“Miss Ladin, my fourth-grade teacher, brought success and beauty and childhood ecstacy. She knew how to unlock our talents…. and taught me that the world is full of stories.” That’s what Barbara wrote in her short story, “Miss Ladin, To Whom I Owe So Much,” in her memoir, Patchwork.
Barbara’s life touched events of historical importance in a number of ways, as she described in her stories. She was among 200 elite 4H wartime achievers who attended the June 1946 4H National Camp in Washington D.C. The prestigious event had been put on hiatus during World War II. She was cook/nanny in the household of the Dr. Lyman Spitzer family and continued as family friend. Dr. Spitzer was the American theoretical physicist for whom the Spitzer Space Telescope is named. She was married to an Apollo-project engineer during the heady days of the drive to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade of the 1960s. Her husband Dick Jodry worked on the first rocket engine designed to fire repeatedly and reliably in the vacuum of space. The engine performed flawlessly and returned six Apollo moon-landing crews safely to Earth.
Photo: Barbara is 17 1/2 years old in her high school graduation portrait.
After retiring from 20 years as a respected teacher of English and history in a school district in northern California, Barbara turned her hand to writing about her memories of growing up on a farm in North Haven, Connecticut during the Depression and World War II. Rounding out the collection in her posthumously-published memoir, “Patchwork,” are stories about working her way through college, marriage, and her parents’ life after retiring from years of farming. Two bonus stories are previously-unpublished articles about Connecticut history she researched and wrote.
She also wrote news articles for a local newspaper published in Sacramento, the Suttertown News, in the 1980s and 1990s.
Her second marriage to Don Coan, a humanist and social activist, opened for her a world of travel that often had the goal of helping people in disadvantaged communities. Their honeymoon in the summer of 1980 was a trip to Communist China, shortly after the country “opened” to tourism from the United States. As leaders of the sister-city relationship between Sacramento, California and the town of San Juan de Oriente in Nicaragua, they assisted the impoverished town full of talented potters. For the next 30 years, Barbara and Don facilitated the sale of the town’s unique pottery in the United States, to benefit SJdO’s schools, roads, pottery-making facilities, and other infrastructure.
There’s more! Don and Barbara were the first and most dedicated volunteers at Sacramento-based Solar Box Cookers organization between 1980 and 2010 (now known as Solar Cookers International) seeking to disseminate information about solar cooking techniques. Together they visited 15 countries. Don died in October 2014.
As Barbara approached 90, her heart’s desire was that her stories would become a book. After Barbara’s death, her daughters located a treasure trove of memoir stories and the outline she wrote of her memoir. They brought their love and expertise to the project.
Barbara died in July 2021 at the age of 93. In 2025, her daughter Melinda as her literary executor published her memoir, “Patchwork.”