Olive was a gifted student, athlete, and artist. She attended the one-room school in North Amity and went on to high school at Ricker Classical Institute, where she was on the women’s basketball team and graduated as salutatorian of her class. She continued her education at Westbrook Junior College and simultaneously studied painting at the Portland Museum of Art. She then earned her BA degree at Colby College, where she edited the White Mule Magazine before graduating in 1940.
After college Olive worked briefly as a teacher in Corinna and Kennebunk, but in 1943, she decided to join in the war effort and was among the first women to enlist in the Navy WAVES. She served as a cartographer at the USN Hydrographic Office in Washington, DC, where the charts she helped to create guided naval forces in the South Pacific. Because of this work, she often knew weeks in advance when major battles such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa would occur. Olive had fond memories of this time, especially of being invited to the White House to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt.
After the war, she worked for the DC Heath publishing house in Boston, and later became the editor of “Notes and Quotes”, an in-house magazine distributed nationwide to employees of the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.
In 1950, Olive married Francis Clyde Palmer of Skowhegan Maine, a highly decorated veteran of WWII. The newlyweds settled in Connecticut and had two children, Kathryn and Keith. In 1959 they returned home to Maine to care for Olive’s aging parents in North Amity. While there, both Olive and Francis worked as teachers, Olive at a one-room school in Orient. After her parents passed, the family moved to Bath Maine, where Olive worked as an English teacher at Morse High School. Over the following two decades at Morse Olive became a muchbeloved teacher who imparted the rules of grammar and her love of Shakespeare to thousands of students.
In her retirement, Olive traveled to England and around the United States with friends and her siblings, but her greatest love was spending time with her four grandchildren, Renee, Nora, James, and Lydia. Olive was a witty, creative, and extraordinarily kind person who continued to make new friends until the very end of her life.
She is survived by her daughter Kathryn and son-inlaw Richard Downing of Winthrop Maine; her son Keith and his wife April of St. Albans Maine; her granddaughter Renee and her husband Peter Simonitis of Auburn Maine; her grandson James Downing and his wife Amy Crist of Cleveland Ohio; her granddaughter Nora and her husband Calvin Wilson of Middletown Connecticut; her granddaughter Lydia Downing and Lydia’s boyfriend Adrian Gonzalez of Brooklyn New York; her five greatgrandchildren: Emme, Brandon, and Anderson Simonitis, and Amber and Grant Wilson; three nephews, George, John, and Robert Gilmor, and her dear friend, Maryli Tiemann.
A family memorial service will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to Morse High School, with attention to The Olive Palmer Memorial Book Fund, at 826 High Street, Bath ME 04530.
Arrangements are in the care of Knowlton and Hewins Funeral Home, One Church St., Augusta, where friends and students may leave condolences on the obituary page of the website at www.khrfuneralhomes.
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