Joyce P. McDowell '57

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Joyce P. McDowell ’57 died peacefully at her home in Hermosa Beach, California, on Saturday, April 26, from heart-related problems — just a few months shy of her 90th birthday and her 70th wedding anniversary.

Born December 26, 1935, Joyce Dudley (nee Goldman) grew up in Forest Hills, New York, and Newton, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Newton North High School in 1953, after which she chose to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In her freshman year, she met Ed McDowell; they married on June 18, 1955, and moved to California to live a life without snow and with a view of the ocean out their window.

As Ed was starting his career in chemical engineering, Joyce was raising two small boys, cooking for Ed’s racing crew and finishing up her studies in linguistics. She graduated from UCLA in 1957 with “Highest Honors in Latin.”

McDowell attended Cal State Fullerton for her M.A. where, in 1982, she became a member of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation's oldest and most selective all-discipline honor society. She earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from USC in 1987.

To some, it has felt as though McDowell spent her life either in the kitchen cooking at a professional level of culinary excellence, at her typewriter, later her computer, typing away, or traveling the globe to far-flung and interesting places, collecting art and snuff bottles everywhere she went.

As soon as she earned her Ph.D., McDowell was hired by IBM to work on natural language processing. Her task was to study and understand the nuances in the word “that” and to program her understanding into predictive language code. She spent an entire summer in New York City at the IBM building working on one word. Returning to California, she started a company to continue the work. She soon discovered that she missed traveling and decided a life of adventure was more interesting, so she closed the business.

Once both Ed and Joyce had retired from working life, they traveled literally to the farthest ends of the earth, to the North Pole and the South Pole, from Russia’s Eastern most peninsula Kamchatka, to Antarctica to Paris. She especially loved Africa and its wild animals, particularly the elephants. At the age of 89, two weeks before her death, McDowell had planned a trip to New York City to see a Gilbert and Sullivan performance.

McDowell pursued her love for Chinese snuff bottles, avidly collecting pieces and serving on the Board of the Chinese Snuff Bottle Society from 2012 to 2017. Her collection of bottles was featured at LACMA in an exhibition titled “The Spinnaker Collection.”

She was a lover of — and a student of — many things. She loved history, especially anything about Winston Churchill, and good mysteries. She loved science. She loved theatre and the opera and she loved Hawaii and an unpretentious life where no jackets and ties are required. And she loved birds — nothing thrilled her more than finding an albatross nesting on the cliff in her backyard in Kauai.

McDowell loved wine, loved cooking and eating and enjoyed combining both at her and Ed’s wine lovers’ dinner parties in Hermosa Beach. She never stopped moving, cooking, reading, typing, drinking, eating, traveling, planning, packing, unpacking, organizing.

McDowell is survived by her husband, son Ed Jr. and daughter-in-law Marni, son James and daughter-in-law Amy, grandsons Edward III and Evan and niece Pamela Burton.