Audra C. Hansen

Audra Caroline (Jones) Hansen, 93, died on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, after a long decline due to Alzheimer’s Dementia. A 59-year resident of Indianapolis, she had lived at Hagerstown, Indiana, since 2018.

Audra was born in Oakland, Maryland, on March 5, 1927, the daughter of Ernest Ray and Tacy Maud (Bowman) Jones. Her parents built a cabin on Deep Creek Lake in the early 1930s and she spent many happy days there swimming, canoeing, walking in the woods, collecting and pressing wildflowers for school, and picking huckleberries. She remembered seeing fireworks over the lake while camping at the lake with Girl Scouts and then finding out that World War II had come to a close. After her marriage, she and her family spent summer vacations at the cabin until the early 1970s.

She graduated from Oakland High School with the Class of 1944, where she played basketball and participated in stage productions, the school newspaper and 4-H. She went on to study at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she began a 75-year affiliation with Alpha Gamma Delta sorority and graduated in 1948.

In 1950, she married her high school sweetheart, John Marshall Hansen, and they moved to Hagerstown, Indiana. She was active there in Psi Iota Xi sorority and Order of the Eastern Star. The family also lived in Piqua and Dayton, Ohio, before moving to Indianapolis in 1959.

The couple were parents of four children. Audra was a full-time mom until the mid-1960s and served as a leader in her children’s activities, including Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. A friend remembered her in 2020 as a “great Girl Scout leader.”

She returned to college, earning a master’s degree in education from Butler University. She became an elementary school teacher, first in Brownsburg, Indiana, and then at School 66 and School 43 in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

She retired from teaching in 1985 when her husband became ill. After his death in 1987, she returned to paid employment, taking a clerical position with the international office of Alpha Gamma Delta International Fraternity. She worked there until 2011, retiring at the age of 84. The organization awarded her its Arc of Epsilon Pi with Diamonds and Pearls honor.

Audra served more than 30 years as a volunteer at Riley Hospital for Children. She was a member of Meridian Street United Methodist Church, where she assisted in the church office and belonged to Sunday School classes and Circle Six women’s group. In the 1980s, she helped start what is now the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Indiana and Kentucky Chapter, serving as its first secretary, and volunteered at its annual One Walk fundraiser from its inception in the mid-1980s until 2017. She served as a Republican Party Election Day poll worker until well into her 80s. She held memberships in Indianapolis Alumnae Panhellenic; Alpha Gamma Delta Indianapolis Alumnae Club; and in the Caroline Scott Harrison Chapter, National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. In 2018, she joined Hagerstown United Methodist Church and attended regularly until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She was a lover of cats. She is holding one in a photo from when she was 13 years old and had cats as pets most of her life. Like her, several lived long, contented lives, with one living to ripe old age 24. In her final years, she had Tacy, a mechanical cat that she named for her mother and grandmother. She enjoyed reading, especially mysteries, and had read all of Agatha Christie’s books as well as many other series. She collected knick-knacks and had been especially fond of Wade Whimsies, small porcelain animal figurines found in Red Rose Tea. For many years, she spent time and effort tracing family genealogy and had become the keeper of several family bibles and other artifacts. Hanging on the walls of her rooms were many pictures of her ancestors. She liked working in her yard and when she moved out of her house in Indianapolis her weeder had been so well used that the points had been worn down to nubs. She shoveled snow from her driveway and sidewalk until she was almost 90 years old.

Surviving family members include four children, Robert (Pat) Hansen of Hagerstown, Indiana, Lynn (Ken) Hansen Wakefield of Thorntown, Indiana, Carol (Dan) Foster of Ellettsville, Indiana, and Barbara (Mick) Hill of Durham, North Carolina; eight grandchildren, Mike (Tonya) Foor, Colte (Samantha) Foor, Emily (Craig) Balint, Evan (Stephanie) Wakefield, Jessica Foster, Brian Hill, John Hill and Harrison (Rachel) Hill; many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren; and a sister-in-law, Despina Jones; two nieces and a nephew. She had excellent care in the past three years from her daughter-in-law Pat Hansen and granddaughter-in-law Tonya Foor and two home health aides, Joey Arnold and Star Hale, who became like family members.

Along with her parents and husband, preceding her in death were three brothers, Lewis R. Jones, Wilbur C. Jones and Thomas S. Jones; and a very dear sister-in-law, Mary Virginia Jones.

Audra chose to donate her body to the Indiana University School of Medicine Anatomical Education Program and then cremation. Inurnment will be with her husband in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis.

Memorial gifts in her name are encouraged to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Riley Children’s Foundation, Meridian Street United Methodist Church or Hagerstown United Methodist Church.