Olive Eikum Overbye

Ten days shy of her 90th birthday, Olive Overbye passed away in her sleep at Overlake Terrace in Redmond, Washington, on July 10. Olive loved bridge, golf, playing the piano, baking and Saturday afternoons at Husky Stadium, but most of all her life centered around her family: two sons, Dennis Overbye, a reporter for the New York Times in Manhattan, Gordon Overbye, a manager of biomedical engineering projects and Pilates instructor in Seattle, her first husband Milan R. (Bud”) Overbye, who died in 1993, and the newest addition, a granddaughter Mira, 8. Olive was born in Sisseton, South Dakota, on July 20, 1920, the eldest of three children of Mons Olson Eikum, a banker, and Clara Thorson, a homemaker. Two years after graduating Sisseton High School, she met Bud Overbye, an aspiring refrigeration and air-conditioning salesman, at a boarding house dance. She followed him to Seattle, where they were married in December, 1942. Olive’s sister Bernis and her brother Milton would eventually follow her to the northwest; both predeceased her. She worked briefly in the Olympic Hotel and then left the work force forever to be a mother. In 1954 the family moved from Gregory Heights to Mercer Island where they remained for 19 years and the boys went through school. During those years she and Bud were regulars at Andy’s Diner and Canlis. She also enjoyed traveling, especially to Hawaii, where she twice scored a hole-in-one on the Hotel Hana Maui golf course. She was a quiet but determined person and almost impossible to beat at cards. Although she herself did not swim, she taught Bud how to swim after sitting for hours by a pool downtown listening to a teacher giving lessons to her sons.The Overbyes were living in Bellevue in 1993, when Bud was felled by a heart attack on the golf course. A year later Olive married Jack Schneider, an old family friend and recent widower himself, becoming stepmother to Jack’s children, Jan Parsons of LaJolla, California, and Steve Schneider, of Kingston, Washington. Jack devoted the last 16 years to seeing Olive through her later years. They continued to enjoy traveling and golf until declining health clipped their wings. In 2003 she became a grandmother when her son Dennis and his wife Nancy Wartik adopted Mira in Kazakhstan. Olive braved the security lines to make one last airplane trip, to New York to meet Mira. She is missed. She was cremated and there will be a private memorial gathering at some time in the future.