Thomas L. Schauer

May 29, 2008 03:24 pm

— Thomas L. Schauer, formerly of Stillwater, died in his sleep on Wednesday, May 28, 2008, surrounded by his family. He died of complications of multiple myeloma, a rare form of bone marrow cancer. He had managed it successfully for almost 11 years before succumbing quickly in recent months. He was 72.
Tom was born in Bartlesville in 1935 to Eugene and Thelma Schauer. Tom’s family moved to Tahlequah and then to Stillwater in 1942, when his father joined the Oklahoma A&M faculty. Tom graduated from Stillwater High School in 1952, from Oklahoma A&M in 1957 and from the Harvard Business School in 1959. As a young man he was always involved in athletics, including high school wrestling and track and college track. Later in life, he was an avid skier and golfer and was a lifelong runner, competing in many 5K and 10K runs over the years. He also loved playing the guitar and was quite an accomplished musician. As a father, he particularly enjoyed taking his children on hiking, rafting, camping and skiing trips.
After college, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area. In 1962, he moved to Southern California, where he met and married Diana Miller in 1964. They lived in Manhattan Beach, Calif., for their entire life together. Tom was the chief financial officer for several start-up electronics firms in the 1960s and 70s. During the 1980s, he started his own telephone answering bureau business. Through acquisitions during the 1980s and 90s, he expanded that business to include about a dozen bureaus covering a wide swath of Southern California. He sold that business and retired in 1997 upon being diagnosed with cancer. For most of the remainder of his life, he responded well to the ever improving therapy drugs used to combat the disease, until his health failed in the last few months.
He is predeceased by his parents.
He is survived by his wife, Diana; his son, Thomas E. Schauer of Washington, D.C.; his daughter, Teresa L. Schauer of Beirut, Lebanon; and a younger brother, Robert E. Schauer and his wife, Patricia (Sewell) Schauer, of Signal Hill, Calif. All were at his bedside with him during his final hours.