Mildred Janzen Balzer

1929 - 2014

(News article) Mildred Janzen "Milly" Balzer, a scholar and author who taught in the Maumee schools for more than a decade and became a nurse, died Wednesday in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She was 85.

She had a long-term blood disorder and was in declining health after the death of her husband, David, in 2011, her son Ned said.

She and her husband, who retired as a University of Toledo professor of education, moved from their home near the Inverness Club to Foulkeways Retirement Community in the Philadelphia area to be near their daughter, Naomi.

The family settled in the Toledo area after UT hired her husband in 1968. She'd taught briefly at a junior college in South Dakota, but not for several years while their children were young and her husband's profession took them to Virginia, Washington, State College, Pa., and, for a project of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to El Salvador.

In 1969, she was hired by the Maumee City Schools and taught English at Gateway Middle School for two years before moving to the high school. There she taught freshmen through seniors. She was proud that she helped start a world literature class and guided students through a course in science fiction.

Her son Ned, an incoming Maumee High freshman as she moved to the high school, recalled that she was a popular teacher.

"She was glad to be teaching. She was really into reading and writing," her son said. "My father was a professor of education. Education was very important to our family, and they probably had lively conversations about pedagogy at the dinner table."

She took a leave of absence for the 1977-1978 school year so that she could join her husband in Lesotho in southern Africa, where for two years he was on a U.N.-sponsored teacher-training assignment.

Mrs. Balzer left the Maumee schools in 1983. With another trip to southern Africa on the horizon - to Swaziland from 1985-1989 - she took courses to become a registered nurse so that she'd have a job that would help people, her son said. She received her license from the Ohio Board of Nursing on Sept. 12, 1985.

Mrs. Balzer worked at a hospital in Manzini, Swaziland - one of the nation's major cities - caring for patients despite shortages of equipment and staff, but not bureaucracy.

"It was real-world experience," her son said.

She was a hospice nurse a short time after returning to the Toledo area.

Mrs. Balzer wanted to be a writer from a young age, and while working on her master's degree at the University of Denver, she began a novel about a Mennonite woman in early 20th-century Minnesota and Montana as she comes to terms with her faith after her mother's death.

She returned to the project in retirement and in 2011 had published Heldin: Coming to Terms.

She'd grown up in a Mennonite family, born Sept. 5, 1929, in Mountain Lake, Minn., to Sara and Henry Janzen. She spoke Low German as a young child, only learning English at school. She was valedictorian of her high school and received a bachelor's degree in English from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. Her master's thesis compared the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer to Low German, the traditional language of the German lowlands. She had a Fulbright Scholarship to Cologne, West Germany, while working on her master's degree.

Mrs. Balzer was an advocate for peace and social justice causes and supported the American Friends Service Committee and the Mennonite Central Committee.

She and her husband were members of Park Congregational United Church of Christ. She gave blood pressure checks to members of the congregation and helped with David's House Compassion, a former AIDS service organization, and at a shelter for homeless women and their children.

She promoted health care for "people who needed it, no matter who they were," said the Rev. Terry Kohanski, now a visitation minister at Park Church who first met her in the early 1980s.

"She was so kind, and she listened to what you had to say, and she was not judgmental at all," Mr. Kohanski said. "She was quick to give a compliment and encourage someone. She was a really good person and a good friend to have."

She and her husband married May 11, 1957. He died April 10, 2011.

Surviving are her sons, Edward "Ned" and Daniel Balzer; daughter, Naomi "Nimmy" Haas; brother, William Janzen; sister, Gladys Franz, and five grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. today in the main auditorium of Foulkeways Retirement Community in Gwynedd, Pa.

The family suggests tributes to the Fulbright Association at fulbright.org.

Contact Blade staff writer Mark Zaborney at: mzaborney@theblade.com or 419-724-6182.