Lillian Rae Powell

The eldest of four children, Lillian Rae McGhie, always known as “Rae” to family and friends, was born April 26, 1930, in her grandparents’ home in Milford, Beaver County, Utah. Her parents were Reginald Raymond McGhie and Lillian May Sherwood.

Rae spent her early years happily in Caliente, a railroad town in Lincoln County, Nevada, where her father worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. She inherited a love of music from her father and would recall her father playing the harmonica while she would tap dance. She would say Caliente was a little town with lots of room to run and play and the McGhie kids were the best hikers, runners, and players around.

She moved with her family to San Bernardino, California in 1944, graduating from high school there and obtaining her A.A. degree from San Bernardino Valley College in 1950. She would leave home and move to Barstow, California after graduation to work as an elementary school teacher and where, in 1951, she would meet her future husband, Dale D. Powell, a pilot in the U.S. Air Force.

In 1953, while the country was in the middle of the Korean War, Rae and Dale were married less than a week after Dale completed his training as a fighter pilot. Dale’s military service took them to Georgia and, thereafter, to Massachusetts where their two children were born.

After Dale’s discharge from the Air Force in 1956, they returned to California, eventually settling in La Mesa, where they lived until they retired to Idyllwild, California in 1996.

Rae spent the years in La Mesa as a housewife and mother. She also devoted herself to volunteer work, from acting as Girl Scout Troop leader and PTA President to founding a volunteer program to assist residents at a local care facility. Then, in 1971, she took on the role of legal secretary for Dale after he passed the California Bar Exam and opened a law practice. It was a role she would occupy until she and Dale retired in 1996.

After 20 years of retired life in the mountain town of Idyllwild, the couple moved back to San Diego in 2015 to be near family.

Rae had a lifelong love of music. She sang in several choirs over the years and was an accomplished pianist, serving as an accompanist for school, church, and adult chorales. She continued to sing and play the piano until just weeks before her passing.

During her later years, she enjoyed visiting her children, grandchildren, and great-granddaughter, traveling, reading, working word and jigsaw puzzles, and doing genealogy research.

At the time of her death, she was residing at La Vida Real in El Cajon with Dale, her husband of 71 years. She is preceded in death by her brothers, Robert D. McGhie and Timothy R. McGhie, and her sister, Hazel Marie Trepanier. She is survived by her husband, Dale Powell; her children, Teresa Laggner and Claudia Powell; her grandchildren, William Laggner and Kelly Laggner; and her great-granddaughter, Sabrina Balint.