Dolores Sue (Palanker) Laschever

GOSHEN — Dolores Laschever, a distinguished journalist and longtime Connecticut resident, died on Dec. 22, 2020, in Simsbury, Conn. She was 92.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Dolores was the daughter of Rose (Banditson) and Meyer N. Palanker. 

Her father was a furrier and her mother owned a dress shop. The first in her extended family to attend college, she earned a journalism degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote for the Michigan Daily, joined Theta Sigma Phi, the Association for Women Journalists, and met her future husband, Barnett D. Laschever. 

Following her 1950 graduation, Dolores and her husband moved to Connecticut, where she worked in the communications department at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum before embarking with her husband on an extended trip that eventually took them all the way around the world. Through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and on to China, they traveled by car and train, seaplane and bicycle, on the backs of burros, horses and camels, and on rickety buses that lurched and slid through mountain passes from Switzerland to northern India. After close to a year on the road, they boarded an ocean liner in Hong Kong and steamed back to the U.S. in steerage.

In 1955, Dolores and her husband relocated briefly to New York City and then East Brunswick, N.J. They came back to Connecticut in 1965, moving into an old farmhouse in Goshen, where they raised their family. Returning to work when her youngest child began school, Dolores spent the next four decades as a reporter, photographer and editor for the Litchfield Enquirer, the Torrington Register-Citizen, The Lakeville Journal and the Hartford Courant, for which she wrote occasional columns about happenings in the state’s Northwest Corner. She mentored generations of young journalists, and was an avid gardener, animal lover and renowned cook who welcomed generations of extended family and friends to gather around her dinner table. She remained an adventurous traveler, even going on African safari when she was 78. 

In Goshen, where she lived for 45 years, Dolores was a member of the Agricultural Society and volunteered for numerous local organizations. She served on the boards of the Nutmeg Ballet Company and Child and Family Services of Torrington. 

Predeceased by her son Adam in 1997 and her husband in 2014, Dolores is survived by her son Jonathan and Jonathan’s wife, Kathryn, of Branford, Conn.; her daughters Sara Laschever and her husband, Tim Riley, of Concord, Mass., Ann-Rebecca Laschever and her husband, Claudio Kupchik of Woodmere, N.Y., and Valerie Chausse and her husband, Keith, of Litchfield; as well as 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. 

Dolores will be interred following a private graveside ceremony at the Goshen Center Cemetery. 

In lieu of flowers, the family has asked for donations to the Melanoma Research Foundation, Alzheimer’s Research Foundation or the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Arrangements are entrusted to Weinstein Mortuary, Hartford. For further information and to sign the guest book for Dolores, visit online at www.weinsteinmortuary.com/funeral-obituary/dolores-sue-laschever/.