Obituaries December 2025
Jon Lyle Kingsley: December 1932-April 2025
Lyle was born in Portland to Lionel Kingsley and Keitha Luce. The family moved to Cedar Mill in 1940. Lyle attended the Cedar Mill Union School and later in life he build a scaled replica of the schoolhouse that was on display at the Cedar Mill History Museum and at the Cedar Mill Cider Festivals.
Lyle enlisted in the Coast Guard after high school, then started work at Tektronix in 1956. He retired at age 55 due to blindness.
He was always creating whimsical artistic items from odds and ends and scrap materials and had a large workshop next to his log home. One of the windows of that home was salvaged from the Union School and he used that to determine the scale of the school model.
He is survived by his younger brother Ron Kingsley, his daughter Connie Jasnoch, four grandchildren and six great grandchildren. We didn’t learn of his death until this year’s Cider Festival, when his daughter Connie brought the schoolhouse model to the Cider Festival. Please see the 2016 story about the model for more photos and information about Lyle and his creations.
Kenneth Lee Anderson: September 1929-November 2025
Most of us knew Ken Anderson from his years running Cedar Mill Lumber (later Cedar Mill Landscape Supply).
In September 1929, a baby was born to Conrad (Connie) and Julia Grady Anderson. Conrad was out of town on business that day and received a message that “The baby has his mother’s good looks and his father’s plumbing.”
Vernonia, Oregon, a town with less than a thousand people at the time, is where Connie and Julia raised Ken and his brother Jack and sister Margaret. Connie was the superintendent of the Oregon-American Lumber Company, a major lumber mill in its day. The mill closed for a couple of years during the Great Depression but reopened in 1936. While the rest of the country was still contending with the aftermath of the Depression, Vernonia hummed along, rousing its residents with the whistles that signaled the start of a new shift and the end of another day.
As a young man, Ken lived and breathed the logging industry and would retell memories of the days and nights in the lumber mill’s camps, deep in the woods, where loggers felled the trees to be sent back to the mill for processing.
After one year of college, Ken returned home and worked in the woods until 1951 when he was drafted and worked as an MP at The Presidio in San Francisco. On returning home to Vernonia, he met and married Odean in 1955. They moved to Beaverton in 1957.
In 1954, Ken’s dad had purchased Cedar Mill Lumber, complete with a hardware store, on Barnes Road near Cornell. Ken and his brother Jack ran the business, with Odean running the hardware store. After Jack passed away, Ken continued to run the business, changing with the economic times. For a time, they rented outdoor equipment from the big quonset huts. The hardware store was leased to BMC and later to Powell Paint Center.
They eventually began to focus on landscaping materials and changed the name to Cedar Mill Landscaping Supply to avoid confusion, since they no longer carried lumber products. Ken’s son Kurt grew up around the business and worked alongside Ken for many years. He now manages the company. Until the age of 96, Ken reported to his same desk every day until last October.
The funeral was held on November 19, at St. Cecelia’s in Beaverton. At the gathering afterwards, neighbors and friends recalled the many conversations with Ken about earlier days in the community. He always had great stories to tell, and we will miss him.
