Katherine Ramus was always ready to cook up some chicken and scalloped potatoes, sit on the porch with you or correct your grammar.
And she did a lot of those things in her 94 years. The former owner of the Blue Jay Inn in Buffalo Creek died Monday in an Englewood retirement community.
“She was a lovely lady who loved people and loved hiking and picnicking,” said longtime friend Ann Enix of Stillwater, Okla. But Ramus was also “quick to tell you what was right and wrong,” said Jim Enix, Ann’s husband.
Ramus was a child in Kansas when her family began making trips to Colorado.
Eventually, she gave up teaching in Topeka, where she “taught everything the coach didn’t teach,” she told The Denver Post, and she and her parents, Dan and Lizette Davis, moved to Colorado in 1948.
They bought the Blue Jay, on the tiny town’s main street. It was a hotel that once housed travelers in horse-and-buggy days and later was an Episcopal girls retreat center. The building, which dates to 1878, closed in 1994. The Enixes, who own a cabin near the hotel, hope to restore it.
Ramus and her mother filled the house with Victorian furniture and antiques. Ramus got good at plumbing and carpentry and was a fanatic about sheets and pillowcases being clean and ironed.
“Things that would make other people throw up their hands, Ramus could figure out,” said Jim Enix.
Postcards were a rarity, so Liz ette Davis took pictures of the scenery and sold them at the Blue Jay as postcards – six for 25 cents.
Ramus loved weaving and quilting, and she bought hundreds of books on both, often transporting them in her yellow station wagon to friends around the mountains and in Denver. Later she had a “beat-up” black Mercury, said Jim Enix. She finally gave up driving in 1992, long after losing sight in one eye. People “stayed out of her way,” he said, laughing.
Ramus loved to tell stories about Colorado and “was the history book of the area,” said Ann Enix.
Katherine Elizabeth Davis was born July 24, 1911, in North Newton, Kan. She went to school in Topeka and earned a degree in English at Washburn College there.
She taught in Fallen, Kan., for four years before moving to Colorado.
In 1950, Davis married Charles F. Ramus, an art history professor at the University of Denver. Charles Ramus’ primary activity in the mountains was tying flies and fishing, the Enixes said.
Katherine Ramus reluctantly left the mountains each winter and lived in Englewood. She worked as a librarian at the DU art department.
She was preceded in death by her husband and is survived by her brother, Dan C. Davis Jr. of Spokane, Wash.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-820-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
