Joanne Stevenson Voogd Dec. 21, 1931 - Aug. 1, 2010
Joanne Stevenson Voogd of Laguna Beach passed away Aug. 1, 2010, at age 78 from maladies associated with old age. She was the wife of Jacob Voogd and they had been married for 57 years. The Voogds lived for some 20 years in the Netherlands and five years in London, returning in 1988 to her favorite place, Three Arch Bay, where she had spent so many summers with relatives as a young girl and while in college.
Joanne was born in Palo Alto, Calif., the only daughter of Bill and Ruby Stevenson, both Stanford graduates. Bill Stevenson was a vice president of Union Oil and plant manager of the Union refineries in Oleum and Wilmington. She attended USC, where she was president of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and where she met Jacob Voogd, a chemical engineering graduate of Stanford and USC. After a time in Niagara Falls where her husband worked for DuPont, they moved to the Netherlands where they established a world-wide process engineering firm named KTI.
In the Netherlands, Joanne was a member of the Church Council of the American Protestant Church of the Hague, a member of the Board of the International School of the Hague, an officer of the American Women’s Club and a Girl Scout leader. She was a founder of the American Community Council which started the annual Thanksgiving Day celebration in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, where the pilgrims worshipped before departing for America, an event seen on ABC. She and her husband founded the American Baseball Foundation. Their three children were raised in Holland and attended university in the U.S. Erica Voogd Phillips attended Scripps College for Women and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and is an Asian art expert who is often seen on the Antique Roads Show. Their son Maarten graduated from Pomona College and has an MBA from USC. He is founder and president of Water Ventures which builds water parks and other recreation facilities. Their daughter Karla Ray graduated from Stanford and also has an MBA from USC and is married to an executive of Heritage-Crystal Clean, an environmental service company in the Midwest. She volunteers at Glenwood School for disadvantaged children. Joanne and Jake have nine grandchildren. Her husband sold KTI and founded Evergreen Oil, the first re-refinery in the U.S. for processing used motor oil with hydrogen to produce a high quality base lube oil thus recovering the original lube oil in the spent but dirty drain oil.
On returning to California, Joanne and her husband have lived since 1988 in Laguna Beach, where Joanne became a docent at the Laguna Art Museum and taught Sunday school at the Laguna Presbyterian Church. Together they formed a charitable foundation which has given grants for scholarships and were a major contributor to the joint Science Center for Scripps and Claremont Universities as well as a school in West Kenya for young children.
A memorial service for Joanne will be at the Laguna Presbyterian Church at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 14 followed by a reception at the church. Donations in lieu of flowers should be sent to Laguna Presbyterian Church, 415 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach, CA 92651. She will be missed by her family and by the children of Laguna Beach and Three Arch Bay whom she dearly loved.