Marian Louise Olson, 96, of Misquah, died Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at her home, with her family near. For forty years she taught the first grade at Oakview Elementary, and there is hardly a soul in this town over thirty whom she did not teach to read.

She was born October 2, 1929, in Misquah, the daughter of the Rev. Magnus and Esther (Holm) Strand — her father the First Lutheran pastor of his day — and grew up in the parsonage on Second Avenue. She graduated from the teachers’ college at Moorhead in 1950, married Harold Olson in 1952, and returned home to teach. Harold, a rural mail carrier, preceded her in death in 2009.

From 1955 until her retirement in 1994, Mrs. Olson taught the first grade, and she counted it the best work in the world. She held that any child could learn to read, given patience and a quiet corner, and she proved it forty times over, year upon year, including with more than a few the rest of the school had quietly given up on. She kept a card for every student she ever taught — hundreds of them, in a recipe box on her kitchen table — and remembered them all: their reading, their troubles, and which ones, she would say, “just needed somebody willing to wait.”

She is survived by two children, Steven (Diane) Olson of Misquah and Barbara (Jim) Aas of Bemidji; by six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren; and by most of the town. Funeral services will be held Saturday, May 30, at 11 a.m. at First Lutheran Church, with burial in the church cemetery. Memorials are preferred to the Misquah Public Library’s summer reading program — a cause, the family notes, she would have regarded as the entire point. She is survived, fittingly, by a town that reads, and by one fourth-grader at the library who is reading still.