“A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.” – Richard Powers, The Overstory
He was a painter and she was a pianist.
They were married 42 years. They didn’t have children, but had many friends in church, the Kiwanis Club, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other social groups.
They held a weekly life-drawing session in their home’s basement and hosted an annual Thanksgiving dinner nicknamed “the orphan party” where anyone was welcome. They dreamed of creating communal space on a more permanent basis. They wanted to throw open the doors of their home to give Manzanita a place where friends and neighbors could always gather, learn, and create.
These are among the things people remember about Lloyd and Myrtle Hoffman. Many who knew them personally have moved away or died, but a dedicated group of local volunteers continues to fulfill the couple’s wish for a full-fledged community art center.
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“Since the beginning, the North Coast has always been a haven for artists, but they were missing a central gathering place,” said David Dillon, a founding board member of the Hoffman Center for the Arts. “We established ourselves and the community embraced us.”
Eighteen years after Myrtle’s death, the Hoffman Center is a polestar of cultural life for locals and tourists, and serves the same role for surrounding areas north to Wheeler and south to Tillamook.
The path to the center’s formation didn’t always proceed exactly as imagined. The Hoffmans’ modest, beloved home on the corner of Laneda Avenue and Division Street is gone, demolished and hauled away. Yet the road to actualizing the Hoffman Center did not detour sharply. Standing today in the spot where the Hoffmans’ house used to rest, you can see the art center established in their name. It’s right across the street.
