Laura Harriet Cline
Oct. 30, 1918-June 13, 2015
Palo Alto, California

Longtime Palo Alto resident Laura H. Cline died June 13, 2015, in hospice care at home, at the age of 96. Laura was born in 1918 in Saginaw, Michigan, to Fred S. and Laura (Gallagher) Weavers. She earned a degree in nursing from the University of Michigan and worked at the university hospital in Ann Arbor. In 1941 she married Jack Fribley Cline, then a graduate student in electrical engineering. They lived in Ann Arbor for the next 16 years; Jack became a professor and Laura maintained an active community life with the League of Women Voters.

In 1957 they moved to Palo Alto, where Jack worked for Stanford Research Institute. Laura continued her involvement with the local League of Women Voters, taking particular interest in Fair Housing issues in the 1960s in conjunction with the Urban League. She also volunteered for two decades at Stanford's International Center. In the I-Center's "homestay" program, she hosted newly arrived foreign graduate students each fall and also provided them with extended English-in-Action tutoring. In the late 1960s, she helped create a popular international cooking class at the I-Center, combining foreign cookery demonstrated by foreign students' wives with discussions about the roles and rights of women throughout the world. In those years Laura worked with students from Japan, China, Norway, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, Panama, Bulgaria and India, among others. She stayed in touch with most of them, and later on, she and Jack traveled the world and were able to visit a great number of those she had befriended. Always intrepid travelers, the couples' last overseas trip, to Sicily, occurred when they were in their late 80s.

When she was not traveling, Laura swam a mile three mornings a week at Rinconada Pool, a habit she faithfully maintained from age 50 to 93.

Laura was an accomplished seamstress and a devoted gardener. Jack built a greenhouse on an exterior wall of their Eichler home; orchids were her particular joy. Laura loved to cook and collected recipes avidly. She made frequent dinner parties look nearly effortless. Once a visiting student stayed for three months and expressed his astonishment that no dinner menu was repeated in that time.

Laura outlived her husband by seven years. Her survivors include her two daughters and their husbands: Mary Cline and Derek Orme of Portola Valley, and Patricia and Benjamin Cohen of Goleta, California. She has two grandsons, Jeremy and Daniel Cohen, and four great-grandchildren.