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Joanna Clark Sewall: She cared about others
REFLECTIONS - Perhaps her best attribute was that she cared about others.

Joanna Clark Sewall died Wednesday and was buried in Hillside Memorial Park, forever a part of the community in which she was a pioneer 60 years ago. Her son, Sam Sewall, manager of the Redlands Chamber of Commerce, paused to recall the many things his mother had done during her 85 years on earth. The memories flooded quickly and like a montage of American life, one could envision her many kindnesses.
“During World War II she was an aircraft observer at the Civil Defense Station on Sunset Drive and headed the Redlands CSO project." Sewall said, recalling with fondness his mother’s community involvement. During the war Joanna Sewall cut out pictures of puppy dogs, shady brooks, blue skies and green forests, baseball games in action and pasted them into scrap hooks for servicemen all over the world. "She didn't just do one or two. she did a thousand of them" Sewall said. "And she received acknowledgement from guys all over the world."S he and her friends would sit at a table in the old Imperial Hardware Store, cutting pictures from magazines and carefully pasting them into books.
"I like to think she put love and concern and kindness into each of the thousand books, and that each serviceman who received one knew that someone loved him." Sewall said.
Mrs Sewall came to visit Redlands in 1912 It was during a visit with her cousin George Mullen and his wife Grace, that Joanna met Edward Houghton Sewall. While riding in a horse drawn buggy on Valentine's Day, Sewall pulled into Prospect Park and proposed to Joanna. In June of 1917 they were married in Trinity Episcopal Church and a reception was held at the fashionable Wissahickon Inn.
Sewall farmed some 40 acres of land in their first home at the top of Canjon Street and they moved to Garden Street in 1928. Sewall and a son, Edward Jr., died in 1946, but Mrs Sewall continued with her community work.
The summer dances sponsored by the Contemporary Club were furnished with hundreds of gallons of hand squeezed orange juice provided by Mrs Sewall. "She provided transportation to and from the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Bernardino for the Red Cross for 20 years," Sewall said.
“For her church work she was appointed as the church' s delegate to the International Episcopal Conference in Hawaii in 1955.”
"I remember her cutting and stitching over 10,000 padded pot holders for church bazaar sales for almost 25 years." Sewall said.
“She was born in a poor family, in fact, she was born in what had been slave quarters in an old plantation house and she had little formal education
"But she became a fine person who gave of herself to others. She was active in the Contemporary Club, the Republican women's Club and she was a charter member of the Assistance league here.” Sewall said.
Maybe few will notice that the hands that that once created packages from home for servicemen and pot holders for church bazaars, are now at rest, but Sewall is confidant that her enthusiasm for living will continue in others.⁵

Professor emeritus of botany and biology of the University of Massachusetts.