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75 Years: Dorothy Zimny, SP
(Sister Margaret Yvonne)
It was Christmas time in her senior year at St. Joseph Academy in Sprague, Wash., when Dorothy Zimny asked her father what he wanted for a gift. When he asked what she had in mind, she promptly answered, “Dad, I want to be a sister like the ones here.” That, her father said, would make him “the happiest man in the world.”
 She entered the novitiate at Mount St. Vincent in Seattle in July 1935 and pronounced first vows in 1937 and final vows in 1940.
Born in Wells, Minn., on January 27, 1917, she was the youngest of the four children of Andrew and Elizabeth Zimny. The family moved to Spokane when she was a year old because her father had heard that work was plentiful there.
Dorothy attended public schools close to home and then she entered high school as a boarder at St. Joseph. Her devotion to the Sisters of Providence began at the piano. A sophomore in the sisters’ boarding school at St. Joseph Academy in Sprague, Wash., she delighted in being offered free piano lessons by the sisters. “I was so impressed with this that it left a lasting urge for me to repay the sisters for their care and concern. I decided the best way I could repay them was to join them.”
Teaching was her first love
Her first ministry was teaching fifth and sixth grades at St. Thomas Home in Great Falls, Mont. Thus began a 17-year career in classroom teaching that took her to Missoula, Mont., Sprague and Colfax, Wash., and Wallace, Idaho. “I dearly loved teaching the children,” she recalled. It was her favorite ministry, “because I could see the students advancing and growing when they previously didn’t seem to care.” Through the years she has kept in touch with many of her former students.
Other ministries included bookkeeping, hospital patient accounts, secretarial duties and medical records administration, but it is the teaching that fills her memories. She recalls taking a boy aside to talk after school when classmates complained that he could not read or spell and had not learned his lessons. “He asked if he could come early every morning before school and show his completed lessons to me. This went on daily, and by the end of the school year, he was on a par with the 10 highest-grade students in the class. He graduated with honors, went on to college and teaches Special Ed to students who need special help,” Sister Dorothy said with pride.
“So at some point in our lives we age and plan for work in our aging process,” Sister Dorothy explains. “And now, at age 94, I am retired, but I try to be busy by visiting others, enjoying more time for prayer in giving thanks to God, for health that helps to enjoy each day for Him.”
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