PORT ANGELES — Dick Goin, who gave voice to the Elwha River’s salmon, has died.
Services are pending for Goin (pronounced GOH-in), 83, who died of natural causes Sunday night at his Port Angeles home surrounded by family members, said Marie, his wife of 64 years, on Tuesday.
The Goins received the Clallam County Community Service Award in 2007 and the Eleanor Stopps Environmental Leadership Award from the Port Townsend Marine Science Center in September 2011.
Two weeks before they received the Stopps award, Dick Goin was a keynote speaker at the Elwha River Science Symposium to mark the beginning of the largest dam removal project in American history — the destruction of the Glines Canyon and Elwha dams on the Elwha River.
“He is an elder to us,” said Frances Charles, chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, which live along the river’s banks.
“He is an individual with a good heart.”
A near-lifetime Port Angeles resident, Goin lived to see the completed removal of the dams as part of a $325 million project to restore the salmon runs and ecosystem of the river, which courses through Olympic National Park.
“He liked everything about the river,” Marie Goin said.
“He worked extremely hard to save the fish and did that for years and years and years.”
What started out as a hobby turned into a lifelong passion that made experts take notice.
Sam Brenkman, the park’s chief fisheries biologist, said Goin collected decades of data, including fish-count surveys, and would visit park officials — including numerous park superintendents through the years — to express concerns about disturbing trends.
When Goin and Brenkman met in 1993, Goin was urging park officials to increase their monitoring of the Crescent Lake’s one-of-a-kind fish, Crescenti and Beardslee trout.
“He was a voice of many of the Olympic Peninsula rivers’ salmon and steelhead in addition to the Elwha,” Brenkman recalled Tuesday.
“He spent the last seven decades observing and studying fishing and sharing information about these rivers.
“He was truly one of the keenest observers we all knew and was sort of universally recognized as an expert of these rivers. . . .
“He just served as the critical baseline of institutional memory for many of us.”
The Goins also were volunteers for Volunteer Hospice of Clallam County, delivering beds and visiting patients.
“It was just something we did together, which we did a lot of over the years,” his widow said.
“It was a way of life for us, being together.”
Richard James Goin was born Aug. 1, 1931, in Talmage, Iowa.
When Goin was 6, his family escaped the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, moving first to Yakima to work the fruit harvest and then to the banks of the Elwha River.
After a few years, they moved to Port Angeles when Goin’s father, James, began working at the Rayonier Inc. pulp mill — the same place Goin also worked most of his life.
Dick and Marie met in history class at Port Angeles High School.
On one of their first dates, they went fishing on the Elwha River.
After getting married at 19, they lived in the same house near Olympic National Park headquarters for 63 years.
The couple had four children, two of whom are deceased. Surviving their father are Cheryl McCurdy and Rick Goin of Port Angeles.
The 108-foot Elwha Dam, just 5 miles upstream from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, was completed in 1913 while the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam, 13 miles from the mouth, was finished in 1927.
The dams blocked the path of salmon whose numbers had dwindled from 400,000 spawning salmon in the early 20th century to about 3,000 when the dams came down.
Brenkman said Goin ramped up his interest in restoring the Elwha River’s salmon runs in the early 1980s, long before the 1992 Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which led to the dams’ removal.
Brenkman recalled the Goins taking regular walks of about 400 yards from their home to visit Brenkman’s Olympic National Park headquarters office, where Dick Goin would share data he had collected since the early ’60s.
“I was the closest fisheries biologist to him,” Brenkman quipped.
But Brenkman was not the only fisheries expert Goin visited.
“He is perhaps best known for his weekly visits to the offices of local fisheries managers, where he challenged current fisheries management paradigms, whether it was fishing regulations he thought were out of balance or whether the agency or biologist should be doing more,” Brenkman said.
“He was the first to let the folks know and [was] just a true advocate for the resource.”
Goin, also a technical adviser to the governor’s salmon review program and a founder of the Olympic Outdoor Sportsmen’s Association, walked with Brenkman along the river once the dams were gone.
“He was very moved and in awe of the free-flowing river,” Brenkman said.
“This is a real hero.”
A trailer for a planned documentary about Goin, describing him as “a mill worker and fisherman turned Yoda,” is at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-Goin.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
