Miriam Dilley, of
Boise, journeyed to higher realms during the night of October
6, 1993, at her home in Boise. She Just recently celebrated
her 90th birthday with her family in Alaska and Roswell, ID.
Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday,
Oct. 9, at Summer Funeral Homes, Boise Chapel. Additional
funeral services will be held at 2:30 p.m. (same day) at the
Sterry Memorial Presbyterian Church, Roswell, ID. Burial will
follow in the family plot at Roswell Cemetery.
Miriam was born in Garden City, Minnesota, on August 25,
1903. She grew up in Roswell and attended the College of Idaho
(now Albertson College) where she majored in French and
mathematics. After graduation she began a teaching career
that spanned thirty-eight years, the last eighteen being in
Boise's junior high schools. She taught in four states -
Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. One of her most
interesting and challenging experiences occurred when she and
her brother, Joseph, were hired to start the New Meadows High
School. Fresh out of college, Miriam and Joe were the only
teachers for the new school. Over the following years, Miriam
continued her education and did post graduate study at the
Universities of Hawaii, Montana, Washington and California;
and at the American University of southern France.
At the
outbreak of World War II, Miriam enlisted in the Women's
Auxiliary Army Corps (the WAACs) and later the Women's Army
Corps (WAC). Her military unit crossed the Atlantic on the
Queen Mary with 10,000 aboard, landed in Scotland, and moved
to England. Assigned to duty in London, Miriam arrived there
on D-Day, just in time for the beginning of Hitler's
buzz-bombing aerial blitzkrieg of Britain. She worked on the
fifth floor of he building in which General Eisenhower had his
headquarters, but because of the bombs raining down on the
city, she had to sleep in the basement. Her first assignment
in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) was to France with
the Office of the Chief of Claims, and she was with the first
WACS to fly into Paris when the Germans began to retreat, Her
military services lasted three years.
Her avocation was traveling. She has gone twice around
the world and has visited more than a hundred countries on
seven continents. She has stood on top of the earth and
walked the tundra above the Arctic Circle, and at the bottom
of the globe she has walked the icy shore of Antarctica. She
swam below sea level in Jordan's Dead Sea, went on safari in
Africa, trekked in Nepal with Sherpa porters, and camped on a
hill in the Anapurna Mountains, She rode an ostrich in South
Africa and elephants in India and Thailand; donkeys on the
Isles of Patmos and Rhodes; horses to a hill station in the
Himalayas in the Vale of Kahsmir; and camels in the Sahara
Desert near Cairo. She was on a water buffalo in Guam "but
didn't ride him anywhere." In India she held a python that
coiled itself around her neck. She rode a riverboat down the
Congo - the boat stuck on a sandbar and had to be pulled off
by a tugboat that was towing a barge. She has visited every
South American country but Paraguay. MIRIAM LOVEDTOTRAVEL!
But she loved even more "to come home again." Her global
adventures gave her not only a first-hand experience of the
word and its peoples but also a deep appreciation of America
and the freedom it offers its citizens; to "think as they want
to think, go where they want to go, say what they want to say,
do what they want to do, and be what they want to be" a
freedom poignantly expressed by a Czechoslavakian man in
Prague who said to her "It's wonderful not that you live in
America but that you MAY live in America!"
In addition to her teaching and traveling, Miriam was
active in P.E.O., Order of Eastern Star, and Daughters of the
Nile. She held a life membership in the National Education
Association and belonged to the American Association of
Retired Persons. Miriam also found time for volunteer work at
St. Luke's Hospital in Boise. She is survived by her niece,
Barbara DeBolt of Boise; nephews Joseph W. and his wife,
Barbara Dilley of Soldotna, Alaska; and George and his wife,
Betty of Roswell; 11 grandnieces and nephews; 22
great-grandnieces and nephews; and one great-great-grandniece.
She was preceded in death by her parents, and her
brothers, Joseph of Parma and Edgar of Vale. OR. |