Susan Jean Ross

Fort Collins—Susan Jean Ross, 73, passed away unexpectedly in her home on Saturday, July 2, 2022.

After graduating from Excelsior High School in Norwalk, California, class of 1967, and the University of California at Riverside (BA Sociology) in 1971, Sue worked in Social Services for the State of California. Here she took pride in treating people well who needed to see a caring face amid the bureaucracy. Sue had been interested in thoroughbred horses from a very young age, talking horses and poring over racing forms with her father, whose meticulous analyses she was later to emulate in her own life. So, after some years with social services, she began a career with a California State agency charged with overseeing thoroughbred horse racing. Here she rose to lead a regulatory office that often found itself at odds with powerful, not necessarily benign, interests associated with the racing industry. She was often asked to look the other way, but—displaying the integrity and stubbornness for which she was known—always refused. Finally faced with a choice between allowing a dubious practice or resigning, Sue chose to retire, moving to Fort Collins, CO, in 2010.

Sue had completed an MBA at the University of California at Riverside, in 1981, with a specialty in finance. She became fascinated with investing as a high-level challenge, and her orderly, detailed approach made her very successful. She shared her knowledge as a member of the National Association of Investment Counselors, teaching courses and also advising individuals. She spoke often about financial markets to her brother, who now wishes he had been a better listener.

Soon after retiring to Fort Collins, Sue experienced a number of drastic medical setbacks, any one of which would devastate most persons. She carried on a positive, independent, flourishing life for many years as a sort of medical miracle, managing to balance highly complex, often contradictory, dietary requirements and medications relating to distinct conditions. She immersed herself in genealogy and, finding she had ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, joined the DAR. She also devoted much time to her longtime loves of quilting, knitting, and cooking. Most of what she did was in the service of charity work and volunteerism, as an expression of her overflowing generosity. She volunteered as an accountant for a start-up business, as a baker for her church, knitted caps for newborns in a local hospital, and donated to every good cause in sight. She would leave cold drinks in a cooler with a sign "for the mail carrier," and mailed huge, anonymous tips to her favorite coffeeshop when it was struggling during the pandemic. (Humor was a big part of her persona, though almost anyone else would have been miserably depressed by the same medical situation. Of the anonymous tips, she said with a giggle "now they have to be nice to everybody".) Sue was a model of fortitude, good cheer, and accomplishment, in seemingly impossible circumstances.

Sue is succeeded by her younger brother Joel Wilcox, of Cherryfield, Maine. There are no funeral arrangements.