Doris Brooks Offerle

Doris Merle Brooks Offerle quietly passed away on September 8, 2012, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Doris was born on July 6, 1916 in Sunbright, Tennessee, and recently celebrated her 96th birthday with loving family and friends.

She was the daughter of Ben M. Brooks Sr. and Ina Mae Land. Her mother and father were school teachers in Morgan County, Tennessee. Her father was also a lay minister and farmer. After graduating from Sunbright High School in 1933, where she played basketball for the school team, she entered Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and pursued an education in teaching. There she met and later married, in 1935, Frank Augustus Offerle, a fellow student studying chemical engineering. While in Tennessee, Doris taught all grades in a one-room schoolhouse for several years.

With the coming of World War II making employment meager or nonexistent, the two moved to Frank’s family farm in Whittemore, Michigan, in 1937. In Whittemore their two children, Joan and Frank, were born. Whittemore times were hard; Doris made all the family’s clothes, baked bread, churned butter, and performed all the duties of a farm wife and helped Frank, “Paw,” operate the farm providing a minimal living. In 1943 they moved to Freeland, Michigan, where Frank worked at Dow Chemical as a metallurgist while Doris worked at the nearby Machine Gun Plant installing firing pins.

The four Offerles moved to Miami, Florida, in 1946. They initially lived in Little River where Doris volunteered her time as a band parent with the Little River Junior High School Band. She used her sewing talents to design and make uniforms for the band members. Later Doris and Frank relocated to the Coral Gables area where they owned and operated a service station for over twenty years. She taught school at the Playhouse Country Day School and later was a bookkeeper for Hill York in Hialeah. Devoted to her children, Doris, again, spent many hours working with the Miami Senior High School Marching Band, volunteering as a “band mother,” and organizing band parents and events.

Doris survived her husband Frank, who passed away in 1984, and remained in Miami until 1995. Doris was active with Wayside Baptist Church and used her teaching skills to educate special needs children. She initiated programs that remain today involving academics, singing, synchronized bell ringing, arts, and crafts.

At Wayside Church, Doris met and married Harold Swartz, a fellow churchgoer, in 1990. They moved to Raleigh in 1995. Together they traveled the world, climbed pyramids in Egypt, sailed the Greek islands, and safaried in Kenya. During those years when they were not traveling, the two spent many summer months on the coast of Maine at Harold’s cabin in Jonesboro. After Harold’s death, in 2000, Doris remained in Raleigh.

Doris took the greatest pleasure in her family and is survived by two children, Joan (Harold) Schmitt and Frank (Mandy) Offerle, two grandchildren, Deanna (Doug) Brocker and Tony (Wendy) Offerle and three terrific great-grandchildren, J. P. Brocker, Luke Brocker, and Elizabeth Brooks Offerle. She is also survived by her brother, Ben Martin (Sue Marie) Brooks Jr. of Michigan.

Doris’s family would like to thank Kadi Diallo and Isatu Barrie, the staff at Magnolia Glen, Hospice of Wake County, and all Doris’s friends for the kind and loving care shown to her.

A memorial donation to Hospice of Wake County would be appreciated in lieu of flowers. Donations may be mailed to 250 Hospice Circle, Raleigh, NC 27607 or email: www.hospiceofwake.org.

Services will be on Sunday, September 23, 2012, 11:30 am at the Brown-Wynne Funeral Home, 300 St. Mary Street, Raleigh, NC, 919-828-4311. Condolences and fond memories can be shared at www.brownwynne.com.