Dolores June Walker

Dolores June Klinsky Walker of Walla Walla passed away peacefully at the age of 82 in the midnight hours of May 5, 2022. A celebration of her life will be held at Pioneer United Methodist Church on Saturday, June 18, 2022. Interment of her ashes will take place in early August on the grounds of the Seabeck Conference Center, on Hood Canal, as part of the planting of a tree in her honor at a place she loved and was loved at for over 45 consecutive summers.

This extraordinary woman was born Dolores June Klinsky to parents Robert "Bob" and Frieda Klinsky on July 27, 1939, in the little town of Milford, Nebraska, but just 14 months later, her extended family fled the recur-rent Dust Bowl devastations and, following earlier family adventurers, moved to the Pacific Northwest in late 1940, first to Yakima and then Sandpoint, Spokane, and eventually Walla Walla in 1949.

There, teenaged Dolores was stricken with polio, a paralyzing disease then doubly terrifying because in 1953, there was still no vaccine available to prevent it nor more than experimental treatment efforts which cost her the use of her leg muscles. Always head-strong; however, she learned to walk with the aid of arm-cuff crutches and resumed her schooling with determination, graduating (with honors) from Pioneer Junior High School ('54), Walla Walla High School ('57), and Whitworth College ('61) and emerging with a Teaching certificate which she immediately put to use as a teacher of English at the high school in Wallace, Idaho.

As her college years ended, she came to know a church acquaintance named Vic Walker, and after a courtship begun in August 1961, they married in June 1962. A year later, their family life blossomed with the birth of daughter Victory, followed in 1966 by son Mark and in 1970 by son Kevin. In the late 1960s, the Walkers moved to a little house on Ankeny Street, just outside Walla Walla city limits, which remains the family home today.

Dolores soon found that motherhood and housekeeping weren't her vocation, and, all the while raising the children and feeding the family, she occupied herself with writing and various community and church responsibility until the kids were old enough that she could take jobs outside the home such as a secretarial position at Walla Walla High School. In later years she resumed her teaching role and taught English at Washington State Penitentiary as well as mentoring newly released convicts with the STAR Project.

But she considered writing her main profession, and in addition to having many "devotions" published in religious magazines during her adulthood, she also wrote the column "Home Plate" for Referee magazine from 1982 to 1985. Her plays "Good Trouble" (1998) and "Not My Son" (and alternate form "A Family Outing") (2012), through Eldridge Publishing, are still performed by schools and churches around the country. She also wrote a memoir of her teenage affliction with polio, which is available in PDF form upon request to the Walker family.

A lifelong child of God, for most of her adult life, she attended and eventually became a member of Walla Walla's Pioneer United Methodist Church. And each summer from 1971 to 2017, she crossed the state with family to participate in a week of spiritual and interpersonal renewal at Seabeck Christian Family Camp to further and deepen her faith and understanding.

After a slow decline brought on by Alzheimer's, she moved to an assisted-living residence at first Whitman Place and then Eagle Springs (College Place), where she peacefully ended her days.

Dolores is survived by her husband Victor Ellis Walker; daughter Victory Dawn Walker and her husband Darrel Tjepkes of Grants Pass; son Mark Ellis Walker of Bellingham; son Kevin Walker and his wife Jennifer Brum-ley of Coeur d'Alene; her sister Judith "Judy" Ohren of Dallas, Oregon, her brother Robert "Bob" Klinsky and his wife Nancy Klinsky of San Juan Cosala, Jalisco, her sisters-in-law Sharon Walker and JoAnne Walker of Hillsboro, Oregon, seven nephews and nieces, and four grandchildren.