Del Raby, 97, longtime Boy Scouts official, Santa Rosa Rotarian remembered for life of service

Sometimes at Sonoma County gatherings of Rotary Club members or Eagle Scouts, someone will ask who among those present has been active the longest. Until a few weeks ago, whenever that happened an affable, gray-bearded gent named Del Raby was tough to beat.

Raby did not miss a weekly Rotary meeting in nearly 62 years. His phenomenal run as a Boy Scout leader, career scouting executive and supporter commenced about the time he earned the rank of Eagle Scout in wartime 1943, when he was 17.

As a Rotarian and a friend of scouting, Raby did not simply, reliably show up. Rather, he served.

“Just a month ago, he was weeding at the Lewis Learning Center,” said friend and fellow Santa Rosa Sunrise Rotary member Richard Randolph of Santa Rosa. “He had a little stool and his weed tool. He just liked to do what he could do.”

Another longtime friend, Redwood Empire Council scouting executive Charles Howard-Gibbon, said of him, “He was the embodiment of an Eagle Scout.” For Raby, Howard-Gibbon said, “It was all about doing stuff for other people.”

Raby, who wasn’t yet 20 when donned an Army uniform and joined World War II, died Sept. 12 in Santa Rosa. He was 97.

If he wasn’t being helpful to the Rotary Club and the people it serves, or to Boy Scouts and their leaders, it’s possible he was taking part in archaeological digs, or weaving. For a time, he and his late wife, Harriet, had fun operating identical looms.

Delbert Allen Raby was born in Grass Valley on July 21, 1926 — the same year Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s first television and English author A.A. Milne published “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

He grew up in Chico and was a couple of months short of age 16 when the Empire of Japan’s attack on American ships and facilities in and near Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drew the U.S. into World War II.

He joined Chico’s Boy Scout Troop 31 and in October 1943 earned his Eagle Scout Award.

Also while in high school in Chico, Raby participated in the California Cadet Corps, a precursor to Army ROTC. In 1944, the high school graduate enrolled at Chico State College as a forestry major with a minor in business.

Early on, the freshman and three fellows — Don Greene, Harry Estes and Wayne Gaskill — started a fraternity, Lambda Pi. The four of them had pledged the only existing fraternity at Chico, but withdrew in objection to its public, on-campus initiation of pledges.

Early in 1945, Raby left college to join the Army. Superiors sent him to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to train new troops bound for frequently horrific combat in the Pacific.

While in Oklahoma, Raby met and married Mary Good. Del Raby also became a scout volunteer there.

After the war ended, Mary and Del hit the road for a grand adventure: They drove a former Army jeep to California, stopping along the way to explore national parks and other attractions.

Del Raby resumed his studies at Chico State, earning a degree in youth services.

He hired on with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), becoming a scout executive whose primary responsibilities included directing camps in Southern California — among them the prized Cherry Valley camp on Catalina Island.

Raby subsequently took assignments that took him to Boy Scout councils and camps in the Palo Alto, Tahoe, Fresno, San Diego and other areas. He’d been a scouting professional for three decades when he retired in 1981.

A dark shadow was cast on that period of scouting and well before and after by the sexual abuse scandal that saw the victimizing of thousands of Cub and Boy Scouts by den and troop volunteers and others. In a historic court settlement in mid-2021, the BSA agreed to pay $850 million to more than 60,000 former scouts who alleged having been abused by adults in scouting going back decades.

In February of 2020, the Boy Scouts organization in the U.S. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the midst of a quickening deluge of lawsuits from abuse survivors. Earlier this month, the BSA began sending out $2.46 billion in payments to 82,000 men who told of sexual abuse they suffered while scouts.

Howard-Gibbon, the regional Boy Scout executive, said Raby never headed a scout council so he never had the responsibility to remove adults for abusing children.

“Del was never in the middle of any of that,” Howard-Gibbon said.

Del Raby was a young man working for the scouts when he joined a Rotary Club in Southern California in 1961. As he moved among Boy Scout councils throughout the state, he transferred also among Rotary Clubs — in Fontana, Alhambra, San Marino, Mountain View, Mendocino.

He joined the morning club in Santa Rosa in 1987.

Randolph, Raby’s friend and fellow Rotarian, said that two weeks before he died amid a bout of COVID-19, he arrived at the weekly Rotary meeting early and helped with preparations for the meeting. Hospitalized out of town shortly before then, he attended a meeting via Zoom.

“He had an infectious laugh and a wonderful directness,” Randolph said. “His was a life well lived.”

Raby outlived both his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, the former Harriet Cooper.

A celebration of his life is set for 11 a.m. Nov. 4, at Sally Tomatoes, 1100 Valley House Dr. in Rohnert Park.