Ethel Olson Baxter ’58
Written by her daughter-in-law, Betty Baxter.
Ethel Olson Baxter enrolled in the Miss Wood’s program at Macalester College in 1951 when she was fifty years old. Her two sons had received bachelor’s degrees three months earlier. When son Eugene and his wife visited her after their first week of teaching out-state, Ethel greeted them with a delighted, “Meet Betty Co-ed!”
After completing ninth grade, Ethel, the middle child of seven, had to go to work. Her father had died when she was seven years old. Her mom gave her meager life insurance settlement to a cousin to start a haberdashery business in north Minneapolis in exchange for a guaranteed job. All the kids had to pitch in.
In 1919 Ethel married Earl Baxter – six months after he returned from WWI where he was gassed in France’s Argonne Forest. She was eighteen, he twenty-three. Eight years later, they lost two children simultaneously. In those days, before penicillin, while she was suffering a miscarriage, the weather turned suddenly unseasonably warm and their overdressed seven year old firstborn son developed pneumonia and died.
Two years later, Eugene was born, followed by Glen two years after that. Ethel worked in grocer stores and bakeries, sewed beautiful custom clothing for women from a nearby suburb, and served as Superintendent of the Primary Department at their church. About the time the boys completed college, Ethel allowed herself to consider her dream of going to college. She took the High School Equivalency Test, got her high school diploma, and was assured she was college material.
Ethel loved children so the Miss Wood’s two-year certification program was perfect for her. A generation older than her classmates, they all called her “Ma.” Ethel was a real “people person,” outgoing and fun, so, though several classes were academically challenging for her, she loved every minute of it. And, seeing life through a lens of diverse experiences, she felt duty-bound to occasionally disagree with instructors and classmates. She gave them all some things to think about. Ethel received her Miss Woods Diploma in the spring of 1953 soon after her son, Eugene, a music teacher, had made her a grandma for the first time.
She practice taught at Calhoun School, then was hired by the Minneapolis Public Schools to teach at Cooper Elementary. When the state mandated four-year degrees, she added Saturday and summer classes to her teaching schedule. She received her B.S. degreed in Elementary Education from Macalester College in 1958 at the same time that her son, Glen, was named associate professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota.
Ethel taught for 13 years. Other schools served included Armatage and Windom. During her teaching years, she and her family literally built a lovely summer cottage at Lake Waconia. There she enjoyed entertaining classmates and colleagues in addition to family and friends. When her husband died in 1987, Ethel, suffering from Alzheimer’s moved to her son’s home where she resided till her death in 1993.