Jane L Andersen

On Sunday, March 30, 2025, Jane Luce Andersen of Orange City, Fla., a beloved widow and mother of four, died peacefully at the age of 90.

Jane was born on March 14, 1935, in Stillwater, N.Y., to Fred A. and Mildred S. Luce. She grew up on a working farm next to the two-room schoolhouse she attended until sixth grade. As a child she helped her father, who worked as a hired hand, by corralling cows and sheep from the pasture. A self-identified tomboy, she enjoyed swinging from the hay fork in the barn and playing weekend football with neighbor boys. In middle school she took up violin and guest-conducting her school’s musical performances. From age 16 to 21, Jane served as the music director for her church choir and orchestra, nurturing a life-long passion for music. She graduated from Jamestown High School in 1952 and began working as a legal secretary for a county attorney in Jamestown, N.Y.

While still in school, Jane knew the boy who would become her husband, Carl William Andersen, simply as the young guy who rode a horse and worked on a nearby farm. She met him again years later at a church picnic in Stillwater, after Carl finished an Army enlistment in 1955. They fell in love and married on August 11, 1956, moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan. A year later, they had their first son, Steven. During this time, Jane supported Carl as he pursued an engineering degree on the GI Bill, tutoring him in English and helping him to pass other humanities classes.

After Carl finished his degree and began working in 1960, they bought a house in East Grand Rapids, Mich., their home for the next sixty years. A neatly trimmed Cape Cod, the house stood on a wooded acre edging Fisk Lake. Despite its urban setting, the property reminded Jane of the rural landscape of her youth. She planted vegetables, herbs and flowers, a garden she tended on mornings and weekends for as long as she lived in the house. From the back deck, she watched wetland birds—wood ducks and mallards, blue herons and loons. Jane spied most of Michigan’s other birds amid the cottonwoods and maples, on the expansive lawn, and gathering at her feeders. In the coming years and decades, as her family grew, the home was a beacon for birthday celebrations, holiday gatherings, graduation ceremonies, and family reunions. Jane’s grandchildren looked forward to spending summers at “Nana and Grandpop’s house.”

On the July day they moved into the house, Jane gave birth to a second child, their daughter Carla. For several years, Jane cared for a growing family. By 1963 she had two more children, a son, Craig, and a daughter, Sandra. In these years, Jane balanced raising her children with part-time secretarial work at John M. Perry Company, a manufacturing services business in Grand Rapids. She also sang in the Grand Rapids Symphonic Choir. Jane fostered a similar love of music in her children from preschool through high school, funding private lessons, encouraging them to join the school band and orchestra, and supporting opportunities to attend band and fine arts camps.

In the early 1970s, Jane began working full-time for a Grand Rapids legal firm, Law, Weathers, & Richardson, eventually serving as a paralegal and staying until she retired in 1995. In her early years with the firm, Jane helped on a case that left a lasting impression. During 1976, Jane spent extended periods in Cadillac, Mich., where the firm represented dairy farmers who had lost their herds from PBB (polybrominated biphenyl) poisoning. Having grown up on a small farm, Jane identified with these families, and she worked tirelessly to help them see justice. She made lasting friendships, and in the years that followed she would visit them, sometimes riding horses.

During her work years, Jane attended evening classes at Grand Rapids Junior College, earning an Associate of Arts degree. Her studies also furthered her delight in ornithology and her love of classical and operatic music, passions that led her to join the National Audubon Society and Friends of the Opera, a Grand Rapids arts organization for which she served as a board member. She also took a finance class that prompted her to join a local stock market club, Investing for Fun, eventually serving as treasurer. She showed exceptional savvy with her investments, growing her wealth enough to pay cash for a vacation condo in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1999., where she and Carl moved permanently in 2018.

Profits from her shrewd investments also helped fund Jane’s love of traveling. She went on a safari in Kenya, bird-watched in the Galápagos Islands, and toured cultural sites in Italy. In 2006 Jane and Carl celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary by taking their children and grandchildren on an Alaskan cruise. In 2011, they toured the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and other European countries. In the years that followed, they took numerous Caribbean cruises. After Carl passed in 2020, Jane continued to travel, visiting family in Hawaii and Mallorca, Spain, and exploring the Oregon coast.

In 2022, Jane moved to a retirement community in Orange City, Fla., where she remained physically and socially active. She took morning walks, attended aerobics and line-dancing classes, and gardened. She often visited the community center, where she enjoyed socializing with friends over a jigsaw puzzle or game of mahjong.

Jane celebrated her 90th birthday with her children, grandchildren, great-grandchild, and friends. From a wheelchair, Jane put on a mock-serious face and twirled her index fingers, conducting everyone as they sang “Happy Birthday.”

Jane is preceded in death by her husband Carl, her father, Fred, her mother, Mildred, her sister, Joanne, and her brother, Harold. She leaves behind her four children, Steven, Carla (Finch), Craig, and Sandra (Shugars), their spouses (Denise, Joe, Debra, and Murray, respectively), eleven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.

A memorial service will be held at the Cape Canaveral National Cemetery in Mims, Fla., where her ashes will be interred with Carl’s.

In lieu of flowers, please give donations for hospice care to Halifax Health-Hospice at https://halifaxhealth.org/hospice-information/give