Doris Louise Stroud
Birthday: 1919
Longtime Tucsonan Doris Louise Stroud was born to Rev. Emil J. Carlson and Lucille Graham Carlson in Russell Iowa on October 15, 1919. She grew up in Kansas where her father was an American Baptist pastor. In 1942 Doris graduated from Ottawa University in Ottawa Kansas. She took a job as a high school music teacher and during the Second World War she also worked as an aircraft dispatcher. Doris met the love of her life J.V. Stroud of Leavenworth Kansas in 1942 shortly before J.V. shipped out for the war in the Pacific. They were married in 1946 and they took up residence in Liberty Missouri where J.V. was attending William Jewell College on the G.I. Bill. Their first son was born in 1947. In 1949 the family moved to Tucson. Initially Doris worked at Grand Central Aircraft near where Tucson International Airport is now located. Their second and third sons were born in the mid-1950s. For a time in the 1960s Doris was a case worker for Pima County Welfare. Throughout her life Doris was active in vocal music and took part in various musical performance groups. In the late 1970s Doris enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona where she received the degree of Master of Public Administration in 1979. During the 1980s Doris was director of the Arts Education Consortium a group partly funded by grants from the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. which brought performing and visual artists into Tucson schools and sponsored the Imagination Celebration at the Tucson Convention Center. Doris was a devout and active member of her church serving in many ways including being a deaconess a summer bible school leader and a member and sometime director of choirs. Her sweet soprano voice was part of services at the church for many years. Doris' husband J.V. Stroud passed away in 1984 shortly after Doris. She was preceded in death by her three siblings E.J. (Dorothy) Carlson of Tucson and Payson Arizona; Norman (Phyllis) Carlson of White Bear Lake Minnesota; and Loree (Lester) Proctor of Lakewood California. She was survived by her three sons Jim (Betty Jo Cather) Tim (deceased 2007) and Mark all of Tucson; by four grandchildren Matthew (Vanessa S. Stroud) Melissa and Michael Stroud and Dominique Lefaive; by numerous nieces and nephews; and by her sister-in-law and lifelong friend Dorothy Marie Carlson (deceased 2008).