Margaret Jeanne Redrow Willson was born on April 21, 1926 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died on May 11, 2006 in Austin, Texas. She graduated from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati and attended Bryn Mawr College. On the advice of a professor at Bryn Mawr, after her graduation in 1948 she attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin because of Professor Lee M. Hollander, a world-renowned scholar of Old Norse. Jeanne had a consuming interest in older Germanic languages. Because she had not studied algebra, a requirement at the University of Texas for graduate school admission, she was admitted provisionally and was allowed to choose to substitute Greek for the algebra requirement. She earned a masters degree in German and, later, a degree in Library Science. It was Professor Hollander who introduced her to A. Leslie Willson, another first-year graduate student. After they were married in 1950 in Cincinnati, Professor Hollander later liked to boast that he had played a role in what became an ideal marriage that endured until her death more than fifty-five years later. After their wedding Leslie and Jeanne drove immediately to Yale University, where Leslie had been admitted to the graduate school. Hermann Weigand, a Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale, guided Leslie in his acquisition of a Ph. D. in Germanic Languages with his dissertation on A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism, a work that was later published by the Duke University Press. Leslie taught at Northwestern University, Duke University, Penn State University, and in 1954 was invited to rejoin the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He became emeritus professor on the occasion of his retirement in 1992. Jeanne was a skilled archivist and at the Barker Texas History Center in Austin specialized on the papers of German immigrants to Texas in the nineteenth century. She is survived by her husband and their children Brian, Juliet and Kevin and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at Weed-Corley-Fish Funeral Home. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be made to the University of Texas at Austin for a German scholarship in Jeanne R. Willsons memory, mailed to The College of Liberal Arts, 1 University Station, G6000, Austin, Texas 78712. Obituary and guestbook online at wcfish.com
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