Rosemary Pell

Rosemary Pell, 88, of Fremont, died Saturday, April 4, 2026, at home, in the front room where for sixty years she taught the children of Fremont — and then their children, and then theirs — to sit up straight and find middle C.

She was born January 19, 1938, in Fremont, the youngest of Herman and Alice Vroon's four children, and she liked to say she could not remember a time before the piano — an upright her mother bought secondhand and paid off a dollar a week. She took to it the way some children take to water. She graduated from Fremont High School in 1956, married Raymond Pell in 1959, and in more than sixty years of marriage never once lived more than a mile from the house she grew up in.

The front room on Dayton Street was her schoolroom. She taught from the same upright she kept faithfully in tune, with a metronome she trusted more than any student did and a jar of butterscotch discs for the ones who had practiced. Her recitals filled First Christian Reformed Church every June — youngest first, always, so the little ones could go home to bed — and she remembered every name that ever sat on her bench, which piece each child had fought, and the afternoon each one finally played it through whole.

She played the organ at First Christian Reformed for forty years, accompanied the high school's spring concerts, and could not walk past a piano in a public place without touching a key or two to hear, quietly, whether it had been cared for. She was patient past all reason, except about rushing — "the notes are not going anywhere," she would say — and she believed, plainly and to the end, that a house with a little music in it was a better house to live in.

She is remembered for that patience, for the butterscotch jar, and for the fact that on almost any evening in Fremont, somewhere, a child she had taught was practicing a piece she had assigned — grudgingly, beautifully, and better than they knew.

She is survived by her children, Janet (Doug) Hoeksema of Fremont and Paul (Lisa) Pell of Rockford; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren; and three generations of students who still cannot hear a metronome without sitting up a little straighter.

She was preceded in death by her husband of sixty-one years, Raymond; her parents; and her brothers, Glenn and Marvin Vroon.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Fremont Area District Library toward its sheet-music collection.