Obit: Heinemann, Jane (1917 - 2007)

Transcribed by: Crystal Wendt

Surnames: Heinemann, Jaszi, Peterson, Schnell

---Source: Foto News (Merrill, Lincoln County, Wis.) Wednesday, 11 July, 2007; Page 10

---Heinemann, Jane (25 Sept. 1917 - 2007)

Jane Heinemann

Jane Heinemann was born in Wausau, Sept. 25, 1917, and raised in Merrill. She received a bachelor's degree in music education from Northwestern University in 1940 and a master's in music in 1952. She taught music in schools in Earlville, Ill. and Hammond, Ind.

In 1943 Jane joined the American Red Cross and was sent to Camp Chaffee, Ark., an armored training post, where she became a staff recreation worker, charged with entertaining recovering GIs in the station hospital. Her job was to put on patient talent shows, plan parties for patients, and arrange visits from celebrities including Joe Louis and Groucho Marx. She pushed a small piano from ward to ward, formed and directed GI choirs, accompanied herself and the patients on the accordion, which she learned to play for the job. She told of being asked to bring music to calm the German patients, prisoners of war, who were upset the day they heard the rumor of Hitler's attempted assassination. She credits her interest in race relations to her experiences in the Red Cross. The Red Cross sent her to the western Pacific in 1945. She first went to Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, to join the staff of one of five hospitals to be set up for the planned invasion of Japan. A week after she arrived, a plane carrying the atom bomb to Japan took off from their tiny island. Red Cross support was greatly needed by the traumatized crew when they returned.

Jane remained overseas after the war ended and moved to club services on Guam and Saipan. She returned to the United States in early 1946, but later that year the Red Cross called her back to William Beaumont General Hospital, in El Paso, Texas, where she worked with long-term battle casualties. She returned to music teaching in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Maryland, and Iowa before joining the U.S. Army's Special Services and becoming a program director in GI service clubs in Germany during 1953 and 1954. She taught music education at UW Milwaukee until her retirement in 1986. (Adapted from her biography in Women Remember the War: 1942-1945, Michael E. Stevens, ed. and her own notes) She bought her first house shortly after her retirement, in Glendale, where she spent many hours in her beloved garden. Jane will be remembered for her love of music, especially the music education of children, and of nature, the chipmunks and canoeing at her cabin on 4-Mile Lake near Three Lakes, for her intense interest in racial equality, and for her support of political action and fine arts groups. She loved traveling, singing (she had perfect pitch), telling her stories, and taking her students to music education conferences in her little Hillman-Minx. Even her clothes made a statement-bright primary colors, animal prints, berets and large feathered hats. She was interested in her German roots. She kept in touch with her campus school students, her UW-M music education prot-g-es, her GI patients and chorus members, her family and her neighbors "up north". She filled her life with purpose, whether it was by parking strategically on campus with a huge political poster mounted on a car that was only a little larger than the sign, or by driving across several states to attend the weddings and other special events of friends and their children.

Jane is survived by her nephews Daniel and Peter (Sheryl) Jaszi, her grand-nephew Ned and grand-niece Sabrina, several cousins, long-time friends Jeffry Peterson and Ruth Walter Schnell, and the many colleagues and friends whose lives she touched and inspired. She was preceded in death by her parents, Fred and Jenos Heinemann.

Northshore Funeral Services, 3601 N. Oakland Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53211, served the family. Interment will be in the family plot in Merrill Memorial Park at a later date.

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