Barbara Pautz

Barbara Pautz, age 95 of Altoona, passed away on Monday, December 20, 2021 at Marshfield Medical Center in Eau Claire. She was born Barbara Elaine in Rockford, Ill on March 25, 1926, just in time to live through the Great Depression. Her parents were Edward and Winifred (Westfall) Garwig. As a first grader in the Rockford School system, she fell in love with learning, a passion that would last a lifetime.

In the worst days of the Depression, her parents left the comforts of the city life and moved to Wisconsin and the rural area of Abon Township in Rock County. She entered the one-room Howard School, where pupils pumped their drinking water, cleaned the privies, washed the blackboards and pounded the erasers. There was more to learning than the lessons found in textbooks.

Barbara attended Brodhead High School and graduated as class salutatorian in 1944. Scholarships and part-time work enabled her to enter Milton College, the first in her family to attend a school of higher learning. She was active in athletics, was editor of the school yearbook and played a number of roles in the school’s Shakespearean productions. She was awarded a bachelor’s degree in 1948, graduating summa cum laude.

After working for a year at Rockford’s Gunite Foundries, she returned to Milton to gain teaching credentials. Her high school career as an English teacher took place in three Green County schools --- Brooklyn, Juda and Brodhead. It was in Brooklyn that she met Wilmer Pautz, another beginning teacher. They were married in the Brodhead Methodist Church on June 2, 1951.

In 1962 the couple spent a year in Germany. While Wilmer taught math and science at the U.S. Army’s Frankfurt Junior High School, Barbara attended a Goethe Institute, a school for foreign speakers of German. Their free time was spent traveling about the country.
After this preparation abroad, Barbara became a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder and received a Master of Arts degree in German language and literature in 1967. She then joined Wilmer at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire where he had been a faculty member since 1963. She became a part-time instructor teaching German.
Barbara’s greatest contribution to the university and community was as the co-founder of the school’s Viennese Ball, now nearing its 50th year. She and Ada Bors, the other co-founder, were inspired by Vienna’s elegant Kaiser Ball and its celebration of the waltz king, Johann Strauss. On an April night in 1974, over 670 guests arrived to initiate what would become the school’s signature event. It now draws 3,000 guests on a two-night schedule, making it the largest Viennese Ball in the world outside Vienna. Ticket Sales have generated over a million dollars for music scholarships and awards.
For many years Barbara was keenly aware of the social and economic injustices suffered by girls and women. In the early 1970’s she and her colleagues from Eau Claire and other universities formed a council to improve the lot of women on Wisconsin campuses, faculty and students alike. They worked to increase the number of women faculty and their promotions, to increase the number of women accepted in Madison’s medical and law schools, to establish campus daycare centers, to add women’s studies to the curriculum and to open varsity sports to coeds. Today a look around tells how successful they were.

Barbara was an avid reader, a world-wide traveler, a gym rat, a lover of music and fine dining, a gracious hostess noted for her legendary pies and genealogist who wrote a number of family histories.

Barbara is survived by her husband Wilmer, her sister Patricia of Beloit, many friends and students who over the years have remembered her with visits, letters, phone calls and invitations to reunions.

She is preceded in death by her parents and grandparents: Charles and Gertrude (Wright) Westfall and John and Dora (Reichenbach) Garwig.

She will be greatly missed.

Barbara will be laid to rest at Greenwood Cemetery, Brodhead, WI at a later date.