Robert Bauer, 60, died on Thursday, August 19, 2010, at his home in Missoula, of cancer.
He had lived in Montana since the late 1960s, when he moved from Ohio. He was born on January 3, 1950, in the town of Ironton on the Ohio River, a birthplace that influenced his love of woods, mountains, and traditional American music, especially bluegrass and other banjo music. He grew up mostly in football-crazy Columbus, but while other boys practiced blocking and tackling, Bob went hiking and camping, hunting and fishing.
Like the young Theodore Roosevelt, he learned the habits of wild creatures by close observation. He collected toads, frogs, turtles, a raccoon, and other animals, drew cartoons of them and kept them as pets, then released them all in better condition than he’d found them.
With his father, the environmental and outdoor writer Erwin A. Bauer, he made trips throughout the West and to wilderness regions of Canada, Central America, and East Africa.
His college goal, at Ohio State University and the University of Montana, was to become a wildlife biologist. But the classroom work seemed dry and confining, and eventually he looked for a freer life.
Stone masonry, a dying craft elsewhere, still lived on in Montana, and gave him creative work to do, as well as time between jobs for other pursuits. He built fireplaces, cabins, and lodges in Montana, and worked on Maryland mansions and an embassy in Washington.
He lived one year in an old one-room schoolhouse in the Paradise Valley, near Livingston, working on local stone masonry projects.
At various times he took interim jobs on railroad steel gangs and a documentary film crew, and also planted trees for the U. S. Forest Service. Fleeing the Montana cold, he spent a sunny winter in Texas, as a raft guide on the Rio Grande in the Big Bend National Park.
Bob was an advocate of natural foods and living proof of their benefits, constantly revising and refining his diet. He was an expert in herbal medicine and wrote many columns for an alternative newspaper on collecting and using wild herbs in cures and cookery.
In the mid-1980s he founded and operated a popular restaurant, the Tropicana, on Woody Street in Missoula, serving everything from bean soup to exotic dishes never before tasted in the city. His advertising slogan, in island patois, was “Nobody canna like the Tropicana.”
In 1998, at a ceremony at Bowman Lake in Glacier Park, he married Laya Kersti, of East Germany. They enjoyed travels together in the U. S. and Germany but were later divorced.
He traveled widely and especially enjoyed camping and living off the land, for weeks at a time, in a roadless valley on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
With his love of music, Bob became an accomplished banjo player, largely self-taught. Many of his close friends were musicians, amateur and professional, who shared his happiest times.
In recent years Bob devoted much of his time to taking care of his mother, in Ohio, until she died in 2009.
He is survived by his brother’s family, Parker and Charlotte Bauer, their daughters Stephanie and Valerie, of Florida, and Katie, of Washington, DC; his cousin Ann Evans and her family, of Ohio; and his dog, Lucky, a stray he rescued in the Ohio hills and brought home to Montana.
A memorial service will be held at noon on Thursday in Pattee Canyon, near Missoula.
Contributions in memory of Bob Bauer may be sent to the Montana Wildlife Federation.
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