Described by friends and colleagues as a masterful storyteller, Robert Lee "Bob" McCaslin was one of the longest-serving members of the Washington State Senate. Though he was known for his strength of will and good nature, the Spokane Valley Republican wasn’t afraid to challenge legislative decorum. His floor speeches were often pointed and concise as he eviscerated political opponents or led efforts to defeat bills he saw as fiscally irresponsible or unconstitutional. McCaslin, who said wedding vows several times during his life – thrice to the same woman – was irreverently referred to as the legislature’s most eligible bachelor. But despite his personal foibles, he left a legacy of both positive influence and public service nearly unmatched in state history.
From Blue-Collar Ohio
Bob McCaslin was born on April 20, 1926, in Warren, Ohio, a blue-collar town populated largely by European immigrants. By all accounts he had a normal childhood. He was raised by his parents, George and Alene, along with two older siblings, George and Colleen, and one younger brother, Ray. As a middle child in a middle-class family, McCaslin was expected to find work as soon as he could and eventually landed a job working at a grocery store while attending school.
At age 15, he learned with horror that the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and vowed to do his part for his country when he came of age. Just over two years later, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a radio operator onboard a water-transport ship. Beginning in 1944, McCaslin helped ferry fresh water to servicemen on Johnston Island, a tiny atoll more than 700 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii. The island was just big enough for a 6,000-foot-long, 500-foot-wide military landing strip, barracks, mess halls, water tanks, fuel depots, an underground hospital, and a few shop buildings. Primarily used as a refueling base for American submarines and bombers, the island became one of the busiest terminals in the Pacific theater during the height of World War II – even providing a stopover for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay, which carried the world’s first wartime atomic bomb to the city of Hiroshima. On one of his final trips to the island on August 14, 1945, sailors heard that the Japanese had surrendered, and McCaslin was said to have quipped, "They must’ve heard Bob McCaslin was on his way" (McCliment interview). In the months following V-J Day, however, the busy pace on Johnston Island diminished and McCaslin’s overseas service was no longer necessary.
After returning to the U.S., he was stationed for a short time in Yakima, where the Navy made use of the county fairgrounds and nearby Yakima Firing Center for training purposes. It was there that McCaslin met and fell in love with Wanda Moon, whose mother owned the airfield restaurant. The pair married in July 1946 in Ellensburg, around the same time McCaslin was honorably discharged from the Navy after 27 months of service.
Civilian Life
After returning to postwar America, McCaslin attended Washington State College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1950 before doing post-graduate work in economics in 1951 and 1952 (the school became Washington State University in 1959). In the mid-1950s, with a college degree in hand, he took a job as the personnel director for Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation in Spokane, where he established a reputation as a manager who didn’t tolerate fools or foolish behavior.
In the early 1960s, Kaiser asked McCaslin to uproot his family – wife Wanda (b. 1926); young daughter Janie (b. 1947), and adopted son Robert Jr. (b. 1957) – and move to Sydney, Australia, to help rescue the company’s poorest-performing plant, Comalco Proprietary Ltd. For two weeks, McCaslin stood side by side with the plant’s Australian workforce, observing the way things had been running but also demonstrating his work ethic. At the end of the evaluation period McCaslin instituted two changes. The first was that teams would now take their breaks together rather than individually. That way, rather than having a team operating at less than 100 percent efficiency most of the time, it could instead work at full capacity except during the short break period. The second change McCaslin made helped solve perhaps a uniquely Australian challenge: He disallowed the consumption of beer on breaks. The Sydney plant soon rose to become one of the top three Kaiser plants globally.
A few years later, Kaiser tapped McCaslin to assist another plant, the Hindustan Aluminum Corp. in northern India. The company was in the process of selling the plant to a group of investors and needed McCaslin’s expertise to help smooth the transition. While he and his family found the culture shock more pronounced than at his previous duty station, he succeeded in getting the plant and its workers through the process.
When Kaiser asked him to uproot his family once again for another international destination, McCaslin refused, opting instead to walk away from his job and move to a new challenge – real estate – that he’d been flirting with for some time. With an intimate knowledge of how often Kaiser transferred its employees from plant to plant, McCaslin was able to capitalize on the constant need for housing. His former coworkers would often recommend his services to their newest colleagues, and McCaslin’s jovial nature made him a successful salesman. His wife soon followed and got her real estate license, beginning a family business that made the pair well known in the Spokane Valley community. McCaslin was known to introduce himself to groups as "The realtor from the Land of Opportunity" (Padden interview), a clever allusion to the historical name of his community in the valley.
Affairs of the Heart
As a father, McCaslin was described as warm and loving, but formidable if crossed. He knew how to run a tight ship and could be intimidating when the occasion called for it. The McCaslins raised their children to be political conservatives, and McCaslin was known to sit down with his children to discuss constitutional principles and the system of government created by America’s founding fathers.
His opinions and strong will may have gotten the better of him in 1974, when he and Wanda divorced that January. After a cooling-off period, however, the couple remarried exactly one month later. They stayed married for another 15 years before splitting up for the second time in March 1989. McCaslin then met and married Mary Kathryn "Kate" Meidling in August 1989. Kate McCaslin was elected Spokane County Commissioner in 1996 and served eight years before stepping down, later becoming CEO of Associated Builders & Contractors. She and McCaslin divorced in January 1993.
When his former wife Wanda was diagnosed in 1986 with breast cancer that had spread throughout her body, McCaslin sought ways to help ease her suffering as she underwent various treatments. He married Wanda for a third time shortly before her death in 1995, and McCaslin subsequently co-sponsored a bill in the state Legislature that would allow for the study of growing and prescribing marijuana for medicinal use. "My philosophy on a terminal illness is whatever helps you, it’s OK no matter what it is as long as it’s legally obtained. You should be able to get it through prescription," he said ("McCaslin Backs …").
McCaslin soon took an interest in a legislative attorney named Linda Medeiros Callahan, and they married in December 1997. As a first-year deputy King County prosecutor with just two years of legal experience, she ran for the Washington State Supreme Court in 1998 and placed third in the primary. She divorced McCaslin in October 2001 and he remained single for the remainder of his life. When pressed, McCaslin would always say broken marriages were entirely due to his own failings.
Unseating an Icon
In the late 1970s, a consortium of conservative-minded Spokane Valley residents, tired of their liberal representation in the state legislature, went looking for a candidate who could successfully challenge the sitting state senator for the 4th District, William "Big Daddy" Day, a Democrat. The group approached Wanda McCaslin first about running for the seat but she declined, opting instead to remain a realtor despite her political acumen. She suggested that her husband run instead. Though he was already serving six years as a Spokane Valley fire commissioner, he agreed.
In 1980, McCaslin successfully rode Ronald Reagan’s red wave into state elected office, unseating Day to the delight of McCaslin’s conservative supporters. During his early years as a state senator, McCaslin met for coffee almost daily in the Spokane Valley with a group of advisors he referred to as his "coffee klatch" to gather information, solicit advice, and assign strategic tasks.
Fellow Spokane Valley lawmaker Mike Padden, elected to the Washington State House of Representatives the same year as McCaslin joined the senate, and who considered McCaslin one of his great friends, noted that McCaslin was a "Valley first" man of the people, always prioritizing the needs of his constituents over competing legislative interests. McCaslin loved golf, at one time boasting a handicap in the single digits, and enjoyed playing rounds with the people he served. He especially enjoyed playing with his longtime legislative aide Mike McCliment, who worked for McCaslin from 1997 through the senator’s death in 2011. Sitting in on countless meetings with McCaslin over nearly 15 years left McCliment in awe of McCaslin’s ability to bring opponents over to his side by the end of a conversation. When tempers in the legislature heated up, McCaslin would often tap McCliment to join him on an hours-long recharging drive through the wilderness surrounding Olympia as the pair sang along to songs on the radio.
East vs. West
During his 30 years in the senate, McCaslin was a pro-business, anti-tax, small-government advocate. The few times Republicans held a majority, McCaslin chaired the Law and Justice Committee; when the Democrats had control, he’d serve as the ranking member. One issue that frequently interested McCaslin was the possibility of making Eastern Washington a separate state. The idea had been bandied about state government for decades, and McCaslin was a staunch supporter. He and Padden had selected the name Columbia for the 51st state – but a mountain of red tape at the state and federal levels, plus the lack of broad support among Washingtonians, thwarted their efforts.
McCaslin’s other primary issue was trying to prevent the Growth Management Act, an environmentally focused law that "requires the state's largest and fastest growing counties to conduct comprehensive land-use and transportation planning, to concentrate new growth in compact 'urban growth areas,' and to protect natural resources and environmentally critical areas" ("Washington Legislature Enacts ..."). Despite strong opposition from McCaslin and the rest of his caucus, the legislature passed the Growth Management Act on the final day of a special session in 1990.
In the senate, McCaslin understood his opponents' tactics of using emotion to obscure constitutional questions. He often countered those tactics with humor. Padden sometimes referred to his seatmate as "the Don Rickles of the Senate" (Padden interview) for his ability to produce biting one-liners. McCaslin’s personality was a cocktail of charm, determination, strong opinions, and a deep respect for the Constitution, traits that made him a formidable political competitor.
McCaslin occasionally approached his son, Robert Jr., a California schoolteacher, about joining his father in public service, but it wasn’t until after McCaslin's death that Robert Jr. felt called to follow in his father’s footsteps. During his successful 2014 run for office, Bob Jr. said that being a kindergarten teacher had adequately prepared him for life in the State House of Representatives. Bob McCaslin Jr. served in the house until 2023.
The senior McCaslin was often the only vote in opposition to bills before the senate. In fact, he had a sign posted above the door to his senate office that read, "What part of NO don’t you understand?" (McCliment interview). When asked by his son why that was the case, he’d often point to the simple fact that inviting government to do something that the private sector already does cheaper and faster is a recipe for trouble, a tenet Bob Jr. embraced during his own political career.
Retirement and Death
When McCaslin retired in early 2011, he was the last World War II veteran in the Washington State Senate. He was also concurrently serving as a Spokane Valley City Councilmember, having helped orchestrate a conservative takeover of that body. McCaslin was diabetic and had undergone heart surgery years before, and he began developing circulatory issues that led to the amputation of one of his legs. Diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome, a bone-marrow disease also known as pre-leukemia, McCaslin was undergoing rehabilitation and physical therapy at his residence in The Gardens assisted-living facility in Spokane when his health began to deteriorate.
Before he died on March 13, 2011, Governor Christine Gregoire joined a handful of lawmakers closest to McCaslin to pay him a final visit. Surrounded by colleagues, both Republican and Democrat, McCaslin lamented the partisanship that he had seen growing in state government and asked his friends to remember to talk to each other as human beings rather than as political ideologues. Unbeknownst to the crowd that attended McCaslin’s funeral, the longtime public servant, husband, and father had arranged for one more smile. A charmer to the end, McCaslin’s well-wishers departed the service to the blasting tune of James Brown’s "I Feel Good."
