Lee R. Martin

Born during haying time in Baker City, Oregon to Wendell Martin and the former Eleanor O'Neill, Lee joined older brothers Rick and Denny.  Three years later, sister Barbara arrived and the family was complete.  Raised on a farm in LaGrande, Oregon for most of his youth, he did the chores of a farm kid, went to school, swam in the irrigation canals, and played "electrocutioner" with the electric fence and his sister.  All siblings remember how drafty the old farm house was, but also fondly remember the crisp, cold, dry fall weather there.

He passed away peacefully, beautifully, surrounded by family, at Hopewell Hospice.  Advanced Parkinson's disease had made his walking unsafe, and Lee fell, broke a collar bone and was hospitalized.  There, he contracted pneumonia and passed away five days after the accident.

His parents are both deceased, but he is survived by a wife, Anjala, her brother Robert, all siblings and their spouses, two neices, two nephews, their spouses and children.  He leaves behind very dear family members, health practicioners, extended family, and scores of friends the world around. He and Anjala had no children, but several dear pets.

Lee had a teen-aged marriage that ended in divorce, and later a brief second marriage that also ended in divorce.  He had a long relationship with Charlene that she broke off, before he wooed and won Anjala.  That marriage would have been 33 years long in May.  Lee greatly admired statuesque women, both as art and as reality.

For many years, Lee was unsure of his direction, briefly trying college at Eastern Oregon University, with dual degrees in teaching and music.  (He played clarinet in high school, piano and keyboards, and loved singing madrigals.)  Finding those college degree efforts unsatisfactory, he enlisted briefly in the military and was trained as a medic and stationed in Okinawa.  Finding this also unsatisfactory, he left the military and worked a series of jobs: in hardware stores, janitorial services, and as a live-in caregiver.

While in the military, a fellow soldier introduced him to the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC, whose mystical philosophy helped him finally to make sense of the world.  He met Anjala at a Rosicrucian meeting. They traveled the United States and Canada, attending Rosicrucian Conventions and making international friendships.  Lee and Anjala eventually traveled to 38 different states and foreign countries. When nephew Sam married Nievas in Spain, along with other family members, Lee and Anjala attended the wedding.  Before going to Spain, Lee and Anjala traveled through France, visiting cities of Rosicrucian historical significance.  He climbed to the top of MontSegur, a place venerated to the Cathar religion.  For a time he belonged to an Episcopal congregation but later chose Tibetan Buddhism as his religion.

Lee called himself an autodidact (a self-taught person), although he later returned to college and finished his bachelor's degree with an emphasis in business at Concordia University in Portland.  He got straight A's in a vigorous series of courses that included statistics, advanced algebra,and comparative classic English literature. Voluntarily, Lee read widely about religions and philosophies, studying the Essenes and Gnostics, Cathars and Templars.  He studied Christian theology, reading the Book of Common Prayer, the C.L.R. James Reader, and many, many more.  He read both the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead.  He read and collected great poets, and wrote some fine poetry of his own.  He read occult philosophy, Iris Murdoch, Francis Bacon, Plato and Plotinus.  He participated with friend Clayton in studying the Shakespeare Authorship question.  He studied astrology extensively and generated and analyzed charts on his computer. He read Kant and Heidegger, and REMEMBERED all of what he read.   He loved mystery novels.  He recounted with affection how Anjala read him all of the Judge Dee (18th century Chinese detective novels) and also the Harry Potter books, using different voices.

His musical tastes were similarly broad: he loved classical music, especially by Mahler, opera, especially Billy Budd, Pink Floyd, Laurie Anderson, Benedictine and Gregorian Chants, Leonard Cohen, Cesaria Evora, Joni Mitchell, "An Die Musik" with Bryn Terfel singing, Sarah Vaughn, James Brown, John Lennon, Talking Heads, Dire Straits, traditional music of Egypt, Neil Young, flamenco music, and so many others.

He and his wife became "culture vultures" and had season tickets to Chamber Music Northwest, Portland Opera, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Portland Center Stage at one time or another.  They also attended the quirky and wonderful Trek in the Park performances. Going to small local theater performances was a constant joy.  They went to performances by Cirque de Soleil and other circuses all across the US.  He and the wife resonated with the grandeur of and attended the full Wagner Ring Cycle, as performed in Seattle.  The last opera performance he attended was in 2014, "The Tales of Hoffman", also performed in Seattle.  The last stage performance attended was the delightful "Blithe Spirit", in which friends Nyla and Peter acted to great acclaim.

He worked as a word processor for the phone company, a database manager, and eventually self-taught himself into his final career as a paralegal.    Lee commuted to and from work on his bicycle, often choosing the route up the steep hill up to Mississippi Avenue for better exercise.  He worked for a time as a utility paralegal for Portland's branch of Enron, and left them one month before Enron crashed. While working at PGE Enron, he joined their dragon boating team, and found it so fun he later joined a dragon boating team that went to international competitions.  His last professional years were spent  working for the Bonneville Power Administration, helping attorneys research rate cases and write market contracts. He was always evaluated as an exceptional paralegal and briefly considered going to law school, before Parkinson's interrupted that idea. He had to take disability retirement after Parkinson's made it difficult for him to sit stably in an office chair and type.

Lee's ten years of disability retirement with Parkinson's were busy with appointments with doctors, specialists, therapists and, with the help of his wife and caregivers Norma and Kinzang, he had many good times.  In 2012 his wife dragged him on an epic journey by train and plane across America to Trinidad & Tobago where they had their second honeymoon and he nearly died from drowning.  In 2013, he and the wife took a hot air balloon ride.  In 2014, when the long walks Lee used to love became impossible, friend Davie helped him convert his recumbent trike into a tandem recumbent trike, and Lee and friends enjoyed fine weather on the tandem.

He was enthralled by a variety of television shows: Rumpole of the Bailey, most British mystery series (especially Prime Suspect), the s.f. spoof series Red Dwarf, The Good Wife, and House of Cards for example.  He would get videos from the library and set up film series for himself and Anjala, all Fellini films for instance, a Bergman festival, the Ealing British comedies, a Monty Python festival, and so forth.  He would decide on a Shakespeare play and invite friends over to potluck and participate in taking on roles and reading the play aloud.  He loved having the wife cook a meal and invite friends over.

Lee was very generous.   He volunteered, for a time, at a local radio station, reading the newspaper to the blind.  If he heard of someone in need, he'd offer them a chance to stay in our spare room.  Over the years, we shared our home with many interesting people:  a couple of older Tibetan Buddhist wandering students, a young Argentinian woman with a 7 month old baby, a Zen Buddhist homeless young man, a man going through recovery from heroin addiction, an artist-author-garden gnome making young man, a niece, the 13 year-old daughter of an ex-girlfriend, a Zen Buddhist couple and others.

He had his bad characteristics too, as we all do, but on the whole, he led a life that left him well loved and missed.

Donations in his memory can be made to Oregon Public Broadcasting www.opb.org or to All Classical FM. www.allclassical.org or to Hopewell Hospice http://www.legacyhealth.org/locations/other-locations/hopewell-house-hospice.aspx

Rosicruian Memorial Ceremony, Monday, March 23, 3 pm

Kenton Masonic Lodge

8130 N Denver Avenue

Portland, OR

Casual attire.  The ceremony is about half an hour long, then we will go upstairs and have a bite to eat, and jointly fill out a timeline of his and our lives.