After an amazing and full life, Isabelle McClung Goeser passed away on January 18, 2022 in Houston, Texas. She was 99 ½ years old. Daughter of the Rev. Arthur J. and Florence W. McClung, Isabelle was born on her father's birthday, July 6, 1922 in St. Joseph, Missouri. She always saw the bright and funny side of life. As a young teen in junior high, she was asked to recite Alfred Noyes's popular poem, "The Highwayman." His melodramatic verses tickled her, and rather than offering a monotone recitation to her teacher and classmates, she dramatically voiced and acted out the lines with broad gestures and a constant gallop, to visualize the "highwayman . . . riding – riding – riding" throughout the 17 stanzas. Later in life, she would trot out her rendition of "The Highwayman" at gatherings of friends and family to gales of laughter.

Isabelle rode into each chapter of her life with gusto and grace. "Izzy," as she was affectionately known in college, became a proud member of the Tri Delta sorority at the University of Iowa, where she majored in speech and communications, while also training as a classical singer and viola player. As a senior, she was clowning one day at the piano, singing country songs of the Ozarks where she grew up. A faculty member was taken with her impromptu performance and arranged an audition for her with WHO radio's Iowa Barn Dance in Des Moines. That marked the birth of her character "Ellie Mae," which she reprised at jobs over the years at KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, and at KVOR in Colorado Springs, where she would become the program director and then station manager.

In parallel with her career in radio, Isabelle continued her classical music studies, earning her M.A. in vocal pedagogy at Columbia University in New York, and a post-graduate Diploma at the Ecole de Musique in Fontainebleau, France. She appeared extensively as a soprano soloist in concert, oratorio, opera and with symphony orchestras throughout the Midwest. She joined the voice faculty of Eastern Illinois University, Lindenwood College in Missouri, and headed the voice department at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she met her future husband, the Rev. Dr. Robert J. Goeser – also born on July 6, 1922! They married in 1958 and taught together at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where their daughter Caroline F. Goeser was born in 1960.

In 1961, Robert accepted a position as professor of church history at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California, and Isabelle joined the voice faculty at California State University, East Bay, and later at Diablo Valley and Los Medanos Community Colleges. In 1970, the family moved over the hills from Berkeley to Walnut Creek, where Isabelle established a private voice studio, accepting a number of high school students. She wrote about her approach to training younger students, "The young voice is like a flower, very beautiful but very fragile . . . . The young voice does not want to be big or loud, it wants to be free and beautiful."

Isabelle was a founding member and President of the Performing Arts Society of Contra Costa County, an active member of the State Board of Directors of the Music Teachers Association of California, and a Coach for the San Francisco Girls Chorus. She continued to teach voice for many years, focusing her studio on her cherished adult students in the later 1990s and 2000s. After Robert passed away in 2005, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio and in 2014 to Houston, Texas to be with her daughter and son-in-law. She is survived by her daughter Caroline (J. Allen Douglas), and her nieces and nephews throughout the country. Isabelle will always be loved by her family and students, and her exceptional caregivers at Treemont Assisted Living in Houston, who affectionately called her "Izzy."