Eleanor Rose Calloway

Eleanor Rose Calloway, 83, of Fremont, died at home on Friday, January 9, 2026, in the town where she was born, with the snow coming down off the lake. For forty-one years she stood the line at Gerber on State Street — washing, filling, and holding up to the light the small glass jars that fed a century of other people's children.

She was born March 14, 1942, to Albert and Marge DeWitt, a Gerber family on Maple Street in a Gerber town. She graduated Fremont High in 1960 — a Packer, green and white — and went where her father had gone, down State Street to the plant and onto the line, union work, Local 530, forty-one years without ceremony and without a jar she wouldn't have fed her own grandbaby. She retired in 2001 with a cake in the break room and a pin she kept in a kitchen drawer full of saved Gerber jars, which is where Fremont keeps everything worth keeping.

In 1963 she married Raymond Calloway, the millwright the plant called when a filler jammed at two in the morning, and for forty-six years they were what Fremont goes in for instead of drama: endurance, done well. She put up her own tomatoes every August over a hot-water bath, played euchre on Thursdays and cheated a little with the grandchildren, kept a thermos of coffee light and sweet at the Friday-night Packer games long after she had any child left on the field, and went down to Fremont Lake every July of her life.

This past November she became a great-grandmother — a girl, Rose, for the middle name Eleanor carried her whole life. She held her a long time and didn't say much. It was the last of her holidays with all her people in the room.

She is survived by her daughter, Carol (Calloway) Ortega, a nurse in Grand Rapids, and her son-in-law, James Ortega; her son, Daniel Calloway, of Fremont; four grandchildren; and her great-granddaughter, Rose — and by every woman who ever stood the line beside her, and by a great many people in a great many states who were fed as babies by her hands and will never know it.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Raymond, in 2009; an infant son, in 1966; her parents, Albert and Marge DeWitt; and her brothers and her sister.

In place of flowers, the family asks that you give to the Fremont Area Community Foundation, or to the food pantry, or simply that you feed somebody. Eleanor would tell you that is the whole of it.

Eleanor’s family also had her full life story written — a FuneralBiography, the long version of a life, kept.