June 9, 2005

OBITUARIES

Frances Anne Peterson Simcich

Frances Anne Peterson Simcich died Tuesday, May 24, one month before her 80th birthday, at Kaiser Hospital, Santa Rosa, California. She died of complications arising from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

She was born June 24, 1925, in Dalhousie, India, the second of Harold and Edna Peterson’s three children. She lived in Dalhousie until she was 8, when her family moved back to the United States and settled in Waukegan, Ill. She graduated from Westtown School in 1943 and then attended Antioch College, where she met her husband-to-be, Walter Simcich.

The Quaker girl of a good family and the radical son of an immigrant steelworker then began their life of union organizing, which took them from the meat-packing plants of the Midwest through the farms of California to the logging mills and camps of the Pacific Northwest.

After raising her three children, Frances started her second career as a children’s librarian, working in Vancouver, Wash., Yellow Springs and the Placer County library in Auburn, Calif. She served as the librarian for Yellow Springs High School from 1969 to 1973. After Walter’s death in 1976, she started a second, calmer life, becoming more involved in her passion for quilting and sewing, swimming in the American River and enjoying “her mountains.”

She is survived by her children, Tina Simcich of Olympia, Wash., Michael Simcich of El Cerrito, Calif., and Peter Simcich of El Sobrante, Calif.; her brothers, William Peterson of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Richard Peterson of Nashville; and her two beloved grandchildren, Danica and Anya Johnson of Olympia.

James D. Davis

James D. Davis died Friday, June 3, at the Miami Valley Hospital. He was 82.

Born in Hendersonville, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1922, he was the son of Dewey and Etta Davis. Jim was an Army veteran of World War II. He was discharged in 1945 and moved to Dayton, where he worked to build his own insurance agency. He was an avid fisherman.

He is preceded in death by his parents and a grandson, Benny Davis.

He is survived by his children, James L. and Dottie Davis of North Carolina, Linda Anders of North Carolina, John R. and Marlena Davis of Ohio, and Sue Ann and Leroy Sturges of Iowa; 10 grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and sisters, Edna Estelle and Alma of North Carolina.

Funeral services were held Tuesday, June 7, at the Jackson Lytle Williams Maley Funeral Home in Yellow Springs. Davis will be interred at the Clifton-Union Cemetery.