Obituary of Lily Schoonover

Lily M. Schoonover was born December 6th, 1916 to Edward E. and Anna Carrie (Hobbs) McCabe in a sod house north of Sharon Springs, Kansas. Lily passed away on November 21, 2014 at Carla's Cluster Care in Limon, Colorado at the age of 97. She was the second of five children. Lily attended grade-school in Wesken. Kansas. Her family then moved to Coolidge, Kansas where she went to high school and participated in basketball and orchestra. Her biggest job was being her dad's hired hand, helping to milk 40 cows before she could leave for school. Milking was done by hand in those days, so you know they were up before the sun! Marriage came right after high school for Lily. She fell in love and married Woodrow W. Schoonover (known to most as “Bud”) on May 31, 1935 in Garden City, Kansas. They made their home in Coolidge, Kansas, where sons Dwain, Marvin Joe, and Wesley were born. The family later moved to Minneola, Kansas where their only daughter, Avril, was born. In 1945 they moved to Hugo, Colorado and in 1946 they moved to a farm northeast of Limon, where all four of their children were raised and graduated from Limon High School. Lily was a hard-working house wife during their time on the farm. She stayed very busy cooking, raising chickens, tending a garden, milking cows, and at times working in the field. While the family was still living on the farm, Lily became employed by the Limon School Lunch Program as a cook, which she did for 17 years. Bud and Lily purchased the Farm Gas business in Hugo in 1962. While she was still cooking for Limon Schools, she started bookkeeping for the new Farm Gas business. Eventually Lily left the school and became full-time office manager and receptionist at Farm Gas. After Bud passed away, Lily kept the business and her son Wes stepped in as her partner and they maintained this business until 2002. As a teenager, Lily told her mother that she was bored, so her mom put her to work on her first quilt. which was called “Jacob‘s Ladder” and it was done completely by hand, made of scraps from her mother's scrap box. This started her love of quilting. Since then, Lily has made hundreds of beautiful quilts. She had a very special talent of cutting material apart and then sewing it back together again into unique and colorful quilt tops. When she wasn't sewing quilt pieces together, she found time to knit, crochet, and embroider. At her 90th birthday, all of her guests received a doily ~ approximately 100 were given away. Many of us have been blessed with her creative gifts. Lily was preceded in death by her husband, Bud, and son, Marvin Joe. She is survived by one sister; Lola Crouse of Salinas, California, her children; Dwain Schoonover of Burr Ridge, Illinois, Wesley Schoonover of Hugo, Colorado and Avril Beattie of Limon, Colorado, along with many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews.