Edith Marie Huck

Edith Marie Huck held on to things - recipes, secrets, stories, and usually the last word. She was stubborn and opinionated to a fault. Fortunately, the fault served her well. It got her through a war, across an ocean, into a trade few women entered, and kept her in her own Sheridan home until she was 92. 

She died August 10, 2026, at Brookdale Littleton. She was 94. Edith was born in Hamburg, Germany, the oldest of four children. Her father, Paul Wrage, kept his tailor shop inside the family home, and the Lutheran church she was raised in stood across the street. During the war, the bombs came for that house three times. One came through the roof and did not go off. Edith and her father carried it to a third-floor window and threw it out. It left a crater in the backyard. She could not have been more than twelve. 

She was also the child sent to stand in the ration lines, where she learned to work her way to the front and come home with more than she'd been sent for. She never lost the skill. As a teenager she competed in ballroom dancing. In high school chemistry she learned to distill alcohol - her father was impressed enough to have a still built in the kitchen. 

She trained as a furrier and earned her master's certification, learning the whole trade: tanning, selecting, designing, dyeing, cutting, and finishing. An uncle in Florida sponsored her to America and introduced her to a friend in the Chicago fur business. 

In Chicago, Edith's skill as a furrier eventually brought her an unusual client: Mae Capone, widow of Al Capone. Just before Christmas, Edith was given a punishing deadline to finish a coat, with the promise of a Christmas goose if she got it done. Edith got it done. The goose never arrived. 

Nearly seventy years later, the story finally came out on another Christmas, while she was riding in a truck to the mountains and telling stories to Rodney, then still new to the family. When she said who the customer had been, she lowered her voice to a whisper - as though, for just a moment, she were back in the fur shop in Chicago and a client's name was still not something you said out loud. 

She was offered a partnership in that business. She turned it down, because she had met Ignaz Huck. 

They married in 1958. Monika was born in 1959. In 1960 they moved to Colorado for Ignaz's work at Martin Marietta and bought the house in Sheridan that Edith would keep for the rest of her life. She returned to her trade in 1963 at Jonas Brothers Furs on Broadway. The family spent 1964 and 1965 in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, where Ignaz observed the aurora borealis for the Bureau of Standards and Edith - never one to sit still - learned needlepoint and picked blueberries. 

Then she gave Sheridan four decades. If there was a committee, a board, or a ballot box in Arapahoe County, Edith was probably involved. She worked her way from PTA at the local, county, and state levels to serving as a head election judge, sitting on county and state mental health boards, chairing the Sheridan School District Accountability Committee, and working with Arapahoe County 4-H. She even became a parliamentarian - of course she did - for national meetings of neurosurgeons, and worked for the Denver visitors bureau for more than ten years. 

At home she canned peaches from the backyard and baked cherry cobblers, croissants, and cinnamon rolls beyond counting. Baking was one of the things she did exceptionally well. Cooking was another matter. Edith owned hundreds of cookbooks, many stuffed with scraps of paper covered in her notes, and the basement still held cookware of every kind, some of it new in the box. No one in the family ever quite understood how all that research and equipment sometimes ended with cut-up hot dogs in refried beans. Iggy, however, never seemed to mind. She loved the Home Shopping Network without apology. 

She and Iggy also had their own version of a power walk. Edith would make laps around the mall, window-shopping as she went, while Iggy eventually found a bench and settled in to people-watch. Both were fluent in several languages and took particular delight in overhearing conversations they were clearly not expected to understand. Every so often, one of them would simply join in - in the same language - and wait for the look of shock on the other person's face. 

Edith loved telling the embarrassing stories about her grandchildren - not the polished ones grandparents usually save for company. She and Iggy also believed toddlers were better off learning to growl than cry, and apparently saw no reason not to teach them. 

Most evenings there were cards on the table, coffee and sherry poured, and friends who stayed later than they'd meant to. 

She went where her family went. When Monika and Philip moved to Indonesia in 1994, and to Qatar in 1996, Edith and Iggy got on the plane. But the trip she was proudest of was Christmas in Germany, when her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren all stayed in the house she grew up in - the same house the bombs had come for three times. 

It had held. So had she. 

Ignaz died in January 2003, days after the two of them came home from Qatar. He had gone everywhere with her. She said afterward that there was no point in looking for anyone else. 

She had already found him. 

Edith is survived by her daughter, Monika, and son-in-law, Philip; her grandchildren and their families - Sarah and Rodney; Daniel and Rebecca, and their children Levi and Max; and Hannah and Steven, and their children Madison and Emily; and her sisters, Margot Shermer and Dörte Braker. She was preceded in death by her husband, Ignaz, and her parents, Paul and Ellie Wrage. 

A memorial service will be held Monday, August 31, at 10:15 a.m. at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver. 

Mae Capone still owes her a goose.