Shirley Mae Snyder, 99, passed away peacefully on Friday, Aug. 23, 2024, in Portland, Oregon, just a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday. Shirley and her husband, Jeff, lived in Burlington from the mid-1950’s until they moved west to Gardnerville, Nevada in 1998.
Shirley was born on Oct. 2, 1924 in Beaver Dam to Vera and Stanley Rissman. The family lived on a chicken farm for the first few years of her life until her entrepreneurial father built a filling station and moved the family into town. Sister Corrine joined the family seven years later and they shared a loving and adventurous childhood rooted in traditional Midwestern values.
After graduation from Beaver Dam High School in 1942, Shirley attended Milwaukee State Teacher’s College and in 1946 earned a degree in kindergarten primary education. An encounter with a handsome Navy medical corpsman from California at a student dance in late 1945 inspired her to pursue a teaching job in the Golden State along with several of her sorority sisters.
That handsome sailor, then a civilian named Jeff Snyder, proposed in 1947. They married in Wisconsin in 1948, a marriage that thrived for sixty-three years until Jeff passed away in 2011. The newlyweds settled down in Beaver Dam where Jeff managed an International Harvester farm equipment business. They moved to Burlington a few years later.
Shirley taught kindergarten until Julie was born in 1949. Sons Jeff and Jay and daughters Janet and Jennifer followed over the next 14 years. When Jennifer started kindergarten, Shirley returned to teaching. She spent the next 20 years at Cooper School, gently guiding five-year-olds onto the pathway of life.
Ready for late-life adventure, Shirley and Jeff headed west to Gardnerville, Nevada in the late 1990s where their daughter Julie and her husband owned a ranchette. There they discovered friendship and community with a beautiful mountain backdrop.
A few years after Jeff passed in 2011, Shirley decided to follow Julie and Janet and their husbands to Portland, Oregon. For the past decade, she lived independently in a congenial senior residence, only moving to assisted living this past December when her vision failed. Her life-long Catholic faith has been a comfort in the literally dark days of recent months.
Shirley lived her last years as she did her entire life – with joy, humor, curiosity, compassion and grace. When she was no longer steady enough to dance to New Orleans jazz in the kitchen, she boogied in her recliner. When she could no longer read a physical book, a library of audiobooks brought the world to her imagination. Even when she could no longer see faces, she continued to touch people’s lives with her generous spirit – especially those of her family and the many who considered her a second mother. As her parish priest noted “our loss is heaven’s gain.”
Shirley is survived by her children, Julie, Jeffrey, Jay, Janet and Jennifer; and grandchildren, Emily, Elliott, Derek and Nick.
A Celebration of Life will be held on Oct. 2, 2024, her 100th birthday, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon.
Her family is grateful that she is reunited with their father, just in time for football season. She will be dearly missed every day. You’ll always be our angel, mom.
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