I met Mike Houser many years ago when I wrote a column about how someone stole his huge bronze bear statue from in front of his French Gulch home.
He was heartbroken, because his wife Marjorie, who’d died a few years earlier, loved that bear, and he thought of his love for her whenever he saw it.
I wrote the column about the missing bronze bear. Someone “found” it and returned it, no questions asked. Mr. Houser couldn’t have been happier. After that, he cemented the bear to its base to prevent future thefts.
Over the years, I ended up writing Mr. Houser’s profile, and I wrote about him after a storm knocked out power to his home for 10 days. I visited him then, and he just kept feeding logs to the wood stove, saying it wasn’t so bad to be without electricity.
He was a soft-spoken man whose Icabod Cranelike body didn’t match his soft voice and his tender-hearted tendency to cry when he talked about his wife.
He died a week ago, and wouldn’t you know it, this humble, 95-year-old man, someone who’d accomplished so much in life, requested no funeral services.
If a funeral were held for Mr. Houser, we might learn he was one of Safeway’s earliest executives. And we’d discover that Mr. Houser was a pilot who flew over Redding 50, or maybe 60 years ago, to chose the site for Redding’s first Safeway.
Someone might mention how Mr. Houser always gave full-sized candybars to trick-or-treaters, a reward for their journey to an area with so few houses.
Someone else might remember Mr. Houser’s cherry red car, that he babied and took for a spin to Redding and back, even as he approached his 90s.
He loved to drive that car. He also loved French Gulch so much that he made sure it had a store and a library and a post office.
French Gulch lost one of its most treasured icons. Goodbye, Mr. Houser.
