Dorothy Chandler (Stuart) Bloom (1917 - 2007)

Born 3 Nov 1917 in Worcester, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States

Ancestors

Wife of Robert Louis Bloom — married 26 Feb 1945 in Washington, D. C.

Descendants

Died 31 Jan 2007 at age 89 in Mendota, LaSalle, Illinois, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Stuart Bloom [send private message]

Biography

Dorothy Chandler Stuart was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, on 3 Nov 1917, the daughter of Harland Francis Stuart and Marion Guendolen (Reed) Stuart.^[1]

She grew up at Ilo Ilo on the island of Panay in the Philippine Islands, where her parents were Baptist missionaries. She was fluent in the Visayan language. She became a talented piano player.

As a teenager, she started corresponding with Robert L. Bloom, a son of an American couple that her parents had met in the Philippines. He was six years her senior and was a student at Shippensburg State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.

In 1935, she left the Philippines, not to return until a brief visit more than half a century later, and she enrolled in the secretarial program at Boston University, from which she graduated in 1938. She then worked as a secretary for several firms in Worcester. While in Boston and Worcester, she continued to correspond with Robert Bloom, who by then was teaching junior high school history and geography in Tyrone, Pennsylvania.

During World War II, she joined the Navy WAVES, where she was commissioned as an officer. While in the service, she discovered that she was stationed close to Robert Bloom, who was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps. They met, for the first time, and spent a day together in New York City.

She was assigned to Naval Intelligence in Washington, D. C. Robert deployed with his Air Corps unit to North Africa, later serving in Italy and on Sardinia, and they continued to correspond.

When his unit was ordered home and he was granted a furlough, Robert Bloom and Dorothy Stuart married on 25 Feb 1945.^[2] Dorothy liked to joke that she had married her husband on their third date—which was true, although they had become intimately acquainted long-distance through a correspondence of more than a decade.

Robert's unit was sent to California to train for the expected invasion of Japan. Dorothy arranged for a transfer to San Francisco, California, where she served as a telephone censor.

The war ended before Robert depoyed again. Dorothy resigned her commission and left the Navy as a lieutenant (j.g.) in 1945.

Later in 1945, Robert and Dorothy Bloom moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, where Robert, who had earned a master's degree from Duke University before the war, was employed teaching history at Monmouth Junior College and studying for his Ph.D. degree at Columbia University in New York City. They lived there until 1949, and then moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Robert joined the faculty of Gettysburg College.

Their first son was born at Long Branch in 1946, and two more sons were born at Gettysburg, in 1950 and 1952.

While raising her sons in Gettysburg, Dorothy Bloom worked as a secretary in the Gettysburg College alumni office and then as the editor of the Gettysburg College Alumni Bulletin. She later worked as a reporter for the Hanover Sun and as a reporter and editor for the Gettysburg Times.

She was involved in several community service organizations in Gettysburg, most notably with the Adams County Library, where for many years she and her best friend Betty Geyer co-managed the library store.

Robert Bloom died from cancer at Gettysburg on 15 Oct 1990, at the age of 79.

As a widow, Dorothy lived alone in the home at 108 Artillery Drive in rural Gettysburg that she and Robert had built in 1961, until 2002, when she moved to the Mendota Lutheran Home in Mendota, Illinois, to be near one of her sons.

Dorothy Chandler (Stuart) Bloom died from dementia and kidney disease at the Mendota Lutheran Home, on 31 Jan 2007, in her 90th year, with her eldest son and her first-born granddaughter by her side. Her ashes were buried following a graveside service the following June, beside her husband's at the Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg.

Robert and Dorothy Bloom were the parents of three sons, all of whom were living as of November 2022. They had five grandchildren, one of whom died in infancy.

Sources

1. ↑ Massachusetts, Vital Records, 1841-1920, Births, v. 642, Nantucket-Worcester, City of Worcester, 1917: Image 659, 4637, 3 November 1917.
2. ↑ District of Columbia certificate of marriage #277983

See also:

• Personal knowledge of her son Stu Bloom for the biographical details and for her death
• Interview with Dorothy Bloom, May 28, 1993, Gettysburg College collection of oral histories