Mary Frances Trester died on April 9th at 90 years of age at Affirmative Care home in Tucson, AZ. Born on September 7th, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois to Mary (née Flynn) and George Jacobson, she was the younger sibling to Tom and Catherine. As the baby of the three, she was always “babe” to her family.

She grew up in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of Chicago's South Side which, as she loved to remind people, made her a neighbor of Michelle Obama’s family growing up. She graduated from Aquinas High School with her best friends Debby and Jeanne and went on to study education at Loyola. She  then went on to the University of Wisconsin - Madison for her Master’s degree in special education where she specialized in motor learning under the supervision of an academic hero, Dr. Ray Barsh. While in Madison, she met her husband Eugene riding on the buses back and forth to march and March on Washington.  Together, they demanded change, and practiced peace, hope, and love in community.

She married Eugene on March 23rd 1969 in Bristol Wisconsin, and then moved to Toronto, Ontario Canada, as conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. There they had one daughter - Anna Marie, born April 20th 1973 at Toronto Women's Hospital. 

A lifelong educator, Mary Frances had a gift for finding creative ways to make learning engaging, joyful, and accessible while somehow making it all look easy, not to mention fun. Fran began her professional life as a special education teacher in Chicago’s South Side, and eventually worked her way into administration serving as a vice-principal and then principal in Dufferin Peel Catholic Schools in Ontario Canada. For a few years in Wisconsin, she worked alongside Eugene as part of the program he developed for studying the Bible within church community which engaged adult-learning theory and biblical scholarship: Adult Biblical and Interdependent Learning (ABIL). ABIL brought her (and Gene) to such places as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. 

After surviving breast cancer in 1986, she took a step back from full-time work as a teacher. Still wanting to work with kids, she became a paraprofessional in the Vail school district in Tucson AZ. One of the gifts of this time was getting the chance to work alongside her niece Kirsten at Mesquite Elementary, and getting to watch Kirsten’s kiddos Angelina and Alex (Fran’s grand niece and nephew) busy and growing while they  attended Mesquite. When the Trester family moved to Texas in 1996, she would drive across the border into New Mexico through White Sands to work as an English as a Second Language teacher, and eventually when the family moved back again to settle home in Tucson in 2002, she and Gene settled into their Pima Community College days. He taught Cultural Anthropology, she worked as a writing tutor (armed with her Grammar Girl books from Anna Marie), and then afterwards they would go work out at the Clements Center. 

Their retirement ritual involved going to Subway for breakfast EVERY MORNING - at store opening. 364 days a year. If you needed to reach them, say that they had happened to let the cellphone lose its charge, you could phone them at Subway. They would get their 7 servings of vegetables piled up on top of their egg sandwiches, listen to the adventures of the young people working there, and come home to give any leftovers to the many birds and rabbits and other animals that Fran would feed daily, channeling her favorite saint: St. Francis of Assisi.

She was a radiant light, and her memory lives on in the lessons she taught, the encouragement she gave, and the love she shared so generously.

In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to causes that meant a great deal to her: the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Taizé community, or The Obama Foundation.

In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by her sister Catherine Philbin (née Jacobson, and her husband Tom Philbin) brother Thomas Jacobson (and his wife Lee Jacobson née Machiodi), and her grand niece Angelina Knox. She is survived by her loving husband of 57 years, Eugene Frank Trester and her daughter Anna Marie Trester (partner Zachariah Cassias). 

Send to someone

Share this obituary with others

https://everloved.com/life-of/mary-trester/obituary/

Copy