Tribute to my mother delivered at the memorial and celebration of her life on May 18, 2024 at Point Pleasant Presbyterian Church in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
My name is Kevin Reed Donley and I am the second son of Corrine Louise Russell Donley. I was raised here in Point Pleasant, NJ along with my three siblings, Mark, Dana and Cheryl, and I am very proud to speak today on behalf of our family at this memorial and celebration of life for our late mother, who passed away last December 19 at the age of 87.
It is truly wonderful to see our friends and family at this event today and I want to thank all of you for being part of this celebration. I also want to thank those who are participating remotely through the live Zoom video stream.
As was her way of doing things, our mother is entirely responsible for organizing this event. For those of you who knew her, you will not be surprised to learn that she left us a very detailed plan for this service down to the selection of the scripture readings, the hymns and the anthems to be sung by the choir. She even specifically requested our organist today, Sarah Hoey, and we are thrilled that she is part of this celebration.
I also want to thank Point Pleasant Presbyterian Church, Reverend Molly Ramsey and the choir for hosting our service. It is indeed an emotional moment for the Donley family to return here. We grew up in this church community in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. We have many memories of our days attending Sunday school and church service here on Sundays. Since our parents were co-directors of the church choir during those decades, we attended many services wearing choir robes and singing from the choir loft. Throughout our childhood and teen years, Thursday evenings every week were reserved for choir rehearsals.
I would now like to turn to my tribute and begin by referring to the quotation our mother selected for this service. It is from the well-known 1915 poem by the American poet Robert Frost entitled, “The Road Not Taken.” The quotation reads as follows:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.
For our mother, “the road less traveled” was without a doubt a metaphor for her life. She started out with meager beginnings and yet she accomplished so many extraordinary things. She was a loving wife and mother, grandmother, great grandmother and great-great grandmother. She was also an accomplished musician, an exceptional teacher, a pioneer in public school special education, a published academic researcher and, in the end, she established a private practice as a counselor for children and adults with autism.
She was the founder of the Wisconsin Association of Behavior Analysis (known as WisABA) and became its first president. There is today, a graduate student fellowship in her name at Marquette University in Milwaukee which is awarded each year to a student wishing to pursue a degree in Applied Behavior Analysis.
Our mother lived a life of enormous compassion and empathy for others, both within the family and, especially, for those with intellectual disabilities. Through decades of dedicated and often very difficult work, she had a transformative impact on many, many lives.
These are among the many important lessons of life that our mother taught us: the importance of strong family ties, the cultural significance of art and music, our responsibility to each other in society, especially for those in need, and the necessity to set goals that extend beyond ourselves. In possessing and living these principles and instilling them in others, our mother truly walked “the less traveled road” in her life.
At the same time, however, I believe there is another meaning in Robert Frost’s poem that has significance for our mother’s life; one that is perhaps more important and applies to all us of here today. This is because Frost’s poem is not only about the road that has been chosen, the one that appears as the “one less traveled by,” but, as the title says, it is also about “The Road Not Taken.” It asks us to question the road we have selected and think about “what might have been?” It points to the irony in the situation and asks, “what if I had taken the other road?” It is in this context that I think one of the most important lessons of our mother’s life truly emerges.
Corrine Louise Russell was born into a working class family in East Liverpool, Ohio on April 9, 1936, during the Great Depression. As she and the Russell family struggled through the many challenges of those early years, my mother found her two passions in life—music and special education—at a very young age.
Her exceptional musical talent was evident as a child. After first teaching herself to play the piano, a teacher noticed her desire to learn and, knowing that the family could not afford the fees, agreed to charge next to nothing for lessons in the morning before school.
By middle school, she was playing both piano and violin. In eighth grade, she was awarded a Level I rating by the Ohio Music Education Association for her violin playing. She graduated from East Liverpool High School in 1954.
After high school she was accepted as a student at The Ohio State University and was the first member of her family to attend college. She was awarded academic scholarships and she worked throughout her college years to pay for her education. She brought her musical talents to the university and studied for a degree in music education. She sang in the OSU Symphonic Choir and the Women’s Glee Club, for which she was piano accompanist, and she also played violin in the OSU Symphony.
She developed her interest in special education at OSU where, in 1955, she visited the Ohio State Institution for the Mentally Retarded in Columbus, Ohio. One year later, she pursued her interest in music therapy by directing a choir of patients at the Augusta State Mental Hospital in Augusta, Maine while also working as an attendant at the institution. It was following this experience that she was given an opportunity to transfer to Florida State University and pursue the field of music therapy.
However, by this time, Corrine Louise Russell had met our father Loren Duane Donley—who was a graduate student in music education at OSU—and the couple fell in love and decided to be married one year later, in December 1957, and start a family. At the age of 20, our mother made the decision to stay in Columbus and finish her degree in music education. She did not pursue music therapy and transfer to Florida State University.
And this brings me to the exceptional character and central point I would like to make about our mother and this something that I greatly admired in her. While she chose to pursue the road of marriage and start a family, she never forgot about her “road not taken.”
Our parents arrived in Point Pleasant in 1958, after our dad was discharged from the US Army at Fort Dix and accepted a position as the first music teacher in the Point Pleasant Borough school district.
My siblings and I were born between 1958 and 1966 and we were raised in what might be called a traditional family for that time. As the wife and mother with responsibility for most of the child rearing and household duties—a situation that was not at all uncommon during those years—our mother also continued to work toward her professional goals.
After the birth of my brother Mark and me, she became a kindergarten teacher for two years. Then she stopped working while she had my brother Dana and my sister Cheryl. She then returned to the classroom, but this time in the capacity of a special education teacher at what was known as The Little Carpenter School in Point Pleasant Borough.
Several years later, in 1969, she took a position as a special education teacher in the Howell School District. Working at the Aldrich School, she helped introduce a classroom where special needs students learned life skills such as how to prepare a meal or how to do the laundry. These students were also able to interact with the rest of the school community. This was a novel approach since, up to that time, students and adults with intellectual disabilities were kept segregated, out of sight and often institutionalized.
During those years, she was awarded numerous accolades, including Teacher of the Year recognition from the ARC, a non-profit association that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. While teaching at Aldrich School, she achieved her first master’s degree at Trenton State College and her thesis project was on music therapy for the handicapped. She was 45 years old at the time.
After twenty years at Aldrich, she could have gone into retirement, but she did not. She continued to pursue her “road not taken,” went back to school again and achieved her second master’s degree, this time in special education at Columbia University. Then, at the age of 55, she earned her doctorate from Columbia University in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis and specializing in speech therapy for autistic children.
In 1989, our mother became an assistant professor of special education, first at Georgian Court College and then at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She left university teaching in 2002 to pursue her private practice until her retirement in 2011.
So, I would like to close this tribute with what I think is the best way for us to celebrate and honor the life of our mother. We are all challenged to find our own “road not taken,” whether young, old or in our prime. With the right combination of compassion and determination, it is never too late to accomplish the goals we set for ourselves, especially those that involve a contribution to the needs of others that make a real difference on the world.
Thank you.
MULTIMEDIAMAN 