Sokol celebrates 35 years in Sisters

Dorro Sokol invited a few friends over — roughly 150 of them — for an open house party last Sunday. She and her husband, Don Watson, hosted the afternoon get-together and buffet at Pine Meadow Ranch to celebrate Dorro’s 35 years of living in Sisters.

Sokol moved to Sisters in March 1971, purchasing the Pine Meadow Ranch at the western edge of town. Born and raised in Oxnard, California, she later married and lived for 10 years on the Oxbow Ranch south of Prairie City in Eastern Oregon close to the Strawberry Mountains Wilderness.

“After my divorce, I wanted to go somewhere else and I looked all around Bend and Sisters before settling on this ranch,” Dorro recalled. “Kitty Warner of Duke Warner Realty, bless her heart, told me, ‘I think I have just the place for you,’ and this is where I moved.”

The ranch was 370 acres, of which 72 acres have been developed into Pine Meadow Village.

“That part of the property was placed in the Sisters Urban Growth Boundary and we just let it sit for quite a few years,” Sokol said. “The town was just starting to become developed back in 1971, but it still had its ups and downs.”

Sokol grew up in the West.

“My father came from the East Coast in 1919 and bought a citrus ranch in Santa Paulo. That is where I grew up,” she recalled. “He also bought a place at Lake Tahoe in the late 1920s where I visit often. I still have the cabin that he built, called Lane Dooley Lodge combining the names of my mother and father.”

Dorro has raised four children, including one daughter who was Sisters Rodeo Queen. She has eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

In Sisters, she served on the planning commission for 17 years and still serves on the Sisters Jazz Festival board of directors. She was a founding member of the Sisters Rotary Club and is a member of the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce and the Sisters Rodeo Association.

She has a pilot’s license and flies her Beechcraft Bonanza airplane hangered at the Sisters airport.

“That was one of the reasons that I moved to Sisters, it had an airport,” Dorro said. “In Prairie City, we had to build one on our ranch.”

Dorro is proud that two of her ranches have been featured on the covers of State of Oregon tourism publications.

She and her husband, Don Watson, have been married for 16 years. Besides the Pine Meadow Village development project, they run cattle and grow hay on the ranch.