Obituaries : Rae Yoshida; Antelope Valley College Official

Rae Yoshida, who rose through the ranks of Antelope Valley College to become the school’s vice president of academic affairs and who volunteered much of her spare time and energy assisting the ill and elderly in the high desert, has died at her Lancaster home. She was 60.

An Antelope Valley resident since 1966, she died Wednesday of cancer, said John Yoshida, her husband of 28 years.

Born Rae Hideko Okamoto on April 23, 1934, in Watsonville, she was sent with her parents in 1942 to an internment camp in Poston, Ariz., in compliance with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order excluding more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during World War II.

The family left the camp after about six months when they were sponsored by a General Motors economist who moved them to Michigan. After growing up in Detroit, she earned her nursing degree from the University of Michigan and received her public health certificate from Wayne State University in Detroit.

In 1958, she began her career in education as an instructor at the University of Michigan’s School of Nursing. She received her master’s degree in nursing education from Columbia University in 1960 and became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan that year.

She moved to the Antelope Valley in 1966 after marrying her husband, who worked for NASA. Four years later, she was offered a job at Antelope Valley College developing the school’s nursing program.

In 1974, she became the program’s director and in 1975 was named dean of allied health. She was made vice president of academic affairs in 1981 and retired in August.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Yoshida also worked for many years to establish services for the Antelope Valley’s ill and elderly.

Yoshida is survived by no other immediate relatives.

A viewing is scheduled today from 2 to 8 p.m. at Mumaw Funeral Home, 44663 N. Date Ave., Lancaster. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Monday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 502 W. Ave. K, Lancaster. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to a scholarship in Yoshida’s name at Antelope Valley College or to the Visiting Nurse Assn. of Los Angeles.