Gloucester, MA — Barbara Louise (Howell) Erkkila, Granite Historian and Author, passed away on December 14, 2013, at the Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers. She was born on July 11, 1918, in Boston, and was the daughter of a nurse Adelia P. (Jones) (Howell) Crowell and John W. D. “Jack” Howell of the U.S. Navy. Before she was two, her father was killed in a motorcycle crash. He had hoped to be a foreign correspondent, one who spoke many languages. Her mother moved to Gloucester with her three little girls, and later, two brothers and a sister were added to the family. In first grade at Lane School, Barbara read at third-grade level. In her senior year, she won the Roosevelt Trophy Spelling Contest. She was excited by vocabulary and had found some books in the attic of the family home. Discarding most of the girls’ stories of the day, she read all the Horatio Alger boys’ stories, and books by G. A. Hently, which had plots about heroic figures in history.
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