Randy Charles Coleman 1946 - 2024

Randy Charles Coleman died peacefully at home with his wife Irene Coleman by his side the evening of January 7, 2024, due to complications from a hospitalization in mid-October for a pelvic bone infection after which he never fully recovered. 

The oldest and only boy of six children, Randy was born November 22, 1946, in McMinnville, Oregon, to Herbert “Bert” Coleman and Wilma Huntley Coleman. The family resided in St. Paul until late grade school, when they moved to McMinnville, where Randy grew up working and playing, like many local kids, in his family’s bean and strawberry fields on their farm just north of McMinnville.  Randy attended McMinnville High School, where he enjoyed science, math and FFA classes, graduating in 1965, and, like his dad before him, went on to attend Oregon State University from 1965 to '66 before leaving school to enlist in the Army Reserve in 1967 during the Vietnam War.  In December of 1967, he married Jan Cellers Coleman. After a brief stint in Portland, the couple returned to McMinnville, where they had daughter Brenda and bought a farm on the south side of McMinnville, just south of his dad’s filbert orchard. Randy grew a variety of row crops over the years and started a lime spreading business.  

Randy and Jan divorced in 1985, and Randy went on to marry his current wife, Irene Rannebeck Paulson Coleman, in June of 1990, where together during the 1990s they transitioned from growing row crops to chestnut trees and where Randy was determined to finish out his days doing what he loved best: farming.  It seems  Randy landed on the planet a farmer, like generations of his family before him, and was blessed to be able to spend a lifetime doing what he loved with many members of his immediate and extended family, including his dad, mom, sisters, uncles and cousins.  In addition to farming, Randy also enjoyed joking and laughing, a good hamburger and milkshake,  going for drives, and listening to music in his pickup and semi-trucks, and piloting small planes, even flying/delivering a couple of small planes from the factory in Florida cross country to Oregon with his family in the late 1970s. 

Randy had a lot of health challenges over the last 10 years or so of his life, but this guy never knew quit. He fought the good fight like the strong-willed farmer he was, kept his “feist” and great sense of humor the entire way, and continued to defy the odds until the very end.  He will be, and already is, missed.

Randy is survived by his wife, Irene; daughter, Brenda Coleman and husband David of Philomath; stepdaughters, Cindy Beck and husband Kevin of Stayton, Anita Mills and husband Shannon, and Lisa Parker, of McMinnville; sisters, Becky Brewster, Connie and Gege Coleman, and Annette Gunderson; grandchildren; and great-grandchildren. 

The family plans on having a service for Randy in the spring.