Doris Marie Howard passed away on Sunday, March 11, 2007, at Eastern New Mexico Medical Center. No local services are scheduled.

Born in 1919 in Fonda, Iowa, Dorie was the daughter of Thomas Floyd and Dora Wilson. Proving herself a gifted athlete at Fonda High School, she went to college on a basketball scholarship. She also attended business school and later worked as an executive secretary.

In 1942, she began a 54-year marriage to Weldon “Wed” Howard, whose long and successful career in show business took them from New York to Los Angeles, Calif. with Chicago, Ill. as home base. While raising her two daughters, Dorie also met new athletic challenges as a skier, bowler, curler, and crack skeet shooter, but she excelled most of all as a championship golfer. She also soloed as a single-engine airplane pilot.

She would meet even greater challenges while faithfully attending her husband during a long battle with multiple sclerosis. When she became a widow in 1996, she continued living on Whidbey Island, in the home that she had shared with Wed.

In the spring of 2006, she moved to Roswell to live with Deborah and John Camp, her daughter and son-in-law. She enjoyed taking walks and admired the beauty of the New Mexico skies. She was a life long Methodist and a member of the PEO Sisterhood.

She survived seven siblings and is survived by her daughters, Meredith Jane Forsey and Deborah Camp; four grandchildren, John Cato, Lauren Cato, Sarah Jane Forsey, and Jack Fosey; and one great-grandson, Santiago Cato.

Her long and active life, a remarkable mixture of privilege and hardship, taught her to tell the things that endure from those that do not. She was a loving and talented lady who never lost her sense of humor, her devotion to her family, or her abiding faith in God.

Give condolences at www.lagronefuneralchapels.com. Arrangements are under the direction of LaGrone Funeral Chapel.