Jane Casey

Jane Violet Casey, 83, of Greeley passed away on Wednesday, January 29, 2020, at the Greeley Care Home.

Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, February 4, 2020, at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Greeley. The Celebrant will be Father Antony Thekkekara. Burial will be in the Sacred Heart Cemetery at Greeley. Visitation will be held on Monday from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with a Rosary at 7:00 p.m. at the church.

In lieu of flowers memorials are suggested to the Greeley Fire and Rescue Department or the Howard County Medical Center.

Violet Fuller, nicknamed Loretta, was born on January 8, 1937 in Seattle, Washington to Harry Earl Fuller and Fern Opha (Clark) Fuller.  She was their third child of five siblings.  Violet's father was a carpenter by trade and her mother a homemaker.  Harry moved his family to Emida, Idaho in 1946 entering town with a horse-drawn wagon and a 2-ton flatbed truck.  The family lived in two different locations over the next few years, one of which was a small ranch three miles south of town.  Violet's best times were there: they had a garden and a cow for milk and plenty of space to roam.  She attended the local grade school through 7 ^th grade.  But life would change dramatically in 1950 when she married her father's farmhand, Philip Grover Waters.  She gave birth to her first son, Phillip, in December 1950.  When her husband was drafted into the U. S. Army, Violet moved to Walla Walla, Washington with her son, her mother, and her youngest brother, David.  After his two-year deployment in Germany, Grover moved his family to Spokane, Washington leaving his mother-in-law and nephew, David, back in Emida.

In 1953 the family moved to Gladstone, Missouri where Grover took a job with Nashua factory for mobile homes.  He worked there for seventeen years before it shut down in 1970.  Violet gave birth to a second son, Harild Dyane, in 1954, a daughter, Linda, in 1956 and a second daughter, Tesia Rena' in 1969.  After the first two children were in school, Violet went to work for National Billahess, a large order packing company in North Kansas City where she worked for seven years.  After the plant shutdown, during the next eight years the family was on the move constantly as Grover worked for mobile home factories in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Boise, Idaho; Grand Island, Nebraska; Winter Haven, Florida,; Mesa, Arizona; Hope, Arkansas; Falls City, Nebraska; Gainesville, Texas; Bend, Oregon; and , finally, Grand Island, Nebraska again as the business waxed and waned and morphed into double-wide homes.

In 1978 Violet went to work at the Nebraska Veterans Home as a certified nurse's aide.  In September 1978, Violet's older son, Phillip, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Texas.  She was understandably shaken by this event, and family problems at home came to a breaking point.  Violet and Grover divorced in 1979-80.  After the divorce Violet depended on three different coworkers to help with over-night childcare for Tesia, now 9 year's old.  One of her helping coworkers had a teenage son who attended Central Catholic and when that coworker took a job in 1980 at Sheridan, Wyoming, she reciprocated by taking care of the boy during the spring of 1980.  The coworker, Dan Casey was moved to Billings, Montana and found a four-bedroom house for Violet, Tesia, and Sean.  During the summer, a second son, Dennis, joined the family.  Casey worked for a national real estate franchise as a franchise representative and covered Montana, Wyoming, western North and South Dakota, and the panhandle of Nebraska.  It was a six-day on, one-day off job that left enough time to wash clothes on a Sunday afternoon and hit the road again.

During that year and five months, the boys shared the house with an "unrelated mother and sister" and bristled under the regime.  Casey left the job in October 1981 to stay home and raise his sons.  Violet had housed, fed, clothed, and cared for the boys without much appreciation at the time.  Sean graduated in June 1982 and moved out; Dennis graduated in 1984 and moved out.  In the meantime, Violet and Casey were still speaking to one another and decided to marry in November 1982.  Violet worked at a long-term care facility in Billings from 1980 to 1985.  A new opportunity with the franchise opened up in Colorado Springs in 1984 and Casey went there leaving Violet, now known as Jane Violet, after her baptism into the Catholic Church at Easter 1982.  The Billings house sold in winter of 1985 and Jane and Tesia joined Casey in Colorado Springs.  The franchise moved Casey to Salt Lake City, Utah in August 1987.  Jane and Tesia stayed in Colorado Springs until Tesia graduated from high school in May 1988.  Tesia had found her a man and was getting settled in her new life.  Jane was free to join Casey in Salt Lake, but within two months the franchise moved them to Chatsworth, California where Casey served a seven-county area of Southern California.  Jane went to work at a nursing home in Resida, California just a few miles east of Chatsworth.  In ten months, July 1989, Casey was moved to the Bay area and rented a home in Vallejo.  Again, Jane went to work at a long-term facility there.  In October 1991 Casey was released from the national franchise in a final downsizing and went to work for a local company as a mortgage broker.  In December 1991 Jane's mother died; we were unable to be with her at the time but managed to get to her funeral a few days later.  Jane had talked to her mom just a few hours before she passed and was the last person to do so.

Jane and Dan moved to Alameda, California in January 1992.  Jane again went to work at a nursing home there.  She eventually worked at four different homes in the Alameda-Oakland area.  In August 1992 Dan was offered a job as resident manager of an apartment house near downtown.  This job expanded into two buildings in 1995 and three buildings in 1998.  Jane gave up her nursing home career in 1998 to help her husband clean buildings and renovate apartments.  Dan went back to college in the fall of 1995 while working two buildings with Jane's help.  After graduating from Cal State University East Bay in 2003, the building owner decided to sell them; and Dan and Jane were back on the road again, back to Colorado.

Dan secured an apartment community management job in Colorado Springs in late 2003.  Jane helped with cleaning and renovating apartments.  Property management is an unstable business, too, because owners sell or change management companies; and so, Dan and Jane moved to Lochbuie, Colorado, near Brighton, in 2006, with another apartment community.  In March 2007 Dan and Jane contracted to rehabilitate some apartments in south central Denver.  In 2008 Jane stayed home and was a happy homemaker.  In January2009 Jane was diagnosed with throat cancer.  She received treatment at Rocky Mountain Cancer Center in Boulder, but never quite shook off the effects of the chemotherapy.  Business slowed in 2010 thru 2012 and Jane and Dan decided to hang it up and retire, but where?  After some discussion Jane and Dan settled on Greeley, Nebraska: fifty miles from two of her children and Dan's mother's ancestral home.

Within 60 days Jane was working at the Greeley Care Home & Assisted Living as a housekeeper until 2017 when poor health slowed her down.  She could never find a cure for the rare blood problems in the aftermath of chemo.  However, she was an active member of the Catholic Daughters of America and the Alter and Rosary Society.  She also washed the Church's purificators and server garments.

Survivors include her husband John Daniel Casey of Greeley; a son, Harild Dyane Waters of Grand Island; two daughters, Tesia Rena Waters of Grand Island, and Linda S. Miller of New Orleans, LA; four grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; a brother and sister-in-law, Wayne "Buck" and Donna Fuller of Emida, ID; and a sister, Juanita Loe of Spokane, WA.

She was preceded in death by her parents; a son, Phillip Waters; two brothers, and Warren and David Fuller.