CORONADO – Her sense of humor knew no bounds, she loved movies and languages, she inspired thousands of people with her miniatures and floral arrangements, she was interwoven into the very fabric of Coronado, and never, ever, used the F word.
This is but a modest introduction to a woman many grew to know and love as Dodo Stanley, an affectionate nickname given to her by her father. Dorothy Evelyn Stanley (nee Gill) left this earth on June 23 as the result of natural causes. She was 91. She is predeceased by her husband, Capt. Thomas A. Stanley (2002).
As a lifetime Navy junior/Navy wife, Dorothy made no fewer than 25 moves between her father’s military career and that of her husband. She said she never remembered a time when they weren’t traveling, “… but we always returned to Coronado,” she would proudly exclaim.
Her father graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1925. He went on to become a highly decorated career Navy captain and is in the Navy Hall of Fame. He started out in biplanes and was a member of the flying stunt team, the Red Rippers Squadron, precursor to the Blue Angels, and the Navy’s oldest continuously active fighter squadron. He later served as executive officer on the aircraft carrier Enterprise during WWII, commanded three carriers, and three naval bases.
Dorothy’s late husband Thomas flew S-2s, and was commanding officer of VS 29 and of the USS Guam during his 30-year career in the US Navy. No matter how you add it up, that’s a lot of deployments. Somewhere in between all that traveling, Dorothy and Tom had six children, ten grandchildren and six great grandchildren.
Born in Annapolis, MD, the youngest of three children, to Evelyn Jeanette Delanux and Cecil Batchelder Gill, Dorothy saw much of the world in her 91 years. Her father’s family emigrated from England to Canada and then Wisconsin in the mid-1800s. Her mother’s family hailed from England and France, and emigrated to Hawaii in the early 1800s. Her mother was born in Hawaii when it was still a kingdom under the rule of Queen Lili’uokalani.
Dorothy was always considered one of the brightest people in the room, waxing eloquently on subjects far and wide. Friends were often surprised to find she only had a high school education. You see, Dorothy had an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and the world was her classroom.
She started her Coronado school journey in kindergarten (1938-39) while living at Quarters Q on North Island. She remembered the Spanish Bight out their front door, and witnessed the Officers Club pool being built. Their first Coronado home was the Colonial Apartments, at Olive and D. They were the first family to rent there. The population of Coronado back then was only 7,000.
Journalist Kimberlie Guerrieri captured Dorothy’s descriptions of just how different Coronado was in those early days. “World War II brought air raid sirens and ration cards to Coronado. Dorothy [recalled] how soap, shoes, and even bananas were hard to come by. Scrap metal drives were held at Coronado High School. You could feel the threat of war in Coronado. Buildings on the base were covered in camouflage netting. San Diego Bay was filled with small dirigibles tied down at various heights to deter enemy planes from attacking.”
Young Dorothy moved away for a year, and returned to Coronado schools from 1940-46, finishing the 8th grade at Coronado Junior High School. Her sister Cecile was valedictorian at CHS. Dorothy’s Class of 1951 classmates included Tom Shine, Herb Rhodes, Mary Carlin King, Jeanne Cursio Bower, and others who went on to became movers and shakers in our community.
Dorothy learned early that as a Navy family, home was where your orders took you. She remembered being on the move constantly as a child. Some deployments were routine, and some were extremely exotic. Her favorite was Kwajalein Island, where her father was CO of the naval station there, and military governor of the Marshall Islands (post-WWII).
As a teenager, Dorothy was taken out of high school her junior year. She lived in a Quonset hut on that tiny atoll. She washed her hair in a rain barrel, and learned to drive in military Jeeps on the island’s runway. She and her mother would often go shelling and could walk to the next atoll, as long as the tide was out (there were a few close calls, which only added to the excitement for mother and daughter). Their family was much-loved by the Marshallese people.
The flexible nature of Navy families during deployment is legendary in Navy towns such as Coronado. Dorothy was typical of that lifestyle. She moved back to Coronado from 1962-74 as a Navy wife, moving permanently here in 1980, where she lived out the remainder of her years.
Although raised very properly and in a somewhat sheltered fashion, she wasn’t a prude. She accepted all people, as long as they were kind. Throughout her life, Dodo modestly found her niche as a creative artist and designer. She was a master floral arranger and miniature enthusiast. She served as president of the Bridge & Bay Garden Club and was chair of the Petite Design section at the Coronado Flower Show.
In her spare time, she served on numerous boards and offered formal input on developing events and projects. She was a beautiful singer, incredible cook, and hostess extraordinaire. The Stanleys were famous for their Halloween and 12th Night parties.
“My mother would always look for the humor in humanity,” said daughter Claudia. “She had a guileless, childlike innocence. Honestly? I think she was protected her whole life by her parents and our dad. She never had a paying job, but was a wonderful scholar. She considered music a miracle, a gift. She played the piano. She loved the Beatles (woke us up to watch their debut on the Ed Sullivan show), took us to all the Beatles movies. She was the most fun person you could ever hope to meet. She took youngest brother Jim out of school to see Star Wars movie openings in the 1980s, multiple times.”
Dorothy always considered herself a “reincarnated Italian renaissance woman,” her children would agree. She felt the history and culture of Italy deeply. She adored opera singer Andrea Bocelli and saw him in concert 8-10 times. She made trips to Italy and other European locations with her husband, and then visited another eight times with her children and friends.
She developed a mad crush on Bocelli. At one point, she was given a larger than life cardboard cutout of the legendary opera singer, standing. She loved posing next to her cardboard Bocelli, redefining the term, “One degree of separation.”
“Mom made dolls and doll clothes for her kids and grandkids,” said one of her children; “troll houses out of shoe boxes, costumes, miniature furniture out of ordinary items such as cakes out of buttons.”
Community-wise, Dorothy served six years on the board of directors at the Coronado Historical Association & Museum, she participated in choirs, was a founding member and past president of the Bridge and Bay Garden Club; she led the Petite Design Section of the Coronado Flower Show for many years, earning accolades and awards for both her standard-sized and miniature floral arrangements. She often exhibited at Art Alive for the San Diego Museum of Art.
This past spring, she received a special award for exemplary volunteerism from the Coronado Floral Association, was named an “Island Icon” by the Coronado Historical Association in January 2023, and continued to support her community at every opportunity. As one of the Bridge & Bay Club founders, she’s credited with coming up with the concept of a pink flamingo mascot and logo for the Bridge & Bay Club, which remains prominent to this day.
Dorothy was fiercely passionate about Coronado history and preserving its charm. She could often be heard to say, “How do we quantify charm?” Her 1927 home is a designated Coronado Historic Home. That was very important to her, ensuring that no one in the future could tear it down. She hated every time a local tree in town was cut down. She considered herself to be so very, very lucky and to have been a part of the Coronado community.
“My mother always felt people were ‘privileged’ to know her children,” said Claudia, her oldest. “She never said the ‘f’ word, ever! She was a lady, and didn’t like anything crass. Her preference was always classic style. She loved the opera and all the arts and sciences. She instilled a love of reading, learning, art (always markers and crayons and paper around) in all of her six children; the sciences, and history (historical novels); sewing, painting ceramics, guitar, piano, singing. Silliness! We could laugh and laugh! She really was a renaissance woman, and we miss her terribly.”
If Dorothy Stanley had a weakness, an addiction, it was movies. Daily conversations with her often included the movie of the day. Her car license plate read, “MUVBUFF.” During her youth she spent every Saturday at the old Strand Theatre, where Lamb’s Players Theatre is now. She would hang out at the Hotel del Coronado hoping for a sighting of one of her favorite movie stars. She met several, including Van Johnson.
Those Saturday afternoon matinee adventures fueled her love of stars and starlets. “Mom was huge movie fan,” recalled daughter Claudia. “Every day, or multiple times a day, she would talk about a movie, recite lines, and walk around the house practicing speaking with foreign accents. She knew all the actors and bit actors, and knew all the movies that came out in the 1940s and ‘50s. She practically lived at the Strand Theatre and got all her news from newsreels that preceded the movies.
She would write to movie stars and ask for autographs, and they would respond. She watched the Grammys and Oscars religiously. Turner Classic Movies was a constant companion. She wasn’t limited to a single film genre. She loved comedy, romance, drama, musicals, sci-fi films, and everything in-between.”
Despite her comic attempts at duplicating foreign accents, which, by the way, kept her children in stitches on a daily basis, she was a linguist and grammarian, often correcting the grammar of her children as well as TV commentators. She was a stickler for pronunciation and punctuation. Local author/columnist and wordsmith, Richard Lederer, was a favorite and she cut out his column in the SD Union-Tribune nearly every week to share. Funny and unusual names were a constant source of entertainment in the Stanley home. She loved people and all the idiosyncrasies that came with them.
Dorothy lost her husband Tom, the love of her life, in 2002. She was only 69. No one had any idea she would live on for another two decades. And yet, in a way, Tom’s passing marked a sort of shifting of gears for Dorothy. She was independent. Her life was never boring, never dull, but now she went into high gear for the remainder of her life, doing all the things she loved doing. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other with enviable style and grace.
She was devoted to her children and grandchildren. In her spare time, she focused on her hobbies and passions. The results were phenomenal. Dodo was indeed a talented lady. She wrote poems and song lyrics to familiar tunes, made collage cards, dried pressed flower pictures, and personalized felt ornaments. Her home is like a museum, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, covered with delightful and intricate miniatures and other works of art.
She found joy in the simplest of things, from a paper clip to a pressed and saved flower — from miniatures to outer space. She read books on nebulae and tried to make sense of physics. She felt that when she died, she would know everything and see how things were formed, such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and see how her parents grew up, etc.
Tom and Dodo traveled a lot with close friends George and Mary Ann Bruce. The two men had parallel military careers beginning in the late 1960s and their families shared many, many adventures together. When the two men retired from the military, the Stanley and Bruce families saw their friendships and adventures continue to grow.
“I’ve never had a friend like Dodo,” said Mary Ann. “We went to Italy with them, and she picked up the language so fast, while we were still struggling just to say hello.
“There was a levelness about her. She didn’t put on airs, she didn’t over dress. She was very self-satisfied and ever so mellow. Most people have big drama, but not Dodo. You could always depend on her to be there, to listen to you, and just be a good friend. I miss her terribly.”
Dorothy was raised as a Catholic and attended Sacred Heart Church. She became ecumenical, and then non-denominational, but she never lost her relationship with God. In Dodo’s world, all people were worthy, underprivileged children were special, the San Diego Zoo is a bit of heaven on earth, and it’s a shame she never fulfilled her desire to pet a baby tiger.
Dorothy is survived by her sister Cecile Brooks (age 94) of Mountain View, CA; her children, Claudia Gallant (Daniel), San Diego; Christopher Stanley, Port Angeles, WA; Jennifer Tucker Orange, CA; Thomas Stanley, Santa Barbara; Carolyn Ewing (Bill) of Blanco, TX; and James Stanley of San Francisco. She is also survived by ten grandchildren, six great grandchildren, three nephews, extended family and many friends.
A Celebration of Life will be held on Sunday, August 11, 3 p.m., at Coronado Yacht Club. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made, “In Memory of Dorothy Stanley,” to Bridge and Bay Garden Club, Lamb’s Players Theater, and the Coronado Historical Association.
NOTE: Many of the contemporary images shown here were taken by photographer Bill Sandke.
