Joan Lincoln Strong Buell

When Joan thinks about her life, she finds images coming from many parts of the world, some finding her as a child in New England, others where she learns to sail a boat with her husband in Northwest waters, sings folksongs with children in the Beehive at Catlin Gabel, sits next to the bed of a dying woman at Hopewell House, or rides, leading a packhorse in the mountains just south of Mt. Rainier. Because she’s always kept a journal and maintained photograph books, these images are sharp, and they thread together lives that have interwoven with hers.

Living as a faculty child in a boy’s boarding school, Pomfret, in Connecticut, she started what would be a long life in schools. She grew up in Pomfret, went away to Putney School in Vermont for her high school years, then on to Smith College which gave her a year in Paris. Her love of language grew in those years so that she now still speaks French, adding Spanish as she went along.

Joan and Tom met at Williston Academy, near Smith, where Tom was teaching English, directing plays, coaching hockey, and running the work program. They married, and from then on their lives were joyfully enmeshed. They set off to Thailand where they both taught English as a Second Language, had their first child, a second Tom, at the Woman’s Hospital in Bangkok, and returned after two years, to yet another school, St. George’s in Rhode Island, where Tom had grown up also as a faculty child.

Five years there brought two more children, Hester and Dexter. The summers during those years re-established a pattern that had existed in Joan’s family for several generations already: going west. The Strongs had migrated to Oregon in the 1840s; Joan’s parents, Dexter from Oregon and Helen Smith from Concord, Massachusetts, had gone to Oregon from Connecticut, mostly by train, every other summer since Joan was born in 1932. Now, Joan and Tom went to Seattle to live for the summers with Helen and Dexter while Tom completed his MA at the University of Washington. And eventually they moved to Seattle for him to complete his PhD.

It was then that Joan entered a new phase of “schooling.” Because she knew a lot of folksongs, she was hired at the UW Lab preschool as a teacher. Joan was part of a graduate program, planning behavioral studies with the children at the school, carrying them out in company with the faculty, and writing them up. (She waited to get her MA till later, since with three children and a husband in the PhD Program, she decided one degree-candidate at a time was enough. Her MA in Psychology is from PSU, 1981.)

The move to Portland came in 1965. Tom entered the English Department there, and Joan found a job at the preschool at Catlin Gabel. Teaching in a school where your children are also attending has many richnesses. Joan was there at a time of great growth and interest. She helped design the Beehive (the name for the Beginning School) and was head of it and taught and sang in it for the next twelve years.

By some great good fortune, when Joan and Tom moved to Portland, a family house belonging to her grandparents was available for them to live in. It was a house in the woods in Northwest Portland, one where she and her parents had come often in her childhood. Built originally as a summer cabin and used during WWII by the military for radio communications, it was still standing, had been rented out for years, and still had a barn, an old garage, and a small guest cabin.

The Buells built an addition onto the old house designed by PSU professor and architect Gil Davis. There for the next forty years Joan and Tom lived, raised their children (along with, over time, various sheep, horses, dogs, geese, cats, and ducks), and grew into yet another phase of their lives. Tom gradually became an artist, using the garage as a studio. And Joan, partly as the out-growth of a high school course she had taught for seven years at Catlin Gabel, called “Birth, Death, and Sexuality,” moved into hospice work. While getting her MA at PSU, she continued to teach intermittently in hospice training, and in Human Development at the School of Nursing at OHSU.

During a sabbatical in London in 1978 to 1979, she had worked as a Volunteer at St. Christopher’s Hospice. Returning to Portland, becoming the Director of Volunteers for the new Visiting Nurse Association Hospice Home Care Team, she began to draw together a group of people who shared her hope for an Inpatient Hospice for Portland. Out of those dreams and out of seven years of hard work, grant-writing, searching for a “place,” this group built Hospice House, a fifteen bed hospice in Hillsdale. It opened in September of 1987, its first patient was a young woman in her twenties.

If the images now are any different than those from earlier parts of her life, Joan would find herself sitting with a sketchbook in her lap, drawing or doing a pastel or watercolor. In her sixties, she began memorizing poems and prayers, and often while waiting for someone, or lying awake at night, she recites those happily to herself. She reads constantly and with great pleasure, but now it is not, as it was often during her childhood, in the boughs of a tree.

Living in faraway places for a few weeks or a few months has always been part of her life. She and Tom, now both retired, can spend a month in a little town in Mexico, or back in her beloved France. They have accomplished trips long wished-for, too: through the Panama Canal from Florida to Astoria, Oregon, and a month in Chile, including a bird watching ship-journey around Tierra del Fuego and the Beagel Channel.

Their seven grandchildren are scattered: Tom and Dorey have Madeleine and Griffin in Pittsburgh; Dexter and Meighan have Clyde and Clara in Brooklyn, New York. Hester and Len Carr are in Portland, with Emily, Julia, and Hannah.

Joan feels immense gratitude and a sense of “Full Circle,” in that Len is on the faculty at Catlin Gable as Assistant Head of the Middle School, Hester is Manager of the Birthing Center at Meridian Park Hospital. And on Thursday mornings, you can find Joan with Dougal, a West Highland Terrier, working at Hopewell House, the place she put so much of her energy and love into for so long. Joan is at the switchboard as a volunteer, and Dougal is giving and receiving love and comfort.