Audrey Enever
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Marriages
Bob Enever
Obituaries
Steamboat Pilot & Today - May 19, 2023
1930 – 2023
I have loved Audrey from the moment we met 73 years ago, and this is my account of her life
…Bob Enever…
Her Mind
Audrey’s beautiful smile hid an extraordinary mind that she used so well. This explains her masters degree in mathematics, her brilliant career in the earliest generations of computers, her competency in accounting and the logic of double-entry bookkeeping. In later years she took joy in solving puzzles of many kinds including: Sudoku and its many variants that she would solve before breakfast; jig-saw puzzles with thousands of pieces; contract bridge. Her intelligence made her a good conversationalist because she was so logical and insightful. Audrey’s demeanor was quiet and thoughtful; she did not talk about her accomplishments.
Audrey was fearless and outspoken in her work at a time when most men thought a woman’s place was in the home. For example she taught mathematics to classes of 300 much older World War II veterans while she was still a student. In Chicago, at Spiegel Inc, Audrey not yet 30, was responsible for leading one of the first big companies to put their faith in digitized data and computers for critical parts of their business when she computerized their million accounts receivable. She taught the assembled proud VPs of Ford Motor Co how to do their jobs better with new technologies.
Audrey was so smart that she always knew she was right, and she usually was, but she never backed down in an argument, so we had a few private wars. She was also hard-working and tenacious; when working she would be oblivious of time, meals, sleep until the problem at hand was solved.
Early Life
Audrey was born in a remote coal mining valley in Wales UK. Her father, a police-sergeant, was a Dutch South African who clashed with her high school when it did not permit girls in physics classes; she was the first! Audrey was a brilliant student especially in mathematics, and she won a prestigous State Scholarship to the University of London, where she and I met. She did her masters degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, where she also worked for the US Navy on experimental computers.
Her Career
Audrey’s first job was with Bristol, a big UK aeronautical company. She led a team tasked with calculating trajectories of guided missiles, but this had to be done with hand calculators because usable computers would not be available for another ten years. Her next job, in far northern British Columbia, Canada, after I had taught her double entry bookkeeping, was to keep the books of small businesses; her own small business. Audrey’s next job, in a plywood mill in Oregon, was to create a perpetual inventory of logs they had to drop into a pond, where the logs had to soak for several months and some sank. After that, in Chicago, Audrey converted Spiegel’s accounts receivable, and she could have gone on to great things as a computer expert at a time when they were desperately needed, but I had moved to a job at Ford Motor Co in Michigan, and she joined me there. Audrey was also hired by Ford and taught Operations Research to Management. Then we became a family with two boys, which interrupted her career. Ford sent us all to Germany where I played a part in creating the new Ford of Europe from 27 different companies, Audrey learned German to talk to the shopkeepers so we could eat, and the boys became more fluent in German than English at kindergarten.
Move to Steamboat Springs
Three years after returning to the US, I decided I’d had enough of big corporations and we moved to Steamboat Springs in 1971. In Steamboat Audrey introduced computer accounting and converted TIC, the biggest local construction company to computer. Then the City wanted the same, for which she had to write the program from scratch because the City needed Fund Accounting, which is different from Profit & Loss Accounting and no ready-made programs existed. She went on to convert the County’s accounting, then its assessment records for which she also had to write original programming. All of this work was pioneering, and her Fund Accounting program became the pattern for a new Steamboat software company, American Fundware, which was sold and is alive and well in Denver today with 4,000 institutional customers. She also wrote the software for condominium management and accounting, which contributed to the success of Mountain Resorts, which Bob Alter and I started. We sold Mountain Resorts in the recession of 1983, together with Whistler Village Townhomes, the Ptarmigan Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Ramada Inn, and other properties we had built or bought.
Semi-Retirement Plan
In 1983 Audrey and I decided to semi-retire and spend at least two months of every year travelling the World. We spent several months of most of the next 10 years learning at source the geography, and something of the history and culture of many countries and states, including half a dozen month-long African safaris, always camping and sometimes walking to see and photograph animals. They were the happiest years of our lives. In 1995 we put our World travel plans on pause to create the Yampa River Botanic Park.
Family
Audrey visited her parents in UK almost every summer until they passed in the 1990s. She worshipped her mother and she admired her father, whose integrity she was proud to have inherited. She adored her only niece Hilary Godfrey. Audrey often visited Hilary and her family, who live in Southern England and who have all vacationed with us in Steamboat.
Audrey dearly loved our son Bruce, who went to Whiteman School and CU, then flew C130 military aircraft around the World for 23 years; he now enjoys managing what was the Gay Ranch in Pleasant Valley. Our second son Peter, went to Steamboat High and Cornell, and died from a heart attack at the age of 31. This cut short a life with a wonderful beginning and a huge potential, and we were both heartbroken. We still miss Peter and we built the Botanic Park in his memory. Bruce’s son and our only grandchild, Christian, whom Audrey also dearly loved, is a successful real estate broker in Laramie Wyoming.
At a wedding for a family member in Wales, UK
Activities
In her younger years Audrey loved to make her own clothes and Hilary says she was very good at it. She was a good swimmer and a lifeguard and she rowed for her college in an 8-oared boat. In her busiest days in Steamboat Springs in the 1970s Audrey would find time to participate in every annual series of meetings of the City’s Blue Ribbon Committee to advise the City on strategic issues. Audrey was also a member of the local League of Women Voters which then had 40 members, and Catherine Lyyken says she was its intellectual leader. For some years she hiked the mountains in the summers with a group led by Steve Romine and she played friendly games of contract bridge for many years with Elaine Gay and others.
Gardening and the Yampa River Botanic Park
Audrey came from a family of gardeners and she had loved gardening since childhood. Her opportunity came when we built our new home and gardens in 1990, and for the next 30 years, until she suffered a stroke in 2021, she tended that garden and loved her flowers. In 1992 we acquired the land that became the Yampa River Botanic Park and gave it to the people of Steamboat Springs (the City). In spring, 1995 we had planned the Park and had not yet considered how to finance its construction, when our beloved son Peter died, which motivated us to build the Park that year with our own money. The construction of the Park and the building of the organization took us 10 years. During that time Audrey, Gayle Lehman and her team developed the gardens and experimented with what plants would grow in Steamboat’s harsh, high-altitude environment. Their gardens set the stage and the tone for the Park, which became known as “the Jewel of Steamboat”.
Audrey and I gradually handed over the management of the Park to the Board of Directors starting in 2005 and we both worked on the ‘Working Board’ which managed the Park until 2019. At that time the Board hired an Executive Director who reorganized the operations; the gardens and the organization have blossomed. Audrey maintained her interest in the Park until the end.
Survivors
Audrey is survived by her husband, Bob and her son Bruce, both of Steamboat Springs Colorado, and her grandson Christian of Laramie, Wyoming. Audrey is also survived by her niece Hilary Godfrey, of Witney, Oxfordshire, England and Hilary’s 3 grown children, Hannah, Zoe and William and their 5 children.
Peace
Audrey had a long, full, eventful and happy life and was at peace when she passed.
