Ronnie Alff

December 31, 1933 - November 2, 2020

Ronnie E. Alff, age 86, died on Monday, November 2nd, 2020, at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Michigan. She was born on December 31, 1933 in Toledo, Ohio, to the late Charlotte Wilson and William Henry Engelke, new residents from Morenci, Michigan and Sumner, Iowa. Her mother was employed as organist at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church for 39 years; her father as choir master for 25 years. Ronnie graduated from DeVilbiss High School, and attended Bowling Green State University for two years before graduating from the University of Toledo. In 1976 she earned a Master’s Degree in education from Michigan State University, and was qualified as a certified school librarian, a job she held for twenty-six years with the Department of Defense Dependent Schools overseas. In 1960 she and her sister Kristin moved to Boyne City Michigan to teaching jobs in Boyne City schools. After the four “Kennedy Years” as she referred to them, she became part of the Malawi V Peace Corps program where she met her husband, Paul Gerald Alff. They married in Japan in 1970 where Paul taught first in language schools and then at St. Joseph’s International school in Yokohama, Japan, and Ronnie continued with DODDS until 1998. Widowed in 1999 after retiring to a home in Traverse City, Ronnie continued library work as a substitute librarian in TADL’s Youth Services section for eight years. Their son John Paul was born in Tokyo in 1971, their daughter Elizabeth Charlotte was adopted at six months in 1974. John teaches English in Ankara, Turkey, where he lives with his wife Meram and daughter Melis June Alff. Elizabeth works for an organization that provides language services and lives with her husband Roger Balbuena, a nutritionist, in New York City. With a large Alff family and four nephews and two nieces, Ronnie enjoyed keeping in touch with the family members who visited her in Traverse City, and especially with her sister Kris until her death in Boyne City in 2014. She was a twenty year member of St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Northport and served as librarian there. In 2000 she began a quilt group which continues today, the Piecemakers. She was an active member of the League of Women Voters in Traverse City and lately of the Leelanau League. Her own passion for quilting began almost forty years ago, in Japan, and continued through fifteen years of attendance at the Beaver Island Quilt Retreats, and until her death. A sixty-four year friendship with Jan Barley, of Waterville, Ohio, included a shared interest in Scotland, poetry, good writing and books, and the Maumee River and Lake Michigan. Ronnie traveled in Europe while teaching for two years in Mannheim, Germany, in East Africa as a PCV, in the Far East with her family, and after retiring, in England and Scotland with her friend Jan. After cremation she will be buried in Charlevoix County’s Dyer Cemetery with her husband Paul, brother Bill Engelke, and sister Kris Skornia.