For the repose of the soul of
Daniele Dibie, M.A.
For 25 years she served as a professor in the California State University System. She was also wrote scripts for movies.
She will be missed greatly by her students. She was always so joyful and radiated God's love.
Her funeral mass will be celebrated on Saturday, June 15, 2007.
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Daniele Dibie was 6 years old when she first saw this country. Coming here had been a dream of her father's for more than 30 years, but it took a world war for the French doctor to uproot his wife and daughter and leave home just steps ahead of the Nazis in 1944.
Dibie, who recalls living for six months in Lisbon, Portugal, and two years in
French Morocco French Morocco: see Morocco.
..... Click the link for more information. before passage could be arranged to America, said her father had long expected the coming of the world war and had salted money away in banks in New York, Switzerland and Egypt, preparing for the time when the family would have to flee.
``He knew that war was inevitable,'' said the Sherman Oaks woman. . . He had been a doctor in the first world war and didn't want to live through it again. He had come to the United States on a visit in the 1920s and fell in love with it. And he wanted to come here to live.''
The family made it to New York unscathed in 1945, becoming U.S. citizens after a five-year waiting period, then moving to California. Her father, Marc, who changed his French surname to Parker to commemorate his new life as an American, made a successful second career for himself in real estate before he died in 1970, she said.
``He loved the opportunity here - the financial opportunity, the freedom to do what he wanted to do,'' Dibie said. ``He loved that if you had an idea, that you could develop it.''
During his visit in the 1920s, he was amazed that he was permitted to travel from state to state without inspections or passports or being stopped by border guards. ``You could travel anywhere,'' she said. ``You were free. He loved it, loved the whole pioneering spirit.''
It was a love he passed along to his daughter, who spends her days teaching foreign students to speak English so they can gain entry to U.S. universities and keep up with their native English-speaking classmates.
``It was a big change to come here,'' Dibie said. ``It was a little frightening at first. My mother cried every day for two years. But now, California especially offers some wonderful things you can't live without after you've lived here - the ability to own a home with a garden, the opportunity to send your children to a university, to make your own choices about your life.
``In the United States, you can wake up at 55 and decide you want an education and you can get it,'' Dibie said. ``You can't do that anywhere else in the world.''
Her three grandchildren live in London with her daughter, but she works hard to instill in them a love of their American homeland. ``I send them books on history and on American Indians,'' she said. ``I think they're appreciative, and that they'll remember.''
Dibie's Fourth of July celebrations are quiet, family-centered, sometimes with a trip to the Hollywood Bowl for a concert and fireworks. But amid the barbecue smoke and the skyrockets, she still appreciates what freedom means. <snip>
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