Robert H. “Bob” Mealey, 94, forester, conservation advocate, land steward and longtime resident of Sweet Home and Albany, died on April 5.
Son of timber and mill owner William and his wife, Fannie (Hamilton) Mealey, Mealey was born in the family home near Foster in 1912.
He was foremost as an outdoorsman. At age 85, he fly fished for silver salmon in Alaska, and at age 87, he took his last elk on a Wyoming hunt. At 91, he was still piling slash with a JD 550 tractor on his farm.
Mealey graduated from Sweet Home High School in 1932. At his father’s urging he originally pursued a degree in law but soon found his passion to be forests. He graduated from the School of Forestry at Oregon State College in Corvallis in 1936, the same year of his marriage to Anna McLaughlin.
His remarkable life in forestry spanned nearly 50 years and included running a logging and sawmill company, setting up the Linn County Small Woodlands Association and completing a full career with the U.S. Forest Service.
He began his Forest Service work supervising the Tillamook Burn CC reforestation crews in the Oregon Coast range. Later, in the 1930s, he completed the original fire mapping of the Olympic National Forest in western Washington. Much of the mapping was done from the vantage point of tall trees and mountain tops instead of today’s satellites. He served as district ranger on both the Rigdon and Blue River ranger districts on the Willamette National Forest as well as timber staff director for the Siuslaw National Forest in Corvallis.
After retiring from the Forest Service in 1973, Mealey became a statewide leader in family forest management and molded his Mountain View Tree Farm, located on 580 acres near Sweet Home, into a nationally recognized example of good stewardship.
Under Mealey’s leadership from 1981 to 1985, the membership in the Linn County and Oregon Small Woodland Owners associations doubled. During this same period, the Northwest Woodland Council was formed. For all these efforts, Mealey was named 1989 Oregon and Western USA Region Outstanding Tree Farmer.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Mealey led the effort to restore the native but much neglected Willamette Valley race of Ponderosa pine. At times, he did this with his own money and personally distributed more than 300,000 pine seedlings out of his garage in Albany to pine enthusiasts.
Today, more than 1 million valley race Ponderosas are planted each year in the Willamette Valley. In 2000, the Robert H. Mealey Willamette Valley Ponderosa Pine Native Gene Conservancy Orchard was dedicated at the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Schroeder Seed Orchard near St. Paul to recognize his work.
He also provided funding to establish a scholarship fund for Linn County youth to attend Oregon State University and study forestry or natural resources. In 2005, he completed a major financial gift to the Oregon State University School of Forestry to establish the “Robert and Anna K. Mealey Program in Forest Ecosystem Health,” which advances the interests of healthy forests in Oregon and the Northwest through research teaching and public outreach.
The Society of American Foresters has recognized him as a “fellow” for his lifetime of contributions to the forestry profession. He once estimated that he personally planted 90,000 conifer seedlings on his tree farm since his 70th birthday in 1982.
In his spare time, he wrote poetry and spun many a yarn about his forestry adventures.
Mealey was preceded in death by his wife, Anna, in 1982 and his youngest daughter, Connie, in 2002.
He is survived by his children, William of Portland, Mary McKenney of Wichita, Kan., and Stephen Leaburg of Oregon; 12 grandchildren; 19 great grandchildren; sister, Rachel Vogel of Sweet Home; and many nieces and nephews.
A funeral Mass will begin at 11 a.m. on April 12 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Albany. Burial will follow at Gilliland Cemetery near Sweet Home.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations in his name be made to the Willamette Valley Ponderosa Pine Conservation Association, OSU Extension Service, 1849 NW Ninth St., Corvallis, OR 97330-2144.