Shirley Mae Snyder
October 4, 1924 - August 23, 2024
Shirley Mae Snyder, 99, passed away peacefully on Friday, August 23, 2024, in Portland, Oregon a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday. Shirley and her husband, Jeff, moved to Gardnerville, Nevada in 1998. There they found friendship and community with a beautiful mountain backdrop for fifteen years.
Shirley was born on October 2, 1924, in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin to Vera and Stanley Rissman. The family lived on a chicken farm for the first few years of her life. Sister Corrine joined the family seven years later and they shared a loving and adventurous childhood rooted in
traditional Midwestern values.
Shirley graduated from Beaver Dam High School in 1942 and attended Milwaukee State Teacher’s College. She met a handsome Navy medical corpsman from California named Jeff Snyder at a student dance in late 1945. After earning a degree in kindergarten primary education in 1946, she took a teaching position in the Golden State along with several of her sorority sisters.
Shirley and Jeff married in Wisconsin in 1948, a relationship that thrived for sixty-three years until Jeff passed away in 2011. The newlyweds settled down in Beaver Dam. She taught kindergarten until Julie was born in 1949. Sons Jeff and Jay and daughters Janet and Jennifer followed over the next 14 years.
When Jennifer started kindergarten, Shirley returned to teaching and spent the next 20 years gently guiding five-year-olds onto the pathway of life. Ready for late-life adventure, Shirley and Jeff headed west to Gardnerville, Nevada in the late 1990s where their daughter Julie and her husband owned a ranchette. A few years after Jeff passed in 2011, she decided to follow
Julie and Janet and their husbands to Portland, Oregon.
For the past decade, Shirley lived independently in a congenial senior residence in Portland, moving to Assisted Living this past December when her vision failed. Her life-long Catholic faith has been a comfort in the literally dark days of recent months.
Shirley lived her last years as she did her entire life—with joy, humor, curiosity, compassion and grace. When she was no longer steady enough to dance to New Orleans jazz in the kitchen, she boogied in her recliner. When she could no longer see faces, she continued to touch people’s lives with her generous spirit—especially those of her family and the many who considered her a second mother. As her parish priest noted “our loss is heaven’s gain.”
Shirley is survived by her five children—Julie, Jeffrey, Jay, Janet and Jennifer—and four grandchildren—Emily, Elliott, Derek and Nick.
A Celebration of Life will be held on October 2, 2024, her 100th birthday, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon. Her family is grateful that she has reunited with their father, just in time for football season.