Violet Norrman Dobbins

Violet Elizabeth “Vi” (Norrman) Dobbins passed away peacefully at home on July 30 after a three-year struggle with lung cancer. Her daughter, Deborah, and longtime caregiver and companion, Christine Miertschin, were at her bedside during her final hours. Born in Manhattan, New York at midnight on August 14, 1929, she lived there and in Camden, N.J. with her parents, Ernst and Hillevi Norrman, and sister, Marie Norrman Leighton, before moving to Sweden in 1934 to live with relatives. About a year later, she moved back to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, Ill. and then Delevan, Wisc. before settling with her family in Williams Bay, Wisc. in 1943.

A 1947 Williams Bay High School graduate, she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison and graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in speech education. While she attended UW at Madison, she joined the Alpha Chi Omega Sorority in the fall of 1947 and became the university’s Centennial Prom Queen in 1949. For the next two years she taught English at a high school in Waupun, Wisc. and then accepted a position as a travel agent in Los Angeles, Calif. She met John Potter Dobbins during a travel/aviation event at the Green Hotel in Pasadena, and they were married on Oct. 1, 1955 at the Williams Bay Lutheran Church.

An inveterate traveler, she took advantage of numerous travel agency-sponsored trips across the globe and eventually visited over 100 countries. In the Late 50's, before her husband’s doctoral work in Switzerland, they traveled westbound around the world including a freighter trip across the Pacific. During their years in Zürich and Lausanne, the family grew to include four children and their nanny.  In 1962 while her husband was finishing his dissertation, she returned with the rest of the family to New York via cruise ship and spent the next few years living in Williams Bay, WI, and in Silvermine and Westport, CT.

Work opportunities related to the space program brought the Dobbins family to Southern California again, where they settled in San Marino in 1966. In 1976 she earned her pilot’s license and later joined the 99ers Flying Club. She joined the San Marino Women’s Club in 1980 and helped them organize the city’s first debutante ball. Over the years she balanced her travel business, motherhood, and extensive volunteer work, hosting numerous gala events for a variety of charitable organizations.  Passionate about her politics as she was about everything in her life, in 1984 she was the first woman to run for a seat on the San Marino City Council.

In 2004, ten years after the death of her husband, she relocated to Del Webb’s Sun City in Palm Desert, where she lived for 10 years. Violet is survived by her brother, Ernie Norrman; her four children, Stephen, Deborah, John, and Michele; Christine Miertschin, the children’s nanny and Vi’s caregiver; and six grandchildren. The family has planned a private celebration of her life at the Indian Wells Country Club on Aug. 15.