Anita Miriam (Fellner) Swetland of Yellow Springs, Ohio died peacefully at home on Friday, Jan. 19, 2007.

Her life began March 15, 1920, at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She was the first of five children born to Irving S. and Hazel Bakewell Fellner, and the only one delivered in a hospital.
The family moved to Chappaqua, N.Y., where the last two children were born and where Anita grew up. In 1932, her father died, leaving his widow with five young children to raise.

Anita attended for one year and graduated from Saint Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Conn., where she was taught by Ruth Chandler, an English teacher who impressed Anita with a love and respect for the English language and its proper usage. “I blessed her every day of my life,” Anita once said. During her final year at Vassar College, Anita sat in on a class on Russian literature, and during that time, all she had learned and experienced “came together for me” and her world view was formed.

Following her graduation from Vassar in 1940 with a bachelor’s in bacteriology, she lived in an aunt’s apartment in Pittsburgh and “fooled around the entire winter.” A classmate’s connections then landed Anita a job “sight-unseen” at the Institute of Pathology. It was a position that “a trained monkey could perform,” she said, “but that got me to Cleveland, Ohio” which was significant because it was there that she met her future husband, Frederick L. Swetland Jr., two weeks after arriving.

The couple was married at Longmeadow Farm, the Swetland residence in Richmond Heights, Ohio, Oct. 24, 1942.
It was wartime, and they moved to Fort Benning, Ga., where Frederick was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. In 1943, Frederick was sent to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and they moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio for the first time, and lived in the Vale before eventually buying a home in the village.

“I drew my strength from literature” was how Anita described her ability to deal with life’s challenges. Diagnosed with MS in 1947, when she was just 27, she refused to acquiesce to any disabilities and remained active throughout her life. She managed the unpredictability of her disease, studied it, joined a scientific survey group, and became her own experimental laboratory to the end. She minimized what she couldn’t do, maximized what she could do, and made adjustments, but didn’t give in. She was thus a role model to many who knew her.

Anita loved literature and history and enjoyed Shakespeare, especially the plays put on for many seasons at Antioch College. Music and opera were among her great pleasures, and she traveled to Cleveland and Cincinnati for their opera seasons. As a young woman, she loved to dance, and she missed dancing with her husband when her limbs would not cooperate. The capacity to swim was her salvation throughout much of her life. In the water, “I felt like a real person and could move my arms and legs in a normal way,” she said.

From childhood on, books were of prime importance to Anita, and the many tomes in her personal library were like old friends, so familiar were their characteristics. On the Isle of Pines, Anita founded a library in the nearby town, and in her later years, she helped sort books for Planned Parenthood’s annual book sale. Her choices for volunteering were based on her ability to use her mental skills, and she would not allow her physical impediments to deny her the pleasure of contributing to causes in which she took an interest.

Using Yellow Springs as their primary home, the couple lived in many homes in many places — Cuba, Mercersburg, Pa., Coconut Grove, Fla., Mexico, and Nantucket, to name a few — traveling with their two sons, Fred III, and Eli Bakewell. Frederick and Anita relocated to and expected to live permanently on the Isle of Pines, Cuba, in 1957. They moved with their children, furniture, books, tractors, horses, and dogs to a large tract of land and hacienda that had been in the Swetland family for many years. Besides introducing a citrus crop and managing a herd of cattle, the Swetlands operated a guest ranch. After Fidel Castro came into power, however, they were forced to leave in 1960, lost their entire investment, and returned to the United States.

For the next two years, Anita was a boarding schoolmaster’s wife, and, seeing the need, took it upon herself to create and manage a bookstore for the students of the Mercersburg Academy. The couple then returned to Hawk Hill Farm in Yellow Springs, Ohio surrounded by the hills, trees and fields that Frederick farmed, and a flower garden that Anita nurtured. The garden was filled with cuttings grown to mature plants that held memories of this place or that person, and it bloomed profusely almost year round. Both Frederick and Anita wanted to pass their last days on their lovely farm, and Anita made sure that happened for her husband.

Anita was preceded in death by her husband, Frederick; and brother, F. Dale Fellner.

She is survived by her two sons and their wives, Fred III and Tinka, and Eli B. and Michelle, all of Naples, Fla.; three grandsons, Fred IV of Salt Lake City, Utah, Captain Eli B. Jr., of Cambridge, England, and Luke and his wife, Lt. Jennifer, of Mannheim, Germany; a granddaughter, Anastasia, and her husband Dr. Christopher Wyckoff of Salt Lake City, Utah; a great grandson, Alexander Wyckoff; two sisters, Leila Lenagh of Flemington, N.J., and Hazel Tuttle of Fort Collins, Colorado; a brother, Irving S. Fellner Jr. of New Canaan, Conn.; a brother-in-law, David Swetland of Alna, Maine; and numerous nieces and nephews throughout the country.

A marker for Frederick L. Swetland Jr. and Anita (Fellner) Swetland is part of the Swetland family plot in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio. Donations can be made in Anita’s name to the Rocky Mountain MS Center (www.mscenter.org), 701 East Hampden Avenue, Suite 420, Englewood, CO 80113.

Greene County
Cuyahoga County