A devoted wife, mother, friend, and aunt, she touched countless people in her life with love and compassion. She was born Carole Marie Johnson in Oconto, Wisconsin in 1920 to a Danish immigrant father (Peter Johnson) and first generation Danish mother (Mary Sorenson-Johnson). The youngest of ten children, she thrived in the small rural community - skating on the river, skiing, and began to develop her musical ability. Beginning with the E Flat Clarinet she soon turned to her true calling - the piano. Upon graduating high school, with her parents unable to pay for music school, she decided to go into nursing. She graduated as a Licensed Practical Nurse from Nursing School in Janesville, Wisconsin and moved to Chicago around 1940. While working at a Convalescent Home she continued studying piano at the American Conservatory of Music until she received her degree in Classical Piano.
During WWII while working at a Jewish Nursing Home, she met her future husband, Edwin L. Baron, who was on leave as a First Lieutenant in the US Army Medical Corps. She was the private duty nurse for Edwin's father. A whirlwind courtship followed and they formed a partnership of work, travel, family, life, and friendship.
During her heyday she lived to jitterbug dance and listen to the Big Bands. She and Edwin won many dance competitions. These were the happiest days of her life. They married in 1951 and were together for 49 1/2 years. They had two sons Phillip Baron, an accomplished musician, and Jamie Baron, an award winning actor and voice-over artist. While raising her children, her husband, Edwin, became one of the world's most famous hypnotists, bringing hypnosis out of the realm of the occult and accepted as a medical science. Carole decided she also wanted to be a hypnotist. She went to night school and received a degree in psychology from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1970. She then worked with her husband running the Hypnotism Institute of Chicago. She lectured, did therapy for weight loss, smoking anxiety, depression and traveled the country under the name Ruth Carroll doing comedy shows.
Both her sons became accomplished hypnotists in their own right. But even this wasn't enough for her. She took a two year course and became a certified handwriting analyst. She did handwriting profiles on employees for many top companies and developed a thriving practice on her own., all the while continuing her hypnosis and her music. In her late 60s she took up painting with no previous skill and became quite an accomplished painter with her work on view in several states.
But in the end it was her nursing skills that came back as she became a caretaker for at least the last fifteen years of her life. First, nursing three dying sisters, then keeping her husband alive for the last eight years of his life. During all this, she endured the constant pain she suffered from severe osteoarthritis and battled breast cancer that had spread to her bone marrow in 1996.
"She was a woman of immense strength, courage, and compassion who dealt with her pain and accomplished whatever she set her mind to in life. But what I remember most about her is her beauty - not just of physical beauty, but of her home, her garden and everything around her. She surrounded her family with beauty and love and compassion, the same way she lived her life," says her son Jamie.
She was preceded in death by her loving husband Edwin. She is survived by two sons Phillip and Jamie, brother Kenneth, and numerous nieces, nephews and friends.
Oconto graveside service will be held at around 1p.m. -1:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 13, at Evergreen Cemetery.