2008
Louise O. Eckerson, 101, a psychologist with the Department of Education, died of aspiration pneumonia March 20 at Doctors Community
Hospital in Lanham. She was a resident of Collington Episcopal Life Care Community in Mitchellville.
Dr. Eckerson began working with what was then the U.S. Office of Education in the late 1950s. For three years, she was detailed by the
Education Office as a learning coordinator to the 1970 White House Conference on Children. She retired in 1975 as a specialist in
guidance in elementary schools and an evaluator of the nationwide experimental program Follow Through.
She was the author of more than 25 professional publications.
A Washington native, Dr. Eckerson graduated from Western High School and received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in
psychology from George Washington University in the 1930s.
She did research in education at the University of Minnesota; taught at Centenary Junior College in Hackettstown, N.J., was an editorial
researcher on the education page of Time magazine, and was an educational/vocational counselor at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken,
N.J.
She married in 1950, returned to the Washington area in 1951 and worked as a psychologist in the D.C. public schools for about eight
years.
She completed a book of memoirs about her summer adventures on seven freighters and an ocean-going schooner in the late 1930s and
early 1940s. The book is expected to be published this summer.
Her husband, Andrew Bennitt Eckerson, died in 1989. A stepdaughter, Andrea B. Eckerson, died in 2006. Survivors include two
stepdaughters, Judith M. Eckerson of Woodbridge and Gale E. Eckerson of Worcester, Mass.; six grandchildren; and six
great-grandchildren.
-- Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb