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Paul E. Walden Hood River, OR QCWA # 18702 |
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HIS SON IS US REP GREG WALDEN, W7EQI. HAS HIS DAD'S CALL
2 April 2003 Hood River News
Paul Walden
Retired Oregon radio broadcaster and radio station owner Paul E. Walden, who served three terms in the Oregon State House of Representatives in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 85.
A memorial service is planned for Wednesday, April 2, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Hood River, where he was a longtime member. The Rev. Rustin R. Kimsey, retired Episcopal Bishop of Eastern Oregon, will deliver the eulogy.
Mr. Walden, the father of U.S. Rep. Greg Walden of Hood River, spent 48 years in radio broadcasting, working as an engineer and station manager at radio stations in Walla Walla, LaGrande and Pendleton. He worked at KODL radio in The Dalles for 27 years before purchasing KIHR radio in Hood River in 1967. He served twice as president of the Oregon Association of Broadcasters.
Mr. Walden earned his license as a Radiotelephone Operator First Class in 1937, after studying broadcast engineering at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Portland. He acquired his radio amateur (HAM) license in 1934, and remained an active radio amateur until quite recently, communicating with other radio amateurs around the globe, both by voice and by Morse Code.
He was in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1946 and 1947, stationed at Fort Monmouth, N.J.
Mr. Walden, who was born on a wheat ranch near Prescott, Wash., on May 7, 1917, to Ernest Edmund and Nellie Angeline Purdy Walden, grew up in Milton-Freewater and graduated from Mac-High in 1935.
He was a descendent of Oregon pioneers; his family came to the Oregon Territory by wagon train in 1845. The diary that his great-grandmother, Sarah J. Walden Cummins, kept of her journey on the Oregon Trail has been published as "The Autobiography and Reminiscences of Sarah J. Cummins."
Mr. Walden's survivors include three sons and their wives: Bob and Connie Walden of Phoenix, Ariz.; Bill and Sandy Walden of Gresham; and Greg and Mylene Walden of Hood River.
He also is survived by a stepson, two stepdaughters, and their spouses: Mike and Val Tenney of The Dalles; Barb and Mitch Hosford of Hood River and Jo Ann and Lewis Wixon of The Dalles.
Other survivors include two grandsons, Mathew Walden of Gresham and Anthony Walden of Hood River, and two sisters, Eleanor Day of Kellog, Idaho, and Ginger Delk of Ridgecrest, Calif.
In 1940 in LaGrande, he married Betty McEwen, who died in 1990. His second wife, Ethel Mae Tenney Walden, died in 1999.
He served as a lay reader in the Episcopal Church for 50 years, and had been a member of the Diocesan Council for the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, serving for two years as council chairman.
Mr. Walden, who greatly appreciated hearing - and telling - a good story, also was a community activist. He was named First Citizen of The Dalles in 1956, where he was president of Kiwanis, twice president of The Dalles Chamber of Commerce, and a member of the chamber's board of directors. He chaired The Dalles Dam dedication committee, and served as the master of ceremonies when then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon dedicated the dam in the mid-1950s.
He was a former Exalted Ruler of the Hood River Elks Lodge, and also was a member of Hood River Rotary, the Pendleton Masonic Lodge, Al Kader Shrine and Portland Valley of the Scottish Rite.
The family suggests memorials to Hospice of the Gorge, c/o Anderson's Tribute Center, 1401 Belmont, Hood River, OR 97031.