Daugharty loses battle with cancer

PONDERAY — The flags in this community hang at half staff this week in memory of a fiery council member who died Saturday after an extended fight with colon cancer.

It’s appropriate that Dale Daugharty, 72, died with his fists up, his friends and co-workers at the city said.

A memorial service is planned Saturday at noon at the Clark Fork Senior Center.

Daugharty, who served on the council for 10 years and was in his third, 4-year term, never turned his back on a fight, not if he felt it was the right thing to do.

“It is a huge loss,” Ponderay Mayor Carol Kunzeman said. “He was my right arm, in addition to being my best friend.”

Daugharty, who grew up in Clark Fork, was a Korean War veteran who moved to Ponderay after retiring as a union representative in Seattle. He was known as a staunch Democrat who enjoyed lively political discourse and whose interest in politics did not take a back seat.

“He always fought for the underdog,” Kunzeman said. “He was a very truthful individual.

“Some people saw him as having a gruff exterior, but he was just a big, old teddy bear.”

He was instrumental in getting a Zip code assigned to Ponderay, which for years fell under the Sandpoint Zip code, causing the city to lose tax dollars, the mayor said, and he was instrumental in the hiring of a city planner.

Erik Brubaker, Ponderay’s planner, met Daugharty at a Pend d’Oreille Bay Trails committee meeting.

“My suspicion, one of the reasons I’m here, is because of Dale,” Brubaker said. “He saw me as a commitment to the community. I’m thankful, I’m very grateful.”

Friends remember him behind the wheel of an older model, brown F-150 pickup bouncing along local streets and roads.

“It was iconic,” Brubaker said. “It always made me happy seeing it pull in, or seeing it drive down, and around Kootenai or Ponderay.”

  At the Sub Shoppe, a Kootenai eatery just off Highway 200 where he spent several hours every day, Daugharty was a fixture.

“He loved to come in an talk his politics,” owner LeAnna Porath said. “Every morning he’d be here and I’d hand him the newspapers.

“He was a big liberal.”

Not a always a popular leaning, especially in a North Idaho popularly known for its conservative tendencies.

“Very rarely could you get Dale mad,” Porath said. “Only once did I see him get so mad, he pounded his fist on the table.”

Even in fiery political debates, he was always gracious, willing to listen and yield to other points of view, she said.

“He was always a gentleman,” a customer, who declined to be identified, said.

After being diagnosed with colon cancer seven years ago he was given a little over a year to live, friends said. Many people didn’t know he was sick.

“Never did he complain,” Porath said. “He was never in a bad mood.”

In a muddy lot at the end of Elm Avenue in Ponderay where pickups surround the office of S. Blood Logging, former city council member Sherri Blood said she just recently heard the news of Daugharty’s death.

She served with him on the council for several years.

“We used to sit side by side and keep each other in line,” she said. “The fact is, I’m just going to miss him an awful lot.”

To older brother Dave, Daugharty’s only sibling, the world is a less warm and colorful place.

“He preferred coffee shops of North Idaho and Seattle where the working people lived, and where he could talk to them about is problems,” he said.

Daugharty returned to North Idaho because he wanted to reconnect with the place he had never in his heart left behind, even after spending most of his life elsewhere, he said.

“He was a great humanitarian, who would help you in any way he could,” he said. “That’s what I’m most proud of, of all the things he’s done.”