In Loving Memory

Shirley Elizabeth Sanger Pasanen

September 2, 1928 - March 6, 2023 Shirley Elizabeth Sanger Pasanen was born in Brighton, Colorado to Charles and Mildred Sanger on September 2, 1928 and died on March 6, 2023 in Woodland, California. She was 94 years old.

There are three areas in her life about which Shirley expressed great satisfaction and pride:

-She considered herself a Pearl Harbor survivor. Early in 1941, her father, a civil servant machinist, was stationed on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Shirley, with her parents and siblings, lived in civilian housing a mile from Hickam Field. On the morning of December 7, 1941 she and her younger sister Beverly were reading the Sunday Funnies at the kitchen table. When they heard the sound of planes overhead, her father, knowing there had been no planned maneuvers that Sunday, called out to the girls to identify the planes. ‘Mustard yellow with red dots on their wings!’ Shirley called back to him.

Her father jumped out of bed to confirm that description as a squadron of Japanese bombers hit Hickam’s airstrip. In the following hours that turned into days, her father, along with all able-bodied men, helped with the recovery effort. Shirley, her mother and siblings, were evacuated to safer locations on the island. Early in 1942, the family was split up again when Shirley’s father remained on Oahu while his family returned stateside to San Francisco.

-Shirley was a best friend and life mate to her husband, John Hill Pasanen. VJ Day occurred on her 17th birthday. Within the year, she renewed her acquaintance with a young man from their San Francisco neighborhood. John Pasanen had joined the Marines in 1944 and been wounded on Iwo Jima. When they met again at Candlestick Cove’s Recreation Center and walked up the hill to the local milk bar, as John told his mother later that evening, he had met the girl he was going to ask to marry him.

The couple was married on June 30th, 1946, at the First Christian Church in Alameda, California. They moved into married student housing at San Francisco State where John had started work on a B.A. in Physical Education and a California Teaching Credential. During those years, the couple welcomed their first daughter, Susan Elizabeth Pasanen Lehman (Gene Fitch), in 1948, and fifteen months later, in 1950, their second daughter, Linda Carol Pasanen Burger (Donald). In 1952, John was offered a teaching position at Dingle Elementary School. The young family moved from San Francisco to Woodland where they eventually built a small house in a new subdivision and where, in 1955, their third daughter, Sarah Jane Pasanen, was born.

As a young mother of three, Shirley used sewing, knitting, and embroidery skills she had learned from her mother and grandmothers to fashion clothes for her family. She and John made sure their girls had books and records and art supplies to help them thrive. Shirley was active in Freeman School’s PTA, serving as president two years in a row. In 1957, when John needed to make good on the promise he’d made to God in an Iwo Jima foxhole, Shirley moved the children and household back to Indiana where John became a student again at Butler University’s Christian Theological Seminary. He was given a student pastorship at Little Flat Rock Christian Church, outside of Rushmore, Indiana. While John practiced ministering, Shirley produced the church’s bulletin and taught Sunday school. The couple was inspired by the Disciples of Christ’s global ministries in the Congo that sent married couples, each spouse with a four-year degree, to mission locations in-country. In 1959, John and Shirley moved to Ontonagon, Michigan where John could teach school, Shirley could work on her college degree at Soumi College, and the family could live economically with his parents.

When John’s father died suddenly, the couple’s plan to become missionaries was put on hold. In 1960, the family returned to Woodland where John took an associate pastorship at Woodland Christian Church and where Shirley again taught Sunday school and was active in Christian Women’s Fellowship.

Over the next two decades, Shirley became a Noon Duty Supervisor at Dingle School and by the early 1970s was hired as an instructional aide for Donna Putnam at Rhoda Maxwell Elementary School.

In their retirement, John and Shirley traveled to Belgium to visit Rosy Mantovani, an American Field Service student who had spent the 1967 school year with the family. Rosy took them to Paris and later brought her nephew to visit them in Woodland. On the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, John and Shirley toured the island as well as Saipan, Tokyo, and Hawaii. John participated in the commemorations at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, ‘Punchbowl’, on Oahu by offering a prayer.

-Shirley loved being a grandmother to Jennifer Burger (Jordan Carroll) and Daniel Burger (Tianzhe Wang) and great-grandmother to Bram Carroll.

After John’s death in May 1996, Shirley remained active for several years with the Iwo Jima Association of America and supported the Wounded Warrior Project, the American Diabetes Association, and the MS Society, among other charities.

Shirley is survived by her daughters, their families, and her good friend Robert R. Serrato.