Bob Roth, a champion of the Auburn community, dies just shy of 75th birthday

The Auburn community learned Wednesday that it had lost a champion. Retired firefighter, local activist and volunteer Robert "Bob" Roth died in his sleep overnight of natural causes, according to several friends and colleagues. He would've turned 75 on Sept. 1. "He was Mr. Auburn," said Matt Tribur, a retired South Placer Fire Protection District firefighter and member of Auburn's Hook and Ladder Company No. 1. "He knew everybody, and if you needed something he was the guy to go to. He was just the nicest guy in the world." A year ago, Tribur brought Roth into the ranks of the Hook and Ladder Company, a nonprofit organization that supports the Auburn City Fire Department and its personnel. One of the group's big annual events is the Fourth of July Pancake Breakfast during which Hook and Ladder members serve some 600 morning meals. Roth volunteered for that event as well as other fundraisers the group hosted. But he was also an active supporter of the Auburn Chamber of Commerce, his Catholic church community, the Tahoe Club social club and Auburn State Theatre Inc., the nonprofit operating the historic theater of the same name. "He was everywhere," said his longtime friend Tim Sands, whose wife Colleen is executive director of Auburn State Theatre. "Bob was always there if you needed him." Sands, a retired Placer County deputy district attorney, said Roth moved to Auburn from the Los Angeles area in the late 1980s and worked for the Newcastle Fire Protection District. After his retirement he continued to serve as a fire marshal specializing in industrial fire investigation and prevention, said Herb Yue, a retired Auburn firefighter and a member of Hook and Ladder Company No. 1. Yue's nephew, Dustin Yue, grew up in Auburn and knew Roth for some 20 years, working with him as a millwright servicing newspaper printing presses. Roth traveled all over the U.S. and to Mexico and China plying a trade that few people today are familiar with. "He learned about printing at a trade school in the Los Angeles area – setting type, old-school style printing," Dustin Yue said. "He enjoyed it and found that he could make a living at. It's a disappearing art." In fact, Roth helped maintain printing equipment at the Auburn Journal and loaned one of his old linotype printing presses to the Journal's Newspaper Museum. At a Chamber of Commerce mixer hosted at the Auburn Journal last week, Roth happily took a group of attendees on a guided tour of the printing press in the back of the building. "He definitely enjoyed making friends," Dustin Yue said. "He would chat with just about anybody." Yue said Roth had a brother and a sister in the Los Angeles area, and a stepson with his ex-wife. "I look at it as I lost a brother," said Matt Tribur. "He was just a good man with a big heart." Tribur said he believes plans are underway to host a public memorial for Roth in the near future, with a date to be determined.