Carol D. Wilson was born Jan. 26, 1934, in San Francisco to David and Dolores Sheets. Carol's mother abandoned her and the family while Carol was an infant. Consequently, she grew up in various foster homes, orphanages and with other relatives until her teenage years. She spent time in both northern and southern California and attended various schools in California and Oklahoma. Her father David provided for her as best he could by working various jobs and serving in the Navy during World War II as a Seabee. David remarried after the war and Carol went to live with them. While attending high school, she worked part time as a telephone operator and as a racehorse exercise rider at Santa Anita Race Track. Her small size and love of animals made her the perfect person for the job. She graduated from Torrance High School in 1950 where she had earned a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. She enrolled in a pre-veterinarian course of study there and obtained an associate degree but never attended veterinarian school. While attending college she earned her spending money by singing with different bands, the best known being the Sauter-Finnegan Orchestra. She also had a part-time job working for William Hewlett and Dave Packard about the time when they were moving their operation out of their garage and into a larger office space. This company would later become Hewlett Packard.
After college, Carol worked for General Electric out of San Antonio, where her job took her to many GE facilities, both domestically and internationally.
In 1959, she met and married John Wilson in Wichita Falls, Texas. John was a petroleum geologist by profession so the family lived in various cities in Texas, Oklahoma and Bogota, Columbia. After returning from Colombia, the family bought a Super Value store in Lenox, Iowa, and operated it for a few years before returning to the oil business with Northern Natural Gas in Omaha. A few years later the family moved back to Houston with the youngest child, Mystie, where she graduated from high school in 1978. The older children, Gail and Paul, were in college, working or in the service by this time.
During this time, Carol was very active with the American Red Cross, both as an employee and as a volunteer. She was a certified first aid instructor and while in Colombia had the satisfaction of knowing that one of her students was able to save a life. As an employee of the Midwest Chapter out of Omaha in the early 1970s, she was assigned the job of getting the SSI program organized in the area of eastern Nebraska and western Iowa. After moving to Houston, Carol took on a new challenge and launched her career in real estate and mortgage banking. She managed several real estate and home loan offices and saw them through a period of mergers and acquisitions during the real estate bubble of the 1980s.
After retiring in 1989, the couple bought a ranch in the Ozarks of Missouri and became green-horn ranchers for 10 years. Carol was very active in this undertaking, but not her idea of retirement. When some of the children moved to Omaha it was time for a move back to Nebraska. Carol made a trip to the Columbus/Fremont area and purchased a home in the North Bend area in 1999, a move for which she was forever thankful, being an area full of her kind of happy, friendly, ambitious people.
