Mrs. Baker listened as her son described his idea of a pictorial system that would aid people with communication disabilities caused by cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, stroke or head injuries.
"She said, 'Go for it,' " said Bruce Baker, and then she fronted him the more than $15,000 he needed to start Minspeak, which today is a million-dollar company.
"She allowed the basement of the house to become our first office," he said. "She also did the accounting and taxes."
Mrs. Baker, 92, died Friday at her Baldwin Township home from complications from pneumonia.
Hers was a sensible life, tempered by the fact that her mother had died in childbirth and she grew up the youngest of six children in Baltimore, where her father, Albert Peddicord, was a railroad engineer.
Removed from school after seventh grade and home schooled for four years by her stepmother, a Latin teacher, Mrs. Baker subsequently joined the work force for 13 years as an assistant to a local doctor, married a childhood friend who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. and gave birth to her only child in 1943.
After many years as a homemaker, she might well have remained satisfied as a septuagenarian volunteer with the League of Women Voters, American National and Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park were it not for her son's fateful phone call.
"She was my guide, particularly for those early years," he said. "She grasped the idea clearly, and she knew it was important to me.
"She knew that an insight like this doesn't come more than a couple of times in a lifetime."
Minspeak, the commercial name for Semantic Compaction Systems, stayed in her basement for three years as it gathered momentum. It is now the principle software developer for Prentke Romich Co. of Wooster, Ohio, the second largest manufacturer of communication aids in the world. Semantic Compaction System's offices are in a 2 1/2-story building in Castle Shannon.
Mrs. Baker kept the company's books until 1991, when she was 82. She continued signing all the company's paychecks until three years ago, and contributed free advice to her son "on how I could spend [my paycheck] better."