Harriet "Skip" Dockstader

Born in Everett in 1939 and raised in Seattle, Skip came of age in a time when a young woman’s ambitions were expected to be modest. Hers were not. A certified pool attendant and instructor at Alki Beach pool before women could be called “lifeguards” and a half court basketball player before TitleIX she was an active youth. In fact, as the story goes, as a young girl she most often skipped along happily from place to place, earning her the name Skip from an adoring uncle. 

After graduating From Ballard High School in 1957 she went to Willamette University, Class of 1961, where she joined the Nu Delta chapter of Chi Omega and threw herself into campus life. From Willamette, Skip went all the way across the country to Columbia University — a Northwest girl in Manhattan, earning a Master of Science in Social Work and becoming an independent New Yorker. She trained in group work: how people come together, how programs get built, how communities organize themselves to take care of their own.

It made sense that she found her professional home at the YWCA. She started in Salem, OR then moved to  San Francisco in the late 1960s — of all places and times — as an activist and organizer. There is a press archive entry, dated November 12, 1969, that captures her perfectly: a press conference, San Francisco, subject — “plans to radicalize the ‘Y.’” Skip Dockstader, thirty years old, standing before reporters with her fellow organizers, announcing on the record their intention to modernize the institution. Soon after she was promoted to bring that zest for change to the national level: New York, the national staff, the role of National Teenage Program Consultant for federal multi-organizational alliance to lead change. 

Skip thrived in the role — the person thinking, on a national scale, about what American teenage girls needed and how the country’s oldest women’s organization could meet them there. Her instrument was the written word: training manuals, program guides, and civic curricula that went out from headquarters to YWCA branches and neighborhood centers in every corner of the country. On their pages, girls’ programming stopped teaching young women to keep house and started teaching them to lead — community organizing, group problem-solving, career discovery, self-advocacy. A girl in a YWCA program in the late 1970s almost anywhere in America was, whether she knew it or not, working from something Skip helped write. 

Her counsel was sought beyond the YWCA too — she represented the YWCA’s National Board in the National Collaboration for Youth’s 1980 curriculum framework, working alongside leaders of United Neighborhood Centers of America, heir to the settlement house movement, and published strategies for building peer-led support networks for teens facing the hardest urban circumstances. Decades later, a historian researching the story of American girlhood sought Skip out, interviewed her, and cited her work as part of the blueprint for the feminist expansion of youth civic education — which tells you everything about the kind of mark quiet, serious work can leave.

In midlife, Skip enjoyed boating with her dad and nieces on her boat: Skips Pal which she kept in Seattle.  In New York City in 1982 the Coast Guard Auxiliary gave her a place to combine that love of boating  and her instinct for service for the next 27 years. Her finest hour on the water came over the Fourth of July weekend in 1986, when the Statue of Liberty turned one hundred and the greatest peacetime flotilla in Coast Guard history filled New York Harbor: tall ships from thirty-one nations, warships at anchor for the International Naval Review, thirty thousand spectator boats, fireworks over the Lady’s newly gilded torch. Skip served as the operational liaison helping to coordinate waves of volunteer deployments across the four day event. The Coast Guard gave her the Merit Award for it, and her task force the Unit Commendation, and it’s hard to imagine a moment that suited her better: liberty, service, and salt water, all at once. 

To her family and friends she was simply Skip — aunt, sister, great-aunt, loyal friend.  the one who had lived in San Francisco and New York and came home to Bellevue with stories. She was there when her sister Carol was lost too soon, and she remained a steady presence for Carol’s family a regular presence at birthdays, holidays, school achievements and sports events for her grand nephews and nieces. 

A life like Skip’s doesn’t fit neatly in a few paragraphs. Eighty-seven years, from Everett to Salem to San Francisco to New York and home again to the Pacific Northwest — she belonged to a generation of women whose legacy was changing  what was possible for future generations. 

One very dear friend said it best: She was a very caring person who always had time and went out of her way to help people. There aren’t many people like her. She was a very special friend.

We remember her with gratitude, and we miss her dearly.