William L. Feeney
1932-2026
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — William Lemons Feeney was born in Crosby, North Dakota on Sept. 22, 1932, and passed away peacefully on June 22, 2026, at Sutter Lakeside Hospital in Lakeport, California, at the age of 93 years and 9 months.
Born on the autumnal equinox and departing on the summer solstice, he would have appreciated the symmetry of those bookends to a life so fully lived.
He reunites in Eternity with his beloved wife, Bonnie Mae Joann Feeney, who preceded him in death last year after 65 years of marriage. He is also preceded in death by his youngest daughter, Susan Deborah Feeney.
William was the fourth of six children born to Lucy Pearl Feeney, nee Wilson, of Aitkin, Minnesota, and Bernard Patrick Feeney of Brookings, South Dakota. Bernard, born in 1884, was the son of an Irish immigrant, John Dominick Feeney, who was born in 1843 in County Roscommon, Ireland.
At the age of 4, John Dominick along with his parents emigrated to America, fleeing the potato famine. He later fought in the Civil War, making William the grandson of a Civil War veteran.
William is preceded in death by his parents and all his siblings, sisters Betty, of Kalispell, Montana; Darlene, of Lakeport, California, and Marlys of Ellendale, North Dakota, as well as his brothers Bernard, the eldest, and Francis, the youngest, both of Whitefish, Montana. He is also preceded by his half siblings, Margaret and Tom Feeney of Plentywood, Montana.
He was raised during the Depression, but the family, led by Pearl, survived and thrived thanks to her immense energy, resourcefulness, and great love for all her children. But it was an acknowledged fact that William, or Billy as she always called him, was the apple of her eye. And William would often quote Lincoln, “All that I am and all that I hope to be I owe to my sainted Mother.”
William graduated from high school in Velva, North Dakota in 1950, near the top of his class. He became the first person in his family to graduate from college at the University of North Dakota, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1954.
He went on to obtain a master’s degree in chemistry, then attended a single year of medical school before having to drop out due to financial constraints.
He worked any number of blue collar jobs during these years, including coal miner, railroad worker, women's shoe salesman. He went back to school again and obtained a teaching credential, and accepted an offer to become principal of the high school in Mayville, North Dakota, in 1957.
It was while he was in Mayville that he met his soon-to-be-wife, Bonnie Mae Joann Torkelson of Karlstad, Minnesota, a 20-year-old student at the Mayville Teacher's College. By all accounts, it was love at first sight.
As Bonnie wrote in her journal at the time, “Ours was a whirlwind Courtship.” They met in the spring of 1959 and were married just six months later at the Lutheran church in Karlstad, Minnesota, near the Winter solstice, Dec. 19, 1959.
As young marrieds, Bill and Bonnie set up household in Mayville, where their daughter Kathryn Jane was born in January 1961. Their son, John William, was born the following year in Karlstad, Minnesota.
Not long after John's birth, anxious to escape the North Dakota winters, they packed up their Oldsmobile 88 and moved their young family to California, where William had been offered a job teaching high school math and science in a small town called Esparto. They settled in a small pink stucco house in an almond orchard just outside of town.
In August of 1964, their daughter Susan Deborah was born in Woodland, California. In 1966, they bought their first home, a brand new Ranch style house in town, a short walk from the high school.
In 1972, William decided to return to school once more, this time to earn his Juris Doctorate from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. He attended night school for four years while teaching full time and coaching track and football, graduating in 1976, and passed the California State Bar later that same year.
The following year, he and Bonnie relocated their family to Lakeport, California, where his sister, Darlene Jane, and her family lived. William and Bonnie's fourth and final child, Daniel Dominick Thomas, was born in Lakeport on Sept. 11, 1977.
William practiced law for almost 30 years, first in partnership with Peter Windrem and Rick Williams in an office on Forbes Street in Lakeport, later purchasing a building on Main Street, where he practiced in partnership with his nephew, Michael Lunas, and eventually his daughter, Susan Feeney.
William loved the California sunshine, the Mendocino coast. He enjoyed the deep respect of his students, many of whom became lifelong friends.
He greatly prized his friends and contemporaries. He had a passion for history and poetry and would quote long passages from Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Yeats from memory.
Conversations with William were often Socratic, probing, and highly entertaining, wandering effortlessly from physics to Irish history to politics to poetry.
William remained close to his extended family in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Montana, and spent many a summer visiting his sisters and their husbands and his large brood of nieces and nephews, with whom he maintained affectionate relationships throughout his life.
In 2008, Bill and Bonnie, together with their daughter Kathryn, made what turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Ireland. A grand time was had. As the years passed he loved to recount highlights of the trip, the mystical site of the Rock of Cashel in the distance, searching through church records for ancestors in Roscommon, making friends in every pub he entered. However, he declined to kiss the Blarney stone, declaring he already had the "gift of gab" and didn't want to be too greedy. All who knew him would heartily agree.
His deep appreciation for life extended into his last days, smiling and tearing up as a Yeats poem was read to him, and even though it had grown so difficult for him to speak, said a single word: "Beautiful.”
William is survived by his daughter, Kathryn Douglas, of Los Angeles, California; his sons, John William Feeney and Daniel Feeney of Lakeport; his grandchildren, Adam Feeney of Los Angeles, Noah Yuen of Maui, Hawaii, and Makana Yuen of Lakeport; and one great-grandson, Kellan Coakley of Lakeport.
He is survived also by many much-loved nieces, nephews, cousins and their families in scattered across California, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey and North Dakota.
More than his accomplishments, Bill will be remembered for the example he set and the life lessons instilled. He will be remembered his reverence for education and athletics; his passion for science and nature; his generosity, his optimism, his humor, and his great love for friends and family and, above all, for his overwhelming and infectious sense of gratitude for his life to a loving God. Those of us who loved him carry those gifts now.
William set a high bar, but his life made ours immeasurably richer in every dimension, and his influence will continue to be felt far into the future. We will love and miss him every day, until we meet again.
Services will be held at noon on Tuesday, July 7, at United Christian Parish, 745 N. Brush St. in Lakeport, followed by burial at St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Lakeport.
Arrangements by Chapel of the Lakes Mortuary, 707-263-0357 or 707-994-5611, or visit chapelofthelakes.com.
