A Deep and Lasting Connection
Marie Losh was a mother to four children, the youngest only three months old, when she and her family boarded an ocean liner for the Philippines in 1957. Her husband, Ken, had accepted the position of chaplain at Central Philippine University, and the young family was embarking on a decade-long residence in Iloilo City. “My father was a minister because he loved people,” Ken and Marie Losh’s daughter Laurie recalls. “To him, this seemed like a great opportunity to be both a minister and a chaplain, and to work with students.” It wasn’t long, she said, before “the people and events of the CPU campus were integrated into every moment of our lives.”
Ken Losh’s role at CPU was the more formal one, yet Marie was equally engaged in campus life. “My mother was a lifelong teacher,” Laurie says, and as an elementary school teacher and a music instructor she helped deepen the young family’s connections to the CPU community. Laurie’s lasting impression of the family’s years at CPU is of a huge extended family, with their busy household hosting youth groups, the college softball team, and missionary and CPU faculty families. The Losh family had a U.S. furlough in 1962-1963 and the returned to the Philippines (again by ship – and again with a new baby!). Ken and Marie continued their work at CPU until 1968, when new responsibilities for Ken in ministry, education, and service called the family stateside. Reunions with Centralians kep the CPU connections strong until Ken’s passing in 1998 and Marie’s on February 5, 2015.
Ken and Marie loved working with students, in the Philippines and the United States, and never sought recognition for their work. “They were doing good because they were good,” their daughter says, and that sense of quiet modesty describes their philanthropy as well. For more than 25 years, their contributions to the United Board supported grants to CPU for improvements to the library and Rose Memorial Auditorium and for enriching academic life. A bequest from Marie Losh’s estate to the United Board ensures that her legacy of generous support for CPU continues.
The United Board extends its sympathy to the Losh family on the recent loss of their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and we expresses our gratitude for the legacy gift from Marie Losh, a woman with a most generous spirit.
(First published in Horizons, December 2015)