Joyce (Andersen) Santos passed away in Modesto on February 3. She was 98.

Joyce was born August 21, 1926, in Oakland, California to Hans Andersen of Oslo, Norway and Karen Cloos of Esbjerg, Denmark. Both her parents’ families emigrated from Scandinavia in the early 1900s.

Joyce graduated from Oakland’s Fremont High in 1944. She then earned a B.A. in Social Science at San Francisco State.

In December 1947, she met the love of her life, Walter “Walt” Santos, at the wedding rehearsal of a mutual friend in Oakland. After the Santoses 1949 marriage, the Oakland natives lived for about nine months in Oakland. They then moved to Pleasant Hill where the Santos family lived in the same house for 74 years. Joyce and Walt were members of Pleasant Hill’s Hillcrest Congregational Church.

Joyce was active in the community. In 1959, she started a weekly, after-school stamp club for the students at Pleasant Hill’s Strandwood School. In the club, children learned the basics of stamp collecting as well as the geography and history depicted on various stamps of the world.

In 1962, Joyce added a weekly, after-school chess club to her volunteer activities at the School. The following year, she began working there as a noon supervisor.

Around 1980, Joyce received a “School Bell” award from the Mt. Diablo Unified School District for her many years of service at Strandwood.

Then Joyce, an avid reader, and her husband, Walt, joined the Pleasant Hill Friends of the Library. Over the years, the couple spent so much time sorting donated books for the Friends’ book sales that other volunteers jokingly called the sorting area at Pleasant Hill’s old School House “The Santos Room.”

Also, through the Library, Joyce’s stamp club expanded so that it was now offered to all the area’s children. In 2001, the Santoses were presented with an “Outstanding Service” award by the Contra Costa County Library.

When not involved in one of their volunteer activities, the couple enjoyed traveling, dining out, and taking in a new movie.

Joyce and Walt celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary at their home with family on September 11, 2009, six months before Walt’s passing.

Joyce was a very thoughtful and caring person, and she enjoyed surprising family members with a “perfect” gift that she would find from searching dozens of mail-order catalogs every holiday season. She was also a cat lover, and had a pet cat most of her life.

The Santoses had four children, Gary, Glenn (passed 1954), Sue (passed 2018), and Ken, as well as two granddaughters, Jennifer, and Sianna.

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