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Note: N744 Description Dad was blond and blue-eyed. He was very small for his age and skinny as a boy. He grew to be five feet, nine inches tall in adulthood and was very handsome. As a young adult he weighed about 125 pounds and was very thin. He had to gain weight in order to obtain his commission in the Navy. He gradually gained weight as an adult and weighed about 190 pounds when he died. He had a beautiful tenor singing voice, and was good enough that when he was coaxed to sing at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in New York during World War II, the patrons assumed that he was a professional singing star who was in uniform for the duration. One of my friends once heard him singing in the shower and compared him to Bing Crosby. Although very thin as a young adult, he was very strong, an outstanding athlete at wrestling, badminton, swimming, and tennis. He was a crack shot with pistol and rifle. I am working on a complete biography elsewhere. I offer the following as a brief introduction to his life. Dad does not have a birth certificate. Instead, however, I have affidavits from his cousin Grace and from his sister Genevieve attesting to his birth. Grace's statement says: "Roy Huling Motteler was born March 24, 1912 in a house on my parents' property on Springwater Avenue, Wenatchee, Washington. Our home was next door. The birth occurred on my mother's birthday." Dad attended a one-room school near the ferry at the mouth of Colockum Creek for a few years. His parents, not happy with the education that he was getting, sent him to live with distant relatives in Wenatchee, and he went through school there, attending Whitman School during grade school, and Wenatchee High School, except for his sophomore year, spent at Raymond High School. He graduated from Whitman School in 1925. I have a picture of the graduating class but I have been unable to find him in the picture. He graduated from Wenatchee High School in 1929 wih very good grades. After a year working for a printer, he went off to Washington State College in Pullman, graduating with an honors B. A. in 1934. During his sophomore year he met my mother, Betty Stanford, and they fell in love and were soon engaged. After graduation, he moved to his parents’ home in Wenatchee and went to work for Puget Sound Power and Light Company. He lived alone; by this time his parents had moved to the Forks Shingle Mill south of Forks, Washington. In the fall of 1934, my mother came through on the train on her way back to Washington State for her senior year, and, not being able to bear the thought of being separated for the rest of the year, they eloped, and were married on 12 September. I was born the following July 4. Two years later, July 2 1937, Gail was born; Terry on 25 Feb. 1940, and Lee on 19 Aug. 1941. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Dad decided to join the navy in spite of his age and family. He was commissioned an Ensign in the Navy in October 1942 and served until January 1946. He was a training officer at Great Lakes and Farragut, Idaho commanding 1200 men, from 1942 until early 1944; Armed Guard gunnery officer afloat in the Caribbean and Atlantic from June 1944 until February 1945; and from then until December 1945 was an Armed Guard Inspection boarding officer in Portland, Oregon. From June, 1943 until early 1944 we lived in Sandpoint, Idaho while Dad was at Farragut; through most of 1944, we lived at the shingle mill in that small community of relatives. During most of 1945 we lived in Portland. After the war, we moved to Olympia, Washington, into a house which Mom inherited from her aunt. Dad went to work with Puget Sound Power in Olympia until June of 1947. After that, he worked for the state department of highways until April 1949. From April 1949 until June, 1950 he worked for H. D. Baker Company, a business machine dealer, and then he and George Dennis went into business as a partnership selling and servicing dictating machines (Gray Audographs), which lasted until January 1953. At this point he went into the insurance business, which he followed until his forced retirement at age 65. He was with Allstate from January 1953 to August 1958, and Farmers from then until April 1962. In about 1960 he moved to Tacoma, Washington and took over an agency there, where the stress level was so high that he decided to sell the business and move to Hawaii. In Hawaii, Dad ended up in charge of the Hawaiian Life agency in Lihue, Hawaii. After he was forced to retire in 1977 after turning 65, he studied for and passed the exam to be a real estate broker, and for most of the rest of his life he sold condominiums on Kauai to wealthy mailanders from the U. S. and Canada. For the first time in his life, he made really good money, and was able to build a good enough nest egg to keep the wolf from the door for the rest of his life. Mom’s health was steadily deteriorating, and she died in 1988. Prior to her death, Dad had met Elnora O’Donnell, whom he married after Mom died. Their marriage was stormy and they divorced and remarried at least once. Dad had been a heavy drinker for much of his adult life, and the last few years before he died, his health declined to the point where Terry and Vicky finally had to move in with him to care for him. By this time, Elnora had gone back to the mainland for good, herself unable to care for him because of her own health problems. We three surviving brothers were all able to be with Dad during his last week of life, and were able to take him out to dinner one last time at his favorite restaurant, the Bull Shed, where we fed him his favorite king crab legs while he beamed with joy at being surrounded by his family. He never recovered from this exertion and lapsed into a semi-coma. Dad died, with Lee at his side, on May 23, 1998, of cirrhosis of the liver.
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