Norma Evelyn Lee

1924 - 2007

CAL member Norma Evelyn Lee, of Lafayette, passed away March 28, 2007 at Boulder Community Hospital. She was 82.

She was born August 28, 1924 to John E. Hardy and Geraldine Gates Hardy in Ross County, Ohio, and grew up on a small farm near Chillicothe. She married Bruce E. Lee in Chicago, Illinois in 1948. They moved to Waterloo, Iowa in 1951 and then to Colorado in 1958, spending most of their years in the Boulder area. She was a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Boulder.

She worked as a secretary until the birth of her first child, then became a full-time homemaker. When her children reached their teens, Norma took up free-lance writing, and later artwork, throwing herself into these activities with enthusiasm and devotion. Her children's book, Chewing Gum, illustrated by Marvin Friedman, was published in 1976 by Prentice-Hall. She described it as "a humorous nonfiction picture book." It followed the development of chewing gum from homemade chaw to commercial product starting with the use of spruce resin among the Wampanoags and chicle sap among the Osages and ending with popular uses and flavorings.

She joined the Colorado Authors' League in 1968, listing publications in Golden Magazine, National Observer, Grit, and Wee Wisdom. She later published juvenile stories and articles to such magazines as Roadrunner, Discovery, Words of Cheer,  Junior Red Cross News, Light and Life Press, Ranger Rick, Child Life, and Montana Reading Clinic Publication; she once sold a joke to Catholic Digest. In 1972 she was given CAL's Top Hand Award in the category Short Non-Fiction-Juvenile for her article, "Only a Hill," which had been published September 12, 1971, in Empire, the magazine of the Sunday Denver Post. She also published the article "I Drive a Monster of Mercy" in Empire.

Norma's husband, Bruce, died in 1983; she is survived by her three children, Rhonda Lee of Alameda, California; Randall Lee of Nederland, Colorado; and Janice Whitney of Erie, Colorado, and six grandchildren; Jerusha, Nathan, Lydia and Gabriel Whitney and Amber and Cailin Lee.

A funeral service was held at the First Presbyterian Church in Boulder on April 5, 2007, with the Rev. John Hess officiating, followed by interment at Mountain View Cemetery.

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Charlotte Jones

CAL member Charlotte Ann Jones, well-known author of children's non-fiction books, passed away July 16, 2007 after a valiant 10-year battle against ovarian cancer. She was 61.

Born Nov. 1, 1945, Charlotte was a life-long Boulder resident, graduating from Boulder High School in 1963 and from Denver's Central Business College in 1964.

When she discovered a passion for researching information for children, Charlotte found a career ideas that would engage children. She published nine books in several languages, among them Mistakes That Worked, Accidents May Happen and Fingerprints and Talking Bones. Her most recent published book, Westward Ho! Eleven Explorers of the West, an account of 11 courageous explorers who opened the West and changed the course of North American history, won the 2006 National Cowboy Museum's Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Children's Literature. Charlotte's final book, as yet untitled, will be out later this year, is an account of animals that have held political offices throughout history.

She joined the Colorado Authors' League in December 1989.

Surviving Charlotte are her son, John Paul Jones, and her husband William C.R. Jones both of Boulder.

A memorial service was held on Friday, July 20 at Crist Mortuary in Boulder.

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Jeanne L. Manning

CAL member Jeanne L. Manning died on April 18, 2007 following a short illness. Born in Kansas City, KS, Feb. 6, 1926, her family moved to Bartlesville, OK, and subsequently to Colorado Springs during World War II. Graduating from Colorado Springs High School (now Palmer) in 1943, she enrolled at Colorado College, graduating magna cum laude in 1946.

Armed with a scholarship to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Jeanne received a Master of Science degree in 1948, and began a job writing advertising and catalog copy for Montgomery Ward and Company. In 1949, she returned to Colorado Springs and worked on the staff of the Gazette-Telegraph.

In high school, she had met Thurston E. (Ted) Manning and in July 1950, they married. He was a member of the faculty at Oberlin College, and they settled at Oberlin for the next 14 years. During those years, their three children, Julia, Peter and Ellen, were born.

In 1964 the family moved to Boulder where Ted began working at the University of Colorado. Having started studying French at Oberlin, Jeanne continued studying at CU, receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1969. When Ted became President of the University of Bridgeport in 1971, the family moved to Fairfield, CT., and soon Jeanne became a doctoral student in French at Yale. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1981.

In 1975, the family returned to Boulder and Jeanne taught at Colorado Women's College and Loretto Heights College. In 1987 Ted accepted a position in Washington D.C., and Jeanne taught at George Washington University for a year before becoming Associate Professor of French at Northern Virginia Community College. There she pioneered distance learning techniques to work simultaneously with classes at two campuses. She also introduced the beginning course French in Action, developed at Yale and using extensive audiovisual learning aids.

Retiring from fulltime teaching in 1992, the Mannings again returned to Boulder. Jeanne continued working in distance learning, this time using the Internet to provide instruction in beginning French as part of an experimental project of the Annenberg Foundation. When the project was completed, she turned to exploring the effects of World War II on "ordinary people" through oral interviews. Networking with men and women throughout the United States and Europe, her early interviews became the foundation of her first book, A Time to Speak. She then wrote Growing Up During World War II, a book for middle school students, again based on interviews with people from widely varying backgrounds and locations in the worldwide. Her third book, Athena's Daughters, was completed shortly before her death and records the World War II experiences and later careers of a number of remarkable women.

During the last 15 years in Boulder, Jeanne served as a member and chair of the Graduate School Advisory Committee and as chair of the Advisory Board for the Center for Humanities and the Arts at CU-Boulder. She received the Alumni Recognition Award in 2001.

She is survived by her husband and their three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.