Bahá’í World/Volume 20/Louise Caswell
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LOUISE CASWELL
1896—1987
SADDENED NEWS PASSING RADIANT WARMHEARTED SELF-EFFACING SERVANT CAUSE LOUISE CASWELL FOLLOWING LONG ILLNESS. RECALL WITH GRATEFUL HEARTS HER DEDICATED PIONEERING SERVICES SPANNING FIFTY YEARS. AMONG FIRST TO ARISE IN 1939 FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT GUARDIAN FIRST SEVEN YEAR PLAN INTRODUCE FAITH PANAMA. SHE CONTINUED HER DEVOTED ENDEAVOURS THROUGHOUT STAGES UNFOLDMENT CAUSE LATIN AMERICA DURING SUCCESSIVE TEACHING PLANS INCLUDED TEACHING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES GUATEMALA TEN YEAR CRUSADE AND CONCLUDED iIFELONG SERVICE TEACHING BELOVED CAUSE YUCATAN PENINSULA MEXICO. OFFERING PRAYERS SACRED THRESHOLD PROGRESS HER SOUL ABHA KINGDOM.
Universal House of Justice 19 March 1987
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Louise Caswell, long-time pioneer to Central America, died at her post in the Yucatan, Mexico, at the age of 91. She was buried at sunset, her favourite time of day, in the Bahá’í section of the public cemetery in Mérida after a funeral service attended by friends from the town and nearby Villages where she had taught the Faith.
Louise was born on 18 March 1896 into an affluent fami1y in Portland, Oregon, USA. Her parents were progressive and invo1ved in the community. Her father once said, “What the world needs is a world religion”, and no doubt such sentiments influenced her when she met the Bahá’ís of Portland.
Louise enrolled in the Faith in 1927, and was blessed with having outstanding Bahá’í teachers including Helen Pilkington, Mr. and Mrs. George Latimer, Ella Cooper, John and Louise Bosch, Keith Ransom-Kehler, Leroy Ioas, and Martha Root, after whom she patterned her own teaching methods.
In 1936, when the Guardian cabled the National Convention with a ca1l for pioneers to go to Latin America, Louise volunteered to go to Mexico. As circumstances would have it, she did not leave the United States that year, but went instead to Knoxville, Tennessee, as a homefront pioneer.
In 1939, after helping to form the first Local Spiritual Assembly of Knoxville, Louise felt that her time had come to pioneer overseas, and in October she arrived in Panama. Together with Cora Oliver, who arrived a few days later, she helped establish the Faith in that country to which the Guardian had given so much attention in The Advent ofDivine Justice.
Louise remained in Panama for 10 years, helping, to form the first Local Spiritual Assembly in that country in 1945. She a1so was the teacher of the first Indian believer in Panama. She did not limit her activities to that country, however, but travelled to many of the neighbouring countries and islands, and in 1951 she was elected to the first National Spiritual Assembly of Central America, Mexico and the Antilles.
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Louise Caswell
In response to the great teaching needs throughout Central America, she left her post in Panama and, after spending nearly a year each in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras, settled in 1953 in Guatemala where she spent the next 22 years. The National Spiritual Assembly of Guatemala was formed in 1961, and she served as its secretary for many years.
In 1975, Louise left Guatemala for Mexico to join her long—time friends Artemus and Dora Lamb, Valeria Lamb Nichols, and Edna Ford. In Mérida, Yucatan, she continued to teach the Faith, not only with words, but With her presence, with her life. People remarked on her exquisite personality and the great love she communicated. Friends enjoyed her good humor and the artless grace with Which she sometimesxunexpectedly expressed herself. Many stories of her services to the Faith were recorded in Divine Springtime, a book by Daniel Wegener. about the development of the Faith in Central America which was published in 1977.
During the last 13 years of her life, many of which she spent bedridden, Louise lived
THE BAHA’t WORLD
with Teresa MacGregor, a Bahá’í whom she had met in El Salvador in 1974. A little more than a year before her death, Teresa remembers being in the kitchen making a dessert for the commemoration of the Birth of the Bab when she suddenly heard a loud thud from Louise’s room. When she ran to see what had happened, she found Louise on the floor, smiling brightly. She widened her big expressive blue eyes and with contagious joyfulness, exclaimed: “‘Abdu’l-Bahá came to see me and He told me He’s going to take me with Him, and so I wanted to come running to tell you about it.”
Teresa cared for “Dofia Luisita” until that dedicated servant passed away on 2 February 1987, at the age of91.
Adapted from an article in The American Bahá’í, April 1987, and from a memoir by TERESA MACGREGOR