Annie L. Baer Aronwald

When Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying in 1969, Annie Lena Baer Aronwald was 55. She lived an amazing 41 more years until the Final Curtain July 7th and her remarkable theatre went dark.

Kubler-Ross captured the essence of "Mama" (that's what all of her children's contemporaries called her) when she wrote: "It is not for us to say she died, but to say God how she lived!"

She was born in Memphis, quit school at 15 to care for her five younger siblings while parents Nathan and Ruth Baer came back from the Great Depression.

When her husband went off to WWII, she took over the little grocery store they owned and grew it from five employees to 20. For more than 40 years she owned and operated Ann's Fashions, a women's clothing store in Memphis. When husband Izzy (who passed in 2000) retired from his retail liquor business, she told daughters Margaret Stern and Sue Ellen Katz and sons Eddie Aronwald and Floyd Herzog they were moving to Seattle to be closer. Nobody believed her until she said she couldn't talk on the phone because she was having a sale of all her possessions and had customers.

She and Izzy quickly made a new life for themselves in Seattle. Annie became a leader in The City of Hope. When daughter Margaret and her husband moved to Arizona in 1994, she took Izzy, her arthritis, fibromyalgia and suitcase full of pills to the desert and started a new life at a Sun City West, AZ retirement home. Within a year she transformed herself into a senior Jodie Foster and began producing, directing and starring in shows at "The Home." A dynamo multi-tasker, she also became known as the Mrs. Field's of rugulah. In addition to that, she became the Grandma Moses of the retirement home and produced some amazing paintings.

After Izzy died, she spread her wings even further and in 2006 after a fall, she returned to Seattle and moved into the Caroline Kline Galland Home. There she thrived. Producing and participating in a series of musicals which became known as "Annie's Follies." Ziegfield would have envied her style. She recruited from within. Actually coaxing residents out of their rooms to be her cast. In “The Sound of Music”, she had a group of Jewish women dressed as Nuns ... None too remarkable. And they danced with bells tied to their shoes while they sat in their habits in wheelchairs.

Just last Mother's Day, she was surprised and honored with the creation of the “ANNIE ARONWALD ENDOWMENT IN FINE ARTS” fund at the Kline Galland Home by an anonymous donor, to perpetuate Annie's Follies. (Contributions in her memory can be made to that fund)..