Born Aug. 22, 1940, in Alameda, CA, Lorie was the first of Harry and Margaret Tobey’s four children.
After extensive travel during the war years, her family settled in Montclair, CA. In 1951, they moved to Portland where she attended Sylvan Grade School and Lincoln High School. Lorie studied at Reed College for two years, moved to the Bay Area where she worked for AT&T, and earned her Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of California-Berkeley. Returning to Portland, Lorie joined Georgia Pacific as an Executive Secretary.
Lorie married Tim James in 1967, and they recently celebrated their fifty-first wedding anniversary. When their first child, Jason, was born in 1977, she left Georgia Pacific.
When her husband left his corporate job at Freightliner to begin a commercial fishing operation, Lorie assumed financial accounting responsibilities for the business’s three corporations while spending months alone each year raising Jason and their second son, Jared, who was born in 1984.
With a strong sense of civic duty, Loralene volunteered many hours at the boys’ cooperative preschool; she actively participated at civic meetings on a variety of issues. She was a thirty-year member of the League of Women Voters. Twenty of those years she served on the board. An AFS exchange student in high school, Lorie supported the program throughout her life by interviewing applicants and running the annual fund raising events each spring at Lakeridge High School.
Lorie was a lover of the performing arts, attending the symphony, opera, and ballet with close friends. She listened daily to NPR, took annual sojourns to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, held season tickets for local theaters, and attended lecture series at Reed College.
Her wit, humor, intellectual curiosity, energy, devotion to family and friends, and leadership will be greatly missed by all those whose lives she touched. There are excellent reasons why her family nickname was “Chief.”
Survivors include her husband, Tim; sons, Jared and Jason (Kathleen); grandsons, Charlie and Cormac; and siblings, Bob, Pam, and Danell.
A private family memorial is planned.
In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory may be made to the League of Women Voters of Clackamas County, The Lakewood Center For The Arts, or The America Field Service Exchange Program at Lakeridge High School.
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