The Rich Life of Robert C Dale, 1936-2014

Robert Charles Dale, known as "RC Dale" or just Bob Dale to Islanders, was born June 11, 1936 to Ferree Seals and Charles Robert Dale, in Madison, Wisconsin, the eldest of four children. He died November 6 at Vashon Community Care; his last hour was spent laughing, watching a Carol Burnett show.

Bob loved film and drama all his life. At age 7, the local YMCA turned their film projector over to him; by age 8, he was ordering their films from film distributors, writing his orders on blue-lined school paper.

He started at University of Madison after high school, took his BA in 1958, and left with a doctorate in French Lit by 1962. While at the university, he helped found the Wisconsin Film Society, which became one of the country's great film societies. During his college days, he ran the movie projectors at the main hall and was head lighting designer for the UW's two drama theaters. His summer jobs were at the local radio and TV stations; he even considered a career in broadcasting. But French had him in its thrall; he graduated from UW-Madison with a Ph.D in French Lit.

In 1958, he accepted an assistantship in the English language at a school in Bordeaux, France, to work the school year 1958-59.

In 1958, during his year teaching English at a lycAC.e in Bordeaux, he married a fellow student from U-Madison, Emeline Chambers, in London. They had two children: Arden Dale born July 29, 1958 and Laura Dale, born March 1, 1961.

He came to Seattle in 1962 for a professorship in French in the Romance Languages Department at the University of Washington, with an annual salary of $10,000. He and Emmy bought a house in Seattle's U-District, a few blocks north of the university, for $20,500, down payment of $3500 (those were the days... ) Three years later, he completed his first book, The Poetics of Prosper MAC.rimAC.e", published in 1966 by Mouton & Co, an academic publisher in the Netherlands.

In 1965, he and Emeline divorced. He became a "summer & holidays" father, traveling to Eugene to be with his girls during holidays and bringing them to the Seattle house for summers and, in Laura's case, for her senior year in high school.

Bob became instrumental in making Seattle a cinema-town. Two years after arriving at UW, he founded the UW's Film series running bi-weekly film programs (matinees and evenings) until 1983. He and other film enthusiasts started up the Seattle Film Society around 1970, offering weekly Saturday showings on of old films and foreign films before there was anything like that in Seattle. The society also published MovieTone News, a monthly magazine of film criticism. Bob stayed with the Society until it died in the early 80s. He claimed " the society's programming and critiques we wrote and distributed with the films were often credited as the driving force behind making Seattle the best film city in the country outside New York. Practically the whole staff of Film Comment, the country's foremost film magazine, cut their critical teeth writing program notes for my series." He himself wrote over 100 film notes (printed duplex on legal paper the day before each film's showing) and edited many hundreds more. He also wrote 50-some articles and reviews about film, as well as making three films himself and editing other films as a freelance editor.

Bob had been brewing his own beer on the QT ever since his college days. After Washington State lightened up the laws against home breweries, he came out of the beer closet and started up a Seattle home brewing club called "The Brews Brothers." That group met monthly at Bob's house to learn brewing techniques, compete with their own home-brews, and enjoy each others company around Bob's dining room table, in his kitchen, and out on his deck. The neighbor used to complain that "You guys sit out there and just talka"RECIPES!"

In 1984, his daughter Laura Dale introduced him to Karen Ray Pierce, a student of film, writing & photograph at Fairhaven College, Western Washington University. When Karen graduated and moved to Seattle, the two started to date. Karen moved into the house by early spring of 1985. They were married on September 12, 1987 after a spring/summer 3-month sojourn around Paris, London, and Southern England.

In 1986, Bob's two-volume opus on french film director RenAC. Clair, a project that Bob had been working on for over 10 years, was accepted for publication by Scarecrow Press, an academic publisher of books on cinema. Incidentally, at the same time a fellow Seattle film society member, Robert Cumbow, published his opus on Sergio Leone that same month through Scarecrow Press.

Bob was an excellent teacher and mentored some of his best students toward their own academic positions. Vic Reinking's comments on a postcard in June 1990 says it best: "Of all the professors I encountered in my time as a student, I learned my most important lessons from youa"how to read with more imagination, how to write carefully and interestingly. I am indebted to you for your superb teaching and the help and advice you offered me as I began my academic career."

Though Bob loved to teach and was often voted by the student body as one of the more popular professors on campus, Bob became increasingly disillusioned with the French department, its dean, and the caliber of students passing through his classes. By the late 80s, he was quite depressed about it.

During a Christmas 1990 trip down the Oregon Coast, they started house-hunting and fell in love with a housea"well, more the sunset viewa"in Yachats, Oregon. To everyone's surprise including theirs, they bought the house the next day. He resigned as an Associate Professor from the UW in 1990, negotiating from the university a full retirement and full year's sabbatical for retiring early. By 1992, Bob and Karen were deeply involved in a non-profit group called The Friends of the Yachats Commons. Its purpose was to support, with programs and fund-raising, the development of the town's surplused elementary school into a community center for this coastal village of 600. Bob was the group's board treasurer for a couple years. The group was very successful: they raised money for new kitchen equipment, stage curtains and lights, and playground equipment for the kids. The group also put on performances, hosted traveling performance groups, and organized big dances in the old gym. Bob didn't enjoy loud music, so he would run a concessions stand in the back kitchen, serving juice, coffee, and homemade cookies and rice krispie bars to hungry kids and thirsty dancers. He also loved running a lunch stand he called "World's End Lunch" at the monthly flea market, serving a stir-fry, a chili, and a cold potato-leek soup he punningly called "Yachyssoise" after the famous french soup.

Bob also took over some of Karen's desktop publishing work, which in the 1990s was flourishing. He was good at details and long-winded projects, so he took charge of the quarterly "Journal for the Seattle Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association", the yearly directory for the Asian-Pacific Bankers Conference, and other projects. He gave up smoking around 1991, but still brewed his famous "Dale's Pale Ale" for his own enjoyment, though he never did re-establish a coastal home brewing club.

As part of his support for the Friends, Bob write a weekly Commons Calendar for the local neighborhood magazine, Coastal Currents. For the Corvallis Mac User Group's magazine, Mouse Droppings, he also wrote a monthly column about programming in Hypercard, a index-card style program developed by Apple Computer in the late 80s. His dry wit and stylish phraseologywas always a pleasure to read ("Drummin' Out the Dales' was his last Commons Calendar, referring to the Send-Off Party that featured Bob and about a dozen other goat-drum players banging away on stage while the audience boogied into the night.

Old UW colleague David WIllingham and wife Elizabeth Freeman introduced Bob and Karen to Vashon Island during a Christmas visit in 1994. Already looking for a new home, Bob and Karen decided to find it on the Island, and moved to a house on Beall Road in May, 1995. Long a swimmer, Bob immediately joined Vashon Athletic Club and became a 4-days-a-week water-walker right up to summer of 2014. (The Dales moved to their second Island home, up Shawnee Hills, in 2002.)

Always into community service, Bob soon got involved in the Labor of Love fundraising services auction for Vashon Community Care Center. He catalogued the services and created the newspaper insert for several years, contributing his own services as teacher of sourdough breads and caterer for multi-coarse dinners (italian, chinese, or homegrown, your choice.) In the first decade of the new century, he and Karen started helping out at the Food Bank, picking up food around local stores and then crating foods as needed. Around 2011, the two partnered with another couple to cook up the Third Thursday Dinner for the Homeless at the Presbyterian Church, part of the Interfaith Council's Prevention of Homelessness effort. Aways a wonderful cook, he would start planning the next Third Thursday dinner as soon as he'd served up the latest one; he did that even when his brain became confused in his last months. He LOVED serving good food and drink to others and seeing how that brought people together.

In the summer of 2014, his eldest daughter Arden died of endocrine cancer. He was very proud of Arden, who had become a columnist for Dow Jones and then the Wall Street Journal. What had been a gradual, nearly invisible slowing into his late 70s became, over four months, a swift degradation of health, mind, and memory. Two heart attacks put him first into hospital, then into Vashon Community Care (the same he'd worked so hard for a decade earlier). In spite of his ailments, he became a relaxed, happy, "Rose-Colored Glasses" Bob who amused everyone around him. His last day, quite by accident, gave him a car ride around Seattle and his beloved Island to see his old haunts; he spent his last hour snacking, drinking coffee, and roaring with laughter to a Carol Burnett Christmas Special. Then he stood up, fainted, and the fall took him away from us.

He lived a good life rooted in ethics and aesthetics, cinema, and service to his communities one after the other. He was always a unique character. He did good things in the world, and he will be missed.

Bob is survived by his wife Karen Dale, his daughter Laura Dale of Eugene, Oregon, and grandson Malcolm Dale of Maplewood, New Jersey. His ashes will be scattered in Quartermaster Harbor, along with the ashes of his daughter Arden, sometime this summer, when a memorial will be held.