Sophia Loving

Sophia Josephine Grabski Loving was born on September 26, 1915, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was the third child of ten, of parents born in Poland. Sophia and her siblings attended Catholic parochial schools, where she likely chafed under the strictness of the nuns. The family tells a story of each of the siblings learning, at one point, well into adulthood, that they had all been slapped across the face by the same teacher. Perhaps this is where Sophia’s keen sense of justice began to grow.

After high school, Sophia went to business school and in 1938, at the age of 23, she moved to Seattle to take a secretarial job with Boeing. During the war, Sophia took the civil service exam and moved to Kodiak, Alaska to serve as a secretary with the Department of the Navy.

Sophia was quite a popular young woman with many admirers. One of her admirers wrote a piece of music honoring both her and her Polish heritage and dedicated it to her. It was called “The Little Sophia Polka.” While in Alaska she met and married Neil Loving. Having divorced him after a short time, she and her son Michael moved to Seattle where she worked at the Continental Can Company. In 1953, they moved to Portland.

Sophia loved Portland. She was an urban soul, as well as an internationalist. After retiring at 62, she traveled to Belgium, Uruguay, Australia, and Russia and visited Poland some eight to ten times. She spent time studying in Krakow and was fluent in Polish. She made her last trip to Poland in 2000 at the age of eighty-five.

WILPF member Mary Bolton wrote about Sophia to the tune of “Young at Heart.” In part it says: “Sophia goes at full tilt, she lives life to the hilt, cause she’s young at heart. She reads books, she sees plays, helps Congress change it’s ways, cause she’s young at heart…” And ends with these lines: “Sophia you set an example, your life is a sample of what we all can do if we are young at heart. 

Sophia was born in 1915, the very year that the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was founded by Jane Addams and an international group of women who met at The Hague to try to stop World War I. Sophia represented Portland WILPF in Washington D.C. in 1969 on a cold, raw November day in a massive protest against the Vietnam War. She wore around her neck the name of an Oregonian killed in action. On that trip she also visited East and West Berlin. In 1983 she marched for Portland WILPF at a huge WILPF demonstration in Brussels, Belgium at the end of a year-long international STAR (Stop the Arms Race) campaign.

In 1987 Sophia and Portland WILPF members Del Greenfield and Ann Campbell were among the mothers present at the Mother’s Day protest at the Nevada Test Site. At a press conference prior to departure for Nevada, Sophia had read a statement including mention of Julia Ward Howe of Boston, who in 1870 was the founder of Mother’s Day—conceived by her as a day dedicated to peace. Howe had called for disarmament so that sons need no longer kill and be killed. In a statement made for a press conference, Sophia read the Howe proclamation: “Arise, then women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm—Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

In 1998, Sophia went with a group of WILPFers and others on an overnight trip to Hanford, Washington to plant a native sunflower, symbolizing the start of the clean-up of that poisoned land.

Sophia has also dealt faithfully with WILPF nitty-gritty: the details of a National Congress at Marylhurst, a Regional Congress at the University of Portland, a term as recording secretary, and a decade of editing the newsletter. We made her home our home, a place for meetings, social get-togethers, and for gathering together the “treasures” for our Treasure Sales at the Old Church. Sophia steered us through eighteen of these! She spoke for us at public events and registered low income voters. And through the years she has written matchless letters-to-the-editor, which cut right to the heart of the matter.

When asked by a reporter why she continued to work so hard, Sophia answered, “Because I’m alive!” and quoted Martin Luther: “Here I stand—I can do no other.”

Written by Johnni Freeborn