Andrea Jane Brown Olson was a wife, a mother, a friend, a sister, and a community volunteer. She died on Wednesday, November 24, 2021, two months after her husband Paul, to whom she had been married for 61 years. Being with each other meant everything to the two of them, and their streak of spending Thanksgivings together remains unbroken.

She was smart – she graduated at the top of her class at Montevideo High School and second in her class at Iowa State. She was talented – a professional artist, a persuasive writer, a singer who was a 40-year member and frequent soloist for the choir at St. Luke. And she was beautiful – it wouldn’t surprise anyone who met her at any age to hear that 19-year-old Andy Brown was Queen of the Fiesta Days Parade in Monte in 1956 (where she shared the stage with the Fiesta Queen from her hometown’s sister city – Montevideo, Uruguay).

Three things stand out as having special meaning in her life: the joy she took in her friendships, the devotion she had to her family, and the way her artistic self shone through in everything she did.

She loved being part of her book club in Devon. She loved to travel, especially to Maui with her husband and to anywhere with her high school girlfriends. She loved to laugh. She surrounded herself with friends who had good senses of humor, and she would have tears in her eyes when she told stories about things they had done together. She laughed every day.

She married Paul in 1960, and they raised three children together – Mike, Dave, and Kris. They lived in Kansas City, Peoria, and New York before settling in Devon in 1969. She was the parent who made the family go. She made the meals, drove the carpools and to and from the train station when it rained. She was the room mother in all the kids’ classes and a regular presence at their schools. She taught her kids that they were talented and important, that others were talented and important, too, and that anything you do in life is worth giving your best effort to. She wrote inspirational notes and placed them in brown bag lunches hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

Straight out of college, Andrea worked as an artist for Hallmark Cards. She never bragged about the job, but cards that she drew as a young person appeared on commercials that played during the Hallmark Hall of Fame movies on NBC. Throughout her life, she always had some sort of art project going on, and the results were always beautiful. Her handwriting was perfect. The holiday decorations were always perfect. She created a beautiful home for her family, with wallpaper and paintings whose colors were perfectly coordinated with one another. The dining room table where she spread out her art supplies – pens and colored pencils, tracing paper and poster board, ribbons and pom poms – was described by a friend as a magical place.

Andrea was born on December 15, 1937, in Montevideo. She was the daughter of Lennard and Beulah Brown, a high school principal and high school Latin teacher, respectively. She graduated from Montevideo High School in 1955 and from Iowa State University in 1959. She was a proud member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She married Paul Wendell Olson on September 17, 1960. She brought the best of who she was to everything she did, whether teaching kids to sketch horses at Strafford Elementary, serving as PTA President at Valley Forge Junior High, or working on Project 1776, at the Diet Center in Wayne, or as an interior designer in Hershey’s Mill, among many, many others.

She loved being an older sister to Tom and Marc, and a grandparent to Carly, Miles, Michael, Hunter, Jack, Sam, and Maddie. She is survived by her brother Tom (Jan) of Columbus, Ohio, her sister-in-law Cathy Brown, her late brother Marc’s wife, of Minneapolis, her sons Mike (Marilyn) of San Diego, Calif., and Dave (Judi Powell) of San Mateo, Calif., and her daughter Kris Robie (Bob) of Paoli, Pa.

A Memorial Service will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 23, at Saint Luke Lutheran Church, 203 North Valley Forge Road, Devon, PA 19333. Old friends are encouraged to contact Kris Robie by email at robie4@verizon.net.