Anthropologist and former Milwaukeean Helen Schuster (nee Hersh) died Oct. 22 in Seattle, Wash. She was 83.
She was born in Menominee, Mich., and grew up in Milwaukee. After graduating from Washington High School in 1936, she moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California there. She received a degree in chemistry in 1940 and worked in the first synthetic rubber plant during World War II in Texas.
She married George Schuster of Stoughton, Wis., in 1941 and in 1946 settled in Seattle, where the rest of his family resided. They later divorced.
She returned to school and received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. She was a professor and teacher of anthropology at the University of Puget Sound and the University of Wyoming, where she was granted the first Newberry Fellowship awarded to a social scientist.
She later taught at the University of Iowa in Ames, retiring in 1990 as professor emeritus. Her grandchildren called her “Grandma-in-Ames.”
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