After leading a life much larger than most of us are allotted, Aurora’s famous lady of felines and flowers left it all behind for good last week.
Karen Kay Schultz signed off, and perhaps died, May 18, 2017.
While her body finally failed her at 74, she leaves behind generations of cats, astonishing day lilies and ham radio waves that have been traveling toward the end of the universe for decades now.
She was, and forever will be, Aurora’s Cat Lady.
Her history is rich. She and her husband, Glenn, who died a few years before her, lived in that odd northeast part of Aurora where small-ish homes dot giant lots that spill out onto the Colorado prairie. It was a perfect place to set up a ham radio tower, plant tens of thousands of prize-winning lilies and collect 80 cats.
I met Karen more than 20 years ago while I was writing a story about pet problems in the Aurora metro area. The local shelter was championing laws that restricted cat and dog owners, limiting the number of pets in an effort to prevent another notorious LuAnne Strickland disaster. Strickland, the wife of a former state Senate President Ted Strickland, was discovered hoarding more than 600 cats and dogs on her rural property in 1991, not far from Aurora.
As the city limited cat owners to five animals, Schultz lined up with a few others to “grandfather”in their bigger packs. Schultz won the dog with the biggest pack at 80 kitties. Yup, 80.
I had to see Karen and her crew for myself. Of course she had searing red hair, an in-your-face voice and attitude to match. If it hadn’t been for her remarkable humor, she could have been a bully. Instead, she was an eccentric rabble-rouser who saw animal ownership rights not inferior to the Second Amendment. She could have had a whiskey named after her.
Rather than shun media attention, she capitalized on it. Inside, her house was neat, but there were cats and cat hair and cat toys everywhere. One room held nothing but about a dozen litter boxes, changed a couple of times a day. The cats were all healthy and seemed about as happy as any cat could. They were cats.
“Why?” I kept asking. “Why would you do this?”
She seemed totally unprepared for the world’s most obvious question, but she never hesitated.
“They need me,” Karen said. They were almost all from shelters, unable to find homes. They were all spayed. They were all over.
It cost her a fortune to feed and care for so many animals. A serious chunk of her Mountain Bell paychecks fed stray cats never allowed outside. After about an hour of listening to the stories of the cats we encountered in the house, picked up, put down, stepped over or around, I couldn’t take any more. Long allergic to cats, it was dander overload.
To this day, my nose itches almost uncontrollably when I fire up the synapses where those memories are kept.
But outside, there, all around her acre or so lot, were thousands and thousands of the most beautiful day lilies in Colorado. Not only did Karen amass just about every breed of felis catus on the list, she made a serious stab at every known species of hemerocallis, the coveted day lily. Way beyond what most of us know as orange-and-yellow Tiger Lilies, Karen’s garden boasted some of the most sought and award-winning specimens on the planet.
Any of her passions, the cats, the endless ham radio chattering or the lilies, would practically preclude a job or any other life. But Karen and Glenn were un-fazed by it all.
She won her “fanciers” permit after a few city inspections, and she kept her 80 kitties. Soon after, she started holding an annual lily sale that benefited a few local no-kill cat shelters. It grew into a big annual event, and she raised thousands of dollars in benefit.
Over the years, Karen would call to announce her lily sale, catch me up on the cats and sometimes just gripe about a story in the paper or something she wanted me to know just wasn’t right. Like everything else about Karen, her voice was unmistakable.
Life changed when Glenn died in 2012. She not only missed his help, she missed a connection that few people ever have with their partners.
In 2014, her own health failed. Her hair went white. Hospitalized, she couldn’t take care of the cats. The city found out and removed dozens of sick and starving animals, a fate Karen worked her entire life to keep other people from inflicting on cats.
“It is dirty, and I am ashamed of it,” she told reporter Brandon Johansson. But she maintained she was not a hoarder, just down on her luck.
Defiant, she sued and won the right to retain five cats in her house, which she said was cold comfort for the loss of all her animals.
“They came in and they took my whole family,” she said. “Every last one of them.”
In poor health, she later gave up the lilies, went off the air as KAØCDN, and eventually left her home and last five cats.
Last week, she left, too.
In my own garden, however, I see Karen every summer as hemerocallis esculenta and hemerocallis lilioasphodelus, specimens I bought from her, wave to me in the hot July breezes.
All those cats are now probably scattered now across the country, about as far as her ham-radio broadcasts can travel.
So she’s not really gone. Dying, like living, was too small a thing for the likes of Karen Schultz.
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