Joan Knox

Joan Knox was born in May 1922, in Moscow, Idaho, and passed away Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011. Her father, Art, was a career executive with Standard Oil Company. The family, Art and mother Irene, Joan and younger sister Nancy, moved frequently with the company and finally settled in the Bay Area. Joan graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco in 1940 and entered U.C. Berkeley in the fall of that year. At Cal, she pledged Alpha Delta Pi Sorority and met Phil, her beloved husband-to-be, on a blind date bicycling around Lake Merritt in Oakland. When the War broke out, Phil entered the V-12 U.S. Navy officer training program. On May 10, 1944, in Chicago, Phil was commissioned as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. Joan and Phil were married the same day with only another newly commissioned officer and his wife in attendance. Phil shipped to the South Pacific and Joan returned to Berkeley to complete her college degree. Phil returned after the War. and they lived in ship worker housing in Richmond, Calif., while Phil attended Hastings Law School. Joan gave birth to two sons. Tom and John. After Phil began practicing law in 1949, they bought their first house in Walnut Creek, Calif. They began an odyssey, following Phil''s career opportunities that carried them from Walnut Creek to Los Angeles, back to Walnut Creek, to Los Angeles again, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Washington D.C., to Chicago again and, finally, on Phil''s retirement, to Sacramento. In addition to making a home for her husband and sons wherever they lived, Joan was everyone''s favorite volunteer. In the 1960s, she was one of two alumna vice-presidents for her college sorority and traveled regularly to campuses to encourage and nurture young women who had joined Alpha Delta Pi. Beginning in the 1970s, she served in increasingly responsible positions with the Red Cross, culminating in her appointment in Washington D.C. as National Chairman of Volunteers of the American Red Cross from 1979 -1982. She could light up a room with her laughter and gaiety. She made herself happy by making others happy. She was as comfortable working a bloodmobile in a tough part of Philadelphia as she was hostessing a party for congressmen and government officials in Washington. She was a devout Catholic, inseparable from Phil until his death in 2002, and devoted to her sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. They returned her devotion in full measure, and mourn her passing now even as they celebrate the fact that God has welcomed her into his eternal embrace.