Rosalina Mendoza, A Stalwart Volunteer Until The Very End

Rosalina Villanueva Mendoza got things done. Her way. Now, if not sooner.

"Whenever she wanted furniture moved or something picked up," said her granddaughter, Sabrina Kis-Young, "she wanted it immediately. We'd say, `We'll be over in an hour,' but we'd get there, and it would already be done."

A vision in her own crocheted or knitted dresses or tops, a safety pin at the neck to help her tell the garment front from back, the spunky Mrs. Mendoza lived for life itself, and for the chance to help others.

"Those pins, sometimes two clipped together, drove us nuts," said Kis-Young. "They were all over her clothes. She was a character. A giver. And she never complained."

A former nurse at Harborview Medical Center, Mrs. Mendoza - also a fan of soaps ("The Young and the Restless") and mysteries ("Murder, She Wrote") - could not, like those TV matriarchs, get enough of helping others.

"I will continue to volunteer until I am unable to," Mrs. Mendoza said in 1988 at her acceptance of KING 5 Television's Making a Difference Award.

Until she died of a heart attack on Jan. 15, Mrs. Mendoza, 86, kept her word.

"No matter how old she was," said her grandson, Bryan Ivanich, "she always went down to the Filipino Community to help out, on holidays and so on, to cook and help people." Her cooking was legendary.

Since 1968, she had been a volunteer nurse at the International Drop-In Center and the Filipino Community's Senior Nutrition Program. She also was active in Filipino women's groups, St. Paul's Parish, the Asian Referral and Counseling Service, and the Remembrance Project to Create the Jose Rizal City Park.

In her "spare" time, Mrs. Mendoza took pottery classes and taught her daughters fine macrame a decade before it became popular.

"She was a liberated woman ahead of her time, really stressing that education was the key to independence," Mrs. Mendoza's daughter, Rosalie Ivanich, recalled. "Her door was always open, especially to Filipino boarders and families."

Ivanich's husband, George, who was "grilled for hours" by Mrs. Mendoza when it became clear he was her daughter's intended, called Mrs. Mendoza "the brains" and "a real clown," always kidding people, but with kindness.

Mrs. Mendoza, trained as a nurse and midwife in the Philippines, emigrated to the United States in 1935 to marry Juan, employed as a houseboy for a Montana family who paid her passage. She reportedly was the first Filipino woman to reside in Montana.

The pair moved to Seattle in 1941. After Washington state passed the Open Housing Act in 1948, they made plans to buy a house. They found one in 1951 in Rainier Beach, where Juan, 88, a former gardener, still resides.

Rosalina and Juan Mendoza were cited as examples of the Filipino experience in America, in two Asian-studies books used in universities.

Other survivors include daughters Joan Sparks of Pittsburg, Calif., and Valerie Glover of Kent; nine other grandchildren; 11 great-grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews.

A rosary and a Mass were said last weekend. Interment was at Holyrood Chapel Mausoleum.