Lou Ann Shirley

Lou Ann Shirley peacefully passed away on Jan. 23, 2026. She was born in Fort Morgan, Colorado on March 9, 1934. Her parents, Thora and Frank Wulf, raised cattle and grew dry-land wheat on what had been her grandparents' homestead outside of New Raymer. As a little girl, she helped her parents by shooing the chickens out of the trees, picking tomato worms off plants, and canning peaches. She told stories of her delight in helping her mother prepare picnics to take to the fields for the traveling horse-drawn threshing crews in the early years before the family owned a combine.

Lou Ann loved to read and thrived at the one-room schoolhouse she attended. Later, she graduated as a valedictorian from Fort Morgan High School. Although her parents wanted her to attend college closer to home, her principal persuaded them that the University of Colorado would be a greater challenge. She loved college, where she was a member of Women's Club and made many life-long friends. After graduating with a BA in elementary education, Lou Ann went on to teach. With her first husband and two-year-old daughter, she spent a year in England and traveled throughout Europe in a VW bug.

After divorcing, Lou Ann met Jon, a handsome physicist who, like her, loved to square dance. They married and spent a year in Finland. When they returned to the United States, they enjoyed the next 45 years square and round dancing together several times a week. In 2014, they were inducted into the Colorado Round Dance Hall of Fame.

The two lived in Lou Ann's beloved mountain home, which Lou Ann decorated with her signature blue and white. She gardened as much as possible. Always experimenting, she traded plants and tips with neighbors and, from the rocky soil, coaxed gardens that attracted birds and butterflies. She grew vegetables in raised beds to conserve water and trained her children to recycle, compost, and to consolidate their trips to town. Never wasting anything, she would say, "I don't want to throw it into the landfill." She treasured the many birds and animals that visited her property: western tanagers, grosbeaks, Steller's jays, deer, foxes, marmots, chipmunks, and mountain lions. In the fall, she harvested choke cherries and wild plums to make delicious jellies and stocked her freezer with pies made from the tart apples that the bears didn't eat first.

A miracle organizer, she made an exceptional quarter master for the Four-Mile Canyon Volunteer Fire Department. She also served as dispatcher, where she relayed communications in the Black Tiger Fire and the Flood of 2013. The department affectionately nicknamed her Q. In 2013, "Q" won the Community Foundation and Pat Shoemaker "Pat-on-the-Back Award" for her many years of service.

Things she didn't know how to do, she figured out. She tiled her kitchen and bath, wired a telephone from the house to the garage, reupholstered her furniture with her old Singer sewing machine, and made Halloween costumes and most of her dancing outfits. When things didn't work out, she'd say, "Oh crumb!" and try again.

As she declined in the last years of her life, her husband Jon lovingly cared for her.

She will be deeply missed.

Lou Ann is survived by her husband, Jon Shirley, son Andy Jespersen (Carol Shirley), daughter Christy Jespersen (David Plante), sister Sherri Hogelin (Charlie), brother Rodney Wulf (Laurette), brother-in-law Frank Shirley (Myvanwy), sister-in-law Emily Castner, and many nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and nephews. She is predeceased by her daughter Ann Jespersen and sisters-in-law, Dorothy Wulf and Savanne Shirley, and brother-in-law Ted Castner.