Educator, Librarian, Wife, Mother, Sister, Aunt, Friend
Audrey Wallace Putney, beloved wife, mother, sister, and aunt, valued friend, gifted educator, and librarian, passed away in the Estes Park Hospital in Colorado July 2, 2025, after a lengthy illness. She was 88 when she died.
Audrey was a wonderful person. She was loving, loyal, considerate of others, intelligent, intellectually curious, open-minded, introspective, courageous, orderly, and ethical. It was very important for her to do the right thing in the right way.
Audrey excelled at building interpersonal relationships. She had a great marriage that lasted nearly 66 years; she bore two children, maintained strong ties with relatives, got along well with co-workers, and made many good friends over the course of her life. Connecting with people was paramount to her.
People correctly perceived Audrey as gentle and easygoing, but she was no milquetoast. She did not hesitate to stand up for herself and what she thought was right.
Audrey had a wide variety of interests, and she particularly enjoyed traveling. Throughout her life, she crisscrossed the U.S. many times, either by car, train, or plane. She also traveled outside the country, visiting Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and filled her home with mementos of her journeys.
In addition to loving travel, Audrey loved nature and engaged in outdoor activities for as long as she could. She particularly liked camping, hiking, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing, and enjoyed learning about wildlife and wildflowers. She also did a great deal of volunteer work in Rocky Mountain National Park, one of her favorite places on earth, and she and her husband, Richard, helped to establish two of the park’s volunteer organizations: the Elk Bugle Corps, founded in 1989, and the Big Horn Brigade, founded in 1991.
When she was at home, Audrey liked to watch the PBS NewsHour and partake of meals prepared by her husband, who is an excellent cook. Audrey could cook, too, but she preferred to read and play music. She could perform on the piano and the recorder and read avidly about many different subjects, always keeping at least one book by her bedside or armchair.
Audrey never lost her passion for traveling, nature, music, and reading. Her other hobbies were more fleeting, though, and they included knitting, baking bread, making jelly, and square dancing. Toward the end of her life, Audrey took up challenging jigsaw puzzles, and she proved to be very adept at completing them.
Audrey spent most of her life in the West but grew up in the Midwest, mostly in rural Iowa. She was born in Davenport, Iowa, August 25, 1936, to Kenneth Wallace, an engineer specializing in building dams, and Elva Reimers Wallace, a homemaker, piano teacher, and church organist.
On her father’s side, Audrey was descended from Scotsmen who immigrated to America in the 18th century. On her mother’s side, she was descended from Germans who immigrated to Lyon County, Iowa, to farm after the Civil War.
For the first 10 years or so of her life, Audrey moved around a lot with her family, as her father went from job to job, up and down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. His peripatetic days, and those of his family, ended around 1946 when he began a decades-long career in Rock Rapids, Iowa, as the county engineer for Lyon County.
The hometown of Audrey’s mother, Rock Rapids, is the county seat, and it was where Audrey and her younger sister, Margo, Audrey’s only sibling, received most of their pre-collegiate schooling.
Audrey attended Rock Rapids from fourth through twelfth grade, graduating from high school in 1954. She enjoyed a classic small-town childhood: babysat for neighbors, played with cousins on nearby farms, and attended the local Congregational Church.
Audrey came from a family that valued higher education, and she valued it, too. She ended up earning four advanced degrees: an associate degree from Cottey College in 1956, a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Iowa in 1958, a master’s degree in human relations from Ohio University in 1967, and a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Denver in 1980.
Audrey worked at numerous places to put herself through college, including the YMCA of the Rockies, where she waitressed in the Pine Room. She spent the summer of 1956 at the YMCA, and the following summer, she worked as “head girl” at a camp in Deering, New Hampshire.
The camp was affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the successor body to the Congregational Church, but more importantly, it was where Audrey met her future husband, Richard “Dick” Putney, the camp’s “head boy,” a native of Massachusetts, and a student at Northeastern University.
Audrey and Dick fell in love almost immediately, and they got married August 20, 1959, in Rock Rapids. For the first few years of the marriage, Audrey taught in elementary schools in Greater Boston, while Dick pursued an M.Div. degree at Andover Newton Theological School. The couple made ends meet by taking summer jobs, such as jointly running the U.C.C. camp in Buck Lake, Vermont, in 1960, and returning in 1962 to help manage Camp Deering, where their sons would later learn to swim.
Dick graduated from Andover Newton in 1962, and he subsequently moved with Audrey to Middlebury, Vermont, where he worked as the assistant minister of the town’s U.C.C. Church.
Dick and Audrey did not stay in Middlebury for long, but they did beget their first son, Clifford, there early in 1963. Later that year, the fledgling family moved to Athens, Ohio, where Dick worked as a campus minister at Ohio University and Audrey bore her second son, Steven, in 1965.
Never averse to trying new things, Dick and Audrey moved with their sons from Athens to Laramie, Wyoming, where Dick worked as a campus minister at the University of Wyoming. Laramie was a fairly rough place when the Putneys arrived in 1968, and Audrey was surprised when she went job-hunting to see an ad in the local paper that read “Wanted: Strong Woman to Sew Animal Skins.”
Rather than taking the skin-sewing job, Audrey oversaw an adult education program in Laramie. She also joined her husband in doing gutsy things, such as traversing backcountry roads in an old station wagon for fun and participating in Wyoming’s first anti-Vietnam War protest.
Unlike some of her fellow anti-war protesters, Audrey was not a hippie. She had a wide range of friends, however that included hippies and church ladies. She allowed traveling hippies to stay at her home in Laramie so they could avoid being beaten up by the state’s constabulary.
Audrey and her family interrupted their stay in Laramie when they spent the academic year of 1972-73 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Dick did coursework at U-Mass in pursuit of an Ed.D. degree. While he did his coursework, Audrey commuted to the University of Hartford in Connecticut, where she worked for a teacher training program until she and her family moved back to Wyoming.
During their stay in Laramie, the Putneys often visited Estes Park, and they fell in love with the resort town. They fell in love with it so thoroughly that they moved there in 1977, settling into the mountain-view home in Carriage Hills that the family still owns.
Like many people in Estes, Dick and Audrey had to commute long distances to work. Dick traveled around the Rocky Mountain region, overseeing mainline Protestant campus ministry programs, while Audrey worked as a foreign student adviser in Boulder, first at the Economics Institute and then at the University of Colorado.
Audrey developed a yearning to live overseas from her work with international students. She did not act on this yearning while her sons were in school, but after they left Estes for college and Dick’s campus ministry job petered out, she persuaded him to move with her to Egypt, where the couple had been offered jobs – a counseling job for Dick and a special projects job for Audrey – at the Community Services Association, an affiliate of the U.S. Embassy, in Cairo.
Dick and Audrey relocated to Maadi, a leafy suburb of Cairo, in 1985, but they did not stay there long. Audrey enjoyed the place, but Dick fell ill there, and he returned to the U.S. to regain his health in 1986.
Several months later, in 1987, Audrey returned from Egypt to join him, and for the next two years, the couple made the Cincinnati area their home. Dick focused on campus ministry, and Audrey commuted to work as a librarian at the University of Northern Kentucky.
Not enamored of life in southern Ohio, the Putneys moved back to Estes Park in 1989. Dick landed a succession of ministerial positions over the next decade, serving U.C.C. churches in Longmont, Colorado, Wheatland, Wyoming, and Littleton, Colorado, while Audrey worked at the Estes Park Library as its circulation supervisor, a job she held from 1989 to 2003.
Audrey greatly enjoyed her job at the library, partly because it did not require commuting but more importantly because it enabled her to interact with people, which she did well. Over the years, she interacted with thousands of library patrons, becoming a well-known figure in Estes Park. Some people knew her not from her library work but from her volunteer service to the community.
Audrey belonged to P.E.O. from college until her death, and she joined several book clubs during her years in Estes Park. She also held leadership positions at the local level in several international organizations, including the Foundation for Lifelong Learning, Sister Cities International, and Friendship Force, which she helped bring to the town in the early 1990s.
For the first three quarters of her life, Audrey enjoyed good health, but in her mid-60s, she developed breast cancer. Fortunately, she managed to overcome that malady, but an even worse affliction struck her in March 2003, when she suffered a stroke related to snow-shoveling after a record-breaking blizzard. Strapped with duct tape to a stretcher and pulled by a snowmobile through deep snow to the Estes Park Hospital, Audrey survived the stroke, but her speech was never quite the same as it had been, and she had to quit her job at the library.
While Audrey was recovering from her stroke, her husband Dick was working in Rocky Mountain National Park as a full-time interpretive ranger, a job he had procured in the late 1990s. However, he was willing to give the job up to move with Audrey to a small blueberry farm in Sedgwick, Maine that the couple had purchased in 2000. The farm included an old house that the Putneys found unsuitable, so they added a new house to the property, and they lived in it part-time, spending their summers in Maine and their winters in Estes Park.
Finding the migration between Sedgwick and Estes overly taxing, the Putneys sold their farm in 2010 and moved back permanently to Colorado. Dick resumed working full time as a ranger for R.M.N.P., but he quit his job in 2018 to care for Audrey, whose health had declined steadily since her return from Maine.
Despite suffering from ailments ranging from neuropathy to microscopic colitis, Audrey managed to volunteer in the 2010s, reading to children at the Estes Park Elementary School and teaching English to staff members at the YMCA of the Rockies. She found it increasingly difficult to walk, however, and she eventually ended up relying first on a walker and then on a wheelchair.
In the last years of Audrey’s life, her health care workers often spoke admiringly about her indomitable spirit. Rather than giving up and becoming bedridden, she kept pushing herself to get up and move inside and outside of the house, and she even managed, a few weeks before her death, to walk a few steps with the aid of a physical therapist.
Audrey retained her mental acuity, and she was able to talk with friends and relatives until the day before she died. She is survived by her husband, Dick; her two sons, Clifford, a history professor, and Steven, a banker; her sister, Margo Conrad, a retired teacher; three brothers-in-law, Robert Conrad, Donald Putney, and Kenneth Putney; one niece, Paula Graham, née Conrad; five nephews, Mike Conrad, Andrew Putney, Thomas Putney, David Putney, and Chad Putney; and quite a few distant cousins.
A memorial gathering will be held August 20, 2025, from 2 to 4 p.m. to celebrate Audrey’s remarkable life. The gathering will take place at the Allnutt Chapel, 1302 Graves Ave. in Estes Park. Refreshments will be served, and all those who knew and loved Audrey are invited to attend.
In lieu of flowers, people are encouraged to give money to the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, one of Audrey’s favorite charities.