Enveloped in the transcendent love of her family, and with a peacefulness that superseded the travails that conspired to bring her life to a premature conclusion, on Monday, July 20th, Mary Ann Baker Fulks, 78, transitioned to the other side. Her memory will permanently resonate in the lives of her husband Barry, her sons Johann(Ceri) and Andreas(Erika), and her grandchildren Aaron and Ella. She was preceded in death by her parents, Norbert and Maxine Baker, and her sister, Kathy Rae Baker.

          Born in Somerset, PA, she was a 1965 graduate of Somerset High School and remained an enthusiastically loyal Eagle throughout her life. She went on to graduate in 1969 from Shippensburg University, earning a degree in Education, the field to which she was to devote much of her life. Following her marriage in 1970, she lived in a fructifying variety of places, from York, PA, to Madison, WI, to Germany, her home for  three years, and  to upstate New York, until life’s vagaries felicitously collaborated to enable her  to return to western Pennsylvania, as she moved to Pittsburgh  in 1983, where she lived for the ensuing 43 years. One result of the somewhat peripatetic phase of her life was an openness to new experiences and to a variety of people, viewpoints, and cultures, leaving her free of any pinched parochialism and enabling her to be equally comfortable hosting a high-ranking East German diplomat in the home of a renowned historian and working with underprivileged children in an experimental pre-kindergarten program.

One immutable constant throughout her adult life was her unalloyed commitment to teaching. To be sure, she taught with élan and success in York and Harrisburg, PA, and at an American school in Germany, but the decades she spent teaching for the Pittsburgh Public Schools constituted both the culmination and the consummation of her career as an educator. The many years she spent teaching at Linden Elementary School in Point Breeze were especially satisfying, for there, teaching students from varying backgrounds and with disparate skill levels and inspiring them to ever higher levels of achievement,

and collaborating with gifted colleagues, her pedagogical creativity and incandescent passion for teaching attained their apotheosis.

          During her years in Pittsburgh she raised a family and, always a Somerset girl, traveled there numerous times to visit her parents, friends, and relatives. Most memorable were the family picnics featuring raucous softball and volleyball games and hair-raising hay rides as well as holiday gatherings, all   organized and attended by her maternal relatives, Somerset’s renowned Lape family, to whom she remained enviably close to the end. As well, when winters could still be discussed in the present tense, she enjoyed skiing at Hidden Valley, joined by her children, both of whom quickly became expert skiers like their mother, and her husband.

          Following her retirement from the Pittsburgh Public Schools in 2009, she was able to devote time to creative  gardening and, most enjoyably, visiting her elder son and his family, including her deeply loved grandchildren,  in Luzern, Switzerland, a country whose  beauty invariably engendered awe-suffused joy on her part, and her younger son in Portland, OR,  whose vibrant culture and proximity to  wine country and the Pacific coast  rendered these trips an invariable pleasure.        

By dint of her contagious joie de vivre, her love for family and friends, her unfeigned empathy, and her altogether beautiful soul, Mary Ann touched and enriched the lives of all who knew her. Hers was a life that, though too soon ended, was rich and full and will be remembered with imperishable love.

Friends will be received at John A. Freyvogel Sons, Inc. (freyvogelfuneralhome.com) 4900 Centre Avenue at Devonshire Street on Monday from 3-7 p.m. and Tuesday from 10 a.m. until an 11 a.m. Funeral Service in the funeral home.

In lieu of flowers, Mary Ann’s family requests that donations be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, or the Special Olympics.