Baker City, Baker County, Oregon
Dorothy I. “Dee” Burke Lopez, 86, of La Pine, a former Baker City resident, died Jan. 8, 2006, at her home with her daughter and son-in-law by her side.
Her memorial service will be at noon Feb. 13 at the Maywood Park Campus of Mount Hood Community College, 10100 N.E. Prescott St., in Portland.
She was born on June 16, 1919, at Baker City to Henry and Isabelle Smith Burke.
She founded the creative writing department at Mount Hood Community College in 1966 and taught there for 37 years. She also taught creative writing at Portland State University for many years.
She is the published author of “The Braid Circle,” a fictional account of Navy life in the early 1940s set at the Puget Sound Navy yard at Bremerton, Wash., and she co-authored “White Nights,” a contemporary romance set in the ski areas of Mount Hood.
She served as editor of two daily newspapers, the Democrat-Herald (now the Baker City Herald) and the Bremerton Sun at Bremerton, Wash. She also was editor of two weekly newspapers, the Gresham Outlook and the Parkrose Enterprise. And she wrote a syndicated column for daily newspapers in Washington and worked as a reporter for The Oregonian and the Oregon Journal, where she also served as co-editor.
She was a former grand worthy adviser of the Rainbow Organization in Oregon. Her hobbies included tennis, swimming, reading, writing, teaching poetry and writing.
During World War II, she wrote a newspaper column for the German edition of the U.S. Army Stars and Stripes. She also served as the recreational director of the U.S. Ambulatory Hospital near Oxford, England. She was one of three American Red Cross workers who helped create enlisted men’s clubs while serving in Austria.
Survivors include her daughters, Patricia Morgan of La Pine, Michaela Carrera of Layton, Utah, and Kathleen Lopez of Lake Oswego; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
She was preceded in death by her parents.
The Baird Memorial Chapel is in charge of arrangements.
Used with permission from: Baker City Herald, Baker City, Oregon, January 13, 2006
Transcribed by: Belva Ticknor