Lois Bender

Lois Bender was born in Indiana on September 24, 1929. She said that an important aspect of her life was that she was born into a secure and loving family. In Lois’s family the five siblings made their own entertainment, and the entire community made music: at home, in school and in her Mennonite church. Lois played piano, and she learned as a child to sing four-part harmonies. Music sustained her throughout her life.

Goshen, Indiana has a large Amish and Mennonite community, and Goshen College is where Lois received her B.A. in English in 1950. That year she married fellow Goshen graduate Byron Bender; a union that lasted 69 years, until Byron’s death in 2020.

While Byron began on a master's degree at Indiana University, Lois worked to support them. She had learned to type in high school and had taken shorthand in college. In those days, there were few choices of occupations for women, but Lois discovered that she really enjoyed office work, and her talent for it was an asset.

Both Byron and Lois came from long lines of conscientious objectors. During WWI Lois’s father had been assigned non-combatant work and was also imprisoned part of the time. But now, after finishing his doctoral studies in linguistics, Byron needed some alternative service work to qualify as a draft deferment, and an invitation for him to work in Micronesia satisfied that. They moved to Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, where Byron researched Micronesian local languages, and Lois served as the island’s postmistress. During the six years in Majuro, they started a family of three children. This was during the time Marshall Islands suffered from open-air nuclear testing. After a time of returning to Goshen, then back to Micronesia, and adding two more children, Lois and Byron decided to bring the children to Hawaii for better schooling.

Lois stayed home for ten years, but when the first two children went off to college, she began a 23-year association with the East-West Center Publications Department. Byron spent his years as chair of the U.H. Linguistics Department, and on his retirement, was appointed to the Board of Regents.

Lois sang alto with the Honolulu Symphony Chorus for many years. She was an expert seamstress, even to perfectly coordinating pocket patterns with the matching aloha shirt pattern. She was also a “quietly fearsome” Scrabble player.

Lois and Byron had known Quakers who worked in other parts of Micronesia and were impressed with how similar their values were to those of Mennonites. They began attending Honolulu Friends Meeting and became members. Lois said that their cultural roots are with the Mennonites, but their intellectual roots are with Quakers.

Lois Bender, 92, died on January 23, 2022, in Honolulu, Hawaii.