Obituary of Joan Ashmore

The stories will live on, but the amazing woman at the center of them has died. Joan “Jo” Ashmore, 92, formerly of Williston, North Dakota, died Tuesday, November 14, 2017, at Three Links Care Center in Northfield, Minnesota, attended by family. She relocated to Minnesota from Montana after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2004. Her family will celebrate her life next summer in some of the places she loved best, including Williston, West Yellowstone, Montana, and Absarokee, Montana, where her ashes will be interred. Jo had many different jobs during her lifetime — waitress, secretary, devoted wife and mother, special education teacher, realtor, dedicated volunteer — but in many ways her life was shaped by a job she didn’t get. Born October 15, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio, during the Great Depression she tried to help out her family by getting one of the few jobs kids were hired for then ... but they wouldn’t take her on “because girls can’t be paperboys.” The experience left her with a determination never to be told what she could and couldn’t do and a burning desire to assure that all people be treated equally and enabled to live and work to their full capacity. She attended the College of Wooster, graduating in 1947 with a degree in geology and worked for Amerada Petroleum Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before marrying Herman T. Ashmore in 1947. After their daughters were born she earned a master’s degree in education at Eastern Montana University in Billings. When her husband was transferred to Williston and she discovered that the school district had a policy of not hiring married women, she put her expertise in special education to work and founded Happy Village (later known as UMARC), a sheltered workshop for young people with developmental disabilities. Later hired to teach special ed at the junior high, she was instrumental in expanding the program to the senior high, where she pioneered “mainstreaming” and served as the advisor to the Coyote Howl, an award-winning student newspaper, and equipped its first darkroom. During the summers she chaperoned swimming team expeditions and assisted at local meets. She served as county supervisor of special education from 1975 until 1977 when, following the death of her husband, she moved to Billings to be closer to the trout streams where she loved to fish. In the early 1980s she added another wonderful chapter to her life, marrying Stephan Zirko, an old family friend. They established a winter residence in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she became an active member and lay minister of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, volunteered for Meals on Wheels, helped found Wahine Choice (a loan program for indigent women that enabled them to have full access to the services of Planned Parenthood), and championed other social justice causes. One of the achievements of which she was extremely proud was filing a sex discrimination human rights complaint against the Hilands Golf Course in Billings that was appealed all the way to the Montana Supreme Court, where the case was again decided in her favor, making her, in her words, “the Roe v Wade of Montana golfing.” The Hilands “picked on the wrong old lady,” she told a reporter for the Billings Gazette. Jo leaves behind gastroliths (dinosaur gizzard stones), the flint and steel with which she showed her grandsons how to make fires from buffalo chips, boxes full of watercolor paints, cowboy sculptures that she welded, a wide array of art including images of the Earth from space, videos of early goddess worship, coral, leis, drums from her drumming circle, and LOTS of colorful anecdotes. She is survived by three daughters, Nancy Ashmore (Ken Wedding), WHS ‘68, of Northfield, MN, Susan Ashmore Mosiman, WHS ’71, Danville, IL, and Mary Ashmore, WHS ’74, Chicago, IL; three grandsons, David Ashmore, Keith (Amanda) Mosiman, and Charles Mosiman, and one great grandson, Elliott Mosiman. She was preceded in death by her husbands Herman Ashmore and Stephan Zirko and foster daughter Maria da Silva, a foreign exchange student from Portugal whom she took under her wing. Tributes to ashmorefamily2017@gmail.com. Memorials are preferred to charities that promote equality and social justice and the preservation of the environment.