Resident Spotlight: Shereatha Baines, An Easter Coaster To the Heart
Meet Shereatha Baines, a Croasdaile Village resident since January 2019 and recent guest on the Croasdaile Podcast.
Born in 1944 in Dover, Delaware, Shereatha attended a segregated school system, graduating from high school in 1962. “I was active in high school, I love to sing and I was in the choir,” she says. “I was my class valedictorian when we graduated.” Shereatha went on to receive a bachelor’s in Business Education from Delaware State College and a master’s in business from Howard University. Over the years, she worked in education, HR, and training for the federal government, before retiring in 2000.
She and her future husband, Tyrone Baines, were high school sweethearts, going to the same elementary and junior high. A year older than her, Tyrone went to a different high school than Shereatha, where he was one of the first African Americans to graduate. The two just celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary together of many happy years.
Shareatha and Tyrone moved to Durham (for the first time) in December 1972. “We moved a week before Christmas Eve with [our son,] a 4-year-old little boy,” she remembers. “And of course, with my trying to finish up my work on my master’s program and Ty [working in] the public administration program at North Carolina Central, we were both busy, busy parents. [But] we managed to have a little something for our son for Christmas that year.”
The two would go on to have a daughter as well, and today have 4 grandchildren: “I just love being Nana.”
Shereatha and her husband didn’t stay in Durham at that time, moving to Michigan in 1988. They later returned, though: “While living in Michigan, we realized how much being East Coasters meant to us. We discovered that we were East Coasters to the heart.”
The family relocated back east, and the couple moved to Croasdaile in January, 2019. And the rest, as they say, is history.
