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Sharon Ruth (Baker) Pierce

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January 21, 1947 -June 11, 2025

Sharon Ruth (Baker) Pierce, 78, of Central Point, Oregon, passed June 11, 2025 after suffering a stroke

Sharon was born on January 21, 1947 in Denver, Colorado, along with her twin sister, Karen Marie (Baker) VanSant, to Dale Lavern Baker and Ruth Evangeline (Loitz) Baker. Sharon’s extended family worked the Harvest during her early years, cutting crops via combine tractors throughout the Midwest from the Mexican to Canadian borders, sharing experiences with her twin, Karen, singing, going to several local schools, and helping their mom during the long days’ work. Sharon graduated from Phoenix High School in 1965, where she was known as part of the “Baker Twins”, after the family of four moved to the area in 1958.

Sharon worked as a legal secretary and Deputy Sheriff for Jackson County before marrying Edward “Bert” Pierce in 1968, with the couple having three daughters. After living in Southern Oregon, Fairbanks & Anchorage, Alaska, and Orangevale, California, the family settled back in Southern Oregon in 1984, where Sharon went to work for Harry & David/Bear Creek Corporation, as Corporate Gift Buyer, among other positions, winning several corporate employee awards, including the Outstanding Performance Award in both 1993 and 2004, during her 25+ years of service, retiring in 2010.

Sharon enjoyed family fellowship, sewing, gardening, baking, embroidery, and camp hosting with Bert at several Oregon RV & Recreational Campground parks. She delighted in working with the Alumni Association for Phoenix High School, fundraising and supporting the upcoming classes. A scholarship is being created in Sharon’s name for PHS students. Along with having a deep faith, her family, friends, and loved ones will remember her as a fun, smart, warm, giving and welcoming woman with a ready radiant smile and infectious laugh, who made those around her smile right along with her, exuding the happiness, love, and the enjoyment she had in her life.

The incredible love story that Sharon shared with Bert will also go down in history as one of the truest, most honest, loving and supportive relationships of all time – they were truly partners in all things, delighting in their family and any time spent together.

Sharon is survived by a close-knit family, including her loving husband Bert of Central Point; her twin sister Karen, her husband James VanSant, and their son Matthew, all of Medford; her eldest daughter Lisa, her husband Aaron Greene, of Ashland, and their daughter Mackenna (Sharon’s only grandchild), and her partner Nick Heinig, of Medford; her middle daughter Marcy Pierce, of Medford, and her partner Darrin Bolz, of Eagle Point; her youngest daughter Bethany Pierce, and her husband Marc Ferolito, of Rogue River; brother- and sister-in-law John and Janet Pierce, of Medford; and several cousins, nieces and nephews. Preceding Sharon in death were her loving parents Dale and Ruth Baker

The family would like to thank the Emergency Room and Nursing Staffs at Providence Medford Medical Center and the Surgeons, ICU Nurses and Doctors at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center for the kind and dignified care they provided for both Sharon and her family during treatment leading up to Sharon’s passing.

There will be no service. In lieu of flowers, please send any donations to Stroke Awareness Oregon (www.strokeawarenessoregon.org) on behalf of Sharon R. Pierce.

Read more at: https://rv-times.com/2025/06/27/sharon-ruth-baker-pierce/

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Story Preview | A DRIVING FORCE – Alesha Goodman

by Jake Sheaffer

“I once threw a canister of my supplement powder at the wall and dented it. That’s something I can’t imagine ever doing before my stroke, but it’s just another part
of my recovery to work on.”

______________________________

On an early October weekend in 2019, Alesha Goodman and her longtime boyfriend Drew hiked over 50 miles of rugged desert landscape in the Ochoco National Forest in Central Oregon. They were on a nine-day hunting trip they’d been planning for months. While Drew streaked up the steep slopes of sagebrush and loose rock, Alesha tarried behind breathing heavily, fighting the searing pain radiating from the base of her skull. An active thirty-four-year-old who frequented local gyms, walked her dog daily, and hiked on weekends, Alesha never suspected the severe neck pain and nausea she’d had for the past week and a half were signs of an impending stroke. And not just one stroke, but two. Two potentially fatal strokes that would occur within an hour of each other the day after she returned from the Ochocos.

An only child, Alesha was close to her parents and her grandmother who lived on her parents’ property later in life. As a kid, she delivered newspapers in her Bend, OR neighborhood, and in her spare time, she wrote children’s books for fun and read voraciously, prompting close friends to refer to her as a “living encyclopedia of odd information.”

On the Monday morning after she got home, Alesha sat in traffic at a parkway off -ramp, still in discomfort from the neck pain and the nausea. She had new symptoms, too, dizziness and feeling faint. Regardless of the pain, she readied herself for work, but she had an uneasy feeling about her job.

Over the weekend, Alesha had received multiple text messages from her employer, a jewelry company in Central Oregon, about an issue with her company email and password, but with no cell reception, she couldn’t respond to her manager’s concerns. After searching through Alesha’s desk for her email password and not finding it, but instead finding an important legal document she’d already dealt with but had not yet disclosed to her boss, the company hired a specialist to get around the digital safeguards. That day, Alesha was let go from her position.

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