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Contact Info
Home Town Marlette, Michigan
Last Address University Place, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
Date of Passing Jun 20, 2014
Location of Interment Riverside Cemetery - Plattsburg, New York
She earned a Lifetime Teaching Certificate from Central Michigan Teachers College at the end of her third year and received a BS Degree in her senior year. With a Commerce and Math double major and a minor in English she was the only one of her class to obtain a teaching position for the next Fall term (at a salary of $60.00 per month for nine months). She taught Commerce and Math in Michigan High Schools for the next ten years; one of her first jobs was in Saranac, Michigan. She earned a Master's in Education from the University of Michigan in 1943, and that summer she took a wartime job at General Motors in Detroit doing statistical typing.
In June 1944, she enlisted in the Navy Reserves, became a WAVE officer and was stationed in Washington, DC serving as Assistant to the Chief of the Lithographic Division at the Hydrographic Office. She was cleared for handling maps and charts where she earned top secret clearance and helped track submarines during WWII. Toward the end of the war, she was transferred to the Offices of the Chief of Naval Operations at the newly-opened Pentagon where she served until 1949. She met her husband-to-be, LTjg Jonathan Allen, in Washington D.C., where he was a doctor in the US Naval Reserves Medical Corps, although she outranked him.
After discharge, she did substitute teaching in the Detroit, MI high schools and continued her post graduate education in science at Wayne University until the birth of her first child. In 1952 she was awarded special recognition of academic achievement and special consideration by the Ford Foundation for having achieved a high grade in the very first Nuclear Physics course offered at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Best Friends For the benefit of her grandchildren, she wrote several illustrated volumes of her life history as well as stories from her husband's recollections. For her 85th birthday, she bought herself a computer and used it to compose many family letters for over a decade. She knew the keyboard so well she could type even when her eyesight had failed and she could no longer read. She was a passionate lifelong learner and hungrily soaked up science articles and television shows until her passing.
Other Memories
Ever curious, Grace had a need for knowledge. When she turned 85, she bought herself a computer and took a word processing class at Clinton Community College. In her later years, Grace was delighted that she could get Discover magazine on tape to compliment her favorite television shows “Nature” and “Nova.”
