Yvonne B. Carroll

Yvonne Burkett Carroll died Friday, June 16, at age 93, surrounded by her loving family.

Yvonne kept her keen intellect to the end. She contributed details to stories of events from decades ago, despite being on pain medication in an ICU. Just last month, as she and one of her eight children watched the Jeopardy! Masters champions series, she sometimes knew answers that eluded these best-of-the-best on television.

She had stayed fit, playing tennis three days a week as recently as age 87, but had been worn down by a series of recent health issues and chose not to keep fighting the acute pneumonia that had spurred an emergency trip to the hospital Tuesday night. When she told the doctor of her decision, he asked, “Do your children know?” She responded, “They will.”

In other words, after a long and splendid life, she left it on her terms and still very much Yvonne.

Cleta Yvonne Burkett was born on May 25, 1930, in Hutchinson, Kansas, the second of three girls. Her father, Albert Leroy Burkett, was a geologist who worked for oil and gas companies exploring opportunities in the West. Her mother, born Cleta Martha Sterrett, raised the three girls. The family fared better than most during the Depression, though there were times when Yvonne’s mother would announce that she wasn’t hungry, and the family would have crackers for dinner.

Yvonne experienced some local fame before age five as an acrobatic dancer and even appeared in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper column as “the girl who can stand on her back” – she could lie on her stomach and put her feet flat on her shoulder blades.

She spent her high school years in Breckenridge, Colorado, where she became the night operator for the phone company and, she said, learned to overcome a natural shyness. She was allowed to sleep, and there weren’t many calls in the middle of the night, but she prided herself on answering every call after just one ring – picking up a habit of sleeping lightly that served her well as the mother of eight.

She was the valedictorian of her high school class and earned an academic scholarship to the University of Colorado, where she became the first in her family to earn a degree. She majored in English literature, with a minor in French. Her yearbook shows she pretty much owned the place during her four years in Boulder. She was a commissioner on the student council and the director of the resident assistance program in her dormitory. She was one of 11 from her class selected for the Mortar Board honor society and one of four to receive the university’s awards for service and leadership her senior year. So much for that shyness. She even played on the University of Colorado basketball team – not that she ever told her family about that or her many other accomplishments in college.

Yvonne became a stewardess with United Airlines and moved to New York City (where she attended the World Series game in which Willie Mays made his iconic, over-the-shoulder catch in 1954). On a flight to Cleveland, she was so kind to a woman traveling with three small children that the woman asked for her phone number, saying Yvonne had to meet a fellow named Charlie Carroll. They did, in fact, meet on a blind date on New Year’s Day of 1955, and the rest is history.

They married Oct. 1, 1955, and began having the eight children she would devote herself to for the rest of her life. With three boys in the first four years of their marriage, Charlie realized that a journalist’s salary wouldn’t support what was looking likely to be a large family, so he left his job as a reporter with the New York Herald-Tribune to work in public relations for Westinghouse. Two years and one daughter later, Charlie was transferred to Westinghouse headquarters in Pittsburgh, where Yvonne had four more girls and which became the center of the universe for the family.

While Yvonne had the intellect, discipline and wisdom to do most anything, she poured herself into her children. One example: education. Yvonne not only shepherded all her children to college degrees (from Carnegie Mellon, Wellesley, Carleton) but sparked them to three master’s degrees (from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern), to a master’s and PhD (from Pitt) and to a law degree. All 15 of her grandchildren who are old enough to have graduated from college have done so (from Yale, Northwestern, Cal, Tufts, Macalester, William & Mary). Two have master’s degrees, and one has a law degree.

Shortly after giving birth to Jennifer, the youngest, Yvonne took up tennis and quickly became a very good player; she would go on to play in various leagues and tournaments for both tennis and platform tennis for almost half a century. When Jen was in high school, Yvonne began working at a B. Dalton bookstore, where she spent several years. She also volunteered for years at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library, selling donated books to raise funds for the library. She always had a large stack of books on her nightstand and was the family’s go-to person for book recommendations.

She was active for decades at St. Thomas More Church, where she was the first female Eucharistic minister. She and Charlie counseled engaged couples and young marrieds at the church and became close friends with the many couples in the Christian Family Movement. Drawing on the lessons from her hard-earned experience, she encouraged young parents to get their children accustomed to making choices as early as possible, to start them on their way to independence. “Parenthood is the very definition of planned obsolescence,” she said.

Yvonne was a devoted sports fan: After giving birth while living in New York, she once asked almost immediately if the Yankees had won that day. She could be superstitious: She often “watched” the Penguins from a different room, not wanting to jinx the team by doing more than listen. Her evening routine included the PBS NewsHour, followed by Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, but she also never missed NCIS. She did the New York Times crossword puzzles and acrostics in ink but disdained the Monday and Tuesday puzzles as too easy.

Some years after Charlie died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, she moved to the Providence Point retirement community. She was involved in book clubs and duplicate bridge games and could be counted on to tackle the toughest of the jigsaw puzzles in the common room. Friends say she was rather like the old E.F. Hutton commercials: When Yvonne spoke, people listened.

She is survived by: her eight children, Charlie, of St. Paul, Minnesota; Paul, of Sacramento; Tim, of Langhorne, Pennsylvania; Anne, of Reisterstown, Maryland; Martha, of Seattle; Amy, of Columbus, Ohio; Katy, of Pittsburgh; and Jen, of Arlington, Virginia, 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren (with a fourth on the way).

Never wanting to be the center of attention, Yvonne asked that there not be a viewing or funeral. Her ashes will be inurned at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in McMurray. She asked that, in lieu of flowers, any donations in her memory be made to the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh or the Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

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