Julie Wagoner

03/13/1928 – 08/16/2020

Julie T. Wagoner was born March 13, 1928 in New York City and spent her early years in Scarsdale, NY. Her father, Richard H. Thornton, President of Henry Holt was a friend and publisher of Robert Frost. She moved to Wellesley, MA to attend high school when her father worked at Guinn & Co. She then went to Smith College studying mathematics and the University of Chicago where she met Glen Wagoner. It was the farthest East he’d ever been and the farthest West she’d been. After they married, they moved to Berkeley where they both studied physics on the PhD track. He then worked in Cleveland, Ohio where they lived for 45 years and their daughter was born. Besides being a homemaker, Julie worked as a computer programmer in COBOL and Fortran at Sohio at American Greetings. She once caught a computer making an error. On the day of her fall she had been reading about the Higgs boson in modern particle physics. She died after hitting her head from a fall from jumping out of the path of a pedestrian not wearing a mask despite coronavirus mandates. They retired to north Boulder in 2003 to audit physics classes at the University of Colorado and live among the pine trees, mountain lions, bears, bobcats and foxes. Julie and Glen Wagoner were together for 71 years.