Retired Tucson teacher who survived Nazi occupation of Holland dies at 100

Aleida Gehrels was blessed with more time than most people get, and she used it to the fullest.

Until last year, the 100-year-old retired Tucson teacher with multiple degrees from the University of Arizona was still riding her tricycle around her Catalina Vista neighborhood. Until about two weeks ago, she was still hosting regular, late-afternoon happy-hour gatherings for friends and neighbors.

Aleida died on Nov. 28 while surrounded by family in the house where she lived for the last 63 years of her life.

“She was a remarkable woman,” said her daughter, Jo-Ann Gehrels. “She was always interested in learning more about the world, for herself and the people around her.”

She was born Aleida Joanna de Stoppelaar on March 16, 1925, in the Netherlands. She grew up in Leiden, a university city near The Hague, where she was the youngest of 13 children.

Aleida was 15 when the Nazis invaded Western Europe on May 10, 1940, seizing her town with paratroopers her family watched drop from the sky.

She would spend the rest of her teenage years under brutal fascist rule, including what came to be known as the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, when the Germans cut off food and fuel to Holland’s urban population through months of bitter cold.

After the war, she met the love of her life, Tom Gehrels, a hero of the Dutch resistance who went on to become an accomplished astronomer.

They married in 1947 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1951 so Tom could complete his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. They moved to Tucson in 1961 so he could join fellow Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper at the U of A’s newly formed Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Aleida and Tom raised three children together while he worked and she attended graduate school at the university, earning her Ph.D. in French literature in 1969 with a doctoral thesis on Albert Camus.

Nepotism rules kept her from teaching at the same university as her husband, so she went to work for Tucson Unified School District, first at Palo Verde High and then as one of the first teachers hired for what later became University High School.

Jo-Ann Gehrels said her parents ended up suing the U of A over its nepotism policy and eventually succeeded in getting the rule struck down. By then, though, Aleida was happily teaching high school classes and decided not to pursue work at the university.

Known affectionately as “Madame,” Aleida taught Advanced Placement courses in French, German and art history and helped in the early development of the nationwide AP test for high school art history students.

She retired from University High in 1997 and returned to the U of A the following year, this time to study math, chemistry and physics and earn a bachelor’s degree in ecology in her late 70s. She thought her studies would help her keep up with her astronomer husband and their adult children, all of whom had backgrounds in science.

That was pretty typical of mom, Jo-Ann said. She was a life-long learner and an avid reader, who would comb through the newspaper every day and The New Yorker every week.

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During the neighborhood happy hours Aleida and her daughter would host, “the conversation wasn’t about the weather,” Jo-Ann said. Her mom was more interested in talking about what was going on in the world and in the lives of the people living around her.

And when one of her neighbors told her about something she wasn’t familiar with, she would go online afterward to learn more about it so she would be better informed the next time around.

“She was genuinely interested in everything and every person in her life,” Jo-Ann said.

Even decades after she retired, Aleida would bump into her old students around town and invariably surprise them by asking about some hobby or interest of theirs from back in high school.

“Her memory of every single student in her career was just astounding,” Jo-Ann said.

Aleida spent a fair amount of her final year recounting her own days as a teenager.

For the 80th anniversary of V-E Day in May, she sat down with the Arizona Daily Star to talk about her experiences during the war.

Two months later, she was interviewed by a pair of retired history professors from the University of Delaware for an oral history project on people directly impacted by World War II. Then she delivered a lecture about life in occupied Holland at the invitation of the 390th Memorial Museum, an independent nonprofit historical collection housed at the Pima Air and Space Museum.

The week before Aleida died, she rode around her neighborhood in a golf cart to watch the live bands and circus performers during Catalina Vista’s annual Porchfest event, and she attended an alumni orchestra show at the U of A School of Music to watch her granddaughter, also named Aleida, play the viola.

Jo-Ann said her mother’s health took a turn for the worse last week. On Thanksgiving night, 10 family members gathered at her bedside to tell stories, read poems and sing to her during her final hours.

Aleida is survived by her son, George, and daughter, Jo-Ann; two sisters-in-law, Ellen Williams and Jennifer O'Brien; six grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Tom, who died in 2011, and son, Neil, a NASA astrophysicist who died in 2017 and now has a gamma-ray-burst-detecting observatory named in his honor.

Services for Aleida are expected to take place next year.

Jo-Ann said the family was already making arrangements for her to celebrate her 101st birthday in March the same way she did when she turned 100: with a night of jazz music at the Century Room inside Hotel Congress. Now the plan is to turn that gathering on the last Friday in March into a celebration of life for the centenarian, “open to anyone who knew her and loved her,” her daughter said.

Jo-Ann also hopes to commemorate her mother later that weekend, during University High School’s 50th anniversary celebration on March 28 and 29.

Aleida was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2016, and she was scheduled to give a lecture about her life as part of next year’s anniversary festivities there.