LeeAnn Ellen Baker

LeeAnn was born March 5, 1950 to Geraldine May (Greenfield)Baker and Robert Brian Baker in Shell Lake, Wisconsin, their second child preceded by their son Bernard.

She attended her first school, in a one room school house in Madge, Wisconsin. Her mother was the teacher and a favorite aunt cooked lunches for the children. She was there until the district was consolidated and graduated from Spooner High School as Valedictorian. She had a perfect attendance record never missing a day from first grade to twelfth. She went on to the University of Wisconsin gaining the Bachelors and Masters in education. After a few short stints at various schools she went to work as a Special Ed teacher at New Prague High School in Minnesota where she taught for thirty years. She retired in 2007 and moved to Horseshoe Lake in Marcell, Minnesota.

LeeAnn was physically active all her life and in her 20’s became a summer councilor on the St. Croix river at a Camp at St. John’s Landing. Discovering a passion for being on the water, she went on to take numerous canoe trip adventures all across North America from the Northwest Territories to Hudson’s and Baffin Bay to Yellowstone and the Boundary Waters. LeeAnn was an avid reader, cook and knitter and delighted in being a “reading buddy” to second graders at Bigfork Elementary.

In 1990 she met her future husband, Albert on a trip to Great Slave Lake and despite warnings from one close friend who warned her “he needed a bit of work,” married him in October of 1994.

She is survived by her husband Albert Gustaveson and family, Kate, Andrew and granddaughter Vivienne also brother Bernard, nephews Brian, Brent, Bradley and niece Kara and many nieces and nephews. She will be missed by scores of former students, teachers and travel-mates scattered about Minnesota and Wisconsin and around the world.