Robert Arthur Rushton

Robert Arthur Rushton died Aug. 14, shortly after a neighbor found him fallen in the driveway of his Spanaway home where he'd lived for half his life.
He knew trailers, once owned an airplane and retired early after leaving school and home in his teens.
If 13th Avenue South had a mayor, his name was Bob. Every day for decades, he walked his dog – he owned at least five during his years in Spanaway – around Enchanted Island and environs, making many friends. He was the fellow with the Chicago White Sox ball cap, not that he had any attachment to the team. A practical sort, he found it in a thrift store, and it would do the job.
When Bob bought his property more than 40 years ago, the county assigned no value to the structure that became his home. By himself, Bob fixed the floors and the walls and the ceilings and the plumbing and the lights and everything else. It was cake compared to what he'd done before.
As owner, and usually sole employee, of Evergreen Mobile Home Service, Bob repaired stuff never meant for resurrection. Twice, he rebuilt single-wides deemed total losses due to fire, then rented them out. He offered 10-year warrantees on repairs to nearly-flat galvanized steel roofs with leak-prone seams and almost never had to return. A lady who summoned him back when a leak developed after he retired sent him home with cookies. He was that charming.
Bob was born in North Vancouver, Canada on Sept. 22, 1933. Second oldest of six children, he lived in the suburbs until 1947, when the family moved to Likely, in the interior of British Columbia. His dad had talked about running a fishing lodge that never came to pass.
The Likely home had no running water or electricity. Double-digit below zero was common in the winter. Schools were far away. There was logging, which Bob did alongside his dad, accomplished with horses and crosscut saws operated by hand.
After two years, Bob left home and drifted between Williams Lake, Vancouver and the Okanagan country. He worked in a tire repair shop and a bakery. Drove trucks and learned to shoot pool well enough that he could make money.
When the United States built what was then British Columbia's second-largest runway in the middle of nowhere for fear of Soviets, Bob moved to Puntzi Mountain in the province's interior and became a boiler room attendant for the U.S. Air Force. It was, he often said, the easiest job ever: If the boiler gets too hot, tell someone. Then again, winters were colder than in Likely.
A few years after marrying the daughter of an American hunting lodge owner, Bob, his wife and their two kids, both in diapers, immigrated to the United States on Aug. 13, 1964, settling in a mobile home near the south end of the JBLM runway, not far from the freeway. He worked for a mobile home company.
Bob could tow a mobile home – he called them "tin tents" -- and get it in just exactly the perfect spot, then set it up for occupancy most faster than anyone. Navigation wasn't a strong suit. More than once, he got lost in route to his cargo's final destination, but he was good at turning and backing up.
By 1970, Bob was in business for himself. He moved his family from runway's end to a Parkland rambler, where he dreamed big. An airplane, he thought, would be just the thing, but planes are expensive. So it was that he bought, or was gifted, a pre-war two-seat taildragger sans engine and moved it into the garage with wings leaned against a wall.
Bob could fix most anything except an airplane. After a considerable number of weekends spent tinkering with the cockpit and fuselage in the driveway while neighbors and passersby gawked, he gave up and acquired an operable 1956 Cessna 172. It is fortunate that he lived as long as he did.
Between trips to Baja and British Columbia, there was that awkward landing at Ocean Shores, where, years after quitting smoking, he bummed a cigarette after touching down on the beach. Also, the time he blew a tire upon landing in Gig Harbor. Nerves, maybe. He'd been headed for Puyallup, but malfunctioning gauges said he was out of gas while over Puget Sound, so he aimed for the closest airport.
Bob's aeronautical ventures ended after he landed in Vancouver, thinking he was in Bellingham, and was greeted by coterie of uniformed Canadians on the tarmac.
Bob also enjoyed motorcycles, saying that he missed his Goldwing more than his Cessna when he gave up bikes in his 60s. He hadn't been able to work for 20 years – from aching back to creaky knees to gnarled hands, his body was too worn out for two wheels. But he kept busy, at his own speed. His yard was the best-looking one on the block. He grew vegetables and flowers and put out bird food. Never said no to Dungeness crab, knew that coho tasted better than chinook or sockeye and loved grilling outside.
A month before he passed, Bob began painting his utility room, then the trim on his house, much to the horror of neighbors and loved ones who begged him to get off that ladder. He refused and came within one window of finishing the job, with not a spot of paint spilled on the ground or a brush stroke gone astray.
Bob Rushton is survived by his brother Jerry, sister Marilyn, daughter Lynn, son Bruce and three grandchildren.