Donna Keyse Rudolph

1934 - 2024

Donna Jean Keyse was born at home in rural Scott County, Kansas, during a dust storm in early November 1934. She died nearly 90 years later in Hillsborough, North Carolina, after living with Parkinson's for 15 years. In between those places, she lived on both coasts, in the Midwest (including 28 years in the Lincoln area) and South, and developed a passion for learning and travel that she followed all her life.

Raised on a farm in a tight-knit small family and extended clan of farmers and ranchers, Donna developed a lifelong love of horses and nature. She kept quarter horses for pleasure riding and occasional breeding throughout her adult life, moving a herd from Kansas to the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia to southeastern Nebraska. She avidly cultivated nature everywhere she lived, planting trees, native plants, and fostering abundant birdlife.

After graduating from Scott Community High School in Scott City, Kansas, in 1952, Donna's intellectual curiosity took her to Stephens College (A.A.), then Stanford University (B.A., M.A) where she majored in history and eventually was A.B.D. in Chilean history. During this time, she discovered a flair for languages, particularly Spanish, in which she became fluent. Latin American history and culture became central to her life after her marriage in 1962 to Gerald (Jerry) Allen Rudolph, whom she met while earning her M.L.S. at Case Western Reserve University. The two worked in university libraries in Peru and Venezuela in the 1960s before starting a family in Manhattan, Kansas. They would eventually collaborate on two editions of the Historical Dictionary of Venezuela.

After staying at home when her two children were young, Donna experienced the frustrations and lack of opportunities that many women in the 1970s discovered when trying to re-enter the workforce. After teaching Spanish as an adjunct instructor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Northeast High School, she bravely founded a travel agency, Contact Travel, in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1982. For the next decade, constant hustling eventually grew the business to three branches. Thanks to her outgoing personality and language skills, she made extensive contacts in Mexico-not a predictable scenario in landlocked 1980s Nebraska.

Eventually, as the travel business sunset, Donna founded Vistas Travels Resources and became a consultant for the Ministry of Tourism in the Mexican states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo. For nearly 15 years, she commuted from Hickman, Nebraska and Bradenton, Florida, to Mexico, where she forged lasting friendships, working on eco-tourism and adventure travel projects and academic long before they became buzzwords, as well as forging academic partnerships between the US and Mexico. Most proudly, she helped develop the state-owned 18th Century hacienda Tabi as an academic study center and forged a relationship between the Yucatán Cultural Foundation and the National Arbor Day Foundation in Nebraska City, Nebraska.

After an unsuccessful start-up that took Donna and her husband to Bradenton, Florida for several years, Donna and Jerry re-retired to the Research Triangle of North Carolina, to be near her daughter's young family.

Donna loved nothing more than a project that could obsess her, whether building and renovating houses, trying to launch a ferry boat between the Yucatán and Gulf Coast Florida, helping raise her granddaughter, campaigning against unsightly cell phone towers, or monitoring her husband's health as they aged-whether he wanted it or not. She also loved dogs, beer, potato chips, Kahlua (so long as she didn't have to pay taxes on importing it), "Knots Landing," Willie Nelson, British mystery series, the musical "Evita" and her family. Although she finally admitted to her family that she did not have a sense of humor and didn't like comedy (she liked a movie where she could cry), she did have a great flair for staging dramatic anti-authoritarian scenes when she felt they were warranted and for delivering memorable zingers and pronouncements that have become bywords among her children and late husband. Perhaps she was influenced by the oversize personality of Truman Capote, whom she met several times as a young woman when he and Harper Lee were resident in Garden City, Kansas, investigating the murders of the Clutter family. She also cared passionately about women's rights and about nature conservation and if those causes resonate, she would welcome your support of them.

Donna was preceded in death by her parents, Iva Crist and D.C. Keyse; her brothers, Clarence (Bud) and Norman Keyse; and her husband, Gerald Allen Rudolph, to whom she was married for a startling 59 years. She is survived by her children Anne Keyse Rudolph (Mebane, NC) and William Keyse Rudolph (Mission, KS), her granddaughter Sarah Ezell (Mebane, NC); her honorary daughter Sharon (Cooper) Baker (Lincoln, NE); her sister Janis Whitham (Leoti, KS); sisters-in-law Jacqueline Rudolph (St. Louis, MO), Helen Hayes (Buford, GA) and brother-in-law Harvey Rudolph (Lauretta; Brookefield, MD); eleven nieces and nephews on the Keyse side, eighteen nieces and nephews on the Rudolph side; and numerous grand-nieces, grand-nephews, and cousins.

The family wishes to thank her devoted caregivers Rebecca Compton and Sonia Salvatierra, whom she loved and trusted; the staff of Terra Bella of Hillsborough, Arosa Care of the Triangle, and Gentiva Hospice Services; and particularly her dear friend Susan Gerbeth-Jones, whose kindness, time, support, treats, assistance with tasks large and small, and frequent cheerful visits she cherished. We appreciate how that wonderful devotion made her life better.

A memorial service will be held in Scott City, Kansas at a future date. She will be interred in Friend, Kansas, in the cemetery at the Prairie View Church of the Brethren that her grandfather built and where her many Crist relatives rest.