Jane Eiman, a product developer at Campbell

When she graduated from an Ohio college in 1947, Jane Patrick spent a year with others plowing potato fields on Texel, an island off the coast of the Netherlands.

She was working as a free laborer among 30 women and 30 men, in a program organized by the Dutch government. "They were students from Holland and Germany and the U.S.," her daughter, Jeannette Boulind, said.

"They were providing labor for the farmers, whose fields had been sabotaged to prevent their use by the Nazis," Boulind said.

On Saturday, Dec. 26, Jane Patrick Eiman, 89, a former supervisor for the Campbell Soup Co. in Camden, died of heart failure at the home of her daughter in Pocono Pines, Pa.

"We visited last summer" the Texel farms, Boulind said. "We visited with the son of the farmer who owned the barn where she slept.

"It was amazing. She was in fantastic health" in her late 80s.

Over the years, Mrs. Eiman had recalled "how incredible it was to be a girl from the Midwest and get on a trip to be part of helping a country get back on her feet again."

Food, her daughter said, became her mother's work.

Born in Dover, Ohio, Mrs. Eiman earned a bachelor's in food science at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, in 1947.

She returned to her hometown to work briefly at a hospital in nearby New Philadelphia, then transferred in the late 1940s to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, "working at developing menus for patients," and then did the same at the former Germantown Hospital in Philadelphia.

In the early 1950s, she joined the creative foods department at Campbell.

"Her responsibility was to create the recipes that would be on soup can labels," Boulind said, such as "how you would use cream of mushroom soup to make a casserole."

She left Campbell in 1958 and that year married William Eiman.

From 1983 to 1991, Mrs. Eiman was back at Campbell, "more in product development," ranging through the firm's extensive holdings at the time, from spaghetti sauce to chocolates.

During her absence from Camden, from the 1970s into the 1980s, the Eimans ran Virgin Island Plus Yacht Charters from a Center City office, offering chartered vacations on friends' boats.

From the 1960s until early 2015, Mrs. Eiman was a docent at the Samuel Powel House, the historic home in Society Hill.

And from the 1990s until three years ago, she was a literacy mentor at Stanton School at 17th and Christian Streets.

Besides her daughter, Mrs. Eiman is survived by two grandchildren. Her husband died in 1998.

Services are being planned for the spring.

Condolences may be offered to the family at Box 2100, Pocono Pines, Pa. 19350.

wnaedele@phillynews.com

610-313-8134@WNaedele