Alison Moldenke

Alison Moldenke (1943-2023) Alison Moldenke died of natural causes on January 9, 2023. Alison is survived by her husband Andrew Moldenke (retired), her son Kelsey (city planner) and his wife Sanskriti (construction manager), and her brother Richard Feerick (retired lawyer) and his wife Cindi. Alison was a loving wife of 55 years, a caring mother, and a perfect big sister. Alison was born in New York City after a rushed auto trip from rural Upstate. She spent her early years on a farm in Kinderhook. When she approached school age, her family moved to Tennessee, where both parents worked at the University of Tennessee for many decades teaching law and English. She attended Wellesley College (class of 1964 BSci), Wesleyan University (MA 1966) and Stanford University (PhD Biological Science 1973) . While attending Wesleyan she met and married Andy (1967). They subsequently attended Stanford while studying separate fields of entomology and development. After their doctorates they moved to Santa Cruz, California, where she gave birth to Kelsey. Alison then taught at Cabrillo College, Santa Clara University and Vassar College. In 1980, Alison started a series of jobs at Oregon State University researching toxicology (how insects escape being killed by agricultural pesticides). She later switched to the College of Forestry where she was a scientific/technical editor for the rest of her professional career. In Forestry, she assisted faculty and students to prepare scientific publications in journals and presentations for professional meetings. She also wrote pieces describing research being done throughout the College. After retiring in 2009, she spent much of her time in volunteer activities. She continued to volunteer at Stone Soup, the community soup-kitchen, serving for over 30 years. She also tutored English as a second language at the local community college and served as a conversant to the diverse international community of Corvallis. Since retirement Alison had the good fortune to establish familial connections in Ireland (and Andy in Scandinavia) as well as piggy-backing on Andy’s fieldwork in insect ecology in Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Alison has described her life as a LONG journey, but not all that strange – just enough to have made it very interesting!

Tributes

Alison Moldenke

October 18, 1943 - January 8, 2023