Caroline Grover, the gentle woman her family referred to as Mother Teresa, will be put to rest tomorrow in Gresham where she was born 86 years ago.
Caroline, who for 60 years was married to Herbert “Bert” Grover, a giant of a Wisconsin politician and educator who served three terms as the state’s superintendent of public instruction, passed away on July 25 in a Green Bay memory care home. Bert spent the past year living with her.
I didn’t know Caroline as well as Bert, who as a young reporter I covered when he was in the Wisconsin Legislature back in the 1960s. He may have been a a 27-year-old freshman assemblyman in 1965, but he already was no shrinking violet and, I now have to admit, was a great source for me on the inner workings of the Democratic caucus.
It was during his first campaign in 1964 when he took pointers from the man he had worked for, the late Sen. Bill Proxmire, and campaigned door to door in his Assembly district, that one of the doors he knocked on belonged to a young woman, Caroline Studach, the daughter of Swiss immigrants. In less than a year they began a marriage that produced eight children and a whirlwind of nonstop public service.
Caroline’s obituary noted that, “while Herbert worked hard on his political career, Caroline held down the fort managing a household of ten on a shoestring budget. She was an expert garage saler, coupon clipper, clothes maker and gardener which helped feed her crew. She never missed one of her kids’ games, concerts, or events and later in life she was always thrilled to attend one of her grandchildren’s events.”
She is survived by 27 grandkids, including two sons of daughter Mary, Harrison and Grover Bortolotti, who are both on the Wisconsin Badgers football team. They were high school football stars at Whitefish Bay.
The obituary described Caroline’s life beautifully:
“Caroline lived her faith daily with her humility and kindness, joy and laughter that were ever present and infectious, filling all spaces she entered with a sincere smile and welcoming heart. She taught her kids and grandkids to enjoy the simple pleasures in life like a morning snowfall, ice skating on a pond, the beauty of wild flowers growing in a field and that life was always better after a scoop of ice cream.”
I called Bert this week to express my condolences. He was heartbroken, of course, but philosophical about the wonderful years he and Caroline had spent together. Raising eight kids and balancing that with a bustling public life wasn’t easy, but he wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Time marches on, and people like Caroline Grover do so much to give it meaning.
