore in high school.
One day, I came into the house after a romp in the river-bottom to find Dick in a heated discussion about racial segregation with mom, a subject that was really heating up nationally.
"Mom!" I heard him say when I entered the room, "it's not right when we condemn southern states about segregated schools when we have de facto segregation right here in Southern California."
Mom was stymied. Having grown up with de facto separation, she couldn't imagine how she and her son were going to do anything about it, and she said as much to Dick.
Dick had no qualms about how to do doing something about it. I sat down on the couch and listened to him articulate our rights for free speech and peaceful demonstrations.
Mom suggested they talk about it later, since she had to prepare supper.
Dick said nothing for long seconds then told mom she shouldn't be surprised if one day a black girl is sitting next to one of her sons at our dinner table. Mom said nothing. She stood up and walked into the kitchen.
Mom told me several years later that she asked Dick a few days after that discussion if he really thought one of her sons might marry a black girl. Mom said he replied he could only speak for himself, but if he loved someone, the color of their skin made no difference. Not that it matters, but in our young lives Mel and I shared with mom the same conviction as Dick did about evaluating people based on outward appearances.
Dick and Mel had an advantage over me when it came to knowing early on what they wanted to do with their lives. Here's a piece of Dick's early past when our dad made that point perfectly clear.
The circumstances were similar to when I came upon Mom and Dick's battle over segregation. This time, I came into the living room to find two coaches from Dick's high school.
Mom, Dad, and the coaches were sitting around the dining room table and talking, so I took a seat on the living room couch so I could eavesdrop.
I soon discovered the coaches were there to see if our parents would encourage Dick to come out for the track team. I knew that wasn't going to happen. Oh, Dick was plenty fast. Even at my young age, I knew he was track-team fast.
That day with coaches sitting around our dining room table, Dad saved Dick the trouble of having to once more decline the coaches opportunities. His words were short and to the point.
"What," Dad asked, "is so important about Dick joining your track team?"
The coaches took turns describing how in gym class Dick is beating the current team sprinters by a couple of yards in the 100 yard dash and goes nose to nose with their best 220 sprinter. They said Dick has declined to participate several times.
"Well, that's his choice to make, and were not going to override it,"Dad said. "Here's why: After school on weekdays, he practices two hours on his violin, eats dinner, finishes homework and goes to bed. On weekends, he buses sixty miles to Beverly Hills, practices with the Southern California Youth Symphony for three hours or more, takes an hour violin lesson from the conductor, then takes the bus back to Riverside. Most Sundays and some Saturday evenings he works at the Golden State Theater. Last quarter his report card was all A's and B's. Do either of you see any slack in that schedule?"
Of course they didn't.
I hope you can see from the aforementioned examples that Dick's successful life was no accident. He went about making it happen at a very young age.
I want to finish talking about conversing with Dick the last year and a half of his life
Almost every day, sometimes twice a day, I talked with Dick on the phone,. These calls were usually initiated by him. I called him on the rare occasions he didn't call me for two days.
Ours for the most part were good conversations, but they always began with his questions about me. He wanted to know if I was okay. I would reply that I was okay and why did he ask? He would say that he worries about me since I am the only one left who knows how it was when we grew up.
Satisfied that I was well, we would then converse. I learned early in this phase of his late life he didn't have a lot to say because of his failing memory. So, without much luck, I searched for some new early life adventure from our youth that might wake up his recollections.
Did he remember having poison oak and me crying with him on the back steps? "No," was his daily answer.
Did he remember his music teacher in Pocatello? "A little bit," he would say, "but he didn't know much about music that I didn't know before I met him."
Did he remember living on the farm before we moved to California? Did he remember Dad buying
a horse for him? Did he remember the two of us taking the streetcar into Beverly Hills from Monterey Park every Saturday for him to practice with the Southern California Youth Symphony? Did he remember when I screwed up the rehearsal the Saturday when I sat in the audience behind the conductor and imitated his motions? Did he remember showing me how to catch grasshoppers and use them to tempt trout out of Uncle Glen's creek? Did he remember when he and I made tapioca pudding and hoped in vain Mom, Dad, and Mel wouldn't eat theirs because of the purple color we dyed it? Did he remember Cecilia had to go sit in the car when we went in the hills to sight my deer rifle in because Peter was kicking her from inside her tummy every time we fired the rifle? Did he remember … and the list goes on with his answers decidedly “no" for the first year or so of everyday conversations he launched from his home in Illinois to mine in Washington.
That changed a few months before he died. On that day, I asked him if he remembered going to the horse races at Bay Meadows when we stayed at our Uncle Nick's house in San Francisco.
The line went dead for a few seconds. I was just about ready to say something when Dick spoke up. "Yes, I'd forgotten all about it until you asked me, I remember going with Dad, and Nick, and our cousin Chunk.
Nick's oldest son's name was Charles, but we called him Chunk instead of Chuck. I have no idea why. That Dick remembered even that! overwhelmed me.
"I remember it too," I said, "even though I didn't go! That night, you and I had to share the same bed in Uncle Nick's spare bedroom. You kept me up all night with your vocal urgings for your favorite horses to win. Do you remember that? I was not quite eight and you were not quite fourteen."
No, he didn't remember. Nevertheless, I was heartened that he remembered going to the races after all those "no's" of past months, so I banked on the horses and persevered.
"Do, you remember when we first moved to California and every other Sunday or so, at your urgings, we all drove to the Cal Poly facility on Kellog Hill to watch the Arabian Horse show?"
The line went dead again. I waited.
"I didn't remember it before," he said, "but I remember it now that you've asked me"
In the months that followed, I went back in time whenever we talked on the phone. His responses were hit and miss, with misses more often than hits until the day I asked him if he had ever played Beethoven’s violin concerto.
Like remembering the horse races had opened up his memories, my Beethoven question triggered a response from Dick that caught me by surprise.
What prompted my inquiry about Beethoven’s violin concerto was listening to it on the classical music radio station. On hearing that work I recalled or thought I recalled hearing Dick play that piece years ago. So, I put the question to him. Dick mulled over my question before he answered. Even though this happened several months ago, I remember word for word his delayed answer.
"Beethoven's concerto for violin? Yes, I've played it several times." He paused for a few seconds and continued before I could respond. "Do you remember the 78's I used to have?"
Dick was on a roll. How long, I wondered, had it been since he had taken over a conversation? My reply came quickly for fear he'd lose track of what he asked.
"Yes, I remember. They were cowboy records, Guitars and banjos maybe, or accordions. Anyway, the singer had a good voice."
Dick agreed that the singer had a good voice and said he was also a talented Guitarist. He went on to tell me his name was Red River Dave or something like that.
Before I could respond. He proceeded to tell me the first 331/3 album he bought was Beethoven's violin concerto, and he bought it with the money he made at the Golden State Theatre in Riverside when he was in high school. As an afterthought, he commented that he made a whole seventy-five cents an hour taking tickets and selling popcorn.
I thought he was done talking, but he wasn't.
Next, he gave me a lesson about Beethoven's Violin Concerto, how it was the only violin concerto Beethoven ever wrote.
"You," he said, "may remember me playing in the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl with the Southern California Youth Symphony. The soloist that day played Beethoven’s violin concerto. We in the orchestra backed him up. That is the only time I can think of that you might have heard me play that concerto."
For the record, I do remember being there to watch Dick play in the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.. My conclusion: Dick's probability about me hearing him play the concerto as a member of the orchestra is no doubt what I remember, although over the years that particular piece is one of my favorites.
Those two times when I asked Dick to recall two of his early life obsessions—music and horses—made a tremendous difference in our quest for sharing the goodtime memories of growing up in those last months of being brothers. They gave us the opportunity to optimize the last eight-plus decades of caring for one another.
Yes, Mel and now Dick are gone. In my lifetime of witnessing their individual stories, nothing impresses me more than how they both set early-in-life goals and fulfilled them with merit to the very ends of their respective lives.
What great examples they both set! What an honor to have memories of their lives as guideposts for living my own life's story.
When my life on this planet ends, my fondest hope is that those I leave behind remember me as one who walked in the footsteps of his brothers Mel and Dick, and like them, made the world a little better place to live in than when I arrived.
Thank you for being here on this hallowed day and thank you for listening.
--Dan Strawn
Forty-eight days later, Dick celebrated his sixth birthday.
I'm sure he remembered me in my infancy, but I didn't remember anything about him, anyone or anything else until one day in 1942 or 43.
Spring was in the air the day my memory woke up. I don't know where Dick was that morning, but Dad was standing by a tree, holding a wedge and a heavy hammer, and giving orders to Mel to stop traffic because the tree was about to come down.
Neither then, nor now do I recall the tree coming down. What I remember is walking over to the stump and sitting on it while I watched Mel and Dad trim branches off the trunk.
What I didn't know was the stump was already occupied by a bee! It was the bee's sting that woke up my memory.
From that day forward, Mel, Dick, Mom, Dad, and the whole world filled my mind.
That little house on Irene Street was not very big by today's standards. Mom and Dad slept upstairs, and we three boys shared the bedroom in the basement. What I remember was how Dick loved to pull practical jokes on me in our basement bedroom. Other than those unsavory shenanigans, I have only one other memory about him and me in that short time we lived in the house Dad built in downtown Boise.
I know what you have to be thinking:
"He's going to tell me something about Dick and playing the violin." To the contrary, my earliest memory has nothing to do with him playing the violin and everything to do with Dick bird-dogging for Mel when they went pheasant hunting down by the Boise River.
I don't remember if Mel shot any pheasants, but, like remembering the bee that stung me when I sat on the stump, my memory is clear about Dick coming down with poison ivy.
I'm guessing it was in the afternoon of the next day that I found him sitting on the back porch steps and crying. I felt his misery, sat next to him and matched him tear for tear.
His crying made me sad, so my four or five-year old self cried with him. I learned later about poison Ivy and had no idea why my brother was crying.
For me, that first moment of shared misery was when Dick and I took up our earthly roles as brothers. Regardless of what went on in the world at large, it was our personal mishaps or triumphs that built memories—good and not so good, and yes, sometimes tears, be they the progeny of either distress or delight.
I don't recall anything about Dick between the poison Ivy event and when we moved from Boise to Pocatello because of Dad's work. I know I wasn't in school. There were no kindergartens in 1940's Idaho, so I guess I was five going on six.
Dad's job took us to Pocatello from sometime in the fall, through winter, and back to Boise in the spring. I remember four events in Pocatello as if they happened yesterday:
(1) Grandma Higgins moved to Pocatello with us; (2) Dad was attacked by a cocker spaniel who ripped his suit pant’s back pocket off when Dad was hopping over the backyard fence of a house for rent. When Dad landed on our side of the fence, the spaniel was latched onto his rear pocket. Grandma was sitting in the back of the car with me. She laughed so hard she wet her pants; (3) Mel went skiing with his Boy Scout troop, and one of the boy scouts died in a skiing accident, and (4) Dick had an alcoholic Bannock Indian as a violin teacher until we moved back to Boise.
That was my first memory of Dick with his violin.
In the early spring of 1944, I was five, Dick was eleven, and Mel was fourteen when we moved to a four or five acre farm. It was just big enough for a garden, chickens, a dog, a cat who hung around in the barn, and three or four milk cows, and a momma pig and her babies.
Dick loved living on a farm, and so did I. Despite the duties we all shared, he and I spent lots of time playing in the outbuildings or the pastures.
Despite our gap in years, we were boys who loved the outdoors. In the winter it was making snowmen and snowball fights as well as doing our chores. In the spring, summer, and fall, it was, doing our chores and all kinds of shenanigans Dick would dream up or just plain silly adventures that boys invent.
You might wonder where Mel was. He was there, but he viewed milking cows and feeding chicken as dull distractions from where his budding artist's mind wanted to be. For him, life on the farm was barely bearable.
A pickup pulling a stock trailer pulled into the driveway one weekend late in our first spring on the farm. A man in a straw hat and coveralls got out, and Dad helped him back a grey mare out of the trailer.
The horse was for Dick. He rode that horse maybe half a dozen times. He got bucked off every time he tried to ride over the wooden bridge that spanned a creek on the dirt road we lived on.
Dad decided that mare was more than Dick could handle and sold it before summer had barely started.
Nevertheless, his brief experience with a horse when we were boys, set the stage for the last of four life-long obsessions Dick acquired before we left Idaho for California in the spring of 1946.
The first, was no doubt music—an in-utero DNA gift from our Mom; the second was fly fishing, something he learned with Mel and Dad on our Uncle Glen's ranch in Long Valley, Idaho; the third was pulling well designed practical jokes on the rest of the family; and the fourth was his brief encounter with his own horse in the spring of 1945.
Of course, he had other interests. As adults, he loved squaring up with Mel in the horseshoe pit. In our youth, croquet in our California backyard was a game we all played, including Mom. In the few times we had bad weather and Dick wasn't preoccupied by his music, he'd play cribbage with me or Dad or read a good book.
Most of all, you should know having Dick around with his dry sense of humor and his penchant for dreaming up a new spoof to catch us unawares, made life in the late forties and fifties a happy one.
A lot happened with our lives in those eventful days between coming to California in 1946 and this day in 2026, more than I can cover on this special day; however, I want to tell you about a few youthful events that demonstrate how early Dick acquired the character traits that made him successful in his adult life
For starters, you need to know that Mel and I agreed that Dick had the advantage over us when it came to his natural gifts of the mind. Here's a couple of things that prove our consensus:
Dick could write his full name--Richard Strawn— upside down and backwards--nwartS drahciR—and as fast as Mel or I could write ours forward and right side up. When he turned it upright and held it the bathroom mirror, his penmanship matched his normally written signature.
In the early fifties, I was straddling childhood and adolescence when Dick was a sophomore in high school.
One day, I came into the house after a romp in the river-bottom to find Dick in a heated discussion about racial segregation with mom, a subject that was really heating up nationally.
"Mom!" I heard him say when I entered the room, "it's not right when we condemn southern states about segregated schools when we have de facto segregation right here in Southern California."
Mom was stymied. Having grown up with de facto separation, she couldn't imagine how she and her son were going to do anything about it, and she said as much to Dick.
Dick had no qualms about how to do doing something about it. I sat down on the couch and listened to him articulate our rights for free speech and peaceful demonstrations.
Mom suggested they talk about it later, since she had to prepare supper.
Dick said nothing for long seconds then told mom she shouldn't be surprised if one day a black girl is sitting next to one of her sons at our dinner table. Mom said nothing. She stood up and walked into the kitchen.
Mom told me several years later that she asked Dick a few days after that discussion if he really thought one of her sons might marry a black girl. Mom said he replied he could only speak for himself, but if he loved someone, the color of their skin made no difference. Not that it matters, but in our young lives Mel and I shared with mom the same conviction as Dick did about evaluating people based on outward appearances.
Dick and Mel had an advantage over me when it came to knowing early on what they wanted to do with their lives. Here's a piece of Dick's early past when our dad made that point perfectly clear.
The circumstances were similar to when I came upon Mom and Dick's battle over segregation. This time, I came into the living room to find two coaches from Dick's high school.
Mom, Dad, and the coaches were sitting around the dining room table and talking, so I took a seat on the living room couch so I could eavesdrop.
I soon discovered the coaches were there to see if our parents would encourage Dick to come out for the track team. I knew that wasn't going to happen. Oh, Dick was plenty fast. Even at my young age, I knew he was track-team fast.
That day with coaches sitting around our dining room table, Dad saved Dick the trouble of having to once more decline the coaches opportunities. His words were short and to the point.
"What," Dad asked, "is so important about Dick joining your track team?"
The coaches took turns describing how in gym class Dick is beating the current team sprinters by a couple of yards in the 100 yard dash and goes nose to nose with their best 220 sprinter. They said Dick has declined to participate several times.
"Well, that's his choice to make, and were not going to override it,"Dad said. "Here's why: After school on weekdays, he practices two hours on his violin, eats dinner, finishes homework and goes to bed. On weekends, he buses sixty miles to Beverly Hills, practices with the Southern California Youth Symphony for three hours or more, takes an hour violin lesson from the conductor, then takes the bus back to Riverside. Most Sundays and some Saturday evenings he works at the Golden State Theater. Last quarter his report card was all A's and B's. Do either of you see any slack in that schedule?"
Of course they didn't.
I hope you can see from the aforementioned examples that Dick's successful life was no accident. He went about making it happen at a very young age.
I want to finish talking about conversing with Dick the last year and a half of his life
Almost every day, sometimes twice a day, I talked with Dick on the phone,. These calls were usually initiated by him. I called him on the rare occasions he didn't call me for two days.
Ours for the most part were good conversations, but they always began with his questions about me. He wanted to know if I was okay. I would reply that I was okay and why did he ask? He would say that he worries about me since I am the only one left who knows how it was when we grew up.
Satisfied that I was well, we would then converse. I learned early in this phase of his late life he didn't have a lot to say because of his failing memory. So, without much luck, I searched for some new early life adventure from our youth that might wake up his recollections.
Did he remember having poison oak and me crying with him on the back steps? "No," was his daily answer.
Did he remember his music teacher in Pocatello? "A little bit," he would say, "but he didn't know much about music that I didn't know before I met him."
Did he remember living on the farm before we moved to California? Did he remember Dad buying
a horse for him? Did he remember the two of us taking the streetcar into Beverly Hills from Monterey Park every Saturday for him to practice with the Southern California Youth Symphony? Did he remember when I screwed up the rehearsal the Saturday when I sat in the audience behind the conductor and imitated his motions? Did he remember showing me how to catch grasshoppers and use them to tempt trout out of Uncle Glen's creek? Did he remember when he and I made tapioca pudding and hoped in vain Mom, Dad, and Mel wouldn't eat theirs because of the purple color we dyed it? Did he remember Cecilia had to go sit in the car when we went in the hills to sight my deer rifle in because Peter was kicking her from inside her tummy every time we fired the rifle? Did he remember … and the list goes on with his answers decidedly “no" for the first year or so of everyday conversations he launched from his home in Illinois to mine in Washington.
That changed a few months before he died. On that day, I asked him if he remembered going to the horse races at Bay Meadows when we stayed at our Uncle Nick's house in San Francisco.
The line went dead for a few seconds. I was just about ready to say something when Dick spoke up. "Yes, I'd forgotten all about it until you asked me, I remember going with Dad, and Nick, and our cousin Chunk.
Nick's oldest son's name was Charles, but we called him Chunk instead of Chuck. I have no idea why. That Dick remembered even that! overwhelmed me.
"I remember it too," I said, "even though I didn't go! That night, you and I had to share the same bed in Uncle Nick's spare bedroom. You kept me up all night with your vocal urgings for your favorite horses to win. Do you remember that? I was not quite eight and you were not quite fourteen."
No, he didn't remember. Nevertheless, I was heartened that he remembered going to the races after all those "no's" of past months, so I banked on the horses and persevered.
"Do, you remember when we first moved to California and every other Sunday or so, at your urgings, we all drove to the Cal Poly facility on Kellog Hill to watch the Arabian Horse show?"
The line went dead again. I waited.
"I didn't remember it before," he said, "but I remember it now that you've asked me"
In the months that followed, I went back in time whenever we talked on the phone. His responses were hit and miss, with misses more often than hits until the day I asked him if he had ever played Beethoven’s violin concerto.
Like remembering the horse races had opened up his memories, my Beethoven question triggered a response from Dick that caught me by surprise.
What prompted my inquiry about Beethoven’s violin concerto was listening to it on the classical music radio station. On hearing that work I recalled or thought I recalled hearing Dick play that piece years ago. So, I put the question to him. Dick mulled over my question before he answered. Even though this happened several months ago, I remember word for word his delayed answer.
"Beethoven's concerto for violin? Yes, I've played it several times." He paused for a few seconds and continued before I could respond. "Do you remember the 78's I used to have?"
Dick was on a roll. How long, I wondered, had it been since he had taken over a conversation? My reply came quickly for fear he'd lose track of what he asked.
"Yes, I remember. They were cowboy records, Guitars and banjos maybe, or accordions. Anyway, the singer had a good voice."
Dick agreed that the singer had a good voice and said he was also a talented Guitarist. He went on to tell me his name was Red River Dave or something like that.
Before I could respond. He proceeded to tell me the first 331/3 album he bought was Beethoven's violin concerto, and he bought it with the money he made at the Golden State Theatre in Riverside when he was in high school. As an afterthought, he commented that he made a whole seventy-five cents an hour taking tickets and selling popcorn.
I thought he was done talking, but he wasn't.
Next, he gave me a lesson about Beethoven's Violin Concerto, how it was the only violin concerto Beethoven ever wrote.
"You," he said, "may remember me playing in the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl with the Southern California Youth Symphony. The soloist that day played Beethoven’s violin concerto. We in the orchestra backed him up. That is the only time I can think of that you might have heard me play that concerto."
For the record, I do remember being there to watch Dick play in the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.. My conclusion: Dick's probability about me hearing him play the concerto as a member of the orchestra is no doubt what I remember, although over the years that particular piece is one of my favorites.
Those two times when I asked Dick to recall two of his early life obsessions—music and horses—made a tremendous difference in our quest for sharing the goodtime memories of growing up in those last months of being brothers. They gave us the opportunity to optimize the last eight-plus decades of caring for one another.
Yes, Mel and now Dick are gone. In my lifetime of witnessing their individual stories, nothing impresses me more than how they both set early-in-life goals and fulfilled them with merit to the very ends of their respective lives.
What great examples they both set! What an honor to have memories of their lives as guideposts for living my own life's story.
When my life on this planet ends, my fondest hope is that those I leave behind remember me as one who walked in the footsteps of his brothers Mel and Dick, and like them, made the world a little better place to live in than when I arrived.
Thank you for being here on this hallowed day and thank you for listening.
--Dan Strawn
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OBITUARY:
Richard (Dick) Strawn was the middle brother of three brothers. I was the youngest and am the only survivor. Melvin (Mel) was the oldest. He passed away in 2019 three months before his ninety-first birthday.
Dick, who was three years younger than Mel, passed away at age 93 on November 5, 2025.
Our parents were Milton Rozell Strawn and Irma Belle Strawn. Our parents and the three of us were born in Idaho, our dad in Cascade, our mom and we three boys in Boise. We moved to Southern California in 1946. The reason for the move was to expose Dick to music instruction. By the time he was twelve, he had advanced as far as the two violin instructors in Boise, could take him. They recommended Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. They said he needed to be where better instruction was available. He came under the guidance of Peter Merumblum, the conductor of the Southern California Junior Symphony. He was an emigrant from Russia and had studied at the music conservatory in St. Petersburg. He formed the symphony in 1936.
Our parents were in no position to pay for Dick's teaching because they had just found jobs several weeks after coming to California. After listening to Dick play at age 13, Maestro Merumblum put Dick on scholarship. He was Dick's only instructor until he entered the University of Redlands. In the years before Dick dropped out of junior college to join the Air Force, he enjoyed multiple events he would have never experienced had our parents stayed in Idaho. In addition to having expensive tutoring for a pittance of the going rate, he experienced playing with the orchestra a number of times at the Hollywood Bowl, in numerous featured movies, and numerous other concert opportunities throughout Southern California.
In 1948, the family moved to Riverside, California, roughly fifty miles south of Beverly Hills where the orchestra practiced every Saturday. From his freshman year in high school through his freshman year at Riverside City College, Dick caught the bus about six in the morning, rode it to Los Angeles, transferred to another bus, practiced with the symphony in Beverly Hills, followed that up with a lesson from Maestro Merumblum, and arrived back home in the early evening (six or seven o'clock.)
The Korean War interrupted his music studies. Mel had already been drafted into the Army. Dick enlisted in the Air Force and traded his two years of Army services for four years in the Air Force.
Mel returned from his twenty-two months of service in Korea about the time Dick arrived in Japan.
After doing his basic training at Parks Air Force Base in Northern California, Dick was sent to train for control tower duty. He spent several months in Biloxi, Mississippi before going for two years or a little more to the airbase at Tachikawa, Japan. While he was there he met Cecilia Akiko Maniwa, a talented pianist.
Predictably, they fell in love and were married in Japan. That marriage produced three children, two boys and one girl, all of whom turned out to be marvelous musicians in their adult lives.
The marriage lasted for fifteen years or so but finally ended. It brought sadness to all of our family. We, Mel and his family and me and my family, loved the two of them together. But life brings changes.
When they returned to the states from his duty in Japan, Dick finished his sophomore year at Riverside City College and then transferred on scholarship to the University of Redlands. He supplemented his scholarship money with the G.I. Bill and playing at weddings and other gala celebrations.
His first job after graduating was at the New Orleans Symphony, A year or so there, and he moved on to the Cadek Conservatory of Music in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
From Chattanooga he moved on to the University of Indiana, where he obtained his master’s degree in music.
Over the next several years, he held assistant professor positions at Utah State University, Wyoming University, Northern Illinois University, and Southern Illinois University. As I remembered it now, most, if not all, of these positions required him to both perform and instruct.
In my mind, the hectic pace of moving about while Dick was searching for a place he wanted to stay contributed to the divorce that came in their lives.
In time, Dick met and married Anne Owen. Having her in our family has been a joy for us, and especially for Dick. She passed away a short few days before Dick.
Dick told me shortly after they were married that he was done searching for the ideal job and was going to find a college in the west, where the three of us brothers grew up. Months after that he was offered a position at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He accepted that assignment and stayed there for the rest of his music career, which turned out to be a perfect fit. In addition to his music instruction and performing at times with musicians from the Denver Symphony Orchestra, he conducted the university orchestra and worked diligently to raise southern Colorado's awareness that classical music is worth listening to. When he retired, he was honored by the local newspaper for raising the communities' appreciation of something other than music "they listened to in boots and cowboy hats."
Dick's second and third loves after music were respectively, horses and fly fishing, followed up by playing horseshoes with Mel and cribbage with me.
I am a lucky man. My two brothers always had my back and raised the family's standards of performance to levels that were tough to follow.
--Dan Strawn
Dick, who was three years younger than Mel, passed away at age 93 on November 5, 2025.
Our parents were Milton Rozell Strawn and Irma Belle Strawn. Our parents and the three of us were born in Idaho, our dad in Cascade, our mom and we three boys in Boise. We moved to Southern California in 1946. The reason for the move was to expose Dick to music instruction. By the time he was twelve, he had advanced as far as the two violin instructors in Boise, could take him. They recommended Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. They said he needed to be where better instruction was available. He came under the guidance of Peter Merumblum, the conductor of the Southern California Junior Symphony. He was an emigrant from Russia and had studied at the music conservatory in St. Petersburg. He formed the symphony in 1936.
Our parents were in no position to pay for Dick's teaching because they had just found jobs several weeks after coming to California. After listening to Dick play at age 13, Maestro Merumblum put Dick on scholarship. He was Dick's only instructor until he entered the University of Redlands. In the years before Dick dropped out of junior college to join the Air Force, he enjoyed multiple events he would have never experienced had our parents stayed in Idaho. In addition to having expensive tutoring for a pittance of the going rate, he experienced playing with the orchestra a number of times at the Hollywood Bowl, in numerous featured movies, and numerous other concert opportunities throughout Southern California.
In 1948, the family moved to Riverside, California, roughly fifty miles south of Beverly Hills where the orchestra practiced every Saturday. From his freshman year in high school through his freshman year at Riverside City College, Dick caught the bus about six in the morning, rode it to Los Angeles, transferred to another bus, practiced with the symphony in Beverly Hills, followed that up with a lesson from Maestro Merumblum, and arrived back home in the early evening (six or seven o'clock.)
The Korean War interrupted his music studies. Mel had already been drafted into the Army. Dick enlisted in the Air Force and traded his two years of Army services for four years in the Air Force.
Mel returned from his twenty-two months of service in Korea about the time Dick arrived in Japan.
After doing his basic training at Parks Air Force Base in Northern California, Dick was sent to train for control tower duty. He spent several months in Biloxi, Mississippi before going for two years or a little more to the airbase at Tachikawa, Japan. While he was there he met Cecilia Akiko Maniwa, a talented pianist.
Predictably, they fell in love and were married in Japan. That marriage produced three children, two boys and one girl, all of whom turned out to be marvelous musicians in their adult lives.
The marriage lasted for fifteen years or so but finally ended. It brought sadness to all of our family. We, Mel and his family and me and my family, loved the two of them together. But life brings changes.
When they returned to the states from his duty in Japan, Dick finished his sophomore year at Riverside City College and then transferred on scholarship to the University of Redlands. He supplemented his scholarship money with the G.I. Bill and playing at weddings and other gala celebrations.
His first job after graduating was at the New Orleans Symphony, A year or so there, and he moved on to the Cadek Conservatory of Music in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
From Chattanooga he moved on to the University of Indiana, where he obtained his master’s degree in music.
Over the next several years, he held assistant professor positions at Utah State University, Wyoming University, Northern Illinois University, and Southern Illinois University. As I remembered it now, most, if not all, of these positions required him to both perform and instruct.
In my mind, the hectic pace of moving about while Dick was searching for a place he wanted to stay contributed to the divorce that came in their lives.
In time, Dick met and married Anne Owen. Having her in our family has been a joy for us, and especially for Dick. She passed away a short few days before Dick.
Dick told me shortly after they were married that he was done searching for the ideal job and was going to find a college in the west, where the three of us brothers grew up. Months after that he was offered a position at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He accepted that assignment and stayed there for the rest of his music career, which turned out to be a perfect fit. In addition to his music instruction and performing at times with musicians from the Denver Symphony Orchestra, he conducted the university orchestra and worked diligently to raise southern Colorado's awareness that classical music is worth listening to. When he retired, he was honored by the local newspaper for raising the communities' appreciation of something other than music "they listened to in boots and cowboy hats."
Dick's second and third loves after music were respectively, horses and fly fishing, followed up by playing horseshoes with Mel and cribbage with me.
I am a lucky man. My two brothers always had my back and raised the family's standards of performance to levels that were tough to follow.
--Dan Strawn