The world is quieter today

Rachel Goldman Shipley took her last breath in this world at 9:58 a.m. Central Time on Tuesday, May 12, 2020. She was one month shy of her 95th birthday. Rachel was a force of nature. She and her sister Lynn performed as the Burton Sisters during a 14-year career in show business. They recorded Yiddish songs for Banner Records and popular music for RCA.

She met me, her husband of 64 years, during a “disc jockey tour” in 1955. We were married one year later on March 4, 1956. She left the world of show business to become a force in the Cleveland Jewish Community and then for close to 40 years in Orlando in both the Jewish and general communities.

Together with me, Rachel raised four successful children, all born 14 months apart. Our daughters are Tracy and Robin; our sons, Tom and Adam.

She conceived and produced the production “Fashions and Faces” for the United Jewish Appeal within our first two years in Orlando.

Rachel loved international travel and the State of Israel. After visiting Rachel’s Tomb in Hebron, Israel, on her first visit there in 1968, she had her name legally changed from Carol to Rachel.

A few years later she founded the Company Leisure Planners to provide activities for the wives and children of Convention Attendees in Orlando. She sold the Company in1983 to spend a full year in the Jewish State where she was in charge of the First Jerusalem International Economic Conference, attended by over 200 delegates from 40 different countries.

She returned to Orlando, where just four months later, with my permission, she spent seven months in the Republic of China where she was invited by the Chinese government to teach customer service to business executives and Chinese government officials.

For the next 25 years, Rachel and I hosted a monthly networking meeting called the “International Round Table.”

Travel was her passion. In her 50s she and son Tom cruised down the Nile together. In her 60s she lived in Israel and in her 70s she had the seven months in China. In her 80s she became a life coach and in her early 90s, we wrote a book about our 60-year-plus partnership titled “The Fundamentals.”

Her friends called her “A Force of Nature.” She was. She will be missed.