Joyce Lawson

This information is posted here as a service to our community. The information was taken from pulic sources rather than from the family directly.


Joyce Merrill Lawson, 83, of Bozeman, Mont., and formerly of La Grande, died Sept. 23. The funeral will begin at 2 p.m. Thursday at Dahl Funeral Chapel in Bozeman. Burial will be at Sunset Hills Cemetery.

Mrs. Lawson was born Sept. 12, 1921, to Elmo and Anne Jehzell Hendrickson in Hillsprings, Alberta, Canada. She attended school at Fort Shaw, Mont., and graduated from La Grande High School in 1939. She attended Eastern Oregon College for two years with a music scholarship. She worked at the Ordnance Depot in Hermiston during World War II, and lived in San Francisco, before moving to Billings, Mont., where she married John P. Lawson on Oct. 2, 1948. The family settled in Bozeman in 1953, where she worked for the Soil Conservation Service, and later the U.S. Forest Service. She retired in 1984, and later worked part-time for the potato lab at Montana State University.

She enjoyed music, playing the piano, attending or hosting Hendrickson family reunions, reading, playing bridge, crossword puzzles, traveling and being with her family.

Survivors include her husband; children and their spouses, Jay and Belva Lawson, Jill and Dave Stevens, and Jan Lawson; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A brother, Jack Hendrickson, and three sisters, Jean Jenson, Anne Isaacson and Betty Waite of La Grande, all died earlier.