Dorothea Dunifon, 87, Was Designer and Editor

Dorothea Miller Dunifon, 87, died peacefully on Thursday, April 11, at the Care Center of The Claremont Manor, where she had resided for the last three months.

Born on August 23, 1914 in Allentown, Pa., to Arthur Persons Miller and Esther Cox Miller, she grew up in Chicago, spending summers with her grandfather, Leslie W. Miller, and her uncle, Percy Chase Miller, at Tannon by the Sea, the Eastville home that the family had purchased in 1871.

She attended Alvernia Girls High School and Boston University, where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi. After college, she returned to Chicago to work for the state of Illinois. She married James W. Dunifon in 1942 in the first Quaker ceremony held at the Friends meeting House in Evanston since its erection on the North Shore five years before.

Mrs. Dunifon lived for the last 50 years in Claremont, Calif. She worked doing layout design, and was copy editor for the Claremont Courier newspaper and Claremont Press until her retirement in the 1970s.

She was also a writer, and was the author of From Shacks to Castles and Paul Revere Slept Here. An active member of the Toastmasters organization, she won a number of awards for public speaking.

She spent most of her retirement quietly with her books and a succession of black and white cats.

Her ashes were returned to the Island for interment with her husband in the family plot at the Oak Grove Cemetery in Vineyard Haven.

She is survived by her daughter, Leslie Lichtenstein of Hatchville and Oak Bluffs, and two grandsons, Robert Lichtenstein of North Falmouth and Blue Creek, Orange Walk District, Belize, and James Lichtenstein of Lake Tahoe, Calif., and Oak Bluffs.