Mrs. Verna Lee Wilson

A child of the Great Depression, she was thrifty when it came to herself, but generous and compassionate to others. She was a loving wife and mother, a conscientious volunteer and a dedicated employee.

She voted in every election and believed strongly in education. She was for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s, and against the Vietnam War.

She lived a long, full life, had a strong marriage and raised two successful sons.

Verna Lee was born in Fresno, California, on May 19, 1925. She was the youngest daughter of Harry Mathews Hunter and Lydia Irene (Murphy) Hunter. Her father was born to immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1894. Her mother was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, in 1898.

Harry and Lydia were married in Nelson in 1917, and soon moved to the United States. Harry served in the U.S. Navy for a year during World War I, and was trained at “electrical school” at Mare Island (near Vallejo, California). After being discharged from the Navy, Harry and Lydia had their first child in San Francisco. She was Meta Irene Hunter, born September 19, 1919. Harry soon found a job with Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in Fresno, California.

The couple had their second daughter, Ellen Jeanne Hunter, on July 2, 1921 in Fresno. Verna Lee was born May 19, 1925, also in Fresno.

But then came the Great Depression. Harry said he was “transferred to Reno” in August 1928, but Verna Lee remembered the “transfer” differently. She recalled that there was no work in Fresno, and so Harry’s bosses suggested that the family go to Reno, Nevada, where the telephone company would have work. The family had purchased a small house in Fresno, which they were unable to sell, so they rented it. Friends in Fresno watched over the house and the renters.

When the Hunter family arrived in Reno, and Harry went to the telephone company to take his new job, he was told, “Why did they send you here? There’s no work here! We’re laying off people!”

Verna Lee remembered that the Bell Telephone Company of Nevada took pity on him, apparently knowing that he had moved his family — with three little girls — all the way to Reno for a job. He was told to come back in a few days, and maybe they’d have something for him. So he kept going back, and each day there would be a little more work — a few hours here, a day there. And eventually, he worked himself into a full-time job as “district traffic superintendent.” He was paid $75.50 per month.

Verna Lee recalled that the family had little money. They rented a house in Reno, and the girls wore hand-me-down dresses. The Hunter family lived in at least four different houses while in Reno.

The family remained in Reno until Harry was transferred to San Francisco on Dec. 13, 1940. There he took a job as an engineer at Pacific Telephone and Telegrap on New Montgomery Street. His salary was $81.50 per month. The family lived at 3541 Divisadero Street.

Harry worked at the telephone company until he retired at 61 on July 1, 1956. At some point, probably in the 1940s or early 1950s, he and Lydia purchased a house in San Francisco’s Sunset District: 1763 35th Avenue.

Verna Lee spent her formative years in San Francisco, and graduated from Galileo High School. As a teenager, she worked as a cashier at a drugstore.

She took the train across the Bay Bridge to attend classes at UC Berkeley. There, she met her future husband, Kenneth Edward Wilson.

Kenneth was born in San Francisco on June 30, 1922, in a house. (His mother, Ruth Elizabeth Burrell Wilson, was then a Christian Scientist and did not believe in doctors or hospitals.)

He and his two sisters — Betty (who married Harold Collard) and Carol (who married Bill Adams) — grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His high school years were spent in Santa Rosa, a small town about 60 miles north of San Francisco. In 1940, when Kenneth was 18, Santa Rosa had a population of 12,605. (In 2015, Santa Rosa’s population was estimated at 174,972.)

Kenneth attended Santa Rosa Junior High School and joined the staff of the school paper, the Journal. He wrote a story that was published in the school paper and was later reprinted in a “real newspaper,” the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

“From this point on,” wrote Kenneth after he retired, “journalism became the most important thing in my life. I was a skinny kid with buck teeth, a 90-pound weakling. These were Depression years and our home life . . . was not tranquil. I have wondered if newspapers and newspapering became a kind of escape for me during these difficult adolescent years. In any event, by the time I moved on to Santa Rosa High School, my prime interest was to join the school paper. An objective was to be sports editor.”

While in high school, he was hired to work part time and during summers at the Press Democrat, and by the summer of 1941, while attending Santa Rosa Junior College, he was spending every free minute at the newspaper. He was offered a full-time job for $25 per week.

He had been a regular staffer only a few months when on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Everything changed. He wasn’t old enough to be drafted but in April 1942 enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force and spent the next three years, nine months and 20 days serving as a weatherman.

His service qualified him for the GI Bill of Rights, and he was able to take classes at UC Berkeley and graduate in September 1948 with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism.

The story of how Verna Lee and Kenneth first met is lost to history, but it happened at UC Berkeley. Verna Lee remembered at least one date at the Hilltop restaurant in Novato (Marin County, California). It entailed Ken’s borrowing a car to pick up Verna Lee in San Francisco and make the drive.

After graduating from Berkeley, Ken returned to Santa Rosa and the Press Democrat, where the editors figured out a way to give him a job: He remained on the GI Bill and collected “that pittance plus a little something in addition from the P-D’s coffers,” he later wrote.

After he and Verna Lee married on April 9, 1949, his salary “went to a princely $50 a week.” The young couple lived in a small house in Santa Rosa with a couple of cats.

In 1952, Ken won a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard, which meant travelling across the country to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The Nieman Foundation today still offers fellowships for select journalists to spend an academic year at Harvard in pursuit of individual study plans to strengthen their knowledge and leadership skills.)

Three decades later, Ken remembered the trip: “In our two-door 1946 Chevrolet, the two of us — still really newlyweds — drove across the country via Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Mississippi, Georgia and through the Carolinas with stops at Monticello and Mt. Vernon in Virginia and on to Washington, D.C., New York, and finally Cambridge, Mass. It was a mighty adventure for a couple of kids from California, but only the beginning of what was to follow at Harvard…”

The year at Harvard was special for Verna Lee, too, as she was able to audit classes and take part in many of the social events, meeting the likes of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Shortly after returning to Santa Rosa after the Nieman year, Ken and Verna Lee moved to San Francisco when Ken was offered a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. His first day there was July 26, 1953, and the pay was $125 per week.

The couple moved from Santa Rosa to San Francisco’s Marina District, where they rented a flat at 17 Mallorca Way (near Fillmore Street).

Their first son, Matthew Frederick Wilson, was born on May 10, 1956. Their second son, Daniel Edward Wilson, was born on February 19, 1958.

About the time of Dan Wilson’s birth, the Wilsons bought a house at 38 Wawona Street in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood. They took out an $18,000 mortgage for it — a very large sum for them in those days.

Ken and Verna Lee Wilson lived in that house for about 30 years. They sold it and moved back to Santa Rosa in 1988 when Ken retired from the Chronicle.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the Wilson family vacationed on the Russian River and at the Lair of the Golden Bear (a UC Berkeley alumni camp), and eventually in a log cabin on Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra (in Toulumne County, about halfway between Lake Tahoe to the north and Yosemite Valley to the south). The Wilson children spent their days swimming, sailing, hiking and occasionally fishing. Evenings often found them sitting around the fire pit at twilight, roasting marshmallows as sparks flew up and meshed with stars in the nighttime sky.

Pinecrest wasn’t the only summer or vacation highlight for the Wilsons. In 1969, the family spent the summer in New York City. Ken was invited to teach at a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism program for minority journalists. The summer program had been created by Fred Friendly, the legendary president of CBS News. The program was funded by the Ford Foundation, and it was intended to train nonwhites for jobs in the mainstream print and television businesses. It was a short, intensive and whirlwind program. When the program started in 1968, it provided training only for broadcasting jobs. The 1969 program offered training for print jobs as well, and Kenneth helped lead that pioneering effort.

During that summer, while Ken taught at Columbia, the family rented an 11th-floor apartment on LaSalle Street near West 125th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. It was on the edge of Morningside Heights, adjacent to Harlem. The apartment was a short subway ride from Columbia University at West 116th Street and Broadway,.

The apartment had a small balcony that looked south and west, toward Morningside Park and Riverside Church. Matthew remembers watching young black children on the street below opening a fire hydrant in the sweltering summer heat and playing in the spray.

Verna Lee and her two boys, Matt and Dan, diligently traveled to museums and historical sites in New York and along the East Coast — visiting Revolutionary War sites in Massachusetts (Boston, Concord and Lexington) and Virginia (the recreated historical village of Williamsburg, Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, James Monroe’s home at Oak Hill, and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville), and Civil War sites such as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Richmond, Virginia.

As her two sons entered high school, Verna Lee decided to return to work. She found a job with The Emporium, first at its Stonestown shopping center store in San Francisco, and then at its flagship store on Market Street. (The Emporium was an old-fashioned department store; it was in business for 99 years, from 1896 to 1995, when the chain was acquired by Federated Department Stores and many Emporium locations were turned into Macy’s stores.) Verna Lee retired in the late 1980s as manager of the downtown store’s rug department.

After Ken retired from the Chronicle in 1988, he and Verna Lee sold their house on Wawona Street and moved 60 miles north to Santa Rosa’s Oakmont neighborhood. They bought a house at 7553 Oak Leaf Drive.

They both took up new hobbies — among them lawn bowling and bocce. And they traveled, both around the country and internationally.

But Ken’s health wasn’t good. He’d had prostate cancer, and it returned. He went through surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but nothing staved off the cancer, which eventually spread through his body. He died in his Oak Leaf Drive home, with Verna Lee at his side, on September 20, 1993.

Verna Lee stayed in Santa Rosa, and developed an independent life. She volunteered at the local public library, took classes and attended lectures, plays and concerts, and traveled far and wide, visiting places as disparate as Turkey and Japan.

In 2010, Verna Lee moved to Salem, Oregon, to independent-living apartment next door to her sister, Jeanne.

When her health began to fail her, she moved to Milwaukie, Oregon (near Portland; her son Dan lives nearby in Happy Valley), and then to Happy Valley.

Verna Lee is survived by her son Matt Wilson and his wife, Lyle York (Santa Fe, NM); her son Dan Wilson and his wife, Lori (Happy Valley, OR); Dan’s two daughters, Christine Marie Wohld (and husband Jeremy Robert Wohld and their children Joseph Kenneth Wohld and Mackenzie Madeline Wohld; Bastrop, TX), and Kelly Nicole Jaroszek and her son Jameson Daniel Wilson (Happy Valley, OR), along with many nieces and nephews (and grand nieces and nephews) in the Munson, Emerick, Collard and Adams families.