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Carol Wessels never started out wanting to be a lawyer, and definitely not an elder law attorney. But one thing leads to another, and now she has been practicing elder and special needs law since 1991. She graduated from Wisconsin Law School in 1988 and is an owner of Wessels & Liebau LLC in Mequon, Wisconsin. Her first Rotary experience was as a delegate to the World Affairs Seminar in Whitewater during high school.
Paul Brown is Carol’s patient, loving and handsome husband. They will celebrate their 5th anniversary on August 25th. They live in Cedarburg with their two dogs, Bowie and Rita. Together they have three kids, Carol’s son Ken who is 28, Paul’s daughter Hannah who is 26 and Paul’s son Luke who is 24. Paul and Carol love to travel and have been to France twice, to Italy, to England to visit Ken, to Alaska, and numerous trips to Canada and camping. Last year, Carol’s family sold their cottage in Canada that her dad and brothers build 50 years ago.
Carol recently completed two terms on the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. This year, she was selected as a Fellow of the Academy, which is the highest honor a member can receive. She is really proud of this and will pay the dollar for bragging.
One of the things Carol hopes to see in her lifetime is an end to Alzheimer’s and she spends a lot of time advocating for that. She is on the Board of the Wisconsin Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and an Ambassador to Senator Baldwin.
She cared for her father Russell as he progressed through the later stages of bladder cancer, a condition that was treatable but that spiraled out of control since he set his own health care aside while caring for her mother, Velma. Mom had Alzheimer’s. When they came to live with Carol in the fall of 2007, he was in the end stages of cancer and Mom was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s. Her brothers pitched in for a family effort to care for her parents. When Russell died in 2008, Carol cared for and advocated for Velma until she died in January, 2015. This experience, more than the years of education, study, and client representation, helped her to understand what it is truly like to face the challenge of dementia.
Hobbies: Gardening, Crochet, Wine, Hiking, really bad amateur photography, travel, and trying to find time to work on the non-profit she started, Summer’s Home, Inc. www.summers-home.org. For some weird reason, her boss just does not give her much time to work on this. Carol is President-elect, and will lead the club as President for Rotary Year 2024-2025.
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