In Memory

Dorothy Case (Sheahan) - Class Of 1941

Dorothy 'Dottie' Case Sheahan, beloved mother, grandmother, aunt, and friend, passed away on August 13, 2015 in Jackson, Wyoming, surrounded by family, friends, and caring nurses. She was 92 years young. Dottie was born June 6, 1923 in Portland, Oregon and adopted into the family of Albert and Ruth Case.

Dottie attended South Pasadena High School and Chadwick School where she played on the tennis team and was selected to compete in the Ojai Valley Tennis Tournament. Later she attended the University of Oregon where she pledged Kappa Alpha Theta and made lifelong friends. It was during her freshman year that she met and fell in love with Richard 'Dick' Sheahan (SPHS '40), a handsome, extroverted, and humorous classmate. Dick enlisted in the Army Air Corps and Dottie returned to California to participate in the war effort. Dottie and Dick were married in March 1943.

At first the young couple settled in San Marino but after their third child was born, they surprised their friends by moving north to Santa Barbara. Two more children followed. Dottie joined the Junior League and volunteered for the Children's Home Society. Always sympathetic to the homeless, Dottie's children remember that she fed itinerant rail-travelers who knocked on her door asking for food. In addition to the piano and accordion, she also learned to play the guitar and joined a musical group named the Singing Mums, inspired by "The Sound of Music." Dottie had a career of teaching music to children in Massachusetts and California. In 1969 the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts and Dottie made new friends through a combination of tennis, bridge, dinner parties, cross country skiing, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She also earned her M.Ed at Harvard University in 1977. 

Dottie and Dick closed out their careers in Ojai, California where Dottie taught special education at Mupu School in Santa Paula and stayed active playing tennis, volunteering, attending book club and PEO meetings, and enjoying grandchildren. Retirement in 1989 to a house north of Teton Village, Wyoming meant downhill skiing, biking, tennis, reading and camping sing-alongs with children and grandchildren. Dottie and Dick canoe camped with their family at Leigh Lake well into their 80th year. Friends recall dinner invitations that included a chilly ski or snowmobile ride from the plowed road to the house.

In the end, it is hard to imagine a world without Dottie Sheahan. She touched and brightened so many lives and thus came to the end of her life surrounded by so much love. We will remember willowy and stylish Dottie as a principled, strong, and positive woman who was the family's anchor. And of course, all were buoyed by the tremendous outpouring of companionship and kindness from longtime friends who called and visited Dottie during her last year after her beloved husband passed away.

Dottie is survived by daughters Kathleen (Kemble White) Reid, Susanne (Blake) Wilson, Marnie (Tony) Paulus, Caroline Sheahan, and son Casey Sheahan; and six grandchildren.

Ojai Valley News, October 9, 2015