Lasting Memories

Diarmuid McGuire
Nov. 5, 1942-Feb. 5, 2023
Ashland, Oregon

We are sad to share that our beloved father, husband and son-in-law, Diarmuid McGuire, died on Sunday, February 5. His indomitable love for family, community, politics and beavers remained passionate to the end, but his physical being could not sustain a weak heart and a bad fall.

A former resident of Palo Alto and long time owner of the Green Springs Inn in Ashland, Oregon, Diarmuid believed in the power of community to elevate individuals and create common good. He saw the inn as a vessel to bring people together – for community dances, weddings, memorials, holiday fairs, Pinehurst School fundraisers, parties, storytelling, -- and food. He believed that it was possible for people to coalesce around shared values to elevate children, preserve ecosystems and rescue humanity.

Born in New Orleans on November 5, 1942, Diarmuid grew up after age 4 in Pittsburgh, PA. and graduated from North Hills High School as a debate champion and aspiring writer. He attended Princeton, graduated in 1964, and promptly joined the country’s newly created Peace Corps, where he was deployed to Uganda. A teacher in a British-run school in the outback, Diarmuid rode his motorcycle through points of armed conflict learning, in the process, that being white and American provided safety that others did not have.

Assessing his next move, Diarmuid devoured the Newsweek subscription provided to Peace Corps members. One issue described the summer of love that would soon take place in San Francisco. That settled it. He immediately applied to graduate school at Stanford (he knew the campus was somewhere near the city, although he mistook it for an arm of the University of California) with the goal of a master’s degree in communication and a career at the Wall Street Journal.

Then came the summer of 1968. As an intern for Newsweek, Diarmuid was assigned to report on the Democratic Party’s presidential convention in Chicago. Wearing a tie and carrying his reporter’s notebook, he wandered through the tumult outside the convention headquarters. He saw law enforcement positioned on bridges with automatic weapons and cops beating protestors with bully clubs. Despite the tie (in truth, it may have said “vote for pig”) and the credentials, when he got too close, he too was swept up in the paddy wagon, spending the night in a jail cell with members of the Chicago Seven.

It was an immediate life-changing experience and the end to his corporate journalistic aims. When he returned to Stanford in the fall, he committed full bore to anti-Vietnam War activism, becoming editor of the Plain Rapper, Palo Alto’s alternative anti-draft newspaper. Many demonstrations, a few broken windows, and a jail stay later, he shifted to conventional politics as campaign manager for a congressional campaign for David Harris, former Stanford anti-war leader.

The campaign was a bust, but the silver lining was meeting a young volunteer at an event planning meeting. That introduction to Pam Marsh led to much more, including marriage and, eventually, four children – Kerry, Meghan, Padraic, and Molly. As Diarmuid remarked at the time, “The electoral system may not be the best way to change the world, but politics sure helps people get together.”

That began a 20 year residency in Palo Alto, where Diarmuid worked as an independent marketing consultant, and later director of community affairs for Stanford Children’s Hospital, (which became the new Packard Children’s Hospital during his tenure), and later at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.

In 1994, spurred by the chance to live in a small community, the family (including Pam’s parents, Walt and Barbara Marsh) purchased Green Springs Inn and moved from downtown Palo Alto to the mountains above Ashland, Oregon. Diarmuid’s career as an innkeeper, restaurant manager, maintenance man, community enthusiast and occasional rabble rouser blossomed. He advocated for Pinehurst School, the birth of the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument, the development of Green Springs Fire District, and many other neighborhood and regional causes. In 2003 the family moved to Ashland, where they have lived while Diarmuid and his son Padraic continued to operate (and expand) the inn.

Diarmuid never gave up his passion for righting the world. Although he would expound on climate tumult, ecosystem destruction, right wing politics, fascism, and Republicans, he remained fixated on hope – most recently, in the form of beavers, which he viewed as a practical and metaphorical answer to a world in crisis. His final instruction to all of us was to save the beaver.

Donations in Diarmuid’s honor are welcome at the Beaver Coalition https://www.beavercoalition.org/ or Friends of Cascade Siskiyou National Monument, https://www.cascadesiskiyou.org/