Katherine Louise Townsend

It was fitting that it rained the day she passed away. Anyone that knew her knew she loved the rain. She could tell it was going to rain, she would say, because she could feel it in her bones.

Her life came full circle. She grew up on a farm in Corvallis on the flooding banks of the Willamette River. She always wanted her own farm and finally got her wish, five acres out in the woods of Deer Island. Her own water, her own dirt, and her own trees (her favorite was the Blue Spruce).

Katie was born in Portland, Oregon in 1933 to William Hobert Bowers and Goldie Ruby Rayfield. As a child she used to walk from Linnton with her siblings, across the St. Johns Bridge, to the St. Johns movie theater. She remembers stories about how her daddy helped build the St. Johns Bridge. As a kid she would dance the Jitterbug at the Skyline Grange Hall.

During WWII her daddy was in the Navy Seabees in the Pacific and her momma worked in the shipyards in Swan Island. Katie and her siblings lived in a children’s farm home in Corvallis run by the Women’s Temperance Christian Union during this time. She spoke of how the boys milked the cows and they made their own butter and being schooled on the farm.

Katie graduated from Corvallis High School in 1952. She attended beauty school in downtown Portland while working at St. Vincent DePaul Hospital as a nurse’s aide. Her mom, sisters Billie, Marilu, and later Sylvia (Honey), worked there as well.

It was there that she met a patient named Luther Taylor who kept showing up after work to court her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. They married in 1955 and lived in the Nob Hill neighborhood. They had four sons, Rick, Mark, Scott, and Paul.

They moved to Chicago in 1960 where she finally had a daughter, Rena, and then another son, Billy, and daughter, Yvette. She worked in Cook County hospitals as a nurse’s aide and Luther became a long-haul truck driver. She attended First Baptist Church of Cicero and enjoyed family camping trips to Gordon’s Long Lake in Indiana, and Lake Thunderbird in Illinois. In 1972 they separated and Katie drove a station wagon full of kids back to Oregon where her mother was.

She married Jack Townsend in 1976. Katie worked at Slim’s and Cornet’s in St. Johns and attended First Baptist Church of St. Johns.

In 1980 she suffered the loss of her daughter, Rena. After her divorce in 2000 Katie moved to five acres in the hills above Deer Island. After raising seven kids and a grandson, Josh, she cared for her mom who lived to be 92.

Dynamite, stubborn, bullheaded, feisty, ornery-just a few of the words used to describe Katie.

Under five feet tall, Katie could down an elk with her thirty-ought-six and then gut the darn thing while the big, burly, men squirmed and gagged. And guess who cleaned and cooked it as well?

On any given day she could out fish everyone around her. She loved eating seafood, county fairs and picnics, camping, and family reunions. She liked dancing and playing volleyball at the St. Johns Community Center and gambling in Reno, Nevada.

Katie loved backgammon, jigsaw puzzles, reading romance novels, watching Jeopardy!, and listening to K103. Everyone, including her neighbors, came to Katie for a haircut. She also enjoyed visiting family in Florida, Chicago, Southern California, and Boise but especially when they came to visit her.

She is preceded in death by her daughter, Rena; husbands, Luther and Jack; brothers, Jackie and Claude; and sisters, Billie and Honey. Katie is survived by her brother, James Bowers; sons, Rick, Mark, Scott, Paul, and William Taylor; daughter, Yvette Thompson; 10 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

Arrangements under the direction of Skyline Memorial Gardens Funeral Home, Portland, OR.