Viola Elizabeth Lund

Viola (Vi) Lund died peacefully on Tuesday, November 12, in Redding, Connecticut, at the age of 87. She is survived by her brother, her two daughters, and three grandchildren.

Born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, in 1937, she went to high school in Kansas City, where she was a national debate champion and valedictorian.  She then attended Stanford University on a full scholarship, where she majored in philosophy and made lifelong friends. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford, she received a Master’s in Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While in graduate school she met and married Charlie Lund. He was a fellow philosophy major with a shared passion for learning and social justice. They moved to the Washington, DC, area in 1969, where they raised their two daughters. They lived there together for more than fifty years.

Vi was a skilled and demanding history teacher, a passionate reader with unerring literary taste, and a dedicated member of her church, pursuing her own distinct form of Episcopalian Buddhism.  A lifelong Democrat, she followed politics avidly (her daughters remember her watching the Watergate trials on the family’s only TV, a 10” black and white Sony, which she sometimes perched at the end of the ironing board so she could watch as she ironed).  Throughout her life, her active mind led her to many new enthusiasms, which included weaving, poodles, birds, bee welfare, native plant gardening, and (especially) Bollywood movies. She loved nothing more than introducing a friend to her favorite multi-hour Shah Rukh Kahn feature. These movies sparked an interest in India, and she and Charlie were able to travel to India as one of their last major adventures.

She will be missed by her daughters, to whom she has left a taste for Trollope, an exhaustive knowledge of the oeuvre of Shah Rukh Kahn, and one miniature poodle.