Dorothy Chaney (Snookie) Schrader, 94, passed away on Tuesday, May 10, 2016, at New Horizons Lanier Park Health Care Facility in Gainesville, Georgia. Snookie formerly lived in Park Creek Apartments in Gainesville for about eight years. She was a member of the First Baptist Church of Gainesville. Mrs. Schrader’s ashes will be interred in a private service attended by the family.
Snookie is survived by her sister, Emily Chaney Jones of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and her children and their families, Dr. Ed L. Schrader and his wife, Myra Schrader of Gainesville, Georgia, and Mrs. Deirdre Schrader Carter and her husband Bob Carter of Center Barnstead, New Hampshire. She had five grandchildren – Melanie Schrader Schwartz, Edward Austin Schrader, Bronson Frey Cooke III, Heather Elizabeth Carter and Mark Alexander Carter – and 10 great-grandchildren.
Snookie was born in a country house just outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her predecessors had lived in Mississippi for more than 200 years after leaving Georgia in haste in the late 1790s. Prior to the New World, The Chaneys and Nettervilles hailed from Scotland and Ireland.
Although she received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of Southern Mississippi, she also attended All Saints two-year college academy in Vicksburg, Randolph-Macon Women’s College and the Mississippi College for Women. Her profession was teaching “English, French and Latin as foreign languages” to south Mississippi students, her passion was creative writing: poetry and short stories. She published two compendia of southern regional stories and poems, Remnants of Eden and I Used to Live in Mississippi: Short Stories and Poems by Snookie Schrader.
“In many regards, Snookie sprang from central Mississippi roots as surely as the big-mouthed bass springs from the green water moss lurking for shiners. Both are inevitable forces of nature,” her son, Ed Schrader, wrote in an introduction for his mother to a north Georgia writers group after she had published her first book at age 80. “You can call Rena and Judge Chaney the physical portals for her birth, but she would have gotten born anyway in some form or fashion in Vicksburg in 1921. She was born into a middle slot of an eight-child brood. Southern social brooding being immiscible with the southern cultural enlightenment of the early 20th century, Snookie always KNEW she was a romantic academic. Hence, she taught languages for her job and manipulated languages into her stories and poems for her heart.”
Those wishing to remember Snookie may contribute to a scholarship in her name to be set up at Brenau University to recognize, encourage and support creative writing in undergraduate students. Please send donations or pledges to Matt Thomas, vice president for external relations, at [email protected] or call 770-718-5309.
For those who wish to convey their sentiments personally, there is a condolence registry book they may sign available in at the front desk of the executive suite in Bailey Hall on the Gainesville campus.
