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Gail W. Caperna July 2, 1922 - December 13, 2012
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A Storytelling Guild Founder has passed on.
More
than 90 years ago this last July Gail Caperna was welcomed into this
world. In mid-December she bid us all a fond good-bye with her son and
daughter, and dear friends Shanna and Veronica beside her.
We have lost (one of) our matriarch(s).
Words can't describe this woman, this
powerhouse: storyteller and puppeteer for countless libraries,
co-founder of the Jacksonville Children's Festival, charter member of
the Jackson County Storytelling Guild, 20-year Girl Scout leader, oldest
recipient of a BS degree in Theater Arts at Southern Oregon University
at age 75, an extraordinary costumer for the SOU Theater Dept. and OSF,
and teacher of creative dramatics when, walking with a cane at age 82,
she toted bags of magical props and costumes to classrooms of children
in local schools.
She had a remarkable
creative influence on her four children. Reading defined her life and we
revere the eclectic treasure trove of knowledge, through books, that
she has left us. Her three grandchildren are especially grateful for
knowing Jody in The Yearling, Sterling in Rascal, or May Belle in Bridge
to Teribithia, characters experiencing rites of passage-often in
nature-and now threatened in our postmodern, digital world. This
knowledge, disappearing as our elders leave us, will be passed on to her
four great-grandchildren and to all who treasure books and
storytelling.
Full of curiosity, she wrote
about everything she did and was a published poet. With her children
and grandchildren, you could find her at a Yaqui Indian ceremony in
Mexico, a fashion show in Italy, on a boat on Lake Meade, inspiring
children with the Little Moon Theater at the Jacksonville Children's
Festival, or hunting in the Wallowa Mountains.
Nature
was a powerful source of her inspiration. Growing up on the coast in
Bandon, Ore., she survived the 1936 fire that destroyed the entire town
and her family home. An Oregon tomboy, she traveled with her father,
Clark, a cattle buyer, and listened to his endless yarns and recitation
of Robert Service poems. In the late 1930s she moved to California and
worked as executive secretary to the Commander of the Mare Island Naval
Base where she met her husband, Ron. She then returned to Oregon,
settled in Medford, and began an art gallery in Jacksonville, full of
watercolors of the coast, misty landscapes, fishing boats, and the
Oregon woods she loved so much.
Obituary taken from Mail Tribune, 12/30/2012
