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Donna Williams Dunckel

Donna Williams Dunckel was born Dona Felice Williams in Long Beach, California, on February 10, 1931, a child of the Depression and a daughter of old California. Raised on the rural Palos Verdes Peninsula before it became synonymous with wealth and manicured estates, she grew up among chickens, vegetable gardens, and horseback rides across dusty hills. Her beloved horse was named Candy. The landscape of her childhood — practical, windswept, quietly beautiful, quick to smile and laugh — seemed to imprint itself permanently on her temperament.

She attended local schools before graduating from Redondo Union High School and later the University of Southern California, where she studied Fine Arts, joined Kappa Alpha Theta, and met her future husband, John “Jack” Miller Dunckel. They married in 1951 while Jack was in Naval Flight Training. During the Korean War, while he served aboard an aircraft carrier, Donna lived with her parents and cared for their first son, David.

Eventually, she and her father Don found a home in Rolling Hills Estates, where she and Jack raised four boys: David, John, Tim, and William. She was 22 when her first child was born and 37 when her youngest arrived. The years were busy, athletic, and quite social for the extrovertist Donna. Dinner parties, bridge, church groups, and impromptu gatherings were a weekly thing.  Children too were always moving in and out of one another’s houses. All felt welcome by her friendly and smiling face, which made wherever she called home a friendly, close-knit hamlet. 

 

When the older boys left for college and Jack retired after selling his business, the family moved to Fallbrook, then still a diverse agricultural town tucked behind Camp Pendleton. There they built a ranch home and spent the next forty-five years. Donna (with Jack) raised Billy there, played competitive tennis and golf (Fallbrook Ladies champion two years in a row), painted, led Bible studies, and cultivated a wide sphere of friendships.  Watching son Bill play baseball and football were especially rewarding for Donna and Jack in those years.

At around age 37, she had an encounter with the Lord that reshaped the second half of her life. Faith in Christ became central to her identity, and obedience to Jesus became the guiding theme for her remaining life. Soon after her commitment to the Lord, the determined Donna gave up cigarettes. Then some years later, realizing she had developed a dependence on alcohol, recovery became a central focus to her life as well. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and remained sober for close to 40 years. She sponsored others in recovery for decades, often maintaining close relationships long after formal mentorship had ended.

 

With the Bible as her guide, Donna’s love for family remained the unifying purpose joy of her life. Cousin Camp remains a favorite memory of her grandchildren. She wanted to nurture her relationships with her grandchildren, and broaden their horizons.  One of her signature ventures was taking grandchildren — individually or in pairs — on trips to Washington, D.C., and other cities around the world before they reached adolescence. For most or all of them, those journeys became formative memories: part history lesson, part adventure, part maturing into responsible adults. She lived her life to the fullest, sometimes even travelling to Europe with a girlfriend. Donna valued her independence greatly. Even in the last year of her life, she talked about getting her driver’s license and a car. 

The vital, life-loving, God-loving, and beautiful Donna Williams Dunckel died peacefully on May 5, 2026, at the Silvergate memory care residence in Fallbrook, at the age of ninety-five. The Cinco de Mayo party being planned at Silvergate was an apt metaphor for Donna’s life — festive, slightly chaotic, and unmistakably alive.  A very appropriate farewell!  “Festive” and “unmistakably alive” are also apt descriptors of what happened next, as Donna entered Heaven and her eternal rest.

 

Those who knew Donna remember not only her devotion to family and faith, but also her vitality — her competitiveness on the tennis court and golf course, her hospitality, her stubborn independence, her sense of humor, and the unmistakable awareness that she fully inhabited whatever season of life she was in. To her children, grandchildren, and friends, she remained until the end what she had always been: loving, spirited, disciplined, always in the present, and devoted to God.

 

Donna was preceded in death by her parents, her sister Adrianne, and her husband Jack. His and her ashes will be buried together at Fallbrook Masonic Cemetery.

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