Five-foot, two; eyes of blue. Well, the “eyes of blue” is correct, anyway. June Schumacher is actually only about 4’7” tall. However, this little wisp of a lady has been more places and done more things than most anyone else that I know – and she remembers every bit of it with keen clarity.

June Wilson was born in 1920 and grew up on a farm in Minnesota that belonged to her grandfather.
“I’ll never forget. I was nine, when the Depression hit. The government shut down the banks, so we couldn’t pay the rent. The whole family was banging out wheat, barley, oats and selling chickens and eggs to sell them for rent money.”

She skipped through the years. “When I was in college, tuition was only $15.50, but it was still more than we had, so my dad said that I’d have to skip a quarter. Momma said, ‘You’ll go’ and she went out and killed some chickens. We plucked them all night and she sold them the next day to a restaurant, so that I could go to school,” she recited.

I suggested that she saw some tough times, but she quickly dismissed that with the history of her grandmother. “My grandfather died, when my mother was only 3 months old. My grandmother had eight other children, so she sold the farm and moved into town with a cow and some chickens. My grandmother and mom would go door to door, around the small town, selling jars of milk to make do. They had a diphtheria epidemic and only four of the nine children survived.”

June explained that her grandmother made sure that all five of her grandkids went to Mankato State Teacher’s College. A good education was a must in that family. June had just started teaching, when the war broke out. Her boyfriend, George, was sent off to the Aleutian Islands in the very first draft.

When George came home, four years later, she became Mrs. Schumacher and they had three adorable daughters. George took a job learning cabinet making, but the business shut down, so he was out of a job.

He remembered the days when he and some other boys would hop the freight trains and travel around working various fields when they ran out of money. He remembered liking Seattle area, so talked June into giving it a try. They came. They stayed.

Years later, June and George visited their daughter, who was serving with the Peace Corps in Africa. June decided that this is what they should do when George retired. However, he died in 1976. For some women, losing their husband would alter all plans and put a screeching halt to any big adventures. Not June.

She retired in 1982, after 26 years of teaching school at Salmon Creek Elementary. She then decided to put her teaching skills to use and spent 1988 and 1989 serving the Peace Corps on the Gutherie Rubber Plantation in Liberia.

As she put it, “I still had that travel lust in me and thought, ‘well, I’ll get to travel and do some good along the way.’”

When she got to Liberia, she found that although English was the spoken language, many of the native teachers were lucky to have an 8th grade education. Also there were only five books that were shared between fifty kids. “Half of them were learning to read upside down and sideways, so I ended up writing a phonics program for Liberia and they adopted it for the nation,” she said.

That “travel lust” never left her. She’s taken most all of her seven grandkids on summer backpacking trips to Europe and has been to every country in Europe and once around the world.

One of her travel memories was going a mile down into the Austrian Salt Mines. I asked her if that was a bit spooky and she said, “Well, I’d hate to have the elevator give out and be stuck down there.”

So, now she’s nearly 92 and has earned a rest, but is she? Heck no. She has a huge garden and grows and cans all of her own veggies and fruit, plus she created a children’s learning toy for her first grandson that she coined Groblox, because they help kids grow smarter. They’re made right here in Seattle and are really quite unique. You can get more info by emailing June at 1920june@gmail.com.

What’s the old saying about big things coming in small packages? Well, there you have it!