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So, my @denverpost colleagues and I are working on several obituaries of Coloradans we've lost due to coronavirus. Earlier this week, during a phone interview about Jossy Eyre, who died Monday, I rushed from my seat to our pantry.
Ya see, Eyre founded the @WomensBean and as I spoke with the nonprofit's CEO, I realized we had some of the org's ten-bean soup because my wife noticed it one day at the grocery store and wanted to support the cause. Small world.
Anyway, Eyre, who died at 89, lived a long and full life. She was a woman of endurance who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland. Two of her siblings were killed during a bombing and another two survived internment camps.
Here's Eyre the day of her first communion with her grandmother (photos courtesy of her daughter, Christina Eyre).
The family immigrated to the United States when Eyre was 13 or 14 and none of them spoke a lick of English. The story went that she couldn't pronounce her own first name (Josepha) properly in school so they called her Jossy and it stuck.
Eyre worked as a nurse in a tuberculosis ward and later in NYC (Harlem, I think) before moving west for a job and deciding to settle in Denver. She founded the Women's Bean Project in 1989 as a way to give down and out women jobs and help them back on their feet.
She picked up distance running in her 40s, went to grad school in her 50s and picked up swimming around then too and kept going until her 80s. All the while, she never lost her empathy, her personal touch with those she helped or the feeling she had when they moved here.
By all accounts Eyre was an incredible woman who did more for Denver and the women living here than I think we can quantify. She never lost that fire in her belly and I know I'm biased since I wrote the story but I think that's something worth remembering: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/22/colorado-coronavirus-victim-josepha-eyre/
