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Caroline Horner Locher-Stein ’67

November 15, 2018, in Chewelah, Washington.

As director and assistant director of alumni relations from 1986 to 1998, Caroline laid the foundation of Reed’s current alumni relations program. Her innovations included Alumni College; the alumni education program, including faculty seminars on the road; the formal alumni chapter program; and the alumni travel program. In addition to many meaningful connections, Caroline brought to her job a great store of intelligence, precision, determination, and elegance. 

Caroline graduated from high school in the Washington, DC, area, but spent a good part of her childhood in Germany and Austria, and came to Reed in 1962 speaking fluent German. At Reed, she majored in German and French, and learned Old French in order to translate a medieval play for her senior thesis. After graduation, she earned her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Oregon. Caroline took a year off during her graduate studies to work on her dissertation on a Fulbright Scholarship in Europe, and she and Prof. Kaspar Locher [German 1950–88] married in Switzerland. 

Caroline’s first faculty position was at Oregon State University, teaching English composition. She moved on to teach French and German at Pacific University in Forest Grove, a position she held for 12 years, and stayed active in professional associations of medievalists. She was a year from being eligible for tenure at Pacific University when the job at Reed in alumni relations was posted, and she decided that the Reed job would be more fulfilling for her.

“It was an exciting time,” she said in her oral history interview, “and there were lots of new things that could happen in the alumni program.” Caroline left the alumni office after Kaspar’s death in 1998. 

She later married Dan Stein, and they maintained homes in Portland; Chewelah, Washington; and Cipressa, Italy, on the Ligurian coast. She discovered a love of visual images and showed her paintings in several exhibitions. Prof. Peter Parshall [art 1971–2000], former Reed professor of art history and her longtime friend, said, “When I think of Caroline I remember someone vibrant and tireless, who not only never turned down a challenge, but managed to reinvent herself several times in her professional and avocational life, an odyssey that culminated in a passion for still-life paintings as meticulous and orderly as her handwriting.” —Contributed by Nadine Fiedler ’89

Appeared in Reed magazine: June 2019