John Archer Rawlins

Obituary For John Archer Rawlins

John Rawlins, beloved brother, husband, father and grandfather, died peacefully April 2, 2026 at his home in Whatcom County, WA.

John grew up in “The Valley” of the Rio Grande River in southern Texas. He went to Edinburg High School where he became proficient in the saxophone and slide rule, while also playing lots of ping pong at the Methodist Church.

John attended the University of Texas where he got his PhD, but also spent time playing badminton, handball and eventually squash. John left his postdoc at the University of Texas to move to the University of Saskatchewan to help set up a lab in Saskatoon, working on a large electron linear accelerator. At the same time, he managed to spend his leisure time canoe camping, fishing, ice fishing, and bowhunting. As if this weren’t enough, John, along with his first wife Mary Busby, were able to form some very important, enduring friendships which are still some of the closest to him and his current wife, Mary Rawlins.

After returning to the US and taking a job teaching physics at a college in Western Pennsylvania, he began serious whitewater canoeing. He was disillusioned with academia so he retrained as a nuclear engineer at the University of Maryland near Washington DC. He got a job at Westinghouse-Hanford and in 1976 he headed west to Washington State with his second wife and 3-week-old baby. They crossed the country in a van decorated with Pennsylvania Dutch stencils that included D2O in the design with whitewater boats strapped to the top and with pots of plants in the cockpits.

After 20 years there in Tri-Cities where he had worked on a small breeder nuclear test reactor until it was closed down in the late ‘80s, and working on the superfund site clean-up, he was then glad to take early retirement. After his retirement, John became a physics and astronomy professor at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham for nearly 20 years. He continued to ride a bike to work, eventually using a recumbent, and finally an electric recumbent trike he rigged up himself. He was quite a sight in the early days of e-bikes riding the highways with a tall flag on the back of the trike. He also had a regular bike he could mount on the bus to travel to work, or the Amtrak to travel to Portland the occasional weeks he did grandchild care there.

By the time he moved to Bellingham in 1996 he had switched to rafting, and then once here by the Salish Sea he and his family became avid ocean kayakers and especially loved the trips to the San Juan Islands and Desolation Sound.

John continued to play music throughout his life. It was a great joy to him. After a stroke made it impossible to play his beloved recorders, he learned to play the dulcimer. He had fun playing in a recorder group in Tri-Cities and in a quintet here in Bellingham. He loved traveling to Port Townsend for workshops and to the gorge for Menucha. He joined the Recorder Orchestra of Puget Sound with his large bass recorder.

John was instrumental in the early days working with the City of Bellingham to transition off fossil fuels. Today his family is still part of the vibrant Goshen transitions group in their neighborhood. He got interested in permaculture and he and his family worked for many years on forest restoration and gardening on their 10 acres.

John is survived by his wife Mary Wister, children Mark (Larissa), Laura, and Michael (Whitney) Rawlins, sister Jo Ann Jones, brother Terry (Betty) Rawlins, nephews Kyle (Anne) Jones, Trey Jones, Kyle (Crystal) Rawlins and niece Adriana Rawlins, as well as his grandchildren Madeleine and Adam. He was predeceased by his brother-in-law Knox Jones and nephew Kirk Jones.

John chose Terramation with Wildflowers Funeral Concepts in Ferndale. A memorial will be held at the end of July on the family property.

Donations in his name can be made to the Portland Recorder Society, or Seattle Recorder Society. The latter organization’s website picture currently shows John with his big recorder in the back row, right.

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