Esther May (Thornton) Hollenbach (1926-2013)

HOLLENBACK, THORNTON, BROWN, MARTIN, SCHAFLER, BJORNSTAD

Posted By: Mark Christian
Date: 1/28/2013 at 19:03:53

From Adams & Soderstrum Funeral Home obituary, Story County, Iowa:

Esther May Hollenbach
March 18, 1926 - January 10, 2013

Esther May Hollenbach, who taught elementary school in Ames for more than twenty years, died January 10 of natural causes. She was 86.

Esther May Thornton was born in Sugar Creek Township in Poweshiek County, on March 18, 1926. She was the youngest daughter of five children born to John and Edith Brown Thornton. Esther’s youth was a combination of privation and migration. Her father served for years as a Christian missionary and evangelist in the Caribbean and the United States. After Esther’s arrival, the family briefly found stability in Hamilton, NY where her father took over the ministry of a church. It was a hardscrabble existence with everyone laboring to make ends meet. Not long afterward, when she was eight years old, her mother died suddenly. Her mother’s early death cast a shadow over Esther’s life. Later, her father sent Esther and her older twin sisters to boarding school in Ohio. The separation from her family, in particular her beloved older sister Lucille, was painful.

The younger sisters were sent to God’s Bible School in Cincinnati. Though they were a year apart in age, the three Thornton girls graduated (with 21 others) in 1943. Esther returned to upstate New York to attend Houghton College where she lettered in basketball and graduated with a degree in French and a minor in mathematics.
Esther married Paul W. Hollenbach in 1952. Together, they followed his itinerant academic career from Virginia to Germany to Ohio to New Jersey and, finally, to Iowa. In 1967, they settled in Ames where Esther began her distinguished career as an elementary school teacher. She was a dedicated and beloved teacher to hundreds of students for a quarter of a century.

Following her retirement, Esther travelled often and was active in women’s rights activities, particularly Planned Parenthood, TTT, and in religious groups sponsored by Collegiate United Methodist Church in Ames. She is survived by a sister, Millie Martin of Bloomingburg, NY; her children, Ruth Schafler of Tiverton, RI, Deborah Bjornstad of Haddonfield, NJ, and David, of Temecula, CA, and four grandchildren.

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