“Death ... a great Leveler — a king before whose tremendous majesty shades and differences in littleness cannot be discerned — an Alp from whose summit all small things are the same size.”
— Mark Twain, 1871
Some people manage to fit a whole shelf full of stories into one lifetime.
Bill Moeller was one of those men. To our benefit, he was not only a man with 1,001 tales, but like the narrator of “Arabian Nights” or his sometimes stage alter-ego, Mark Twain, Bill knew just how to tell them for our delight and maybe even our edification.
Bill, who died Monday at age 96 about a week after taking a hard fall, was a storyteller of the finest order.
He was The Chronicle’s 2024 Person of the Year — and so much more.
He was a radio announcer and disc jockey, a paratrooper and Korean war veteran, a stage performer and director, a pilot, a ukulele player, a handyman, a bicycle repairman, a ski salesman, an ordained minister, a bookstore owner, a traveling Mark Twain stage show recreationist, beloved (and sometimes reviled) newspaper columnist and a visionary community leader.
In an early newspaper column he revealed a “tagline” for both his column and his philosophy of life: “It's never too late to follow a dream.”
He was a Renaissance man of constant reinvention. He started taking flying lessons at age 68 and earned his pilot’s license at age 70. I seem to remember a story from him about building his own ultralight and quickly living out the old maxim, “any crash you can walk away from is a good crash.”
He rose to local fame as one of the first local rock-and-roll radio DJs. He also became a gentle voice of community dialogue on KELA’s “Let’s Talk About It,” a call-in show that he created and hosted until 1993, when he retired from his radio career and took his Mark Twain one-man show on the road across the Pacific Northwest.
That was how I first learned about him when I was still a high school student at W.F. West. My English teacher, Janelle Williams, had a poster for Bill-as-Twain on the wall. I thought that was pretty cool, long before I met Bill in person and learned that he was even cooler than I thought.
He had a mellifluous baritone voice which served him well on the radio as well as in community events, such as his reading of “The Night Before Christmas” at the Centralia’s downtown Christmas tree-lighting.
As an ordained minister he performed hundreds, perhaps thousands of weddings. I attended at least a few. His gentle, genial spirit came through in his good-natured homilies as he united couples in wedlock.
In between one of his own three marriages, he founded Huckleberry Books, a quaint bookstore in the long brick building that now houses HUBBUB in downtown Centralia. He lived there in an apartment in the back with his cat.
I’ll always remember and appreciate him for signing the city ordinance creating the Seminary Hill Natural Area in the early 1980s. Bill was the city’s elected mayor at that time. He remained faithful to the natural area for the rest of his life, serving as a stalwart volunteer at work parties each year. Even into his 90s, he would park himself on a gentle slope to clip blackberries and weeds.
He also wrote heartfelt odes to the natural area, which he called “this gem in our midst that sits there within the reach of anyone who wants to take the time, and has the energy, to enjoy it.”
He took us with him on his rambles, describing his adventures navigating the hill in rain and shine, seeking the beauty of trilliums and the majesty of its trees, which were just a little older than he was.
Bill won his election for mayor by four votes. He was a civic leader who bridged the gap from the old three-person “get ‘er done” city commission as it changed in the 1980s to the more modern seven-person council-manager form of government.
Later, re-elected to the new council, he served as a city representative on the six-member board that helped merge the city fire department and rural Fire District 12 to create the Riverside Fire Authority.
Bill wasn’t afraid to toot his own horn. In that spirit, I’ll let you know that I deserve the credit (or blame) for getting Bill onto The Chronicle’s editorial pages. As a new assistant editor in 2007 and 2008, I suggested to then-editor Michael Wagar that we bring on as columnists Bill Moeller and Julie McDonald and bring back John McCroskey. I’m so glad we did.
In Bill’s first column (published March 19, 2008, under the headline A Life in 600 Words, More or Less), he said, “It’s been a full life thus far, and I hope to share my thoughts and opinions with you for at least the next few years as well.”
He stayed on for almost a decade and a half, sharing stories and nuggets that showed him to be our own local Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
More on that next week. Bill’s life and legacy can’t be contained to just one column. He deserves at least a twain of them.
Brian Mittge can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
