Missed the Saturday dance, heard they crowded the floor, couldn’t bear it without you, don’t get around much anymore.
Sometimes I think my life is dancing to the beat of old WW II songs. Since losing Georgann in 2018 and moving to Russellville Park, I don’t get around much anymore. But Dolores Taylor died a couple of weeks ago and the trip to Grants Pass from Portland for her memorial service was not given a second thought.
Dee was a member of the class of 1948 at Grants Pass High School. As was I. From that class of 300-plus in 1944, I know of only nine or ten who could answer, “Yo” to the roll call now. There may be a few others. But for us survivors, Dee’s passing had a special sense of loss because among our classmates she was the central unifying force; the one who organized the reunions every five years and kept the trains running on time.
There were no students of color in our school because Grants Pass observed Sundown laws until the late ‘50s. One of the few beacons of light in our community was the Newman Methodist Church where the Reverend Ed Aschenbrenner preached sermons of racial enlightenment and where one of his sons, Lawrence Alden, was a classmate of Dee Braden and Bill Landers. Who knows if Larry’s and Dee’s “going steady” in high school led to Dee’s lifelong membership in the church, but there is little doubt the preaching of Ed Aschenbrenner planted the seeds of social justice in the mind and soul of Dolores Braden.
If you polled our class as to who the stars turned out to be, Dee and Larry would head the list. As a young lawyer in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Larry opened a law office in the belly of the beast, Jackson, Mississippi, at the height of the Civil Rights movement to defend African Americans. He ended his career in Anchorage, Alaska as an advocate for Native Alaskans (we called him Lawrence of Alaska).
In less dramatic fashion, Dee made public service the focus of her life. Standing tall in the shadow of the Reverend Ed Aschenbrenner, she lived her life in Grants Pass as a high school teacher of English, all the while taking active roles in a multitude of public service organizations.
So, on a warm autumn day in October, her friends and family gathered to celebrate her life well lived as a Christian soldier, marching as to war. Dee and I were special friends with a bond that became closer over all those years. I will miss that girl a lot.
We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.
