Anita Marie Fortney, 75, passed away on December 19, 2017.
Anita is survived by her husband Jack; daughters Jacqueline Walp of Wichita, KS and Michelle Fortney of West Coxsackie, NY; sister Terri Rowland of Wichita, KS.
Anita is preceded in death by her parents.
Wife and companion of husband, Jack K. Fortney, Jr., married 4/08/1983.
Anita was born to a high school 14 yr. old mother, Leora, and was raised by her and her aunts until Lawrence, her father, returned from serving in the U.S. Army in WW2 in the Pacific theater when they set up home as a family. A few years later, a sister, Terri, was born to them.
Anita was schooled at various locations in Wichita and eventually graduated from Wichita's North High School in 1960. She attended Graceland University in Iowa for a time and came back to finish her degree at Wichita University, graduating in 1965.
She went into teaching foreign language (Spanish), located in central Missouri for a time, then moved to teach in Spain, Japan, and the Hawaiian islands in the following years until she left the profession to manage grants for treating newborns and mothers with heroin addictions at a large hospital in Houston, Texas until the early to mid 1970s.
She traveled for a time with some friends and helped manage an apartment complex in San Francisco until locating in upstate N.Y. briefly before returning to Wichita late in 1978, meeting her future husband Jack in mid 1989. She and Jack moved back to upstate N.Y. in the summer of 1980 where he had hoped to live closer to his daughters from his first marriage. In 1981, Anita and Jack returned to Wichita - he to work for Anita's step father in the machine tool business in W. Wichita.
They lived for a time in Ralston, Ne. where Jack managed a branch office of P&L Machinery. They were married then and the economic recession of the early '80s forced them to relocate to Andover, Ks where Jack took a position at Augusta Municipal Airport in '85.
Wanting to work with animals, they moved to Strafford, Mo in 1988 to work at a large drive through exotic animal park. The position was closed late in the year and they returned to Wichita where Jack was offered a mobile home park maintenance position.
After the passing of Anita's father in 1990, they moved to a home in the central Ozarks and opened a used book store in the mid '90s in Cabool, Mo. When the business failed in the late '90s, they moved to West Plains, Mo where Jack took up a position as a traveling technician/contractor with a Sears store from which he retired in '83.
Early during their time in Missouri, Anita developed diabetes and some hearing loss which she was able to overcome by the time Jack retired. They returned to set up home in Augusta, Ks where they lived simply and began to take care of orphaned felines that populated the mobile home park they live in, as many as 20 to care for at times.
Anita was weakened by immune system disorders which contributed to her lessening of activity over the years and developed digestive system distresses that lead to her being hospitalized in Sept., '17 to dilate her esophagus to allow nutrition for her body. During this time, a kind of dementia set in and contributed to her physically failing until her passing peacefully in her sleep at a Wichita dementia care home.
A remarkable person coming from the austere and turbulent times of the early '40s and the war years that set the tone for us all who came into the world at that time.
*Contributed by her husband, Jack Fortney - 12/21/2017*
Private family services will be held at a later date.
