Dorothy Foley Knecht

1916 – 2018

Dorothy Foley Knecht died peacefully of natural causes, at home, shortly after 3:00 AM PST on Monday, February 5, 2018, at 101 years old. Widow of San Francisco native, Gustav Knecht, Jr., she lived in San Francisco from 1945 until 2008 when she moved to University Village in Thousand Oaks, CA. Her long life began in Tampa, FL where she was raised by her New York-born father Hansard Strahan Foley and her Stockholm-born mother, Else Östergren Foley, along with her older sister, Elsie Foley Wolfe (1915-2013).

She left Florida for boarding school at Dana Hall in Wellesley, MA, and graduated from Vassar College in 1937. She spent the following year in Asia, based in Japan and traveling by train through Korea to Beijing (then Peking) at the dawn of World War II. During the war, she worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York until she married Gus in 1943, when he was a Captain in the Army, and moved to his base in Virginia.

After the war, she moved with Gus to his home town of San Francisco where their four children, Gary, Curtis, Patee, and Barbara, were born and raised. She was active in civic organizations from Edgewood Center for Children and Families in the 1950’s to the Executive Committee of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) in the 1960’s. She had an enduring interest in plants and landscapes, building a greenhouse on top of the garage of the family house on Pacific Avenue, transforming the family property near Gilroy into a working farm, and eventually opening The Native Planter store on Sacramento Street.

After Gus died in 1984, Dorothy moved to a condominium on Russian Hill near North Beach. She took up fly fishing, an interest inherited from her father, practicing in Golden Gate Park, and fashioning her extensive travels around fly fishing and contemporary art. She studied Italian, made many new friends, and gathered old friends around her dining table often.

Dorothy is survived by three of her children, Gary, and his wife Squeak Carnwath (Oakland, CA); Curtis, and his wife, Kat Knecht (Ojai, CA); and Barbara, and her partner, Ken Kruckemeyer (Boston, New York, Buenos Aires); and by two grandchildren, Emily (Los Angeles) and Nathan (Los Angeles), and two stepgrandchildren Laurel Rankin (Los Angeles) and Devon Rankin (Birmingham, AL). Her daughter, Patee, predeceased her in 1977.

Dorothy was politically active with Emily’s List (www.emilyslist.org), an organization to elect prochoice democratic women. She proudly displayed a photograph of herself with Hillary Clinton, and she attended Barak Obama’s inauguration in 2009. She was equally dedicated to the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org), a legacy of her southern childhood. The family would appreciate donations in her memory to either of these two organizations.

A memorial to celebrate her life is being planned around her birthday in July.