ARLINGTON — Sally Lien served on the Arlington City Council for 16 years before she left office in 2011, and on Dec. 7, she passed away nearly one month shy of her 82nd birthday.
Sally was the sister of Ken Riker’s grandmother, but he always saw her as more of an aunt than a great-aunt because of how close they were.
“She was very smart, very articulate,” Riker said. “In a different time, under different circumstances, she might have gone further in her education, but to the extent that she was opinionated, it was because she was well-informed.”
Signe A. “Sally” Lien was born Nov. 11, 1933, the sixth child of Norwegian immigrants Andrew and Sigrid Lien. Riker noted how proud Sally remained of her heritage and her Lutheran faith, and how she embraced improvements and learning new things even as she held fast to traditions.
“She loved Arlington and its people,” Riker said of Lien, who graduated from Arlington High School in 1951. “She didn’t want to overhaul it. She wanted the town to keep its character. Sally wanted things to be more efficient, but she didn’t want them to change all that much. She was a very thoughtful person.”
Part of her contemplative nature was to “read voraciously, on tons of topics,” to the point that Riker recalled a number of occasions when “I read an interesting article in the news, and I would call up Sally to ask her what she thought about it, and she’d invariably already seen it. She was unflappable.”
Riker added that this intellect was not unique to Sally, since one of her nephews was a doctor who was instrumental in early AIDS research.
“And Sally read the papers that were written on it,” Riker said. “She had manuscripts from the New England Journal of Medicine, and she understood it all. She could talk to you about just about anything.”
Council member Marilyn Oertle served alongside Lien for 12 years, and felt welcomed by her from the first.
“She was always engaged and very knowledgable,” Oertle said. “She was very dedicated to the city on every level, and it was a privilege to work with her.”
