A spectacular and sometimes controversial tower some call the lighthouse rises nine-stories or 124 feet above the northern tip of the Long Beach Peninsula just south of Leadbetter Point State Park.

Today, a welder’s bucket swings precariously on a long metal arm in the salty ocean air, nearly 90 feet above the earth. A 57-year-old man known to friends as “Chuck” is inspecting the steel structural supports – metal 4-by-4 counterparts – held together by welded joints and heavy steel bolts. The carpenter takes the height and danger into consideration and rises to the challenge. A man of strong skilled hands and a keen engineer’s mind, Charles Neaman is simply doing his job; doing it – as is the habit of this master craftsman – to the best of his ability. He began carpentry like father and his before him, apprenticing with a skilled mentor. Neaman picked up the saw and hammer as a very young man and never looked back.

Neaman was raised in the small Long Island town of Massapequa, not far from New York. During his youth, Massapequa felt like a small New England village. Neaman matured like any rural boy. His grandfather was a bayman, a gatherer of oysters, fish, mussels and bait. Neaman spent a good part of his youth on Great South Bay, kicking around with his grandfather or hunting ducks and geese in his small wooden punt. The most important lesson he garnered from his grandpa was more specific: “Nothing is more important than a man’s honor.” The second value was a strong work ethic.

With the work ethic came skill. Neaman spent a good part of his apprenticeship with a German carpenter named Heinz Pfaff, a barrel-chested man with huge muscular hands and a big heart. One Sunday morning, the Neamans went to church. When they returned, their family home had burned to the ground.

Neaman remembers how Pfaff came around that afternoon and stood looking sadly at the rubble and at the dejected family. All they had left were their church clothes and shiny Sunday shoes. Speaking with a strong German accent to Neaman’s father, Charles, Pfaff matter-of-factly declared, “You are going to need work shoes tomorrow.” It had snowed hard that day on Long Island. Pfaff took off his shoes and handed them to the father, and then walked through the snow to his car.

The next morning they began to rebuild the house. Family and community hung together like the foundation of that new home, each board bound together with shiny steel nails and a liberal dousing of love and commitment.

Neaman’s parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His father was a bishop. A strong sense of family and commitment to God followed the boy like a long shadow. Along with those values he learned about prejudice. The history of that church is fraught with hardship, but the reality of discrimination only made Neaman stronger.

Like most teens, Neaman rebelled against the authority of the church and against the strong hand of his father, but not for too long. He joined the armed services and was sent to Germany, narrowly avoiding combat in Vietnam. The young man was patriotic, but Neaman was one of two in his company who weren’t sent into the conflict. A number of the young men in his outfit died.

Out of the service, Neaman enrolled at Brigham Young University where he studied for a year, then moved back to New York. Carpentry was on his mind. At 23, he was cajoled into a triple date. He met a lovely 17-year-old student with curly lustrous hair, soft brown eyes and a determination that would guide her and her family in the decades to come.

As Neaman recalls, “She was a hot-looking honey with a tube top and hot pants.” Like most young men, Neaman was smitten. As it turned out, the woman had more than just good looks. Neaman credits his wife, Debbie Ekelman, with bringing him back to God, the church and his core values.

Ekelman was a Russian Jew with strong heredity back to the old country. “I brought a Jewish girl home and mom cried,” states Neaman. But attitudes change and the family became tight. The Neamans had three children: Keith, Chris and Nicole. The oldest boy is now 30 and a doctor doing reconstructive surgery in Michigan.

Debbie is an active woman with energy to spare. She has been an alcohol and drug abuse counselor, and nursed the infirm. She describes herself as “a seeker of knowledge, a connoisseur of life and an entrepreneur.” Like her husband, she is also a believer in the work ethic. “What I’m thankful to my husband for is that he taught my children to work.”

After spending most of their lives in New York, the Neamans spent nine years in Utah, and have lived the last five in Chinook, Wash., where Chuck Neaman has built a house with his own two hands, mostly working on the structure after long work days as the foreman at Leadbetter Farms for Craig Tillotson, the entrepreneur and a major principle in Nu-skin. Tillotson bought the land and developed a theme-park-like domain that nestles artfully into the sand dunes just north of the Oysterville Approach.

The property has remained controversial because of the height of the new water tower, a structure that rises like a lighthouse above the Pacific Ocean and supplies fire suppression for his 1,200 acres. Neaman defends the structure and the park-like atmosphere of the private property.

If the building is controversial, no man can condemn the brilliance of the construction. The edifice is an engineering marvel, built on 55 pilings sunk 48 feet under ground. On top of the pilings, Neaman oversaw the pouring of 360 yards of concrete, “Just for the foundation.” There are 10 tons of rebar in that cement slurry alone. 55-foot steel beams – 247 pounds each – rise to the top of the tower, offering a view consummate with Sauron’s tower in the Lord of the Rings. With the verdant landscape of Leadbetter Point State Park to the immediate north, the view is inspiring.

Neaman also played a major role in the construction of the three-story rock house called the Barn that defines the property. From the woven oak paneling whose idea Neaman borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to the Disney-like tree houses that nestle into the old growth Sitka Spruce that punctuate the property, Neaman has left an inspiring mark on Leadbetter Farms.

Neaman refused to fall the small forest in front of his own house in Chinook, a home with a view, but a vista that weaves thorough a pastoral setting. Sitting in his living room and gazing on a salmon-hued sunset through large picture windows across Baker Bay, the Neamans reinforce each others love of the Columbia-Pacific Region and their rich commitment to each other.

“We believe in eternal marriage. Why would I go to heaven if Debbie wouldn’t be there with me?” The question is rhetorical. Saying that, he sits down to an Italian dinner his wife has lovingly prepared. “I grew up with immigrants fresh off the boat, the Irish, Italian and Germans from Europe. Peace to me means men treating other men-all men-as brothers.”

He talks about the National Apprenticeship Program that he has supported for most of his adult life. Today he has four apprentices of different ethnic backgrounds and remains committed to a hand-me-down program of passing on a craftsman’s gift to the next generation.

Flat-bellied with a sandy mustache and leathered face from long days of manual labor, Neaman relishes a marinara sauce with meatballs over homemade ravioli. He takes a short break from the repast, and talks about his three loves: his wife, God and a European work ethic, his own brand of a sacred trinity. Eating pasta while watching a brilliant fireball of sunlight fall over the Columbia River, the man feels lucky; lucky for a full journey through life, for love and for the challenge of the eternal unknown. Studying the capable man, it is fair to venture that he is well prepared.