Club Secretary Dora Dye has set herself the goal of organizing the Club’s historical records during her two-year term on the Board. That’s in addition to her regular duties, which include taking minutes at the monthly Board meetings and maintaining the Club’s membership data with Rotary International. And, if that’s not enough, she also edits Grindings, the Club’s weekly newsletter; regularly updates the Club Website; and helps members interact with ClubRunner.
Born in Oakland and raised in Vallejo, Dora earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley, then taught Spanish at the former Presentation High School in Berkeley, leaving after a couple of years because “the pay was poor.” She then worked for five years for a real estate investment company in Emeryville, starting as a secretary and moving up to marketing and publications and finally switching to the legal department, which led her to start law school at the University of San Francisco.
After one year in law school, “I asked myself if I really wanted to be a lawyer,” she says, “so I decided to work in law before deciding to stay” at USF. She worked as a paralegal in a San Francisco law firm and found that “I liked being a paralegal so well that I didn’t go back to law school.” During 15 years as a paralegal for various San Francisco law firms, she became president of the San Francisco Paralegal Association, where she met representatives of several paralegal schools who asked if she would be interested in teaching, which led to her working as a paralegal by day and teaching at night, first at San Francisco State, then for 10 years at California State Hayward (now CSU East Bay), and finally at San Francisco City College, where she has been since 1994.
Dora met her husband, David Dye, when she was a speaker at an American Association for Paralegal Education conference in San Francisco in 1995. They worked on projects together for the association and “discovered we had a lot in common,” she says. David, who was working as an attorney and paralegal educator in Missouri, moved west in 1996, “and we’ve been together ever since,” Dora says. After their son, David, Jr., a junior at San Francisco State, was born in 1997, Dora quit her job as a paralegal and became a full-time teacher. They live in Pacifica.
During David’s many years as a Rotarian in several clubs, Dora “followed along to events,” and, when David became Rotary Club of San Francisco President in 2015-16, “I was helping him with a lot of things,” she says, “so I decided to just join.” Because she works and couldn’t attend regular lunch meetings, she became involved with membership and publications.
"Rotary," Dora says, “is an opportunity to meet people I would never meet in daily life; that part I like.” She says she enjoys “getting to know people in the District” and expects to take on the role of Secretary of District 5150 in July. She and David love to travel and have attended RI conventions in Hamburg, Atlanta, and Seoul, as well as enjoying trips to England and Wales, England again and Scotland, and Germany, Paris and Belgium.