Born in Spokane during the middle of the Great Depression in 1933, William “Bill” Logan — a U.S. Army veteran who served in Korean and Vietnam before becoming Lewis County sheriff in 1987 — died on Feb. 2, 2025.
A celebration of life will be held for Bill and his late wife of 44 years, Marilyn Logan, who died in 2023, on Saturday, April 19, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Jester’s Auto Museum, located at 321 Hamilton Road in Chehalis.
Instead of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to either the Veterans Memorial Museum or the Twin City Rotary Foundation in Bill and Marilyn’s memory.
The public is invited to attend the celebration of life for Bill and Marilyn.
The Chronicle spoke with two of their daughters, Laura Rider and Doris Logan Westley, on Wednesday, March 5, to learn more about their family.
“Growing up with a father as a policeman, I’m not sure if I can tell too many stories, if you know what I mean,” Rider said.
While originally from Eastern Washington, Bill’s parents moved the family to Centralia, where he would go on to graduate from Centralia High School in 1952. He enlisted in the Army the next year and went on to serve active duty for the next nine years.
“He served statewide (and) was overseas in Korea, Vietnam and Turkey,” Rider added.
While she didn’t know exactly what he did in the Army, Bill did work with a helicopter test unit and in personnel administration. During his time in Turkey, he assisted NATO officials with contracts, according to his own personal notes.
After he got out of the Army in 1962, he moved back to Lewis County and joined the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office, becoming a commissioned deputy in 1963.
Bill worked his way up through the ranks to patrol lieutenant before being elected county sheriff in 1987.
It was during this time that Bill met and eventually married Marilyn on Feb. 11, 1978.
Just after being elected sheriff, he got the opportunity to go to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for special law enforcement leadership training the FBI has available.
“It was pretty cool that he made it there, because he would’ve been more than 50 years old at the time,” Rider said.
Bill and Marilyn resided in Chehalis while Bill was a part of the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office, but after he retired in 1994, they began developing land they owned on Burnt Ridge Road in Onalaska.
On 40 acres, they built a private campground for their family, complete with 10 RV spots and all the hookups.
Bill was also an avid diver and dive instructor who was a member of a local diving club called the Murky Lurkers.
“It was a diving club. I can’t say scuba diving and I can’t say skin diving, because they did both,” Rider said.
The family would make trips up to the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington for Murky Lurker events and camp out in an old converted Weyerhaeuser Company bus.
“It didn’t have a bathroom or running water or anything, but back in the 70s you didn’t need that stuff, you just used the bathroom at the KOA,” Westley said.
Bill’s old converted camper bus would do a lot more than just take the family on trips up to the San Juan Islands.
“In the summer of ‘76, we took a trip in the same bus and there were four of us and our parents, and we ended up in the panhandle of Florida,” Westley said. “There was no GPS, so we just had the mapbook out and we’d look for KOA camps and just know we’d have to go so far each day to make it to the next camp. We did our laundry and went swimming, and our mom cooked on a fire outside most of the time … We like to think he enjoyed doing that. He might’ve told you differently towards the end of his life, traveling with four kids under the age of 18.”
On top of diving and taking road trips, Bill was a firearms safety instructor and a member of Chehalis Eagles and the Twin City Rotary Foundation.
“He hosted parties for the Rotary and the forestry management group he was a part of, too,” Westley added.
He could also be found giving tours or visiting with fellow veterans at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis on most Fridays.
In 2015, Both Bill and Marilyn won the Lewis County Washington Farm Forestry Association’s award for Tree Farm of the Year for their farm in Onalaska — named the J.W. Logan Tree Farm after Bill’s father.
“That was one of the things I think that he was very proud of that he could pass on to us. It was fun, my girls are 25 and 27, and they spent most of their life out there on weekends on the farm,” Westley said.
The couple is survived by their children, Laura Rider (Fred), Karla Mitchell, Doris Logan Westley and Elmer Logan (Bonnie); and their grandchildren, Katie Ferrell (Kaejae), Natasha Rider, Sarah Emerick, Lela Mitchell, Heidi Fisher (Chance), Natalie Elwanger, Zachary Bland and Sarrah Beth Stanton (Derek); and great grandchildren, Keiona, Jazarie and Wesley Ferrell, Anyah Dollarhyde, Charlie and Leanna Emerick, Scarlette and Draper Fraley, Jolene Fisher (on the way) and Sierra, Daniel and Logan Stanton.
Donations in Bill and Marilyn’s memory can be made to the Twin Cities Rotary Foundation by mailing them to P.O. Box 6, Chehalis, WA 98532. For more information on the Twin Cities Rotary Foundation, visit https://twincitiesrotary.com/.
To donate to the Veterans Memorial Museum in their memory, visit the museum from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday at 100 SW Veterans Way in Chehalis. To learn more about the museum, visit its website at https://www.veteransmuseum.org/.
