April 4, 1943 — April 25, 2025
Dorothy Clark was born in Pomona, California, to A. Burton and Lois F. Clark. The young family soon moved to Visalia, California, where Dorothy’s sister Sue was born. The family continued in Visalia for over 50 years.
Dorothy graduated from Redwood High School in 1961. She graduated from Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, in 1963. Dorothy attended the University of Arizona and then moved to Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, where she was a member of the first graduating class in dental hygiene.
She married some random guy and ended up in Medford in 1978, where she ridded herself of him. After working for several years as a middle and high school teacher, in 1985 she attended Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls to renew her dental hygiene credentials.. She worked briefly at the Veterans Administration in White City. Then she began a stint of more than 20 years as the hygienist at the office of Dr. Richard Kelley in Ashland.
Dorothy became a Master Recycler and a Master Gardener. She began volunteering at the Britt Festival, joined the Britt board, and became the volunteer housing coordinator for the Britt Festivals Orchestra. She held the post for over 20 years. Along the way she changed her name to Sam.
In 1994 she placed a Britt musician with Jon Elliott, then took the musician’s advice and married him in 1995.
She became one of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s strongest advocates. If you were of a certain age and met her you left knowing more about OLLI at SOU than you cared to know, often with a course catalog and recommendations. In 2012 Sam joined the committee to restore the Holly Theater in Medford, where she applied her skills as a good soldier and advocate until the Holly finally reopened in March of this year. She continued on the committee and had planned to continue on as a Holly volunteer, but was sidelined toward the end of March.
Through it all, Sam had two real passions. The first was gardening. Her yard was a jumble of plants of all kinds vying for space with their neighbors. She thought plants should be allowed to express themselves as they pleased and, while she would spend days rooting out an unwanted weed from the lawn, she was perfectly oblivious to weeds taking over her raised beds. She loved her yard and spent mornings, often in her jammies and bathrobe, puttering in it.
Her other passion (call it Master Estate Saler), possibly surpassing gardening, was seeking out bargains and re-selling some of them. Thursday mornings were spent waiting for a sale to open while she often passed the time by pulling other peoples’ weeds, usually without permission. She would return home with every sort of thing, sometimes things that the sale organizer hadn’t thought sellable. The time spent being out and interacting with her friends was as important to her as the hunt for bargains. Probably her best find ever was the carnival shooting gallery target that landed her as the star on an episode of “Antiques Roadshow.” The clown target has great value, but the rewards for Sam were that she had got it for a dollar and the interactions she had with the Roadshow people.
Sam is survived by her sister, Sue Yergensen, and her partner Rodney Jackson of Lancaster, California; by her stepdaughter Elizabeth Moore and her husband Sid and grandson Jack Moore, all of Hillsboro, Oregon; and by her husband, Jon of Medford.
No service is planned. Sam will be buried on family property near Eagle Point. Please consider making a contribution in Sam’s memory to a worthy cause of your choice, to the Rogue Valley Symphony or to the Holly Theater.
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