Jean Nye Rohrer

Jean Nye Rohrer went to be with the Lord at daybreak on the first day of the first month of the new year of 2025, having had a good, full and long life for 101 years. She died in her own bed, at home.

Jean was born in 1923 to Clarence Campbell and Nettie Nye Campbell in Frederic, Wisconsin. She was the seventh of eight children. In the chaos and scrambling of a large family her confident can-do attitude was born and her great social skill was honed. The family owned and managed a resort on a lake in Siren, Wisconsin, and spent their summers there. The children helped with renting out cabins and boats, booking tourists and feeding them, stocking the ice house, hunting, fishing, swimming with the guests, hooking up horses and carriages, selling gas for Model T cars, and also managing their own enterprises such as selling fishing worms to the resort guests. Her father was a railroad conductor, which opened the great wide world of the U.S. to them via free passes. Because so much of her life was spent outdoors, she grew a great love of nature through these early years. In her 70s and 80s, walking around a pond in Boulder, Colorado, she closely tracked the activities of ducks and geese and reported on them.

Her oldest sister Lucy taught Jean in a one-room elementary school. She evidently was a handful there. She earned a D in deportment--no doubt, from over-socializing!

Jean attended Central High School in Omaha, Nebraska, where, in addition to making top grades, she lettered in nearly every athletic event she participated in, from swimming and basketball to ping pong and tennis. She was adept at archery and shooting, too, having spied out and shot squirrels with a rifle in childhood.

Her athletic prowess continued throughout her life. She typically walked 45 minutes a day in her 80’s, pausing to do 25 pushups on the edge of a picnic table and then in a corner of the elevator while returning to her apartment. In her 90’s she pedaled a mechanical bike for 30 minutes on every day possible.

Flushing that good circulation through her brain kept Jean mentally quick and alert until her final month. After an MRI scan a doctor remarked, “I’ve never seen such a beautiful brain in anyone in their 90’s!”

Another time late in her life, a doctor noticed Jean’s tennis shoes when he entered her examination room, and exclaimed, “You look FAST!” He proceeded to caution her about curbs and tripping, because (he said), “You’re getting old!” She retorted defiantly, “Well, I don’t FEEL old!” He replied, “Well, madam, may I be the first to inform you that you ARE old.”

Mom had a great sense of humor that was fueled by a runaway imagination. She would often get on a roll, telling us what could have happened in an ordinary event that we had all just lived through. And then the lid was off and the “Campbell stretch” had begun. She’d go on and on, having us all in stitches. She was one of those larger than life persons, firing up any social gathering with her spunk and wit.

Jean attended Wheaton College in Illinois, graduating with a degree in English Literature. Billy Graham was an upper classman at the time; she often saw him in the cafeteria. After teaching high school English for a year, she moved to Southern California to study at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (it later became Biola College), and then was hired to work as a front desk secretary with a new parachurch organization called The Navigators (now headquartered in Colorado Springs).

At the time, The Navigators had a vigorous ministry among the soldiers and sailors in Los Angeles who were returning on leave during World War II. Many came to the Navigators’ headquarters as a sort of home away from home and walked away with vibrant newfound faith. It is not surprising that, being surrounded by all those men, she eventually married one of them, C. David Rohrer, not long after taking a pause to do graduate work back in the Midwest at the University of Minnesota. Soon after their wedding in 1950 they were sent to Paris to begin a Navs ministry overseas. While traveling on the transatlantic ship she was attacked by an acute case of nausea from sea sickness, only to discover a few weeks later that it was an acute case of pregnancy. The waves were far bigger than she had imagined!

Being poorer than church mice, she and Dave rented a large cold cement and marble home outside of Paris that became the Navs European headquarters. Its door was always open to those who traipsed through after the weary war. She rolled up her sleeves and went to work. She bedded her firstborn baby in an open dresser drawer, cared for several Jewish girls who had escaped the Holocaust alive but battered, and fed scores of visiting college students and other missionaries while trying to make it as a new wife and mother in a strange land. After three years in France, while her brother was serving as a missionary doctor in the heart of the African Congo, the young Rohrer family returned to civilian life in the U.S. Dave became a court reporter and later a New York Life estate planner, maintaining a strong Christian testimony, and his Jean developed her own entrepreneurial skills, subletting our large, rented home to Colorado School of Mines students when we lived in Golden and then to CU students when we moved to the Hill area in Boulder.

In the dozen years after Dad died, Mom read copious numbers of deep, thick books, returning to her love of good literature. She moved into the Presbyterian Manor in her 90’s and was followed soon after by her younger daughter, Margot, then in her retired 60’s, who rented an apartment in the same building and was thus able to take loving care of Mom for several years. Jean eventually moved to Durango to live with her elder daughter, Renée. Then blind, Jean loved experiencing the power of hearing the Word of God read to her daily by her son-in-law, adding her own avid comments on scripture passages and devotional books.

Jean has three grown grandchildren, one from each of the three families of her three children, and became a great-grandmother. She was preceded in death by all seven of her siblings. The final resting place of her body is with her husband Dave at Fort Logan National Cemetery (he was an Admiral's Writer in the Navy during World War II).

Jean was good at business, significantly helping her husband build his second career in estate planning as an office manager. She enjoyed crafting words as a hobby. She wrote children’s poetry in her early years. Later she penned (or dictated) short insightful poems composed of tidbits of profundity that reflected her faith. Blind in her last season of life, she did what she could and then dropped both the reading and the writing, but she didn’t drop the praying--for which her offspring, relatives and friends are so blessed and grateful. One day she sweetly apologized for no longer being able to get down on her knees to pray!

Those who knew Jean would agree that she will most be remembered for her outstanding people skills. She had an insatiable aptitude for encouraging people, helping to buttress and tweak their good resolves, listening to their struggles, mitigating their sorrows, and championing both their persons and their endeavors. She often said of a wandering restless soul, after a brief encounter, “He [or she] is going to make it in life” and “I’m sure he [or she] is veering North” [whatever that means].

Frequently in her later years Jean would remark that the Fall is deeper than we know. She knew we all have clay feet. But with her clay feet she repeatedly somehow found a way to rise up out of countless quagmires of life, almost as if aspiring to somehow walk on water.

We will miss her greatly.

Per family request - Please no flowers in condolence due to allergies.