Fred Owens, former La Conner journalist, died in California last week

The actor Jonathan Goldsmith gained a wide following for portraying "The Most Interesting Man in the World" during a popular Dos Equis promotional campaign.

The part could have just as easily gone to Fred Owens, who carved out a creative and colorful niche in La Conner as a journalist, author and activist among his numerous careers and landing spots around the globe.

Owens byline appeared in the Channel Town Press. In the 1980s he briefly resurrected the historic Puget Sound Mail here. He died at a Santa Barbara, California hospice last week, family members at his side.

Owens had dealt with various health issues recently, most notably Parkinson's disease, and had a brain tumor that went undetected until shortly before his death.

Those who knew him best find it cruelly ironic that Owens succumbed to cancer of the brain because the depth of his writing revealed a most fertile mind. Through the years Owens demonstrated a rare ability to uncover the story within the story, possessing a unique talent for casting light on angles that eluded others.

His work and demeanor, while striking some as quirky, was deemed insightful by a loyal readership he cultivated wherever he and his typewriter – and later, his computer – landed.

The La Conner chapter of Owens' life provided him much material. He molded and shaped his local encounters and experiences into accounts many found magazine worthy.

The best of those compositions, described by one reviewer as a blend of "folk wisdom" and "delightful irreverence," provide the meat for his efficiently lean "Frog Hospital," a 162-page compilation of favorite Owens blog entries and news articles.

"Frog Hospital begins in La Conner and heads out to America and the places I've seen in the past 10 years," Owens wrote as an introduction. "Then it comes back home. That's the theme of the book, coming home."

A son of the Midwest who attended college in Canada and whose travels took him to Africa and other far-flung locales, Owens always felt at home in La Conner, where he built a committed following through newspapering and freelance writing while aligning with those who shared his worldview.

In La Conner, Owens was as apt to make the news as report it.

For example, it was 35 years ago this week that Owens helped organize a weekend protest against the logging of 60 acres of nearby timberland known as the Fishtown woods along Dodge Valley Road. More than 100 people took part. They also raised just under $1,000 – a not insignificant amount of money in 1988 – to help pay legal costs incurred while state permit approval of the logging project was appealed.

Owens wasn't surprised.

"They started logging out here again on Thursday," Owens explained in remarks to the Channel Town Press, where he had previously worked as a reporter, "so we got on the phone and by Saturday we figured we could get a good turnout Sunday."

Owens' main objection to the timber operation centered on his belief it would have an adverse impact on wildlife in the Fishtown and Dodge Valley areas by replacing a mixed woodlands with more commercially profitable Douglas fir trees. He also thought it wouldn't look good, or in the parlance of the day, would "prove aesthetically unsightly."

The event, as Owens predicted, drew attention from Seattle media outlets, including KING-TV.

His strategy left nothing to chance. Owens requested the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs survey the logging site for remnants of a tribal burial ground believed located there.

Ultimately, the trees were harvested, much as had been the case a generation earlier, in the 1950s, when the area was selectively logged.

But Owens had won support for having literally gone out on a limb. Nor would it be the last time he would do so. Owens was an impassioned crusader who rarely shied away from one cause or another, even if it meant jousting with modern windmills.

Through it all, Owens, who between writing gigs worked in health care, as a farm laborer and in landscaping, repeatedly returned to journalism. He made the transition from print to electronic media and gained a new legion of readers with his "Fred's Almost Weekly" newsletter.

La Conner author Claire Swedberg can be counted among Owens' current fans.

"I only knew him later in life," Swedberg said, "but always enjoyed him and his love of writing. As long as I knew him, Fred was the quintessential writer. He chronicled everything around him – from politics to mundane daily tasks, from his neighbors to life on the Skagit River."

Swedberg takes pride in having never missed an issue of "Fred's Almost Weekly."

"And I know," she said, "that he had hundreds of readers doing the same."

Owens' son, Eugene, said his father enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with the readers far and wide who were captivated by his wit, whimsy and pithy commentary.

"He gained so much joy from his readers," Eugene Owens said in a public social media post last week, "and we appreciate you all very much."