HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY DOROTHY FOWLER 

The Chicago that Dorothy was born into (Oak Park was a residential suburb) had become since the Civil War the largest city in the Midwest. It was a bustling, energetic city that invested in the new and wonderful. She remembers the electric lights in the city, although their house was lit with gaslight and food was cooked on a gas stove. They had a telephone, the only one in the neighborhood, and they took messages for the neighbors.
Her mother, who was a high school graduate and taught school before her marriage, went often to the opera. A hairdresser would come to the house to do her hair, and well coifed and well dressed, she and her husband in silk hat on his head and spats on his shoes would get into a horse-drawn cab to see the opera.

In 1911, her parents came north to Strongfield, Saskatchewan to buy land for their 17-year-old son, Kay, who wanted to farm. It was quite a change. Dorothy and her younger sister Mary went to a one-room school over 2 miles away by a horse-drawn uncovered wagon. In winter, they had heated stones to keep them warm. At the farmhouse, there was no running water, just a pump outside. All water to cook and wash was pumped outside, brought in and heated on the coal and wood cook stove. This stove also heated the farmhouse. Later her father built an addition for a separate bathroom and a coal-fired heater.

Her father worked at the grain elevator as a grain inspector in Strongfield; her brother farmed, and her mother worked equally hard at raising chickens, gathering eggs, feeding men at harvest time and all the other innumerable jobs necessary for succeeding.
The one-room school only went to Grade 8, but by the time Dorothy was ready for Grade 9, the High School had opened in Hawarden. She was driven 4 miles to the school, but because she was out of the district, she had to pay tuition. For Grade 11, Dorothy went by train to Loreburn, south of Strongfield.

The next summer, Dorothy was offered a short stint of teaching in a school near Strongfield. She taught for 6 months and earned enough to pay for six weeks of Normal School in Regina. Three of those weeks she was home with the mumps. After that she taught for 3 years at Avonlea school, a small one-room school 15 miles from Kenaston, Hawarden and Hanley. She moved to a school in Hanley and taught there until 1924, when she went to a school in Wilcox, south of Regina.

Dorothy taught there until on August 11, 1927 she married Harry Fowler, the secretary-treasurer of the school board, who had lost his wife in childbirth a year earlier. . So she became an instant mother, making a long train journey to Ontario to get the pale, fragile 16 month old that would thrive in her care. They had four more children, but the first two boys, Kay and Douglas, died tragically in a house fire. Kenneth Rogers was born in 1931 and Helen Joyce in 1933.

It was during this time that Harry Fowler found his life-long devotion to the ideas of the co-operative movement. Dorothy was much more than a supporting wife. She became an important part of this movement in her own right. She realized that education of the consumer was a key part of organizing co-ops. When she travelled with her husband, she talked to the women who came to the meetings and emphasized their role in any co-operative enterprise.

In 1935, during the planning and construction of the Co-operative Refinery at Regina, the Fowlers moved into Regina. For the next nine years, she managed the house and children, and remained active in church and the co-operative movement. In 1944, the Fowlers moved to Shelbyville, Indiana where Harry managed the National Co-operative Farm Machinery Corporation. They moved back to Canada to Tisdale, Saskatchewan for two years, and then to Saskatoon where Harry became secretary of Federated Co-operatives, and later served as president until he retired. Here Dorothy was active in church and community. In 1955, she was one of the organizers of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Women's Guild and was president for five years. She served on the board of the Saskatoon YWCA and also as president.

On Harry's retirement in 1966, they bought a cottage at Pike Lake outside Saskatoon where they spent their summers. In the winter, they went to Florida where they had a trailer near Miami. In 1973, they joined a housing co-operative in Abbotsford, B.C. which provided senior's housing. Harry died there in 1980, but Dorothy continued to be involved with the church, the co-ops and the community. She was for most of the later years a member of a group called Widows Helping Others.

In 1995, she found it hard to continue living on her own and she moved into the Inglewood Care centre in West Vancouver, where she presently resides and receives excellent care.. She has three living children, seven grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren, all of whom she keeps track of and remembers their birthdays.