Oregon

... Schuman was born Sharon Avonette Johnson, the youngest of six children, on Feb. 11, 1946. Her impoverished parents worked as live-in caretakers on a wealthy estate in San Rafael, California, says Schuman’s daughter, Rebecca Schuman, of Eugene. “They had very little,” she says of her mother’s family. “She slept in a crib until she was nine years old. And she experienced abuse.”

Sharon transcended her childhood with the help of music and literature, her daughter says. An aunt gave Sharon a violin when she was nine, and a high school English teacher later introduced her to reading novels and poetry. Sharon practiced violin religiously and received a scholarship to study music at Stanford. “She arrived there a complete hayseed, knowing nothing about anything,” Rebecca says. “And then, in her sophomore year, she met my dad.”

The two undergraduates found each other on a study abroad program in Florence, Italy, Rebecca says, adding that an excess of chianti may have been involved on the night the couple got together. Sharon gave up drinking after that night, but the pair remained inseparable.

She and David Schuman soon moved in together, to the chagrin of their parents, and got married years later in a backyard ceremony — Sharon wore “a scandalously short mini dress,” Rebecca says — only after they graduated. He would go on to study law at the University of Oregon, became a judge on the Oregon Court of Appeals and later taught as a professor of constitutional law at the UO. She taught literature as a professor at Willamette University and later the UO ...

https://eugeneweekly.com/2025/05/01/sharon-schuman-1946-2025/