Exceptional Alumna Remembered with Support Fund

By all accounts, Joyce Golden (née Brusati) was an unapologetically vibrant person. She had a fondness for travel, a passion for theatre, and a knack for creating communities around a shared love of the performing arts. 

Golden discovered that love in Idaho State’s theatre program, where she learned to sing and dance in the late ‘50s. She’d eventually start a theatre company in York, Maine. She constantly sung show tunes, said her son, Steve Golden.

“Theatre stayed with her — it was really what defined her personality,” he said. “She learned it at the college, and then she took it with her.”

To honor Golden’s love of theatre and lifelong Bengal spirit, her two sons, Steve and Michael, have created an annual support fund to aid the theatre department. Each August, to celebrate Joyce Golden’s Aug. 12 birthday, her children plan to make a contribution.

The fund aims to support a department full of students like Golden, whose career and hobbies revolved around the skills she learned at ISU. The donations felt fitting to Steve Golden, who last saw his mother clad in a vintage ISU sweatshirt before she passed away in April.

“She loved the university and cherished Pocatello,” he said. “It just struck me that she really loved Pocatello so much and her family was from there. I told my brother, ‘Look, we should really do something in her name, and then we should continue it so it does have an impact.’”

Golden, then Joyce Brusati, grew up the granddaughter of first-generation immigrants, in a family of miners and housekeepers from Butte, Montana. She attended Pocatello High School and graduated from what was then Idaho State College in 1957. She was the first in her family to attend college, and her sister Margueritte would follow a decade later.

“I look at her as being extremely independent,” Steve Golden said. “She was very much a feminist, but not in an outward sort of way. She just was in the decisions she made and the way she lived. She just wouldn’t tolerate anyone compromising her freedom.”

She was a first-generation student, determined to carve out a life for herself that involved the thing she cared about the most.

Joyce Golden first dabbled in the communications program, but after enrolling in theatre courses at the university, there was no turning back. She joined the theatre fraternity Alpha Psi Omega and the honor society Chimes, and served as the chapter president of the sorority Alpha Omicron Pi.

In Feb. 1957, she appeared in one of the several Idaho Sunday Journal articles that would feature her name — this time when she and friends initiated a snowball fight a 25-minute car ride from Reed Gym.

Though she lived on the East Coast and abroad for the majority of her life, Golden’s heart always belonged to the West. Each summer, she and her two sons made the long drive to Pocatello, where they’d visit her childhood home on Cherokee Street. Those summer road trips were only a few of the many journeys Golden took in her life. 

After graduating from ISU, she worked as a secretary at Idaho National Laboratory. There she met Mark Golden, a submariner from the East Coast whose Navy service would take the couple across the world. When the two married, the Idaho Sunday Journal ran an announcement about the wedding. 

The Goldens moved between naval bases on the East Coast for most of the ‘60s and ‘70s. They spent a stretch of the ‘60s stationed in Franco-era Madrid, Spain. They had two sons together, Steve and Michael, whom Joyce took camping throughout Europe.

After a pair of peripatetic decades, Joyce and Michael separated. “She kind of left it all,” Steve Golden said. “She really wanted to be independent.” She relocated to York, Maine, but never stayed there for too long.

Golden visited Hawaii and wandered throughout the continental U.S. She spoke Spanish and a bit of Swedish. She and her sons traveled to Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Bali, Singapore, China and Laos beginning in the mid-’90s. She imparted her taste for travel to her children, who now reside in Asia — Steve in Singapore and Michael in Shanghai, China.

“That gave us a look at the world that we wouldn’t have had."

At home in York, a town of roughly 13,000 people in the southern tip of Maine, Golden founded a community theatre group called Theater on the Rocks. The company brought theatre to an area that lacked performing arts opportunities, Steve Golden said, and members invested their own money into it.

“They saw something needed in the area,” he said. “They really just wanted to make people’s lives better by bringing really good theatre to them.”

Joyce Golden performed with the company all around the coast and took on leading roles in area productions. Her directors said she was a true professional, well-trained. 

She opened her house up to boarders, or teenagers looking for a place to stay, and held post-production afterparties in her living room.

“She really opened the doors to all kinds of people. She just never judged anyone,” Steve Golden said. “That gave us a look at the world that we wouldn’t have had ... There’s a kind of courage that you would get, a confidence living there and just being yourself.”

It’s his hope that his family’s contributions to the theatre department will open doors for students like Joyce Golden. She was a first-generation student, determined to carve out a life for herself that involved the thing she cared about the most. Steve Golden said he hopes, in the future, to help support first-gen students in the performing arts.

“Particularly in the theatre, it takes so much courage,” he said. “It’s a conviction.”