96-Year-Old Seattle Woman Honored by Former Students

Author and Seattleite Doris Ray shatters preconceptions about seniors who are living in the upper reaches of old age. A political activist who devours the news, drives regularly and swims two or three times a week, Doris is now looking forward to a very special event.

She is about to be honored and her book celebrated by the Doris Ray Fan Club consisting of students whom she taught in Fairbanks, Alaska 60 years ago!

This soon to be 96-year-old retired high-school teacher was thrilled last spring when former students – all senior citizens now – invited her to come north to Fairbanks, Alaska to launch her newly published memoir, Finding Savoonga: Letters from the Edge of America.

In the book, Doris and her late husband, Charles “Tod” Ray, describe their extraordinary experiences teaching from 1951 to 1954 in the remote Yupik village of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island, a desolate, wind-swept island in the Bering Sea, closer to Siberia than to the Alaska mainland. The village had no airport, no roads, no phones, infrequent mail, and little contact with the outside world.

In 1951, on a whim, Tod and his fiancé, Doris Derby, answered a help-wanted ad seeking teachers in Alaska. Back comes a telegram from the Bureau of Indian Affairs offering jobs 3,000 miles away in Savoonga, population 250, on St. Lawrence Island.

Doris had met Tod on a double date at the University of Colorado, where she taught while continuing her studies and Tod earned a bachelor's degree. Newly married after his graduation in 1951, the couple departed for Alaska to teach in the Yupik village.

The Rays were two of three white people. In letters to their families in the Lower 48, the young newlyweds tell of teaching children who spoke no English, melting ice for water, fighting a frightening measles epidemic, receiving groceries by ship once a year while villagers hunted walrus for survival, and forming close friendships in Savoonga.

“Our lives have become so vastly different from anything we have ever experienced!” Doris wrote to her mother.

Three years later, they moved to New York City, where Tod earned a doctorate at Columbia University. But they could not resist the pull of Alaska, and lived for 40 years in Fairbanks. Tod joined the faculty at the University of Alaska, and Doris taught advanced-placement history and political science. She became head of the social studies department at Lathrop and West Valley High Schools, and later became director of secondary education for the Fairbanks School District.

The original plan, a Fairbanks celebration honoring Doris and her new book from Gatekeeper Press, was not to be. The plan was nixed due to concerns about the lingering Covid and the rigors of travel. So, a group of former students from Lathrop High School, where Doris taught history and civics in the 1960s, decided to take the party to their beloved teacher – in Seattle.

Doris, a resident of the Horizon House retirement community on Capitol Hill, will celebrate her 96^th birthday and read from her book at a private event on August 8 with 30 or so former students from Alaska, Washington, and Oregon.

“Doris was a special teacher who cared about and motivated her students and brought American history to life,” said Jeff Cook, class of 1962, a civic leader in Fairbanks. “We are having this party to honor Doris’s new book, to thank her for making a difference in our lives, and to show her how much we care and love her.”

“Doris Ray was animated and had a wonderful sense of humor. She had so much energy, and it energized the class,” recalled Sue Sherwood Wilken, a 1964 graduate who later followed her former teacher onto the Fairbanks School Board.

“She taught us to look beyond our textbooks,” said Paneen Gordon Davidson, class of 1962, a transplanted Alaskan living on Mercer Island. “Ever since then, I have ‘looked beyond’ in my life. My son was once asked in an interview who in his life had most influenced him. He named me. Doris Ray taught me how to think, and the wisdom of her teaching was passed on to my children.”

Bonnie Roberts, class of 1964, said the Rays treated her students like family and invited them into her home. Many have remained in touch for 60 years.

Northwest Prime Time is wishing you a wonderful reunion and book reading, Doris!