I first met Joe over the phone when he expressed interest in buying our acreage in San de Fuca on Arnold Rd (and the highway).   Over the next few years I was able to meet his wife Sally and watch the two of them buy and restore the Captain Blower house and the old San de Fuca Schoolhouse.  After Sally died of cancer, Joe tried to give the old schoolhouse (plus $50,000 for a maintenance fund) to the central Whidbey Historical Society but for reasons which escape logic they turned it down and he was forced to sell it.  People incorrectly blamed him for selling it.  It would have made a perfect visitors center for the Ebey's Landing Reserve ad in my opinion the Society was foolish to refuse it.  Anyway, Joe hired me to help sell some other land he owned and we did get some of it sold, but he suffered a stroke around that time and became wheelchair bound. He was living in a house right next to the Big Rock in Coupeville. He then spent some time at Regency then the Careage.  In the yeas when he had the stroke we would come by and bing him to our home on Wednesdays to eat dinner with us and the sailors from the base who came by for the weely Bible studies.  It was here that Joe asked Christ to save him.  Joe was a Yeoman in the Navy for a quick enlistment way back when, and told me he played minor league baseball as a young pitcher.  He loved Baseball.  I feel terrible that I had to find out he passed from a 19-day old online obit.  He deserved better than this.