Marie Potts lost her youngest daughter, Kitty Marie "Pumpkin" Potts Flores, on April 1, 1951. Bertha Stewart (Tolowa), Secretary of the FIC, had worked closely with Kitty for many years and wrote a touching tribute to her as founding editor of the Smoke Signal. Marie Potts, who was elected to the position of Smoke Signal editor in March 1949, added biographical information about her daughter just beneath Bertha Stewart's typescript signature.
Kitty--beloved daughter, wife, and aunt--was laid to rest in East Lawn Cemetery. Her untimely death was clearly a tremendous loss not only to her family, but to the larger world of California Indian activism.
