Carmen Hooker Odom

Personal life On June 25, 1966, almost directly on the heels of their graduation from Springfield College, Carmen Anne LeFrates and Lawrence Highland Buell—simultaneously fellow alumni and fellow honorees in that year's Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities—were married at a small, friends-and-family-members-only ceremony conducted at The Narberth Methodist Church in Narberth, Pennsylvania. In 1995, Hooker Buell accompanied her husband to North Carolina when he was named Chancellor of that state's Chapel Hill-hosted flagship school.

In 1999, the one-time divorcée became a widow when Hooker, aged 53, died following a 6-month-long battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

The seed was planted for marriage number three in January 2001, when, while attending the inauguration of North Carolina governor Mike Easley, Hooker Buell encountered an old, primarily work-related acquaintance, former state senator T. L. "Fountain" Odom. The relationship grew tentatively at first, with the attraction somewhat one-sided, as Odom himself later acknowledged. But eventually she did, as he put it, "get used to the idea" and so, on January 19, 2002, the former Carmen DeFrates finally acquired the name, Carmen Hooker Odom, by which she has since become best known.

On November 28, 2023, Hooker Odom was widowed once again when her husband, aged 85, "passed away peacefully [...] after a lengthy illness". As of that date, both Hooker Odom and each of her two daughters continued to reside in North Carolina, albeit each in a different city.