Dora Cary: Learning to Live Free

from Paso Robles Press Magazine • #253 • May 2022

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In Downtown Paso Robles, local business owner Dora Cary owns a successful quilting shop on Railroad Street. She has a beautiful family and lives a happy life. But growing up in Timisoara, Romania, Dora’s life was not always so full of color and freedom.

When Dora was five years old, her kindergarten teachers told her class to bring a toy to school the next day. At the time, the government deemed toys non-essential and hard to come by. Dora and her sister had one doll to play with at home. So that was the doll they brought to class.

Dora’s teacher let the students play with their toys during class. But soon, the fun was over. Dora recounts what her teacher told them.

“Well kids, nothing that you own belongs to you,” she recalled the teacher saying. “Everything belongs to the state. So everybody put your toys here [in the box], and we will decide who plays with what toys and when.”

From the 1940s to the early 1990s, Romania was the Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR), run by a communist party — a Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist state.

“Even though Romania was a socialist country, the party was communist, and the aim was to transform the country into a fully communist one,” Dora explains,

Dora’s father was only two years old when the new socialist regime took over in 1946. For decades, the country, like most of Europe at the time, struggled to fight communist and socialist regimes.

She was 5 when she realized something wrong with her country. That same day, her father told her about America and its promise of freedom.

“By 5 [years old], we knew that you don’t go against the state,” adds Dora.

When Dora’s father learned of his daughters losing their dolls, he had a talk with them.

“He told us about America,” she said. “He was talking about America like the Promised Land. And that was when I realized that something is wrong in the country, and America is the hope.”

Dora’s father knew about America through his one lifeline to the outside world — a wire tied to a radiator, picking up static of two radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.

“I loved that he was such a hands-on parent where he made sure what we learned was accurate,” she said. “And how he knew was just through that line that the radio was throwing to us. It was a survival line.”

When the communist regime took over in the ‘40s, Romanian women wore their family values on a gold coin necklace. Romanians held their wealth in these gold coins and land. Both were among the first to be taken from the people. Next, they took the people’s guns, animals, and land. Along with farmland being taken from the Romanian people, the new government took control of all the factories.

But to gain control of the entire country of Romania, the Communist Party began pitting social classes against each other. The party deemed everyone wealthy as evil, and intellects were people who thought for 20 | pasoroblesmagazine.com

themselves — also not allowed in the new regime.

Soon, everything was centralized by the RSR government. Factories produced one “brand” of everything. Everyone, except the elite, had no choice in even the smallest aspects of their life.

Although other communist territories surrounded them, a known path through Yugoslavia would take them to freedom. During Dora’s high school years, two boys from her class took that chance — and didn’t make it.

The boys were brought back to Dora’s school, battered and unrecognizable. They were never seen or heard from again, and that cured Dora of ever thinking she could run from her country.

“That’s how we grew up, this constant heavy weight behind your head that anything you can do, you can get in trouble,” said Dora. “But you get to a point in life where you need to survive, and you do what you need to do to survive. That’s what we did.”

By the 1980s, Dora said, her country reached its peak misery. There was no food to be found in the grocery stores. The young and healthy became malnourished and weak.

“People were reaching their point of no more,” she said. “There is a point in everybody where you cannot take it anymore, and your life does not matter anymore. You are going to take those shackles off.”

The Romanian Revolution against communism started in Dora’s city of Timisoara on December 15, 1989.

Dora witnessed a protest that started with 40 people turning into hundreds of protesters in the streets. She described it as a vibration in the air, a vibration of hope that something was happening. People marched through the streets banging pipes on poles yelling, “Down with communism!”

Dora joined the protest the following day in the plaza. That afternoon, police began to shoot into the crowd, but their protests started a ripple effect followed by the rest of Romania. By the end of their revolution, thousands of people were killed.

By the end of December, the Communist Party, which ruled over Romania for over 40 years, had fallen.

Dora went on to finish her degree in mechanical engineering and later studied marketing and design in a free economy. In the late ‘90s, she met an American man who later became her husband, and in 2001, they moved to the United States.

Growing up in such a controlling dictatorship, Dora had to learn how to live in freedom. She says she never wanted to talk about her old life in Romania — she didn’t think anyone would believe her — but in recent years she changed her mind. She began to tell her daughter her stories and, over time, began to tell others too.

Dora now successfully runs her quilt shop in Downtown Paso Robles, Orange Dot Quilts — the name inspired by her life in Romania.

“We would all watch the sunset, and I learned to love orange,” she said. “It was exactly the opposite of our gray lives.”