Trudy Baker, longtime local substitute teacher, dies at 85

Almost every weekday morning, the phone rang in Trudy Baker’s home on the outskirts of Petaluma, summoning her to a substitute teaching assignment at one of the area’s schools. The morning routine spanned more than three decades, from 1963 to her retirement in 1998, and Baker almost always took the job, handling preschool through eighth-grade classes ranging from Spanish, art and music to special education for disabled kids and even junior high shop class.

A native Californian and 53-year Sonoma County resident, Baker died Friday of a heart attack at a Santa Rosa hospital. She was 85.

Lillian Gertrude Frasch Baker, known as Trudy since junior high school, was a gregarious woman with a wide circle of friends, a dedicated mother of five and, in retirement, a world traveler who rode the Siberian Express across Russia, visited Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America and toured China, New Zealand and her parents’ native country of Germany.

Less than two months ago, Baker made her way from Petaluma to visit grandchildren in New Jersey, spending Thanksgiving with family in Texas and Christmas with other relatives in Chico. On visits to a grocery store or restaurant in Petaluma, she would invariably receive greetings from former students, teaching colleagues or her children’s friends, said her eldest son, Tim Baker of Short Hills, N.J.

“I guess I got the wandering urge from my parents,” Baker wrote in a brief autobiography in 2006. She was the only child of Kathe and Christian Frasch, who immigrated from Germany to San Francisco in the 1920s “with only a few cents in their pockets.”

On a six-month visit to Germany with her mother to meet relatives in the late 1930s, Baker recalled that she was “scolded by a nun in a German kindergarten for not saluting (a photo of) Hitler. My mother said that I was an American citizen and refused to allow me to do so.”

In 1935, her parents bought a bakery in downtown Vallejo and lived above the shop. During World War II, the bakery was open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. while the Mare Island shipyard was in constant operation, Baker wrote. Her father worked nights; her mother worked days.

“Needless to say, I had my share of cleaning pots and pans and was left to tend the store often at the age of 8,” she wrote.

In 1944, Baker’s parents purchased the old Appleton Bakery on Main Street in Sebastopol, and she attended Analy High School, graduating in 1947. Four years later, she graduated from San Jose State College with a bachelor’s degree in education.

Baker met her late husband, Art Baker, while working at a Sebastopol apple drier in the summer of 1951, and they settled in San Jose, where Baker began her teaching career. Tim Baker, a former Press Democrat photographer, said his mother often joked that every time she signed a teaching contract she got pregnant, so she quit signing contracts.

Her five children were born in the 1950s, and in 1962 the family moved to a small farm just outside Petaluma. Baker began juggling work as a substitute teacher with raising a family.

“Occasionally she’d tell a fib (when the morning phone calls came) and say she was already working when she needed to stay home to do housework or go grocery shopping for the seven of us,” Tim Baker said.

His mother also drove all over southern Sonoma County, ferrying her children in a blue 1960 Rambler station wagon to sports practices, cheerleading, piano lessons and after-school jobs, he said.

Summertime camping trips at Lake Pillsbury were an annual event, and Tim Baker said his mother sat by the water with a paperback book in hand but never read beyond the first paragraph because she repeatedly looked up to count five heads in the lake.

The family still gathers for annual reunions at Lake Pillsbury, which Tim Baker said is ironic because his mother disliked the early trips there, with cooking and cleaning for seven people away from the conveniences of her kitchen.

In 1996, the Bakers divorced. Trudy became a part-time travel agent and began traveling the world.

Survivors, in addition to her son Tim, include her daughters, Linda Dickson of Chico and Janet Sturkey of Sacramento; sons, Tom Baker of San Ramon and Matt Baker of Discovery Bay; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at the Parent-Sorensen Mortuary, 850 Keokuk St., Petaluma, followed by a reception. Memorial donations may be made to Rebuild Together Petaluma, 402 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma, 94952.