When Ellen Rae Thiel was in elementary school in Jackson, Montana, she used to listen in on the older students’ history classes. She said students were only allowed to start taking history in the fourth grade, and she was not there yet. She did not know why, but she could not resist peaking across the room, straining her ears, and listening in on these stories of the past.
“I was supposed to be probably studying spelling or something, but I was always listening to them. I just always liked history, all my life,” Thiel, 82, said in an interview on July 22.
Throughout her life, Thiel has devoted innumerable hours to history, most recently to the history of Jefferson County in her work as the vice president of The Heritage Center in Boulder. She said that the museum is a nonprofit, therefore all services for the center are volunteer-based. Apart from donations, she said volunteers—Thiel, Nancy Alley, Shirley Rogers and Kathy Dyer—purchase everything: the cartridges for the printers, the paper, the toilet paper, the pens, the glue, the tape.
