At 95, unstoppable Dorothy Benson focuses on seniors’ issues

Continued from page 8 regional commission meetings.”

Fulton County Commissioner Bob Ellis calls her “consistently tenacious and persistent in her work and advocacy.”

“She is passionate about ‘affordable housing’ within north Fulton,” Ellis said in an email. “She is a true advocate for seniors being able to remain in the community that they love. She is just tireless in getting it done!”

She’s also a fixture around north Fulton County, where she’s lived for about 60 years. She was born in Pennsylvania, she said, but grew up in Miami. “My father retired when I was very young,” she said.

Her husband’s job brought them to Atlanta and they settled in Sandy Springs, then just a country crossroads. The business district offered little more than a gas station and grocery store on Roswell Road, Benson recalled. “It was before any of this development happened,” she said.

The Benson family lived on a farm, where Dorothy taught horseback riding. “I built the barn—literally,” she said. “I sawed the wood and hammered the boards.”

She taught riding for 50 years, she said. She worked with the U.S. Pony Club, would take the family’s horses for a swim in lakes on the Glenn estate, she said, “and we always rode horses in parades” in the area. “When they started building Ga. 400,” she said, “we could take our horses over there. It was like a race track.”

For the past 40 years or so, she’s lived in Alpharetta. About 30 years ago, she took up working with stained glass. She’d studied art in college and painted with oils and pastels and other media, but found a new interest in working with the colored glass. “I wanted to learn, so I went out and took lessons,” she said. “I just liked stained glass.”

Now she teaches classes twice a week to teach others how to work with stained glass. And pieces of her own work are permanently on display at the senior center that bears her name. She made six stainedglass panels for the center. Each panel shows images of native Georgia flowers.

At the Benson Center, it sometimes seems Dorothy Benson’s work is never quite done. One recent afternoon, after showing a visitor around, she headed off for a quick conference with staff members.

She wanted to find a place somewhere in the busy senior center to set up a Wii computer gaming system for interactive bowling, she said. That way, she said, the bocce players could continue their twice weekly games through the cold days of winter.