Former Cedaredge resident Helen Mae Gillum died October 16, 2018 in Stevensville, Montana. She was 84.
Helen was born September 11, 1934 in Pleasanton, Kansas, to Helen (Robinson) and James McCulley. She grew up on a farm, where she and her parents and her two brothers lived in a clapboard farmhouse built before the Civil War. They still kept an old plow horse, and Helen remembered when her parents bought their first tractor and, as a condition of the loan, also were required to buy a pressure canner for preserving food. On Saturday nights, her father played the fiddle, banjo, and guitar at dances. Helen accompanied him on the bass fiddle, which they hauled around on the back of a flatbed truck.
Helen started school in a one-room schoolhouse, where all members of the tiny student body were forced to play softball or risk a spanking from the teacher. As a teen, she attended a larger school in Pleasanton and became friends with LaVerne Ray, who would remain her steadfast friend for life. After high school, Helen moved to Wichita to live with LaVerne and work at her first real job with the Butler Paper Company.
At 21, Helen married Howard Gillum, then a machinist at Boeing. They lived in a little town near Wichita, Kansas, where their two daughters were born. When Boeing required a transfer to Seattle, the family moved to Colorado instead, eventually settling in Coal Creek Canyon, a mountain community west of Denver. When Howard retired, he and Helen moved to Cedaredge, Colorado. They loved camping and watching wildlife, and Helen was an active member of the First Baptist Church and garden and quilt clubs.
Howard died in 2011, and Helen moved to Montana in 2017 to be near her youngest daughter and son-in-law and her two grandsons. She handled the transition with good humor, though as she was downsizing her possessions, she asked, “What will I do with my cannonball?”—referring to one found in the driveway at her parents’ farm. She moved into the Living Centre Assisted Living Facility in Stevensville, where she and her family were treated with great kindness.
Helen’s Christian faith was very important to her, and next to her chair, she left a card inscribed with the Bible verse Isaiah 40:31: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles.” Her last request was for “more books.”
Helen is survived by her two daughters, Jana Burritt of Grand Junction, Colorado, and Julie Lue of Florence, Montana; her brothers Don McCulley of Topeka, Kansas, and Frank McCulley of Adrian, Missouri; and her two grandsons, Jaren and Quinn.
A memorial service will be held in Cedaredge at a later date.