June Marie Olson Damon

June Marie Olson Damon, 92, died of congestive heart failure on January 31, 2021. She was born in the Bronx, New York on May 31, 1928, the first child of Charles Henry Olson and Alice May (Anderson) Olson. June was raised in Yonkers, New York and graduated from Roosevelt High School. She went on to the New York State Teacher’s College (now SUNY - Albany) from which she graduated in 1949, intending to become a science teacher. She was the first person in her family ever to have attended college – the daughter of an immigrant family that struggled through evictions in the Great Depression, her father undocumented (albeit a union carpenter), and her mother working intermittently as a seamstress.


After a brief unhappy stint as a practice teacher, she got a job at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research – a rare place then and now in the welcome it provided women scientists. There she discovered a love of bench research and was mentored by one of those women scientists, Florence Flemion Miller, a lifelong friend, who, in the early 1950s, encouraged June to go on to graduate school. June obtained her PhD in analytical chemistry at Purdue University in 1958, working with the great Dr. M. Guy Mellon. Along the way, she met her husband, Dwight Hills Damon, whom she married in 1955 after a whirlwind courtship.


Her research career was interrupted in 1959 by the arrival of her first daughter, Candace Perry, and the contemporary complete lack of affordable day care (and scarcity of unaffordable day care). In 1962, second daughter, Inger Kristina was born. Notwithstanding frustration, June averred that spending the early years of her daughters’ lives focused on them was something she was proud to have done and never regretted. In 1968, she returned to the workforce as a lecturer at Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, the then women’s school at Carnegie Mellon University.


In 1970, June and Dwight and their daughters moved to Storrs, Connecticut where Dwight had accepted a position in the Physics Department at the University of Connecticut. After a brief unsuccessful effort to obtain tenure-track employment at a post-secondary institution (impeded by the overt sexism of the time), June accepted a position teaching high school chemistry at Tolland High School. From there, she moved on to Waterford High School, where she spent more than a decade of happily teaching students, many of whom went on to careers using the education and inspiration she provided in careers ranging from nursing to patent law. As she downsized her household over the last several years, the photograph the Waterford HS 1988 Honors Chemistry class gave her inscribed to “Doc” Damon remained one of her proudest and most prominently displayed possessions…. demonstrating that the career that does not suit when first attempted may very well later on.


After retirement and sabbatical travel to Scandinavia with Dwight in the late-1980s and again in the late-1990s, June became more engaged with the League of Women Voters in Storrs. She furthered her political interests through voter education and leadership positions in the LWV, includung studying introduction of sewerage in rural communities and emerging voting machine technologies.


In 2005, she and Dwight moved to Decatur, Georgia to escape New England snow and be closer to daughter Inger. June spent 15 good years there – making new friends, enjoying her Saturday wine and politics discussions, proudly voting for John Lewis, and discovering a love of reading biographies. In her last year of life, after moving to an independent living facility, her declining eyesight forced her giving up her principal creative outlet - sewing – and substitute painting. Multiple joyful landscapes and several portraits resulted.


June was predeceased by Dwight - her husband and best friend of more than 50 years - and her brother, Carl Helmer Olson. She is survived and will be missed by her daughters, Candace of Athens, Vermont, and Inger of Decatur, Georgia; their husbands, David Jacobson and Gregory Armstrong; grandson Otis Jacobson; six nieces and nephews; and grand-dogs, Brutus and Minnie.


Her daughters will remember her embodying feminism, championing science and science education, voting Democrat, loving classical and baroque music, enthusiastically dancing at every party, cooking from the New York Times Cookbook, and drinking white wine. She was a demanding and loving mother, a touchstone for how a successful marriage is managed, a gracious host, and a proud Swedish-American.


Funeral services were provided by A.S. Turner Funeral Home in Decatur, GA. Memorial services are planned for times to be announced – when we can all gather in person – in Decatur, Storrs, and Sweden. Memorial contributions may be made to Amherst College – In Honor of June Damon. Any such contributions will be used to advance science in liberal arts education, as directed by Candace and Inger. (Means of giving are described at https://www.amherst.edu/give/ways-to-give. Gifts made online can be designated as being in honor of June on the final screen.