Leta Eileen Swift, born December 14, 1924, passed away peacefully at the age of 90 on March 6, 2015 in Alamosa, Colorado.

Born the daughter of Jewell and Leta Murray in Boyero, Colorado, Eileen moved to Mosca, Colorado at the age of 12 with her parents and older brother Dean Murray. While in high school, she played on the women’s basketball team. After graduating, she met her husband, Clyde Swift, who, as the story goes, began courting her from atop his horse.

Clyde was drafted into the U.S. Army in November of 1942, and for a time during his two year deployment to the Aleutian Islands beginning in 1943, Eileen worked for the Remington Arms Company at the Denver Ordnance Plant, which manufactured small arms ammunition for the War Department. At peak production, its 22,000 employees, nearly half of them women, produced as many as six million cartridges a day. Among her other duties at the plant, Eileen worked as a machine gun shaker, an impressive undertaking given her small stature. Clyde returned to the San Luis Valley on November 3, 1945, and married Eileen just a few weeks later on November 28, 1945 in Manzanola, Colorado.

Eileen also attended Adams State College in Alamosa during the war, where she earned her lifetime teaching certificate in 1943. She returned to the college to earn her B.A. in Education in 1966, and began teaching in 1966 in Center, Colorado, where she continued to teach until retiring in 1990. During those 20 plus years, she taught all grade levels from kindergarten through high school. Even after her retirement, many of her former students visited her to express their appreciation and admiration for her thoughtful, creative approach in the classroom, and for encouraging her students to take an active interest in learning, as she did.

Along with teaching, Eileen had a second full-time job as CEO and CFO of the Swift household, helping Clyde and her daughters run cattle, herd sheep, and raise race horses, which included cleaning stalls, cooling horses after races, and cooking for the horse crew. The Swifts owned and operated two businesses over the years, Goldie’s Gift Shop, and Swift’s Ice Cream Shop. Eileen also had various other jobs during her life, including housekeeping for Hank & Freda Wiescamp and working for the National Forest Service for a time, but probably the most adventurous and one of her favorite jobs of all time, was flying crop dusters with her brother Dean before the war.

Eileen’s hobbies included crocheting remarkably beautiful afghans, for which she won awards at the Colorado State Fair, and many of which she completed while on long, twelve hour drives to Oklahoma to visit family friends. She also enjoyed loom weaving, embroidery, and collecting antiques. She was an avid reader, and after her eyesight deteriorated, a listener of audio books.

Eileen was a loving and caring friend, teacher, daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, and above all, wife of 69 years.

The family would like to thank her caregivers, the medical staff of SLV Health, and friends who were so good to her in her final days.

She is survived by two daughters, Jewell Ann (Hal) Meredith and Myrna Bell Swift, as well as grandchildren Jill (John) Corbin of Savannah, GA, Travis Witkowski of Berlin, Germany, Dan Witkowski of Telluride, CO, and June Richie of Broomfield, CO.

A service to celebrate Eileen’s life and achievements will be announced at a later date. In lieu of flowers, please send contributions to the Home Lake Resident Benefit Fund, In Memory of Clyde and Eileen Swift, P.O. Box 97, Home Lake, CO 81135.

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