Lorraine Manderscheid: Stone-Ground Faith

Lorraine Manderscheid conducts a symphony of three movements, but she’s not a musician. She essentially orchestrates three lives, keeping as busy as she was when her seven children were still living at home.

At fifty-five, after a twenty-year career as a teacher and school psychologist, she earned a doctoral degree in psychology so she could offer counsel to the many troubled people she met—especially teens. Her desire to help people was born of empathy, she says, “because of severe scarring from burns I suffered as a child. I was also overweight. From my pain came my quest to be a healer and builder of people, especially the outcasts, the unaccepted.”

But counseling alone didn’t seem to provide enough emotional support for Lorraine’s clients, so she began formulating the second movement of her life’s symphony—establishing a school for delinquent teens where they could receive intensive, continuous support. In hopes of funding this school, she added the third movement, or life number three—a bakery.

Lorraine’s daughter, who had operated a bakery with her husband, helped Lorraine open her own. Driven by her desire to help others through counseling, Lorraine unwearingly baked, loaded, and—just before dawn each morning—delivered bread to Seattle, Washington, area stores.

Eventually, her freshly-ground, homemade-style bread began to catch on with consumers. Lorraine’s is now the sixth-largest bakery in Seattle, and it turns out more than eighteen thousand loaves a week. Not infrequently, Lorraine employs individuals who need a financial or emotional boost.

With profits from counseling and the bakery, Lorraine founded Lee Academy, not her original school for delinquents, but a private school committed to academic excellence taught with kindness. “I can’t imagine doing anything I love this much,” she says of her busy life in the family bakery, the school, counseling, and her other love, serving in the Seattle temple with her husband, Clifton.