She graduated from Bayfield High School in 1938 and then attended nurses training at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Ashland, Wisconsin. She worked at Pureair Sanatorium in Bayfield, Wisconsin during World War II, attended welding classes and then went to work in the shipyards in Superior, Wisconsin. She worked at the cannery in Bayfield, and later graduated from Ashland County Teachers College and Northland College in Ashland. Her first job was in Springstead, where she taught all eight grades. She then taught and later was principal of the two-room school house on Madeline Island. She retired in 1986. She is at Northern Lights Nursing Home in Washburn, Wisconsin in 2006 and died in 2007.