Audrey Louise Lincoln

Audrey Louise Lincoln, a retired high school teacher, was a dedicated volunteer who traveled to foreign countries to advocate for world peace and ending hunger.

Lincoln, 93, died at her Healdsburg home on Oct. 11 from renal failure.

Under the auspices of the organization Promoting Enduring Peace, she traveled to Russia, Cuba and other countries to meet with citizens there and promote cultural interchange.

She also met with Russian citizens who came to the United States. The intent was “getting common people together, deciding we're all more alike than different and promoting world peace,” said her son Stewart Fox of Healdsburg.

She also was involved with The Hunger Project and World Runners, working toward trying to end hunger.

Lincoln's avid passion for volunteering led her to teach literacy to adults in Sonoma County and read to nursery school children. She was a past president of the Welfare League and served on the board of the Family Service Agency and the YWCA.

In Healdsburg, she volunteered for Friends of the Library and the Healdsburg Museum. She also served as a member of the 1985 Sonoma County Grand Jury.

“She wanted to have meaning in her life and be doing things. She was extremely active,” said her son.

“She was strong, tenacious, very persistent at things, sometimes a little too frank,” he added. “She would speak out. You knew what she thought.”

Audrey was raised in the East Bay and went to Alameda High School before attending the University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley.

She met her future husband, Herbert Fox, at UCLA and they ended up settling in Tulare where he had a refrigeration repair business. She raised her children and taught English at Tulare High School for a few years prior to her husband's death from heart failure in 1952.

She then moved to the Bay Area to work for her family's book exchange for lawyers in San Francisco.

She married Fred Lincoln, an insurance salesman, before the couple moved to the Healdsburg area in 1965. She was a substitute teacher at Healdsburg High School for several years.

In retirement, she and her husband wanted to promote world peace and visited a number of countries as unofficial goodwill ambassadors. Besides communist countries, their travels took them to South America, New Zealand, Australia, Egypt and the Orient.

She also was a member of the Healdsburg Chapter of the American Association of University Women, and played bridge at the Healdsburg Senior Center until a few months before her death.

Other survivors include her sons Ernie Fox of Santa Cruz and Tim Fox of Healdsburg; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A gathering to honor her life will be held at 2 p.m. Nov. 7 at the Riverside Clubhouse in Healdsburg.