Alice M Pearson

Mar-Ka Nursing Home in Mascoutah, Illinois.

Alice had an adventurous life. She was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and started school there before

the Simons family moved to Jasper, Minnesota, where she grew up with 7 brothers and sisters.

At age 3 or 4, cousins who had just seen their first motion picture, a Western, tried to hang

her. “But they didn’t realize I had to be off the chair so I lived,” she later recalled.

After completing high school where she played snare drums in the school band, she moved to

Minneapolis at age 17 where she worked as a housekeeper for poet Allen Tate and his wife

while going to business school and taking courses at the University of Minnesota.

After graduating, her first job was as secretary to a Pillsbury vice president. Later she worked as

a legal secretary, as a paralegal, secretary with security clearance to a deputy commander at

Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan, city desk secretary at the Minneapolis Tribune where she

met her second husband, Anchorage School District administrative assistant in Alaska, and

Delta Air Lines agent.

She was extraordinarily selfless. She would go out of her way and make sacrifices, large and

small, to help others. She took unpaid leave from her airlines job so that another worker

wouldn’t be laid off. Once, at a yard sale, she ran after a girl to sell her a prom dress of her

daughter’s for 50 cents. The girl had turned away in tears moments before upon learning that

the dress was on sale for $50, not 50 cents as she had thought.

Alice had an infectious smile that stayed with her to her final days. And she had a sense of

humor to go with it. For a while when she was 40 she wore a t-shirt that said, “I’d rather be 40

than pregnant.” She was both.

She is survived by her husband of 40 years, Larry Pearson; a daughter and son-in-law, Hillary

and Dave Wilburn; a son and daughter-in-law, Andrew and Kimberly Pearson; and a son and

daughter-in-law from Larry’s first marriage, Gregory Pearson and Jennifer Povey; as well as by

five grandchildren; brothers and sisters and other relatives.

A memorial gathering will be scheduled at a later time at Lake View Funeral Home, 5000 North Illinois Street, Fairview Heights, Illinois.

Memorial donations may be made to St. John’s Community Care, 222 Goethe Avenue, Collinsville, Illinois 62234.