Lavonna Faye Dodd

Graveside Service for Mrs. Lavonna Faye Dodd, 90, is scheduled for 2:00 P.M., Friday, November 21, 2025, at the Duncan Municipal Cemetery with Roger Sims officiating. Visitation will be Thursday evening from 5-7 P.M. at Alexander Gray Funeral Home in Ratliff City.

Lavonna Faye (Seals) Dodd, loving daughter, wife, mother, aunt, and grandmother, departed from this life on November 8, 2025, in New York. Lavonna was born April 10, 1935, and raised in Fox, OK, by her parents, Reuel and Cleo Seals. She was a graduate of Fox High School (1953), Draughn School of Business, and East Central State University (Master’s degree).

In 1954, she married Joe Dodd, and while raising a family and continuing her education, she became a teacher at Fox High School, where from 1969 through 1975, she taught Typewriting I and II, Sociology, Economics, Oklahoma History, and was the 4-H Sponsor, leading the school and her students to many wins in both typing and 4-H competitions. When not spending summer vacations going to school, she enjoyed traveling with Joe and their two children, while she also worked, as she had done since she was young, doing the books for the family business in Fox, Seals Well Service.

She was privileged to then work at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where she taught in the Business Department from 1976 to 1980. Wanting to be closer to family, she moved back to teach at Healdton High School from 1980 to her retirement, where she was honored as one of the first teachers in Oklahoma to create a fully integrated digital “office” for her business students, many of whom still live and work in the area.

Lavonna loved playing the piano for the Pentecostal Holiness Church in Fox and singing as a quartet with her sisters, Mary Jenkins and Betty Thompson, and Betty's husband, Pete. After she retired, she also spent many happy hours online with a small group of friends who knew her as Princess Redbud.

Preceded in death by her son, Rodney, and her husband, Joe, she passed in New York City with her grandson, Robert Dodd, of the home, and her daughter, Rhonda (Dan Renkin), at her side.

In lieu of flowers, please donate in her memory to your local hospice, Meals on Wheels, or the Alzheimer’s Association, which is searching for a cure.