Margaret Dossiter Radke

Upon graduation from high school she went to work at the Lucas aircraft factory in Birmingham building aircraft engine carburetors in support of the British WW II war effort.

While at a pub one evening with her girlfriends, she met her eventual husband George Radke, a US Army soldier who was temporarily stationed in England awaiting deployment to France.

A favorite story was that when George first asked her on a date her reply was that “she wouldn’t go out with him if his hair hung in diamonds”.

In 1944 Mr. Radke was sent back to England for war related medical injuries and the two were married in 1945.Their nicknames for each other were Cookie & Curl because Margaret hadn‘t learned to cook and George had curly hair.

After the war ended and leaving Birmingham England for the first time in her life, Margaret followed her husband by ship and train from England to the US arriving in Portland just before Christmas 1946. After living through the blackout years in England she said that coming into New York harbor with the lights of New York ablaze, she felt all of her worries dissipate, and that she had made the right choice in the start of a new life in a new country.

She earned her citizenship 10 years later in 1956. She said on many occasions that attaining US citizenship was one of the proudest moments of her life.

Margaret was the definition of a ‘War Bride”, being a member of a local English War Brides Club, loving her new home but missing her birthplace. She eventually traveled back to England three times.

The young family lived in the Mt Tabor neighborhood raising three boys until 1957 when they sold their possessions and moved to Bend Oregon, where they had purchased an auto parts business. They lived in Bend adding a fourth child, a girl in 1960.

Upon her husbands premature death at the age of 46 in 1964, and with minimal education and three young children in tow, Margaret relocated to Fairview Oregon, where she purchased the Fairview Trailer Park.

She retired from managing and operating the mobile home park business in 1986 and purchased a home in the Argay neighborhood of the Parkrose area where she lived until she died at the age of 89 due to natural causes.

She was preceded in death by her husband George and son Roger, and is survived by 3 children, Duane, Grant and Marcelyn, 5 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren.

Two of her younger sisters who followed her from England still reside in the Portland area.

Arrangements under the direction of Gateway Little Chapel of the Chimes, Portland, OR.