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Alternative cinema's right-wing champion.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

He was a spy, a helicopter pilot, a patriot and a right-wing conservative who spent his career screening art films for Eugene's liberal elite.

Michael Lamont, owner of the Bijou Art Cinemas, was a private man who didn't exactly hide his views but didn't exactly trumpet them either, longtime friends and employees say.

"He was someone very far to the right to show left-leaning films. There's some ambiguity there that I never penetrated," said Lois Wadsworth, a retired film critic and arts editor.

Lamont died Dec. 22 of Lou Gehrig's disease, which over a half-dozen years slowly robbed him of his ability to walk, eat, breathe, speak and finally live. He was 62.

Gone is a man of enormous talents and contradictions, say many who knew him.

As a young man growing up in El Paso, Texas, he was a "genius" with a perfect grade record, according to his sister, Michaele Rychetsky, of Redmond.

At age 18, he joined the Air Force, which sent him to Yale to learn Chinese. After that, he was based in Taiwan, where his job was to translate Chinese radio transmissions, Rychetsky said.

After his hitch in the Air Force, he joined the Army because that branch would allow him to do what he really wanted: Fly. He became a helicopter pilot and served for an additional five years.

At age 32,...

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