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Rosamond E. Stricker Day ’33

A picture of Rosamond Stricker Day

Rosamond E. Stricker Day ’33, January 14, 2006, in San Rafael, California. Rosamond was born in Grants Pass, Oregon, and moved frequently during her first eight years, while her father worked as an army physician. The family settled in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, and Rosamond grew up playing on the Reed campus. At age 9, she decided that her career would be in art. To achieve that goal, she attended the Portland Museum Art School for three years and then completed a BA in art at Reed. For a few years following graduation, she remained in Portland and painted, took business courses, and worked as a secretary. Art remained her passion, and after traveling to San Francisco to view two exhibitions, she decided to move to the city, and there she studied design and textile printing, taught classes, worked at World's Fair on Treasure Island, and did independent designing on table linens and draperies. In 1941, she married artist and teacher Edward C. Day and moved to San Rafael. With her husband in military service during World War II, she continued her teaching in San Francisco and at Dominican College in San Rafael. She did freelance designing and printing and worked for the innovative American textile designer and weaver Dorothy Liebes, at her design studio in San Francisco. “It was a stimulating period for craftsmen at that time, and finely designed products were made,” she noted. Rosamond and Edward had one son, Donald J. Day ’68. Following her husband's first heart attack, Rosamond determined that she should earn a teaching credential, which she did at Dominican; Edward died prematurely. Rosamond volunteered in scouting, PTA, and at Boyd Natural Science Museum, where she conducted tide pool studies. Eventually her work at the museum inspired her to study marine biology, marine algae, land plants, botany, natural history, and conservation. She went birding with the Audubon Society, did annual bird counts, and later focused on work with the California Native Plant Society. She tended her acres of native oak and grassland, joined the Sierra Club, explored Yosemite, and traveled abroad to Europe and Asia. A study of Pre-Columbian art prompted travel to ruins in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the Yucatan. She expanded on that experience with other trips to Costa Rica, Kenya, and the Hawaiian Islands. Prior to her 50th-class year reunion at Reed, she scheduled an extensive trip to Alaska. And for that reunion, she recounted a few of the details of her life after Reed. “My house is full of collections of many kinds, from herbariums, family heirlooms, cookbooks, unfinished projects, drawers of sketches, and just plain junk.” Pursuit of knowledge, supported by experience, drew her steadily onward.

Appeared in Reed magazine: November 2009