Gwendolyn Harrison, 95, died peacefully March 21, 2013, from complications of hip surgery. Gwen was born October 23, 1917, in Rockville, Indiana, to Homer and Mamie (Young) Cornthwaite. She graduated from Rockville High School (class of 1935), then attended one year at Indiana University, two years at Purdue, and graduated in 1975 from Antioch University with a Master’s degree in psychology.
 
Gwen worked for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, Maryland, after the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. On December 28, 1937, she married Charles William Harrison (class of 1934). Together they built their own home in New Jersey and started Harrison Laboratories, Inc., which operated successfully before merging with Hewett-Packard Company.
 
Gwen and Bill retired to Santa Barbara in 1965. After her husband’s death Gwen became a world traveler and visited 145 countries over the next 20 years. She was a lifetime member of the Travelers Century Club, which requires its members to have journeyed to 100 countries. In 2001, she published her memoir, “In Transit: The Insatiable Quest,” which recounts many of her travels, including a trekking safari in Kenya, touring Southeast Asia, hiking the Baltoro Glacier, climbing the trail to Mt. Everest’s base camp, and an excursion to Ladakh, a province in the northernmost part of India, where she was thrown off a horse and endured nine days of agony with five severed ribs until she was transported to Srinagar, a trip that entailed traversing 17,000-foot passes in the Himalayas on unimaginable bumpy roads. Gwen’s family likened her to the cat with nine lives. She called them “near misses.”
 
Survivors include son Stephen Harrison and daughter-in-law, Jerri, of Santa Barbara, California; three grandchildren, Kari, Kristina and Siri; three great-grandchildren, Nicolas, Rison and Liam; and a sister, Dorothy McMahon.