Rose Trujillo had 11 children, taught school in one-room schoolhouses, worked as a psychiatric technician at a mental-health hospital and served on a state commission under two governors.
She also lived to be 100 and stopped driving only four years ago.
Trujillo died Aug. 21 at the home of her granddaughter in Pueblo.
“She was a miracle, doing things that weren’t normal for a woman of her time,” said her son Larry Trujillo, a former state representative and senator.
He said he could remember his mother getting her uniform on, walking to the bus stop in the dark and working as a psychiatric technician on the graveyard shift at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo.
She’d get home at 6:30 a.m., “get us up, feed us and get us off to school,” Larry Trujillo said. “She did the washing, cooking, cleaning, and all of us kids had jobs.”
She got water from a well to wash their clothes.
Friends told her she could get welfare, her family said, but she wouldn’t hear of it, said son Harold Trujillo.
On her 100th birthday in June, Rose Trujillo told people it was time for her to go because if she was unable to help people, “I’m not good for anything,” according to a Pueblo Chieftain story.
Rose Atencio was born in Fort Garland on June 14, 1911, and graduated from high school there. She earned a teaching certificate at Adams State College in Alamosa during World War II. She taught in the San Luis Valley for 14 years.
She married Arthur Trujillo, and they moved to Pueblo, where she earned a psychiatric-technician license and worked for 23 years at the mental-health institute.
Rose Trujillo was named by two governors — Dick Lamm and Roy Romer — to a Colorado council on aging.
After retiring, she worked with Volunteers in Service to America, assisting elderly flood victims in Arizona at a food and clothing bank.
She trained to be a paralegal and worked for Pueblo Legal Services as a senior citizens advocate. At 71, she became the first woman and first non-lawyer to receive the Serving Senior Citizens Award from the Colorado Bar Association, her family said.
In addition to her sons Larry and Harold, she is survived by another son, Walter Trujillo; and six daughters, Beatrice Espinoza of Layton, Utah, Mary Robertson of Portland, Ore., and Brenda Mesa, June Kitzman, Evelyn Lopez and Alice Trujillo, all of Pueblo. She was preceded in death by two children and her husband.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
