Virginia Olson

Virginia H. Olson of Harbor Springs and Denver, Colorado, died October 21, 2006, after a brief illness.

She leaves behind a son and his family, Peter and Marta Olson and their daughters, Brita and Kaia, of Mackinac Island and Harbor Springs.

She was born April 7, 1925, to TC and Carolyn Harrison at their home in La Paz, Bolivia, and was reared in Denver. She attended Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, and received a master's degree in microbiology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and

Denver. There, she met her husband, Howard, while both were teaching at the University's medical school.

With the birth of her only child in 1956, she effectively retired from a scientific career, but returned to education part-time in the mid- 1970s in the Native American Department of the Denver Art Museum, where she took great pleasure in introducing Denver schoolchildren to the wonders of Navajo weaving and Hopi beadwork.

She moved to northern Michigan shortly after the death of her husband in 1998.