The nine-year-old boy crouches over homework, intent on his task. He's just finished a third-grade report on red-headed woodpeckers, learning about their habitat. Now he needs to illustrate his opus. Barry Walker assembles markers and paper and begins to draw. He finally finishes, triumphant. But, as he pulls up the paper, he's horrified. There, on his mother's good living room coffee table, he finds a perfect replica of his woodpecker image, bled through in indelible ink. He can't imagine that she's going to be happy about this.

When Ruth Walker sees it, she chooses not to punish her son. And, over time, his woodpecker blunder becomes a great conversation starter. Although Mrs. Walker eventually covers it up with a table scarf, she likes to whip that off and show guests Barry's unintentional embellishment. Perhaps other mothers might have been angry, might have rushed to replace the marred table, but Ruth Walker did things a little differently. She didn't always do what was expected. Certainly, most other housewives didn't expect her, a stay-at-home mom in the 1970s, to be more familiar with her husband's power tools than he was, and to take on the official role of household handywoman.

And when she went back to work in the '80s, teaching K–12 students in the gifted and talented program in Columbiana, Ohio, public schools, her students and the other teachers learned to expect the unexpected. For one, she went by "Wa-Wa" in class—a name she was affectionately dubbed by students—instead of Mrs. Walker. She crossed picket lines during a particularly ugly teachers strike to go in to work. She started up a student academic challenge team and took the team to competitions—without any supplemental income from the school district to cover expenses or reimburse her for her time. She even battled cancer and pulmonary disorders before eventually retiring when her health simply became too bad for her to continue working.

When Ruth Walker passed away in January 2009, many of those she knew wrote, called, and visited the Walker family, sharing stories of a woman who made a unique mark on their lives. She certainly made a mark on her son's life. Barry Walker, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1989 with an undergraduate degree in physics, recalls his mom as someone who was always there for him, who made lunches and doctored scrapes and cuts in the early years, and later on, as he and his sister got older, went back to work and saved her income to help pay her children's way through college.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Walker traveled the world doing live-fire vulnerability testing for the U.S. Army—testing a tank or ship or plane to see how well it would stand up to enemy fire. Today, he is a self-employed technical sales and marketing consultant and full-time caregiver for his five-year-old daughter, Sarah. He's there for her, just as his mom was for him.

But Walker also wanted to have a fitting tribute to his mother that would leave an impression as permanent as the woodpecker. That's when it came to him. Once again, he got out his pen, like he did so many years ago. This time, though, he wasn't the only one involved. He, his wife, Lorraine, and his daughter, Sarah, all wrote their signatures on a scholarship. The Ruth Welch Walker Scholarship provides support for undergraduate students with financial need in the Carnegie Mellon College of Sciences.