Marie Owen, thought to be the first woman to earn a degree in architectural engineering at the University of Colorado, died June 14. She was 92.
Owen loved her work despite being paid “maybe one-third what men were paid,” said her son Don Owen of Edmonds, Wash.
A Denver native, Owen worked for the late Temple Buell, whose company designed the city’s — and one of the nation’s — first shopping centers: the Cherry Creek Shopping Center on East First Avenue. It opened in 1954.
She also worked for Denver Fire Clay, helping with a project designing the first aluminum cans for Coors beer, said Don Owen. The Fire Clay lofts are now at the company site, near 31st and Blake streets.
Don Owen, who was a designer for Bechtel Co., an engineering and construction firm, learned a lot from his mother that helped in his work.
Marie Owen and her husband, the late Reginald Bryan Owen, reared five children during her early days of engineering.
“She had us all organized so we could help with cooking” and other household jobs, said her son Kent Owen of Three Rivers, Calif.
“She was strong-willed and sometimes rather difficult,” Don Owen said. “You didn’t get anything past her.”
Much of Owen’s designing was commercial, though she designed a home for her brother in Missouri and a mountain home for the family at Black Hawk.
Engineering was in her genes. Her father, Eugene Weber, was an electrical engineer.
She designed a dollhouse for her grandchildren, said her son-in-law Byron Waring of St. James City, Fla.
“She was working on some blueprints in the basement, and I went to her and asked if she could design a dollhouse,” Waring recalled.
“She just swept everything off the table and began on the dollhouse. It’s probably the only dollhouse in the world that has a full set of blueprints,” he said.
The dollhouse, which included a stone chimney fireplace, “survived through two piles of kids,” he said. “She was the smartest woman I ever knew.”
Owen “was outspoken and stubborn” and didn’t hold back if her kids disobeyed, said her daughter Donna Waring. She sometimes swatted them on their behinds, “but it didn’t hurt us at all.”
Marie had a good math mind and put it to use to make good investments in the stock market and a condo in Hawaii, said her daughter Jenna Rose of Portland, Ore.
“She was a trailblazer,” Don Owen said.
The seven-member Owen family lived a year in Camberley, England, an experience that Rose said she will never forget.
Marie Owen was a skier, played the piano, loved bridge and took her kids camping. “We didn’t have tents — just a big blue tarp,” recalled Don Owen.
Marie Weber was born Sept. 28, 1916, and graduated from East High School. She earned her bachelor of science degree at CU in 1936. She married Reginald Bryan Owen on Sept. 28, 1938. He died in 2000.
Also among her survivors is another daughter, Regis Miller of Fernley, Nev.; nine grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
