Lajuana D. Carabasi

Lajuana was born on December 3, 1923, in Taylor, Texas, the daughter of Wynne Thomas Danforth and Mae Cornelia Hunt Danforth of Granger. The family lived in Temple for a time, where her father worked in sales and bookkeeping for D. B. Boyd at Best Furniture. During the Great Depression of the 1930s they returned to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm six miles west of Florence, where she attended a four-room school housing eight grades. She played in the creek and the barn, gathered eggs, and learned how to play the domino game 42, make ice cream, take a bath in a washtub, ride a horse, dress a hog, and pluck a chicken.

When the family moved back to Temple, they bought a house built by Cornelia Rich in 1910. Lajuana attended Reagan School from fifth to eighth grade, and then Temple High School, where she graduated as salutatorian of the class of 1940. A special memory was riding the train to spend two summers at camp; she changed in St. Louis and Chicago and rode a horse-drawn wagon the last stretch to Shelby, Michigan, arriving dirtied by soot from the open train windows.

After Temple Junior College, she attended North Texas College in Denton (now the University of North Texas), graduating in December 1943. She immediately got a job teaching shorthand, typing, algebra, and Latin at Ball H.S. in Galveston, where many afternoons were spent on the beach grading papers and enjoying the company of her roommate Sylvia Stern.

After two years trying to live on $85 a month, she found a job teaching at Highland Park H.S. in Dallas for $135 a month, where she stayed another two years. She then returned to Temple to live with her parents and got a job for $150 a month as a medical secretary at Scott & White Hospital and Clinic. She especially enjoyed working with internist Dr. A. E. Moon, and was chosen to develop a course for nurses to learn how to run a doctor’s office, in conjunction with Gracie Watson and a continuing education program at TJC.

On November 22, 1952, she married Dr. Carabasi, a medical resident originally from Philadelphia, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Temple. In 1954, Bob was drafted by the U.S. Army in a sweeping call-up known as the “doctor draft” and was assigned to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, where Lajuana continued working as a medical secretary and attended a Presbyterian church with over 10,000 members. In 1956, the young couple moved to McKinney, Texas, where Bob was on the chest and pulmonary lab services at the V.A. Hospital. Lajuana continued working as a medical secretary and part-time elementary teacher and singing in the Presbyterian church choir. Housing was so scarce that they lived in a converted WAC barracks, persisting despite challenging conditions including the stench of a nearby abattoir.

In 1958 Bob joined the medical staff at Scott & White, becoming its first director of pulmonology and respiratory therapy. Lajuana taught night school at TJC and volunteered with the Child Welfare Board, helping raise funds, keep records, and provide a house and services for foster children, one of whom, Judy Plumlee, grew especially close to her heart. She also helped establish the Saulsbury Day Care Center for low-income children, volunteering with teaching, fundraising, maintenance, and parent education. With Augusta Byrd and Helen Saulsbury, she started a series of night classes for adults at Bethune School, where she taught for two years until TISD took over. “My dearest wish,” she wrote in a short memoir, “is that people would help each other, especially getting children off to a great start.”

Lajuana served as an elder at Grace Presbyterian Church, where she sang in the choir for over 60 years. Even late in life, Lajuana still enjoyed helping cook meals in the church kitchen for senior citizens with Meals on Wheels, where her cornbread was a monthly favorite.

In the early 1970s, the church helped Lajuana and Bob to meet and assist Christina Nkweti, a Mary Hardin Baylor student originally from Cameroon. With their help, she went on to the University of Texas for graduate study and became a social worker in Brooklyn, New York. Over the decades, the Carabasis enjoyed staying in touch with their foster daughters and seeing them raise families of their own.

Throughout her life, Lajuana was a strong volunteer on behalf of the Cultural Activities Center, especially through its womens’ group, the Contemporaries, and member groups such as the Friends of the Visual Arts and the Central Texas Orchestral Society. In 1975 she helped launch the Magic Blue Bus, a traveling program to bring the fine arts to the schools. It eventually grew into Hands On and summer arts camps now attended by thousands of area schoolchildren every year. Her love of art also led to lifelong study and travel, from teaching classes in art history to many enjoyable trips, visiting art museums everywhere from Dallas and Fort Worth to Italy, a favorite destination.

After Bob’s retirement in 1988, the Carabasis visited Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida each winter for many years. Lajuana loved walking on the beach, and she collected entire closets full of seashells for art and craft projects. She donated many shells to Temple schoolchildren, who came to know her as the “shell lady.”

An avid reader her entire life, in later years she also took up stamp collecting and crossword puzzles. Her friendly dinner tables were always set with an artistic theme, from painted eggshells for Easter to handmade Christmas-card placemats. She and Bob often played bridge with friends, and they both loved classical music, from local concerts to prized recordings, and in recent years the “Live in H.D.” cinema broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Lajuana loved animals, especially the outdoor cats who sometimes became indoor cats, and the over 83 species of wild birds that she and Bob were able to watch in the scrub forest behind their house near Bird Creek. At one point, she was feeding dry dogfood to over 30 raccoons nightly on their back deck, plus a snake that lived in the carport.

The Central Texas community will remember her as someone who was extraordinarily generous with her time, her passions, and her resources, living out her deep belief that “happiness is helping others.”

She is survived by her husband, with whom she would have celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary on November 22, and her cousins Dr. Barton Allen of Prosper, Texas; Trisa Thompson Jacobi and Tryna Thompson Newman, both of Austin, Texas; and Molly Danforth Keefe of Wilmington, North Carolina. She is also survived by foster daughters Judy Plumlee of Stephenville, Texas, and Christina Nkweti of Washington, D.C.

A memorial service will be celebrated Saturday, December 3, at 2 p.m. at Grace Presbyterian Church. Burial of her ashes will be at Bellwood Cemetery in Temple.

Memorial contributions may be made to Presbyterian Children’s Homes and Services, P.O. Box 140888, Austin, TX 78714; Grace Presbyterian Church, 2401 S. 57th St., Temple, TX 76504; the Contemporaries of the CAC, P.O. Box 1791, Temple, TX 76503; or the Cultural Activities Center, 3011 N. 3rd St., Temple, TX 76501.