Fredrika May

1918 - 2020

Fredrika Doelker May
September 27, 1918 - July 19, 2020
She came into the world during one pandemic and departed from it during another. And over those nearly 102 years, Fredrika Doelker May lived a life filled with global adventures, an enduring sense of style, and a bon vivant's passion for literature, cuisine and the arts.

Known by her family and friends as Fredi, May died peacefully on an early Sunday morning in July in the Oakland hills home where she and her husband of 60 years, the former Alameda County Judge Lewis P. May, raised their six children. And in pure quarantine fashion, many of the loved ones she left behind were able to say goodbye to Fredi via Facetime calls.

Even as she hunkered down at home like most of the world, her beloved caregivers at her side, Fredi was still walking the neighborhood for exercise, dining out with her kids at Casa Orinda or Italian Colors, watching the Metropolitan Opera on TV, and weeding her garden until just days before she passed away. It was pure Fredi feistiness, the same socially-mobile, wisecracking routine that she would leave as her legacy.

And what a legacy it was: living a life of Renaissance-style learning and driven by a boundless desire to meet new people and see new sights, Fredi seemed to do it all. A profile of her in the Cal Alumni Magazine described her as "an eyewitness to much of 20th-century history. She watched Amelia Earhart take off on her final flight from Oakland, spotted Winston Churchill in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel, saw Adolf Hitler protected by a phalanx of SS guards in a German airport in 1935, and watched the famous racehorse Seabiscuit run.'

Indeed, Fredi's wanderlust took her across a huge swath of the planet over the decades, inspired in part by her father, Fred Doelker, a Vice President at Grace Line. After her dad sent a teenaged Fredi and her sister and brother on a few globe-trotting passages, Fredi had the travel bug for the rest of her life.

"My favorite travels were with my dad,' Fredi told her interviewer early last year after turning 100. "Europe, Hawaii, Cuba, Germany—seeing where all those young men died during the war. I've traveled my whole life. Even to Antarctica. Now if I take a ride on a Sunday it's a big thing."

One of Fredi's favorite travel stories was cruising to Europe and being invited by fellow passengers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to sit beside them on deck. And as she roamed the world, sometimes with her husband and other times with small travel groups, Fredi met presidents, painters, celebrities and master chefs along the way. Well into her nineties, after she stopped traveling and finally gave up her driver's license, Fredi continued to regale her kids and grandkids with tales that seemed to come from another era.

"She was an entertaining storyteller,' said her son, Patrick. "And for most of her life, her memory was incredible; Fredi could tell you exactly what she had for dinner at a small restaurant near the Chain Bridge in Budapest 50 years earlier.'

Born in Alameda on September 27, 1918, just as the Spanish Flu was taking its deadly toll around the world, Fredi was the second of three children to Doelker and his wife, Florence de Haven. The family eventually moved to Oakland, where Fredi's mother passed away in 1941 at the age of 51 after a long illness.

Fredi entered Cal in 1937 at a time when college campuses were still very much a man's world. She put up with put-downs from some of her male classmates, wrote for the Daily Cal as a political science major and joined the Alpha Phi sorority where she made friends she would remain close to for decades to come.

After graduating from Cal in 1941, Fredi took another bold step and enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law to pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer. But because of the discouragement of one of her law professors, who felt women belonged at home and not in a courtroom, Fredi left Hastings shortly before meeting her husband-to-be at a dinner party in Piedmont. She worked briefly at a bank in Oakland while Lew May studied law at USF. He, it would turn out, would become the lawyer in the family.

Fredi raised her children with a combination of tough love and persistent encouragement for each of them, as she had always done, to never stop learning, always be inquisitive and never be disrespectful.

Fredi is survived by her three daughters, Ann May Vandor of Seattle; Sheila May Adrian of Lyon, France; Madeline May Horton of Oakland; her three sons, Patrick May of Pleasanton, Bruce May of Newport Beach and Peter May of Oakland; 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. A joyous celebration of her life will be held when there is a return to normalcy. Please feel free to donate in Fredi's memory to the Alameda County Community Food Bank, PO Box 2599, Oakland, CA 94614, or Holy Names High School, 4660 Harbord Drive, Oakland 94618.