Lawrence Lee Odle had foreign-service career
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A knack for leadership was his world passport, but music made Lawrence Lee Odle feel most at home. He managed to practice both during a 19-year career in foreign service, supervising overseas operations in health, agriculture and education for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Mr. Odle died of cancer last Tuesday, April 3, in his native Seattle. He was 85.
He'd grown up on a Meadowdale farm, graduating at age 16 from Edmonds High and earning Eagle Scout honors. He found his ear for music blowing a trumpet at Edmonds, then took up the tuba when it turned out the University of Washington had too many trumpet players.
As a member and leader of UW's first marching band, he accompanied the Huskies to the 1937 Rose Bowl. Bandmate Bert Pound, who played snare drum, remembers that when the musicians arrived by train in Southern California, they found any visions of hotel comfort quickly put to rest.
"They left us in the sleeping cars in the middle of that dog-gone railroad yard," Pound says.
Mr. Odle served as a major in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and it was in Berlin that he met Helga Rohrig, an airport interpreter who became his wife of 53 years.
His career with the Agency for International Development (AID) began with an assignment in Lashkar Gah, capital of Afghanistan's Helmand province. "That was really out in the sticks, especially in the middle of the '50s," says daughter Bettina Nordby of Lake Forest Park, who was 9 at the time.
From there it was on to New Delhi, Iran and back to Afghanistan. Then came Vietnam, where he oversaw AID airlift operations during the war, but without his family, and finally a memorable, four-year posting in Rio de Janeiro.
Nordby says her father was exceptionally broad-minded and tolerant. "I think his biggest heartache in life was when he had to fire somebody," she says.
Without his family in Vietnam, Mr. Odle turned to a familiar source of company - his music. He found an old bass and played with an impromptu band, and continued to play when he was transferred to Brazil.
After retiring in 1975, Mr. Odle and his wife spent time in Maui, La Conner and Whidbey Island, where he joined local symphonies as a string bass player.
Bob Odle says his older brother once bought a new string bass and, rather than try packing it as check-in baggage for his return to Maui, bought a ticket for it instead.
"He got the junior fare because it was less than 6 years old," Bob Odle says. "It sat on the seat next to him."
It was a reunion that prompted Mr. Odle's last big trip, to Chicago in June. His daughter had gotten together a half-dozen folks who'd lived together back in Lashkar Gah in the mid-1950s.
Mr. Odle already wasn't feeling well, and it wasn't much later that doctors discovered he had cancer.
"When you come right down to it, a father just seems like an ordinary person to a daughter," says Nordby, who sat with her father in his last hours. "But everybody who knew him admired him and respected him and thought he was a really good man. He always did his job well and never did an unkind thing to anybody."
Mr. Odle was preceded in death by his wife, who died in 1999. Other survivors are son Lawrence Lee Jr. of Seattle; brothers Bob of Seattle and Jim of Clinton; sisters Charlotte Butler of Sylmar, Calif., and Kay Warren of Bothell; and five grandchildren.
At his request, no memorial service will be held.