- Date Of Birth: February 25, 1940
- Date Of Death: December 22, 2020
- State: Colorado
Mary Jean Shoemaker (Jendro) wife, mother, grandmother, sister and friend passed away on Tuesday December 22,2020.
Jean was born in Bowlus Minnesota to Leo and Marjory Jendro on February 25,1940. She was the second child and oldest daughter of their eight children. Growing up Jean wanted to follow in her mothers footsteps and become, in her words “a teacher as great as my mother”. She graduated from Saint Benedict’s in Saint Could MN with a teaching degree and taught elementary school in Minnesota before moving to Great Falls Montana.
While in Montana she met Ron Shoemaker who swept her off her feet and they began their 51 year romance, never being apart for longer than a month until Ron passed away. After they married, Jean and Ron moved to Littleton Colorado with their son Eric and soon to be daughter Kari.
Jean got a position teaching elementary school with Cherry Creek School District. It was through that that Jean met her closest friends and impacted the lives of hundreds of children in her decades long career. She viewed teaching as a way to give her students not only the scholastic tools but the emotional ones to become the best people they could become.
She was extremely close with her family and spent almost every summer vacation from teaching in Minnesota with her brothers and sisters. Where they would have large family dinners at each other’s houses, and she would work on renovating her parents house in Bowlus, at times to the irritation of her sister who lived there. Including one summer where Jean tore up the floor to refinish it without asking if she could. The entire family would gather with Jean and would spend many summer weeks swimming, water skiing and fishing at their lake house on Gull Lake.
Jean was a wonderful friend with a wicked sense of humor and was known to play pranks on her family and friends through the years. There were many times when friends who stayed the night at Jean and Ron’s found themselves getting into a “short sheeted” bed only to hear Jean laughing in the hallway.
She was a fantastic cook and loved to share it, whether having friends over for dinner parties or baking and giving away hundreds of Christmas cookies. Almost everyone Jean met received at least one jar of her famous raspberry jam made from her raspberry bushes in her back yard. She would give the jam out with the instruction that if they returned the jar she would refill it for them.
In later years Jean suffered from dementia that took many things from her, but not her smile and love of music and being with people.
Jean will be missed by so many people who’s lives she touched with her wit, kindness and generosity. She was truly an amazing person and we as her family ask you to think of her as she was before her dementia set in, smiling and talking with the people she loved.
She is predeceased by her husband Ron who passed in September of 2020 and brother Pat. And is survived by her son Eric, daughter Kari and granddaughter Paige. As well as her brothers Rolly, Terry, Tim and Dan and her sisters Kay and Connie.
