Anne Cameron Forrester was born in the town of Shipley in Yorkshire, England, and died peacefully on June 19, 2015. She was the oldest daughter and second of four children of George Forrester, a teacher and school headmaster, and Sabina Kate Cameron Forrester, a seamstress. In early childhood she traveled often with her family within the UK, especially to Edinburgh and Glasgow to visit family, and to the seaside at Filey for summer holidays. The Second World War changed everyone’s life: the Forrester children were supposed to be sent abroad to stay safely with relatives, but the plan was canceled after a ship of evacuated English children was sunk in the Atlantic. Since the family was Catholic, some Polish soldiers stayed with them as the war was beginning; Anne recalled her mother’s embarrassment when they would gallantly kiss her hand. Anne’s father was a gardener and beekeeper who had grown up in a village, her mother was a good cook, and the family kept hens; all of this meant that wartime food rationing impacted the family less than many others in the UK.
Anne attended Catholic schools (named after St. Walburga and St. Joseph) in Bradford, Yorkshire. She had hoped to attend the University of Leeds and study genetics, which she found fascinating, but did not pass the scholarship examination because “the nuns didn’t teach us fractions.” Instead she attended teacher’s training college and then taught junior high school in England for five years. During those summers she hitchhiked around Europe with a friend, staying in youth hostels. At 25, she took a boat to New York and then a plane to San Francisco to visit her father’s two sisters. She planned to spend a year or two away from Yorkshire’s rainy weather, and as a teacher she quickly found work in the Bay Area. She met Robert Clapp, and they married in 1957; some years later they moved to Boulder, Colorado, where she would remain after they divorced. To support her four children (then aged seven, four, two, and zero), Anne made the family home on University Hill into a day care center; some of the parents who brought their children told her she was “the best daycare mother in Boulder.”
In 1979 Anne met Gordon “Scotty” Snow, a teacher in the Nederland schools, and they married in summer of 1980. The following summer Anne moved with three of her children to join Scotty and his youngest son, Kent, in the house on Sugarloaf Road where she would live for over thirty years. Getting to know her six stepchildren and their children was a lasting pleasure for her. She recertified as a teacher in the state of Colorado, began substitute teaching in Gold Hill and elsewhere, and then settled down to teach second grade at Nederland Elementary School. She loved her colleagues and the beautiful drive to work along the Peak-to-Peak Highway, except when she had to dig her car out of snowdrifts on Sugarloaf Road.
After retirement in 1995, Anne greatly enjoyed socializing with other senior citizens in Nederland; attending meetings of the Red Hat Club; knitting tea cosies and other useful objects; learning to use watercolors (she sold a fair number of cards featuring her paintings of flowers and birds). She attended St Rita Catholic Church in Nederland and was often asked to do a reading during Mass, thanks to her mellifluous accent. (During her last trip to England she was quite put out to hear from old friends there that she now sounded American to them.) She volunteered at the Nederland Visitors’ Center, once striking up a conversation with a slightly younger tourist who had a Yorkshire accent, and who turned out to have studied “maths” with her father at St. Bede’s in Bradford. She loved and appreciated her neighbors in Coughlin Meadows and her many friends in Nederland and Boulder. Anne loved a good game of Scrabble and was fairly gracious on the rare occasions when she lost. Her green thumb raised a rich variety of houseplants on all her south-facing windowsills. She loved a good cup of tea, and chatting over tea with friends, neighbors, and members of her large blended family. She spent many happy hours watching birds and various wildlife passing through her yard, though she began taking in the bird feeders at night after two episodes when hungry bears clambered up on her porch. She loved living in the mountains and hoped to spend the rest of her life there, and indeed she did so.
Anne Snow was predeceased by her husband, Gordon Snow, her brother William Forrester, and her stepson Kent Snow (Maria) of Rapid City, SD. She is survived by her sisters Mary Willcock (Gerald) of Cumbria, UK, and Anna Golder (Alan) of Reno, Nevada; her four children, Sibelan Forrester of Swarthmore, PA, Raian Kaiser of Berthoud, CO, Mary Waterman (Michael) of Vestal, NY, and Robert Clapp of Grand Junction, CO; five stepchildren, Jim Snow (Kathy) of Boulder, CO, Kathy Sills (Richard) of Longmont, CO; Fran McReynolds (Charles) of Hillsboro, OR, David Snow (Tracy) of Niwot, CO, and Laura Snow (Jim Adleman) of Ft. Collins, CO; seventeen grand- and step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
A memorial mass will be held at St. Rita Catholic Church in Nederland on Saturday, July 18, at 11:00 a.m., with a memorial high tea and potluck to follow at the Nederland Community Center, beginning around 12:00 or 12:30 p.m.
Contributions in memory of Anne Snow may be made to the National Brain Tumor Society (in honor of the late Kent Snow) or to the Women’s Ordination Conference.
