William Henry Edelman III

RONAN — On May 15, 2006, the world lost one of its most generous friends, impatient futurists and enlivening conversationalists. A man of boisterous integrity and a lifelong advocate of individual rights, Bill ended his years of lifelong pain and died at home following a series of debilitating diseases.

Born in 1933 to William Jr. and Coramay Keeline Edelman, Bill was raised in Gillette, Wyo., where friends fondly remember him to have been an avid tennis player, co-organizer of the town's first controversial co-ed basketball league, and the class of 1951's valedictorian who relished time spent working and recreating in the mountains and waterways.

During his first years of college in Wyoming, he forged lasting bonds over golf games and gin rummy hands with veterans in "Butler huts" then joined the Army himself. As he told it, the most action he ever saw during his service was Tempest Storm in the burlesque halls of Baltimore.

Aside from meeting his joke telling buddy Bill from Wichita, his most memorable experience from his service years was how the Army's then cutting-edge literacy programs and individualized learning programs profoundly expanded the potential and outlook of young soldiers who had previously been ignored or otherwise thwarted by conventional schooling.

Embarking on his lifelong interest in alternative education and technologies for self-paced learning,

After his honorable discharge, he completed his degree at unorthodox Colorado College and then returned to the mountains near Sheridan, Wyo., where he met and married Timmie Walsh, his wife of 44 years, in 1961.

In the mid 1960s they moved their growing family of daughters back to Gillette, and in 1970 while working as an innovative SBA loan officer there, a twist of fate brought Bill to the Mission Valley for a business trip. In 1971, the family settled near Ronan at the base of the Missions, which so resembled his beloved Tetons.

He began decades of intense collaborations at the state level including setting guidelines for the Coal Tax Trust Fund to benefit future generations, successfully lobbying to alter facilities' restrictions in order to allow for home schooling, participating in the Institute of the Rockies, endeavors including the Columbia River Watch and establishing small hydro generating site which continue to benefit municipalities.

In the early 1990s Bill began to focus his "do-gooder" energies on the local level by building consensus to improve a neighborhood road, restore fish and bird habitat to degraded waterways, replenish once prolific native species, preserve local histories in the Mission Valley and created a community foundation. He advocated not just talking about making a better future, but doing it.

With his passing, we feel most deeply his lesson that life's only guarantee is that tomorrow will not be the same as today. In his memory, his family asks that you gather your loved ones to enjoy a card game, read a book to a child, forward an intriguing link, tell a joke to a neighbor, feed a pet table scraps it loves, and plant a tree — or better yet lots of them.

The family asks that memorials be sent to the Mission Valley Animal Shelter. A memorial will be announced at a later date.