Obituary

Avis Hobbs was born deaf in Electron, Washington in 1913. She died blind on Vashon Island, Washington in 2003.
The 90 years between her birth and her death were filled with challenges – from the death of her father when she was 2 years old to her new home burning down on the Oregon Coast shortly after marriage.
Through it all she was a prolific artist with a wicked sense of humor.
“Muzz,” as her daughter called her, was politically incorrect in a loving way.
The parade of friends over the years was proof of this.
There was the high school friend who was sent to a Japanese internment camp. They were pen pals for a half-century.
There was the woman who lived in a garbage dump in Bay City. She fed her, listened to her, offered her showers and support.
And after friends – or maybe along with them – there were animals.
Dogs and cats found their way to her front porch. She took them in, loved them.
As a young child, she was taken to Tacoma for an operation that helped her hear.
She graduated valedictorian of her class at Kapowsin High School, which was across the street from her home.
During World War II she attended Yakima Community College briefly. It was not a happy time.
She then received a scholarship to attend the University of Washington, where she studied art.
Watching people dive into dumpsters for food made her uncomfortable with attending university, so she said, and so she returned to her hometown to live with her mother and stepfather without a diploma in hand.
While home, she worked in the bulb fields in the Orting Valley, walking off a job once when she learned the men were paid more than the women for the same work. She was rehired.
She also worked cleaning rooms at a resort at Tanwax Lake, which is where she met Ernie Arthur, coming home from World War II. They married and moved to Oregon in the early 1950s.
It’s unclear if any of her art went up in flames when her home burned in Bay City. There is no artwork that is before that time. And she never discussed it.
So her portfolio of work begins in 1952 and a series about the presidential election that year. Ernie Arthur is featured along with other characters of the town, including a gay man that Allison is named after.
She briefly served as a librarian for the city of Bay City. Otherwise, she did not hold jobs, as that was not the norm of the day. So her paper selection for her art was scraps. It included large lumber labels from the Ralph Angel Lumber Company of Portland, Oregon. Ernie worked in Tillamook and would bring home the large labels that she used the back of for a variety of art.
Efforts to become published were difficult during those years. An editor of the Portland, Oregonian, returned her artwork once, complimenting her for her “professional and smart” work but chiding her for the presentation because she used chalk on those leftover lumber labels.
Over the years, as her eyesight became worse and she was deemed to be legally blind. She used thick Bic ballpoint pens and thin typewriter paper. The ink bled through the paper. Then the lines became thicker. Some times she experiments with brown and red pens.
Her daughter, Allison Arthur, loved her dearly and called her “Muzz” early on. She liked the name and thought it represented her art as well.
It must be noted that was die-hard news consumer. News was important to her and she listened people of all walks of life, introducing her daughter to Nightly News with Walter Cronkite.
Nature also was important to her, and she watched the days turn to nights, usually with a cup of coffee, sitting on the front porch, until it was cold.
She also enjoyed listening to opera and would take her transistor radio out in the rain to listen to a good set.
Her daughter once took her artwork to San Francisco to try to get her published. But a cartoon instructor in Berkeley said the same thing: “Smart. Excellent. But the paper and size is all wrong.”
The World Wide Web doesn’t judge a book by the weight of the paper or what’s written on the back of the piece.
And so, during the pandemic, MuzzPostHumorously.com was born with the assistance of a colleague, Marian Roh, a graphic artist who Allison knew to have a kindred sense of social justice and wicked sense of humor.

Please see www.muzzposthumorous.com for that collection.