“I call her Lola, because she’s red, perky and cute,” said Lopezian, Karin Stow Gandini, about her car.  The purchase was a rebellious response to gasoline prices and was one of the first electric vehicles on the island.

“I’m a very happy person.  I love my life,” said the calm, blue-eyed, blond as she spoke of moving among exotic places.  Her father was English, a shipping agent in Palestine when he met an outspoken young German woman seeking refuge from a raging Hitler.  Her mother had moved without her family who feared she would be a target for a Hitler Youth Camp.

“I was born in Jaffa, Palestine, a British mandate, in1941as war broke out,” said Gandini.

“My mother’s father owned an engineering company.  You had to hang a picture of Hitler in your business but my grandfather turned it against the wall.  For doing that, he was sent to a concentration camp for two years.  My mother’s brothers perished in the war.  One was a Nazi sympathizer and died of pneumonia.  The other hated the Nazis, but had to fight and was killed.

“My father felt he had to join the service and fought in the Cyprus Regiment.  He came back for my christening when I was one-month-old.  Taken prisoner in Crete by German parachuters, he spent four years as a prisoner of war in Germany.   He was fairly safe in a camp run by the Geneva Convention.

“I didn’t see my father again until I was four.  We went to England and I wondered about the stranger was who was taking my mother’s attention. I didn’t like him at all.”

After a stay in England, Gandini’s father returned to work in Palestine but women and children were not allowed.  “So we lived in Beirut, Lebanon, where father would visit every other weekend and I attended a French school.  Then we moved back to England for awhile and to Alexandria, Egypt, for two years.  There, we had a house and finally lived together as a family.  It was really nice.

“When King Farouk abdicated and Prime Minister Nasser came in, everybody had to leave.  We just had our suitcases and the clothes on our back. I was about ten.  We moved to Cyprus but my parents chose to have me educated in an English boarding school for six years.  I was a colonial person and not thoroughly accepted but I knew I had to stay there.  I saw my parents in the summer and my grandparents in Kent during Christmas and Easter breaks.

“Only two men were in the school.  One was the chaplain we called ‘Trousers.’  The other was the fencing master, very dishy looking, so as older students we tried to take his class.”

When Gandini left boarding school, she went to Freiburg where her German grandparents lived and then to Grenoble, France.  She spent a year studying in each place.  Back in England she took a secretarial course, was employed as secretary to the manager of a chemical firm and interpreted for French and German customers.

While living in London, Gandini met and married a young American.  The couple moved to his Seattle home in 1964 where she raised her two children.  She taught French in a private K-6 school, took a legal secretarial course at Renton Vocational Technical School and was hired by a large downtown law firm.  Gandini divorced after 17 years of marriage.

Nine years later, Karin and Pete Gandini who met while line dancing, were married.  The couple spent two years building a house on his Lopez property.  They moved to the island in 1997.

“At first I was a little worried because I went to the opera and cultural things in Seattle but I soon realized that I really love it here.  It is the first time I’ve felt I belong to a community.  My whole life was so chopped up by moving around that I’ve never had regrets about living here,” Gandini said.

The first year, Gandini met Glenys Bennett, also English, through a book club. “I became good friends with Glenys and her husband, Peter. Then I began mentoring and I have my second mentee.  On a busy day at the clinic, I asked if they needed help. I still restock their rooms once a month.  Pete and I thought it would be fun to do BLM land monitoring so we do that once a month.  I’m in charge of lunch programs for the Seniors and am involved with the Thrift Shop. It keeps me very busy.”  She enjoys her grandchildren, her book club and the Garden Club.  “I’m just curious,” said Gandini. “I love birding and traveling.  We have made quite a few trips abroad.

“I try to live in the moment, not dwell on the past and not think much about the future.  Just live today,” she concludes.