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Loralene James ’62

May 5, 2018, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, of natural causes.

Lorie was born in Alameda, California, and moved with her family to Portland in 1951, where she attended Sylvan Grade School and Lincoln High School. She studied at Reed for two years and then moved to the Bay Area, where she worked for AT&T and earned her bachelor’s degree in history at UC Berkeley.

Lorie returned to Portland, joined Georgia Pacific as an executive secretary, and, in 1967, married Tim James. When their first child, Jason, was born 10 years later, she left Georgia Pacific. After Tim left his corporate job at Freightliner to begin a commercial fishing operation, Lorie assumed financial accounting for the business’s three corporations while spending months alone each year raising Jason and their second son, Jared. With a strong sense of civic duty, she volunteered many hours at the boys’ cooperative preschool and participated at civic meetings on a variety of issues. She was a 30-year member of the League of Women Voters, serving on the board for 20 of those years. An AFS exchange student in high school, Lorie supported the program throughout her life by interviewing applicants and running fundraising events each spring at Lakeridge High School. She loved the performing arts, attending the symphony, opera, and ballet, and listened daily to NPR. In addition to annual sojourns to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, she held season tickets for local theatres. Lorie is survived by her husband, Tim, and her sons, Jared and Jason.

Appeared in Reed magazine: September 2018

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