Remembering My Step-Mother, Dr. Louise Fiber Luce

Oxford, Ohio. I first met Luan, who would later marry my father Stan Luce, on Easter 1970. My dad and I were walking back from church on our weekly separation-Sunday visit. He wanted to introduce me to his “friend,” the woman he was dating. I was ten. Luan was not particularly kid-friendly, but we grew closer as I grew older and had more to chat about. And I liked her a lot because she made my dad so very happy.

Luan, or Dr. Louise Fiber Luce, was Professor Emeriti of French at Miami University. Miami was founded in 1809, making it the second-oldest university in Ohio, Miami was one of the original eight Public Ivy schools, a group of publicly funded universities considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League. Miami maintains an international campus, the Dolibois European Center in Luxembourg where I visited Dad and Luan on several occasions when they were there on sabbatical.

Luan wrote both The French-Speaking World and The Spanish-Speaking World: An Anthology of Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Toward Internationalism: Readings in Cross-Cultural Communications with her sister, Elise Smith.

A native of Detroit, Luan earned degrees at the University of Michigan, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University. In addition to French and cross-cultural communication classes at Miami from 1970 until her retirement in 1995, she was also half-time Associate Provost for three years and a long-time member of the Women’s Center Policy and Management Council.

She toured Europe–and Russia–with my father, and had really enjoyed the Women’s Conference in Asia. The United Nations‘ Fourth World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing, China in 1995. The conference was attended by 189 governments, U.N. agencies, intergovernmental organizations, activists, and organizations

Shortly after retiring, Luan applied her leadership skills to designing and implementing an Institute for Learning in Retirement at Miami; she was very involved in the League of Women Voters and loved singing in the Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony Orchestra’s Chorale.

Always gracious and interested in others, Luan focused on possibilities and on making opportunities for learning and development widely available. She was an avid reader and eager learner who was open-minded, appreciated differences, with a wonderful sense of humor and infectious laugh.

She died at the age of 75, shortly after my father passed away. Her funeral was held in the church I was baptized in half a century earlier, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, in Oxford, Ohio, blocks from the Miami University campus that was her home for so many years.