Sally Dudley

July 4, 1944 - May 26, 2018 Palo Alto

Sally J. Dudley passed away in Palo Alto on May 26th, 2018, at age 73. Weakened by advancing Alzheimer’s, she succumbed peacefully to an unexpected internal brain hemorrhage, surrounded by her loving family.

Sally was born on the Fourth of July in New Haven, Connecticut, and always appreciated the fact that the rest of the country took the day off to help her celebrate. She grew up with her three brothers (Gus, John, and Sam) in New York.

Sally graduated as a math major from Vassar in 1966 and entered the unfamiliar world of computer programming at a time when IBM was just starting to expand its resource pool by recruiting at women’s colleges. She moved to the West Coast and thrived in her chosen field, staying at the forefront of opportunities for professional women in Silicon Valley for the rest of her long and successful career.

After relatively brief stays at IBM, Lockheed, and PG&E, Sally joined Hewlett-Packard in 1973 as a programmer in the Corporate Information Systems organization. She loved the old HP, with its culture of cooperation, contribution, and unshakable integrity, and played many different management roles in different parts of the company until her retirement in 1999, including a pioneering role in software quality management at the division, group, and corporate level, and a key strategic position as the highest ranking woman in Personnel, with worldwide responsibility for HP’s compensation and benefits programs. Throughout her career, Sally served as a mentor and role model for countless younger women navigating their way through the still predominantly male culture of a traditional engineering company.

After retiring from HP, Sally turned her positive energy to volunteer tutoring and even teaching calculus at a startup school in East Palo Alto, Eastside College Preparatory School, which has since compiled a remarkable record of sending all of its underserved minority students on to four-year colleges for the last 19 years. She also served on the Board of Humanities West, a San Francisco-based non-profit offering cross-disciplinary programs focused on history and the arts.

Sally will long be remembered for her intelligence, her cheerful disposition, her unfailing sense of humor, her generosity, and, above all, for her love of family and friends.

She is survived by her husband of 41 years, Chuck Sieloff (whom she met at HP), by her two beloved daughters and their husbands (Christy and David Story; Lindsay and Casey Pera), and by six wonderful grandchildren (James, Charlie, Chris, Sage, Cricket, and Ember). She is also survived by her three brothers and their wives and all her cherished nieces, nephews, cousins, grandnieces, and grandnephews.

A celebration of Sally’s remarkable life will be held on Sunday, July 29, 1:00-4:00, at the enclosed patio area of the Lucie Stern Community Center in Palo Alto (1305 Middlefield Road). Donations in her memory may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association Sally J. Dudley Tribute Fund: http://act.alz.org/goto/Sally_Dudley