In a wide-ranging conversation last week, retired KING-5 General Manager Sturges Dorrance (a peninsula resident) and I reflected on Ken Callahan and the strange circumstance of one of the Pacific Northwest’s celebrated artists being so little remembered here where he spent so much time.

This undoubtedly has much to do with the era when he lived in Long Beach. Someone making a good living from art would have been something of a fish out of water here in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Then-city Councilman David Campiche’s proposal that Callahan’s beach cabin be acquired as a public asset fell flat as a painter’s canvas after the artist’s death in May 1986.

As part of her masterful series marking our centennial in 2000, “Reading 100 Years of the Chinook Observer,” historian Nancy Lloyd wrote a brief biography of Callahan, one of four founding members of the artistic movement known as the Northwest School. She noted the importance Callahan placed on early encouragement by a Pacific County teacher about a century ago. “The Callahan family also lived for two years in Raymond before moving to Seattle. Kenneth was always interested in being an artist and a school teacher in Raymond told him she thought he could be an artist if he wanted to. ‘That was a great stimulus to me,’ he said many years later.”

He went on to excel in the art world and in 1964 came with his wife to the Peninsula, to the cottage on North Boulevard in Long Beach. “There Callahan walked through beach grass and sand dunes to the ocean shore where he contemplated the edge of the surf and the scruffy debris left behind by the tide, and returned to his studio to paint,” Lloyd wrote. Some took considerable pride in his connections here; quite a few of his paintings grace local walls.

Nowadays in Long Beach and the rest of Pacific County, artists of every sort are warmly acknowledged. They are routinely profiled in the Observer and Coast Weekend, the arts and entertainment publication we share with the Astorian. The arts are vitally important to our economy and culture. As Dorrance observed during our conversation, how many rural communities have not just one but two lively amateur theater groups? (Plus a third in north county.)

To keep up with the Pacific County arts scene, please subscribe to the Observer — we need you! As a big fringe benefit, a subscription grants full access to our archives, including Nancy Lloyd’s fantastic overview of a century of our stories, as well as her deeply researched current series about shipwrecks. For example, read her profile of Callahan at www.chinookobserver.com/news/reading-100-years-of-the-chinook-observer-kenneth-callahan/article_57cda296-02df-55a7-a6a6-2fc6143dc462.html.