Tulu Kirkpatrick King

Tulu, or Tulie, as many of her friends called her, was born in Tonkawa, Oklahoma to James Lewis Kirkpatrick and Loucillah Fisher Kirkpatrick in the early days of the Great Depression. At an early age, the young family moved to Tulsa, where she grew up, attended public schools, graduating from Tulsa Central High School in 1946. She described herself then as a tomboy who loved playing softball, tennis, swimming, riding her bike, and ice skating. The love of sports and athletics as either a participant or a spectator, would always play a role in her life. During the high school years, she had lead roles in class plays, belonged to the Debate Club and was a member of the Tulsa Figure Skating Club. In a written personal account of those days, she stated, “In those days girls did not have official teams in sports, or I would have been right in the middle of it.”

In 1936, the summer after third grade, her mother Loucillah found a temporary job managing a dress shop in Colorado. Tulu spent four months with her mother and grandmother at age nine in a cabin below the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Tulu immediately fell in love with Colorado and its majestic mountains, vowing to return.

The summer of her senior year she took care of small children at one of the country clubs, supervising swimming, eating and games. All these years she attended the Christian Science Sunday School and Church. In the early fall of 1946, she and two other Tulsa girls boarded a train to Kansas City and then on to her beloved Colorado to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder. They were in awe of the panorama as they arrived over the hill, into the Boulder Valley. The girls pledged the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority where Tulu would make friends like Tate McArthur Todd and Gerry Goodwin and that would later became her connection with Greeley.

That fall of 1946 in Boulder, she met and fell in love with John Thomas Ferrier, also from Tulsa but three years older, a former Air Force fighter pilot fresh out of the service. Tulu was honored as the CU Homecoming queen in 1947 and John Ferrier ran track and played ‘scatback’ for the Buff’s football team. After Johnny completed his post-graduate degree, they were married in 1948. He was called to serve as a reconnaisance pilot in the Korean conflict and, on his return, went to work for United Airlines and fly weekends for the Colorado Air National Guard. Their first child, William Scott Ferrier, was born in Boulder in 1950. A second child, Vickye, was born in Tulsa in 1952. From 1952 until the summer of 1958, they lived a relatively normal life (airline life), bought their first home in Denver where, in 1954, the third of the Ferrier children, Zack Mitchell, was born. They skied on vacations at Aspen and Winter Park and introduced their oldest child, Scott, to the slopes at the tender age of five. Tragically, Tulu was suddenly widowed in June of 1958 when John Ferrier lost his life in a disabled F-86 aircraft while performing with the ‘Minutemen’, a precision flying team for the Colorado Air National Guard, over the skies at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. Tulu was suddenly alone at age thirty with three young children to raise.

Providence had other plans for her. Two years after Johnny’s death, she was encouraged by her CU sorority sister, Tate McArthur Todd and her husband, John Todd, to be re-acquainted with John Lee (Jack) King of Greeley, from the “Boulder days” who had been married to Tulu’s other Kappa sister, Gerry Goodwin. Gerry had sadly lost her life to illness, leaving Jack with their two young daughters, Debbie and Nancy. In 1959, the two joined forces into one family and the Ferriers moved to Greeley where Jack King was president of the family business, King Lumber Company, established in 1916 and a lifelong Greeley resident.

So life was renewed. They raised five kids in the tumultuous 60’s. In 1961, two years into the marriage, Jack and Tulie purchased a summer cabin 2 1/2 miles outside of Estes Park, as a “joint venture in happiness”. Their idea was to pull the two families together, without the distraction of peers, television, or telephones. According to Tulu, “It was a wonderful investment where the children learned to appreciate the beauty of the Colorado mountains, the nearness of wildlife, the cool mountain air, and experience the quiet, soothing peace.”

Tulu remained active, even as a housewife and mother to five children. In 1970, she returned to Colorado State College (later, the University of Northern Colorado), part time, while raising the family, to finish her Bachelor of Arts degree. She became an ardent golfer, a former Greeley Country Club ladies champion, and — an accomplishment she was very proud of — she worked very hard as a volunteer for two years with the U.S.G.A. to help the Greeley Country Club host the 1982 U.S.G.A. Junior Girls Golf Championship and then served as its chairwoman.

In 1975-76, the couple ‘winterized’ their mountain home with the idea of retiring there. They did so in 1988 when the King Lumber Company closed its doors. But in 2003, Jack lost his long battle with leukemia. The couple had been forced to eventually move back to Greeley where they could be closer to their friends and medical facilities. Following Jack’s death, Tulu remained in their last Greeley home for just over fifteen years until it was necessary for her to relocate to an assisted living facility, owing to the health issue to which she finally succumbed. Tulu had a full life, which she fully lived with dignity and with love. She will be missed by all who knew her, especially her children and grandchildren.

In addition to golf, Tulu enjoyed hiking with her friends in the Rocky Mountain National Park, reading, travel and needlework. She was a member of W.T.K. Club and P.E.O. Sisterhood (Chapter EE) in Greeley.

Tulu is survived by her five children, Debbie King, Scott Ferrier, Vickye Ferrier Sippel, Zack Ferrier, and Nancy King-Naude. She is additionally survived by two grandsons, Baylor Ferrier, Zack and Loni’s son, and two grandchildren by Vickye and husband Richard Sippel, D.J. Sippel and Brittany Sippel Dziadosz. Brittany, Vickye’s and Richard’s daughter provided Tulu with two great-grandchildren, Jake and Raelyn Tulie, Brittany’s children with her husband Jeremy Dziadosz. Tulu is survived also by nieces from her first marriage (John Ferrier’s sister Phyllis) — Anne, Lynn, and Rhonda Asbury from the Tulsa area.

Memorial Gifts may be made to the Jack and Tulie King Memorial Scholarship Quasi-Endowment at UNC for men and women golfers and the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra.

Inurnment at the Linn Grove Cemetery will be private. A Celebration of Life reception in her memory will be held at Macy-Allnutt on a date to be announced after the new year.