OAKLAND, Calif. – Olive Lee, 98, died on Oct. 1, 2003, in Oakland, Calif., having lived the grand sweep of the 20th century and into a new millennium. She was born on Feb. 24, 1905, in Foxcroft, to Sarah Augusta French and Lyman Kingman Lee. Olive was a 1923 graduate of the Foxcroft Academy and a 1928 graduate of Radcliffe College. After 10 years of teaching in South Dakota, Maine, and Ohio, Olive earned a degree in library science at the University of North Carolina and entered the library field, surrounding herself, both at work and at home, with books, one of her fondest passions. Her first position was at the Portland Public Library (1937-1940). She then embarked on a career of college librarianship that spanned more than 30 years, working at the University of Maine (1941-1942), Mount Holyoke (1948-1954), Bowdoin (1954-1958), and Bridgewater (Mass.) State College (1960-1974). Olive also served as librarian of the army publication YANK during World War II, and as secretary of the Piscataquis Red Cross (1945-1948), and worked in the Maine State Library in Augusta (1958-1960). Olive retired in 1974 and returned to Dover-Foxcroft, enjoying the company of the extended family and friends whom she cherished, and spending summers at Sebec Lake, as she had in her youth. In 1991, Olive married fellow Foxcroft Academy graduate Paul Gates, then professor emeritus of history at Cornell University. The couple resided first in Ithaca, N.Y., and then moved to a retirement community in Oakland, Calif., where Paul died in 1999. A devotee of the outdoors and an enterprising traveler throughout her life, Olive roamed from Alaska to India to the tip of South America, gathering interesting people of many nationalities to add to her large and warm circle of friends and correspondents of all ages. She was immensely engaged with the world around her, her preference always to be a participant rather than a spectator. Deeply committed to social justice, Olive joined the March on Washington in 1963, listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous address as it carried live across the Capitol Mall, and in 1965 went to Mississippi to help register voters. Olive is survived by her four wonderful step-children and their families; the descendants of her beloved siblings, including four nieces and a nephew; six grandnieces and seven grandnephews; six great-grandnieces and six great-grandnephews; and treasured friends from many places. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, 2003, at the Dover-Foxcroft Congregational Church, with interment of ashes to follow immediately at the Lee Cemetery in Dover-Foxcroft.
OLIVE LEE
