Annette Robinson Obituary

Sara Annette Robinson of Harbert, Michigan and Dawson, Alabama passed away peacefully on June 25, 2025 at her cottage in Camp Hazelhurst of the Prairie Club of Illinois in Harbert which she loved so dearly. She was surrounded by her husband Layton Olson and many friends in the camp. This special place is where she, her husband, family and friends gathered many times by Lake Michigan in the Michigan Dunes since the early 1980s.
Born July 12, 1942 to H.C. Robinson and Thelma Lawson Robinson at the Lawson family home near Mt. Tabor on Sand Mountain, Alabama, while her father was in the Army Corps of Engineers. This area is the resting place for Lawson relatives dating back two centuries and the time of Indian removal along Lawson Ford on Town Creek. In 1946, she moved to the nearby new family home on County Road 204 in Dawson. This is where her family including two younger brothers lived, and which became her cooler weather home and pasture after her mother passed away. Riding the school bus for Geraldine schools, she graduated from high school as valedictorian in 1960. She won a scholarship to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, graduated in 1964. She gained a masters' degree in political science the next year. She went to Washington, D.C. briefly and did foreign economic research for the US Department of Commerce.
Joining with University of Alabama colleagues in the US Foreign Service, she spent time traveling hroughout Europe and the Middle East, and some time in Central America, and then returned to New York City. She enrolled in Rutgers Law School and commuted from NYC and studied at New York University library. She was a leader of Women's Law Journal and other activities at this cutting-edge institution for women. Upon graduation, she traveled to Chicago to pursue a career in trusts and estates at Continental Bank, where she continued until taking early retirement in 2000. While there, she met her future husband, who worked with common Chicago attorney friends in community law on the South Side. He travelled through Chicago to his family home in Los Angeles from Washington, D.C. where he was a higher education advocate and manager of projects to provide information on college choice and to help with financial aid to college student leaders across the nation. Annette and Layton were married July 5, 1980 on the Bluff overlooking Wills Creek valley, and celebrated with fireworks and with family and friends locally and from across the country. Including the enactment of an outdoor play.
At Camp Hazelhurst Annette was a leader in the annual book club readings, participating in readers theater production, using her substantial financial skills to assist in accounting, and her always enageing personal skills in making decisions about cottage size in this nature community begun in 1930 with cottages often close together. In recent years, she assisted in leadership development.
She is predeceased by her brother Larry Robinson of Dawson, dispatcher for Alabama Highway Patrol, and by John Robinson of Section, Alabama, former assistant district attorney for Jackson County, and former Alabama State Representative from 1994 to 2014. Family includes nephew Lawson Robinson of Birmingham and Scottsboro, niece Amy Robinson of Niceville, Florida, cousin Bobby Honea of Dawson, and Azalia Grubbs, widow of cousin Eugene Grubbs of Geraldine. Burial will be private at Liberty Baptist Church cemetery on the Lebanon Road. A future community celebration is planned. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to Geraldine Public Library for the Northeast Alabama Nature and Heritage Program.