Callahan-Russell services

Mrs. Callahan-Russell died Monday, April 12, 2004, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., after complications of heart surgery.

She was born Feb. 24, 1926, in Chicago, the daughter of Charles and Ruth Jane Laury Callahan. She was raised in Independence, where she graduated from high school in 1944.

She graduated from Baker University with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1948 and a master’s degree in music from Northwestern University in Illinois. She also attended a folk school in Denmark for a year in the 1950s. She earned a doctorate from Syracuse University in New York in 1977.

Mrs. Callahan-Russell taught music for two years at Southwest Texas State University before returning to Baker to teach music. She helped launch the first Baker in Africa program in 1963 in Botswana, where she taught basic music. She returned to Baker and raised enough money to purchase a piano for a secondary school in Botswana. She received the Outstanding Professor Award from Baker for the 1976-1977 school year and a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2001. She was admitted into the Teachers Hall of Fame in the 1990s. She taught at Baker from 1953 to 1989 and continued to oversee the Artists and Lecture series for the university and the Baldwin community after she retired.

She married Tom Russell on July 29, 1978. He survives, of the home.

Other survivors include three sons, Thomas Russell Jr., Memphis, Tenn., Spencer Russell, Overland Park, and Fletcher Russell, Emporia; three daughters, Jennifer Russell, Tracey Russell, both of Denver, and Pamela Russell, Jennings; two sisters, Charleen Potter and Mary Jane Chubb, both of Baldwin; and seven grandchildren.

The family suggests memorials to Baker University, sent in care of the funeral home, P.O. Box 64, Baldwin 66006.