Evelyn Lieberman

Evelyn Lieberman, a retired professor and an expert in childhood development and learning who ran an educational program that trained thousands of teachers throughout the American Southwest, died in the loving embrace of her daughter at her home in Huntington on February 12 at the age of 85.
She began her career teaching preschool at Phoenix College. At the age of forty-seven she obtained a PhD in Early Childhood Education from the University of Arizona.
Mrs. Lieberman was born in Bountiful, Utah, the second oldest of ten children. She grew up in Denver, Colorado, in a somewhat eccentric family that caught the attention of Sociologist Vance Packard who lived with the family for a period and wrote a piece for Life Magazine that ended up in Readers Digest, which portrayed it as “The Fabulous Jacksons.”
She attended the University of Illinois in 1957 where she met Mr. Lieberman from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. During summers they worked as counselors at Camp Ramapo, a summer residential camp in the Hudson Valley serving children with a broad range of cognitive, social and emotional challenges. They married on Long Island in September 1961.
Mr. Lieberman obtained a law degree from the University of Illinois and after brief residence in Reading, Pennsylvania, the couple moved to Phoenix, where they spent the next fifty-three years raising their five children. They moved to western Massachusetts during Covid to live with their daughter, Julie Lieberman, and her wife Renee Bachman and their three children Lili, Maya and Moses in Huntington where she enjoyed exploring western MA, doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles, marveling at nature and reading this paper every day. .
She is survived by her three daughters, Lisa Schallop, Amy San Roman and Julie Lieberman, by two sons, Aaron and Daniel Lieberman, by fourteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren. The family held a funeral at Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton Friday. A memorial service is planned in Phoenix in March.