In Memoriam

Miriam Dearborn Dunn '50 A champion of just causes and good grammar By Lois Shea '95G

Miriam Dunn '50 "couldn't sit still," says her son Vincent. "When she was 84 or 64 or 44—she was always going like hell, 100 miles an hour all the time, and in the right direction, I think."

"Mim" Dunn was "a champion of just causes and good grammar," her son wrote after she died. One did not confuse "lay" with "lie" in her presence. "She could hold a really good conversation," he says. "She was profoundly prejudiced against dullness."

Dunn's father was a doctor. The family had a farm in Windham, N.H., and could afford household help, and Dunn's mother did not want her daughter to do menial labor. But Dunn wanted to learn. So she got the family maid to teach her to sew and iron on the sly. "She knew how to milk cows and goats and ride horses, and she was a crack shot with a .22," says Vincent. "She could slaughter a chicken and dress it."

Dunn served two terms in the N.H. House of Representatives and became a voice for children, low-income families and working mothers. She was also elected a delegate to two Democratic National Conventions. The Dunns' Concord, N.H., home was a place where Democratic presidential candidates could stop for a respite from the crush of the campaign. Ed Muskie came by. George McGovern. Bill Clinton. Vincent remembers his brother Mark taking a call from the Jimmy Carter campaign saying that the candidate would like to come by—and then forgetting to tell their mother. She was in the shower when the doorbell rang. Vincent describes his mother in her bathrobe, with a towel around her head, greeting the future president "with a welcoming sweep of the arm—graciously, as if she had done her hair and put her makeup on."

Dunn was founder and president of the legislative reporting service Capitol Eye, Inc. After she retired, she became a tireless volunteer for Democratic candidates. She was fierce about the causes she believed in—but never uncivil. Congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster says Dunn was "the best volunteer on my campaign." She used humor to diffuse tension or difficulty, Kuster says. "It was the way that she brought people together to roll their sleeves up and get something done." Dunn worked on the campaign until just days before her death from heart failure on April 12 at the age of 84. She was predeceased by her former husband, Vincent, and a son, Jonathan.

When Dunn wasn't working on a campaign or playing with her grandchildren, she was kayaking or canoeing with friends. Vincent's favorite photo of his mother shows her, at 80, flying down a slide into Lake Winnipesauke.

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