Yvonne Annette Heffron was born in 1949 in Michigan, the daughter of Edison J. Heffron and Anna Theresa (Wysocki) Heffron. Edison and Anna were married in June 1949 in Bowling Green, Ohio and divorced in February 1950 in Oakland County, Michigan, only two months after Yvonne was born. When the 1950 census was taken, Anna and Yvonne were living with Anna’s brother Joseph Wysocki and his family. Yvonne’s father Edison Heffron was married again and died in Missouri in 1985. Her mother Anna passed away in 1999 in Michigan. Yvonne was first married to Gary James Dillon, also a Michigan native, but they were later divorced. They had at least one child, Jamie Edward Dillon, born about 1975, who graduated from Fenton High School in 1993 and was married in 2001 in Holly, Michigan. Gary died in 1995.
Yvonne was married again to Donald Robert Ottewell, before the fall of 1984, when I was assigned to her Reading class at Avondale Middle School. Mrs. Ottewell always dressed very professionally; her clothes were more like those of an executive than a middle school teacher. During the 1984-1985 school year, I cannot remember her wearing pants even once – she always wore skirt suits with heels, fancy blouses and jewelry. She was also always heavily made-up, to the point where we could see the line around her hairline and on her neck where the makeup ended and the actual skin began. [My sister, who also had Mrs. Ottewell as a teacher when she was in middle school, recalled that on a class retreat away from school Mrs. Ottewell wore jeans and let the students peg the cuffs – a memorable event partially because of her usual extremely formal attitude toward her appearance.] Sixth-grade Reading class was the first time we were assigned full-length classic novels to read and discuss. I don’t remember what many of them were, but I do recall that we spent so much time reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell.
Mrs. Ottewell also introduced us to Hink Pinks – descriptive phrases meant to elicit rhyming answers. An example of a Hink Pink is “An empty seat;” wherein the answer would be “bare chair”. It was the most fun I ever had in school doing spelling and vocabulary. Mrs. Ottewell also had a single computer in the back of the classroom, and she would allow students to use it for a few minutes on a rotating basis – each of us was allowed to play with it maybe once a month. The only program I recall that was on it was the turtle drawing application (perhaps Apple Logo Writer?), an early programming teaching application in which you could tell the “turtle” to draw lines, turn angles, and change color; if you had more than a few minutes, the idea was you could create intricate designs. It was really our first exposure to computer programming. Later in middle school we were offered the opportunity to learn very basic BASIC programming.
Another of Mrs. Ottewell’s assignments was that we had to publish our own newspaper. My obsession with wanting a pet cat was at its height when I was a sixth grader, and so the theme of my newspaper was cats. I called it The Siamese Press, and I still have it – seven pages of silliness typed on a manual typewriter with most of the handwritten titles in my mom’s handwriting – I didn’t like the way my own looked. I believe the point of the assignment was the familiarize us with the sections of a newspaper and what kinds of information we could find in them. I got an A- the first quarter, but the rest of my Reading grades were As, and Mrs. Ottewell wrote “Keep up the good work!” at the bottom of my fourth quarter report card. She also wrote in my yearbook: “Wendy: To an extremely intelligent and nice student. Always keep up the good work! Best of luck, Mrs. Ottewell.”
I don’t know when Mrs. Ottewell retired from education, but she was still teaching when my sister left middle school in 1993. Post-2007, she and her husband have lived in Farmington Hills, Livonia, Lake City and Stanwood, Michigan; I believe they are currently residing in Weidman, Isabella County, Michigan.
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