Donna Mary Austin

Published 12:23 am Saturday, February 6, 2016

October 31, 1933 –January 27, 2016

Donna Mary Austin, the beloved wife of Ned Austin died at Mt. Bachelor Memory Care in Bend, Oregon on January 27, 2016 surrounded by family. She was 82 years old. The daughter of Walter and Marguerite (White) Newell, Donna was born on October 31, 1933 in Seattle, Washington and spent much of her life in the Seattle area before moving to Bend in 1987. Donna graduated from Washington State University and worked for fourteen years as a special education teacher in Seattle area schools including eight years as a teacher at the University of Washington’s innovative Experimental Education Unit where she helped develop special education teaching methods that are still in use today.

Donna and Ned met in 1982 when she was a manager at the corporate headquarters of PACCAR in Bellevue, Washington and he was on assignment with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Center in Seattle. They eloped and were married in Wenatchee, Washington on September 2, 1983. When Ned retired in 1987 they moved to Bend and Donna became an active volunteer in Central Oregon with more than 2000 hours at the High Desert Museum and ten years in the Friends of the Bend Library Book Cellar and many years at St. Francis Church in Bend. Donna had many other interests which she pursued enthusiastically including reading, spinning and knitting, gardening, fly-fishing, birdwatching and Benedictine spirituality in which she became a Benedictine Oblate. Donna loved to travel and Donna and Ned had many wonderful travel adventures throughout the world. In 1993 she fulfilled a lifelong dream when they visited Kenya and Tanzania with the High Desert Museum. A lover of books, she made it a project to instill this love of reading at an early age in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and her success in this was very rewarding to her.

Donna is survived by her husband Ned, her daughter Debra and her husband Thomas Fairbanks of Seattle, her son Thomas Hardman of Chelan, Washington, her sister Shirlee and her husband Royce Cooper of Sequim, Washington, seven grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren. Donna was a kind and loving woman with a smile full of sunshine that she readily shared with all who knew her. She will be dearly missed.

Final arrangements for cremation were entrusted to Niswonger-Reynolds Funeral Home. Their online registry for Donna is at: www.niswonger-reynolds.com. In lieu of flowers, Donna’s husband requested that donations be made to the Alzheimer Association.