Barbara Lynn Hamilton Osterhoudt

Barbara Lynn Hamilton Osterhoudt, 85, of Saddletree Drive, Cottonwood, Sun Lakes very sadly passed from life in the Sun Lakes home of her daughter Karin on the morning of Friday, March 21, 2025. She had struggled valiantly and with great resilience against an unusually harrowing and cruel form of dementia as well as against several cardiac, intestinal, pulmonary, and immunological ailments, variously for 36 years, principally for the better part of three years.

 Barbara was born Barbara Lynn Hamilton in Los Angeles, California to Neva Laverne Siroky and Robert William Hamilton on June 16, 1939, the eldest of her father’s three daughters and of her mother’s two. She grew up principally in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, where she graduated from high school in 1957. Barbara was a strikingly adventuresome, intelligent, handsome, and diligent child who effectively came into the world as a self-reliant adult. She had a signal hand in raising her two siblings and in caring for all consequential domestic chores in her family’s home. From early pre-adolescence, Barbara provided almost entirely for herself and also very notably for others; she took from no one and gave to everyone, a becoming pattern that continued throughout her life.

 Barbara fatefully left home within weeks of her high-school graduation and came with a friend in search of work to Arizona, where she beavered away at a Scottsdale bank for a year before winning her model job at Arizona State University, Tempe. Her long tenure at ASU began in the photography laboratory, then continued in the purchasing division, in library acquisitions, and in the Department of Kinesiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She served with acclaim as the Administrative Assistant in this Department over the last ten years of her distinguished thirty-year career at the University. She expertly managed this Department, which was among the largest, most diverse (in respect to subject), and most contentious units in the institution, until forced into early retirement in 1995 by an especially severe case of rheumatoid arthritis. Despite all of the strife which became characteristic of the unit and despite her deepening illness, Barbara remained among the institution’s most respected employees, widely loved and admired for her steady, efficient, reliable, and evenhanded judgment as well as for her kind, generous, and considerate treatment of everyone. She was appropriately honored as ASU’s Classified Staff Council Supervisor of the Year in 1992.

Barbara married Jerry Stone in Tempe in 1960. Their exceptional children, Kristi Lynn and Karin Lee, were born in 1963 and 1967 respectively. Barbara and Jerry were divorced in 1970 and Barbara was left to raise her children largely unassisted. Although the children hadn’t a father in the home throughout most of their childhood and neither had adequate financial resources throughout most of their childhood, they had an exemplary mother: loving, attentive, responsible, and dutiful. Barbara married Bob Osterhoudt in Tempe in 1994, made a wonderful life with him, and thoroughly charmed his entire family.

 Barbara’s uncommonly gentle, charitable, humble, civil, and gracious nature and her laudable sense of communal obligation made her an ardently loved, respected, and admired asset to everyone, an especially empathetic and agreeable companion to children and animals, and a burden to no one. She was among the very best people, among the most irreplaceable people, and among the most beautiful women in the known universe. Her family and friends are, without qualifying condition, altogether fortunate and altogether grateful to have had her at the heart of their lives. They are too, of course, altogether aggrieved at her loss. She will be profoundly and tangibly missed for all the time remaining to them. Barbara was preceded in death by her parents and by her elder daughter, Kristi Boykin. She is survived by her younger daughter, Karin Stone (Kevin Bode); her sisters, Marlene Kelly and Marta Prime (Curtis); her husband, Bob; her two grandsons, Joshua Brown (Stephanie) and Kyle Stanley; her granddaughter, Brittany Anderson (Greg); her two step-sons, Kris Osterhoudt (Paula) and Kirk Osterhoudt (Leah); her step-daughter, Nicole Osterhoudt; her five step-grandsons, Lee Hall (Katie), Kyle Hall (Aly), Zachary Osterhoudt, Derek Osterhoudt, and Dylan Osterhoudt (Bailey); seven great grandchildren; and two great step-grandchildren. A memorial service honoring Barbara will be arranged within the next several weeks.

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