NEWPORT — Ed Cameron died on the first Monday of the New Year just minutes before the Newport sky lightened to dawn. The surprising death of the 94-year-old artist, writer, and showman whom many thought might well live forever brought the expected tears, but mostly it inspired smiles and laughter among friends recalling memories of the man once known as the Mayor of Nye Beach.

“To me, Ed was the bridge between the old Newport and the Newport that I moved into in around 2000,” said Gary Lahman, a retired medical technologist. “He could tell these stories about Newport that many of us didn’t know. He was kind of a link between the old Nye Beach and what Nye Beach was in 2000, which is not what it is now. He was like the bridge to the past.”

Cameron died after a brief illness at 6:50 a.m. Jan. 5 at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital. I learned of his death in a text less than an hour later. I wrote about Cameron numerous times — about his Bloomsday celebrations held in Nye Beach on June 16, about his graphic novel Gilmore by the Sea, about his first solo art show, The Moment, held at the Yaquina River Museum of Art in 2024, and most recently to get his thoughts on the sale of the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

The Sylvia Beach Hotel was formerly the Hotel Gilmore, the “flophouse” Cameron once called home that inspired his graphic novel. While others expressed outrage that the Sylvia Beach Hotel would now be the more refined Hotel Sylvia, Cameron, having experienced the transition from the Hotel Gilmore, took a more reasoned view. “The improvements being made now are again saving the building,” he said. “It’s quite simply acknowledging progress.”

Cameron was a skinny guy with a likewise skinny braid peeking from beneath his ever-present cap. Prior to moving to Nye Beach in the ‘70s, he graduated from Portland State University, married, had children, divorced, taught high school and delivered pizza in Los Angeles. It was there he decided he didn’t want to die in California and came back to Oregon, eventually making his way to Newport. “I used to wonder how people could live on the coast when they could be living in Portland,” he said in an interview about his graphic novel. “Now I’ve been here 32 years. Nye Beach — I’m still trying to find words for it myself.” That was 2011. For 14 more years, he remained the lively, joyous guy at the heart of the arts scene.  

Artist and Newport City Councilor Cynthia Jacobi remembers meeting Ed when she moved to Newport in the late 1990s. “He was just this kind of dapper, friendly gentleman around Nye Beach.”

When Cameron invited Jacobi to take part in his annual Bloomsday Celebration, she got to know the literary Cameron. “He just opened up my mind to the world of James Joyce and Ulysses,” she said. “I struggled reading it when I was in high school and college, but instead of reading Ulysses as a chore, he made it a joy. He just made it come alive to me.”

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Friends remembered Cameron as a guy who liked to dress up. For the Bloomsday Celebration, he favored a white linen suit and white cap. “I think he thought he looked Irish, but we kind of thought he looked like a real thin Colonel Sanders,” Jacobi said. For the millennial celebration in 2000 at the Newport Performing Arts Center, Lahman recalls Ed as “a gentleman with a top hat, red, white, and blue garb, dancing around on the stage.”

They remembered him for the stories he shared at the Writers on the Edge open mics where they were introduced to Jack Patch, Columbine, Marina, and Balzac — characters  that would one day inhabit Cameron’s graphic novel. He was a janitor at the Hatfield Marine Science Center and spent time at the Mount Angel Abbey before deciding the religious life wasn’t for him, Lahman said.

He was the guy, even recently, who showed up at Newport’s 60+ Activity Center, “playing guitar and singing with gusto,” said writer Sue Fagalde Lick. “I was amazed he was still getting out. He would show up at with a box of harmonicas. I don’t think he could hear worth a damn, but he wanted to be there. He represented the old times here. He was definitely into all the arts, but also an old hippie.”

Cindy Hanson Steensland will remember Cameron as the gentleman who saw her sitting alone and asked her to dance.

“I remember going to Cafe Mundo by myself and feeling very lonely, and as soon as I saw the smile on Ed’s face, I was with my tribe. At least he made you feel that way. He would come up to me at my table, bow down, and say, ‘Would you like to dance?’ And then we would both break into a wild dance.”

Early on, Steensland knew Cameron from Cafe Mundo and open mic night at Writers on the Edge. It was only later she discovered Cameron’s other gift. “I had no idea of his talent with art. I mean, he could draw something with five lines, and you knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. It was amazing. He was one of the most joyful people I’ve ever met. He never lost interest in anything. He was fascinated and humored by everything. He was a Renaissance man.”

Survivors include Cameron’s brother, John (wife, Vicki) of Portland; daughters, Marcel of Portland, Ellen of Coarsegold, Calif., and Caitlin (husband, Link Leuthold) of Mercer Island, Wash.; son, Brian (wife, Jennifer) of Eugene, as well as several grand- and great-grandchildren. He was pre-deceased by his daughter Darcy.  Marcel Cameron said memorial services will be held at a future date. 

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