Josephine "Jophie" Owen

Josephine “Jophie” Owen was born on May 17, 1928 in a tiny company house at the Mutual Coal Mine on the outskirts of Walsenburg, Colorado. Her parents were proud to be recently naturalized immigrants from Italy. While she was still an infant, Jophie’s family moved to another Colorado coal mining town, Rockvale. Growing up there, she received an incredibly thoroughgoing Depression-era public school education under the strict tutelage of firm but dedicated teachers from the no nonsense “old school” tradition. It prepared her well for the intellectual and professional challenges of what would prove to be a long and fruitful life.

At the age of 19, she met and married a rancher and moved to his sprawling family property near Guffey in Park County. They had two children, a girl, Sharon, and a boy, Joe, both born in Florence, Colorado. Eventually, they abandoned the ranching life and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. They divorced after 15 years of marriage and Jophie then began a fledgling career in the field of cosmetics. She worked behind a drugstore counter while she raised her two kids alone on a proverbial “shoestring”. Her natural talent in cosmetology led to a career as a traveling makeup artist with the Max Factor Company. Trained in Hollywood and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she called on department stores up and down the West Coast and in Hawaii, training store employees and conducting makeup promotions.

By pure chance in Sausalito during the fall of 1971 she met a young Marine pilot named Jerry “Bear” Owen. After a storybook courtship, she joined him in Japan where they were eventually married at the Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station in 1973. They traveled extensively throughout the southern regions of Japan, with Jophie riding her own Suzuki motorcycle and causing many cases of abject culture shock in a country where, if women rode at all, it was only side-saddle-style on their tiny ladies’ Honda motor scooters!

Upon return to the United States, Jophie accompanied her husband to Beeville, Texas where he served as an instructor pilot. In 1976, after three leisurely years in Texas, Jophie’s husband was transferred to a Naval ROTC teaching position at the University of Colorado. They purchased their first home together in Boulder, and Jophie soon went back to work in the cosmetics field at the Denver Dry Goods department store.

In 1979 her husband left the Marines and transferred to the Nebraska Air National Guard in Lincoln. As a devoted and supportive wife, she accompanied him to training in Panama City, Florida and later to Sumter, South Carolina. Upon completion of his training, Bear and Jophie returned to Colorado. Jophie resumed her career in cosmetics until joining him in the real estate profession in 1981.

In 1985, Bear joined Continental Airlines as a pilot, and Jophie readily gave up her position as a successful Realtor, lured away by the siren song of world travel. Although they never gave up their home base in Boulder, Jophie accompanied Bear first to Continental’s Honolulu crew base and later out to Guam.

Meanwhile, Jophie had discovered the sport of hiking and subsequently developed her intense, lifelong love of the high country. When not accompanying Bear on working trips and numerous vacations throughout Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Micronesia, Latin America, and Europe, as well as military deployments to Turkey, Jophie spent many ecstatic hours hiking the rugged mountain trails of her native Colorado. She never tired of her treks to the mountains where she could drink in the vistas along the Continental Divide that she loved so well. She also traveled out of state and internationally to hike the spectacular Glacier National and Waterton International Peace parks. Her hiking boot soles also knew the stony tracks of the Swiss, French, and Italian Alps.

In 1992, Jophie and Bear moved to picturesque Newport, Rhode Island where he attended the Naval War College. Upon his graduation, they returned home to Boulder. Bear, resumed his career with Continental Airlines and was based in Guam. Jophie and he bought a condominium overlooking the turquoise waters of Agana Bay, a second home away from home. She spent many happy hours power walking the indescribably beautiful white sugar-sand beaches of the Marianas, and snorkeling the warm Pacific waters off Guam, Saipan, and Palau. For her, these were totally carefree and happy times filled with exotic travel to scenic places and spiced with the adventure of cultural discovery.

On the domestic front, during the years since moving to Boulder in 1976, Jophie, ever the maternalistic Italian “Mama Mia”, began to gather her kids back into closer proximity, with Joe and wife Darlene, and newborn Jason arriving in 1977, and Sharon moving back from Hawaii with daughter, Liana, in 1990. Jophie enjoyed every aspect of life, but nothing more than the frequent family gatherings which were organized to celebrate birthdays, special familial occasions, and all of the traditional American holidays. The parties were invariably raucous affairs but, above all, fun!

Sharon, the first of Jophie’s brood expecting a child, decreed her mom henceforth to be named “Gammie”, “because”, as she said at the time, “‘Grandma’ was in no way fitting for such a youthful and vivacious grandparent as Jophie”. To this day, her kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and their numerous friends, as well as Bear always called her “Gammie” or simply “Gam”.

Jophie was soooo Italian! She was obsessed with food and took pride in being generously hospitable to any guest of her home. Her greatest fear was not having enough food or drink for guests, whether invited or impromptu. Bear was notorious for dragging home fellow pilots or students with little or no notice. No one ever left Jophie’s house hungry or thirsty! In the Japan days, she invited all the “stray dogs” she encountered on base to the house for Christmas dinner. 55 of them actually showed up! Somehow she managed to improvise with a five-pound turkey and a canned ham, feeding the masses as if with the loaves and fishes!

Over the course of her lifetime, Jophie was never much of a “joiner” or “club-lady”. Her highest priorities were always Bear and her loving family first, followed by hiking in the mountains, travel and sightseeing, food and hospitality, and being the most loyal friend anyone could ever ask for. Ironically an introvert, she always did her best to appear exactly opposite. Those who knew her seldom suspected that she was actually shy and private by nature. She hid it well, successfully camouflaging herself as the life of the party. She was irresistibly fun to be around. A natural comedienne, she typically had everyone around her in stitches. Many friends described her as “a kick”.

In 2005, Bear retired from the airlines resuming his real estate career. As a result, Jophie had to adjust to having him around all the time. Never one to willingly play second fiddle, she shared her domestic prerogatives only grudgingly, stubbornly clinging to her natural sense of rugged territoriality. That in turn contributed to one of the personality characteristics which friends and family respected most about her. She was indomitable! The Italian phrase for this is “testa dura”, literally “hard head”. It made her irrepressibly memorable to everyone who knew and loved her.

Through travel and hiking, Jophie developed a sense of adventure. She would literally try anything once. She had no natural fear of heights, or come to think of it, much of anything else. She hiked the lengthy and precipitous lateral traverse on the back side of Longs Peak as casually as she would have sashayed into an elegant restaurant, dressed to the nines. At the age of 45, she fearlessly learned to ride a motorcycle all over three of the four home islands of Japan, in some of the most daunting traffic on the planet, and if that weren’t admirable enough, she did it all on the “wrong side of the road” and in “heels”!

Nearly drowning in a fast-flowing irrigation canal as a child, she nevertheless courageously learned to swim and snorkel at the tender age of 65. Ask anyone who knew her. She was a true “phenom”, there’s no other way to cut it. She was unique, a totally “one off” item. All the cliché’s fit her….including “they broke the mould”! But perhaps her very best quality may have been her transparent, self deprecating sense of humor. She had the ability to tell a joke on herself and then laugh harder about it than anyone else in the room. It defies description to think of just how magically magnetic she was to virtually everyone who ever met her.

So, Jophie left us with aching voids in all of our souls, but she also left everyone of us with hearts much larger than we had possessed before we experienced the pure joy of knowing her. She was gorgeous, gutsy, animated, passionate and gregarious. Her outer and inner beauty were both age-defying. People were always awestruck if she shared with them her real age. She could be side splittingly irreverent and saucy, yet simultaneously wholesome. She was fiercely loyal, yet incredibly quick to forgive the truly repentant. She was exceptionally self sacrificing, always putting her loved ones’ needs ahead of her own. Continuously protective and sweetly nurturing, she could be terrifyingly combative if a closely held belief or vital personal interest were threatened. She never lost her amazing curiosity about virtually everything, so our endlessly fascinating world will never be quite the same without her inquisitiveness in it.

Jophie was a loyal wife, a caring mother, and an awesome Gammie! Her moxie, fun-spirit, and passion for life were inspiring to people of all ages. Moreover, Jophie was incredibly generous and always supportive of her family. She truly made a significant impact on all of her family members’ lives. She is survived by her loving husband, Bear, daughter Sharon, son Joe, daughter-in-law Darlene, grandsons Vaughn and Jason, granddaughter Liana, and five great grandchildren: Thomas, Ashley, Sophia, Drew and Josie, scores of relatives both here and abroad, and literally hundreds of friends all over the world.

Arrivederci, Giuseppina, we shall miss you!

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Heart Association or the American Cancer Society.

Arrangements under the direction of Olinger Highland Mortuary & Cemetery, Thornton, CO.