San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
ENCINITAS’ FIRST POET LAUREATE, WAS POPULAR AT POETRY SLAMS
Trish Dugger, 94, the city of Encinitas’ first and thus far only poet laureate, died Monday, her family announced.
It was very fitting that she passed away just a few days before this month’s full moon because she was one of the founding members of the city’s Full Moon Poets group, her son Kevin Dugger said Thursday.
“Her poetry was such a big part of her life,” he said, describing how she constantly wrote poems about all her life experiences. “It came natural to her.”
Dugger published several volumes of poetry and was a popular performer at the Full Moon Poets’ Poetry Slam events at the La Paloma Theater.
In 2005, the Encinitas City Council designated her as the city’s first “honorary” poet laureate. Last month, the council issued a new proclamation declaring that she now was the city’s “official” poet laureate.
Dugger wasn’t able to attend the council’s ceremony last month, but her sons David and Kevin, her granddaughter Mimi Sheldon, and some poet friends did. They praised her love of family, her enthusiasm for life and her ability to craft poems infused with humor, colorful language and detailed descriptions of the challenges of raising three boys and a daughter.
One of her fellow Full Moon Poets co-founders, Danny Salzhandler, told a reporter at the time that
Dugger was a “wonderful, wonderful person” and any city poet laureate who came after her would have a high bar to cross.
Born Nov. 29, 1929, in Chicago
at the start of the Great Depression, Dugger didn’t have the happiest of childhoods. Her father abandoned the family, her mother couldn’t afford to raise her and her siblings, so she grew up in orphanages, her son Kevin Dugger said Thursday. Her only contact with her father was seven post cards he sent after he left.
“She never saw him again,” he said.
Dugger’s love of writing started in childhood. She achieved recognition in high school for her poetic talents. She was the Class of 1947’s Poet at her high school in Oak Park, Ill., a San Diego Union-tribune story noted. In that story, which was written when she received the honorary Encinitas poet laureate status in 2005, Dugger credited her husband, Tyree Grant Dugger, with helping her become involved in Encinitas’ poetry community. Months before he died in 1998, he took her to participate in a poetry reading at the Carlsbad City Library with the Magee Park poets, she said.
“He was my biggest fan,” she told the reporter. “I read my poems to him all the time.”
Kevin Dugger said Thursday that his mom and dad bonded over having similar childhoods. He too was raised in orphanages.
After reading aloud one of Dugger’s poems about love and heartbreak, Encinitas Mayor Tony Kranz concluded this week’s council meeting by adjourning in her honor.
Dugger is survived by four children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.