Susan A. Ellis

Susan A. Ellis passed peacefully from this world on January 5th, 2020 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Born Susan Audrey Whitten on May 7th, 1944, she was a dancer when she was young. Ballet, Tap, even the Can-Can! In between dance recitals she would patrol the mean streets of Binghamton, New York on her bike dressed as a cowgirl, having fun and bruising up her knees to her mother’s constant chagrin. When she was 16 she moved with her father Clyde, mother Harriet and younger sister Sherry (Poulter) to St. Petersburg, Florida where she later graduated from Dixie Hollins High School.  Her older sister Mary (Plauson) was at that time living in Maryland with her husband Richard, whom Susie adored and thought of as a brother.

At age 21 and after a whirlwind romance at the Grand Way Supermarket she married Norman Ellis and had three children – Michael (Michelle), Christine, and Amy (Andy). Alas the union would not last, and in 1978 she moved up to the land of the ice and snow (otherwise known as Wisconsin). However, as an eternally free spirit and domestic pet enthusiast, she continued to answer the call of distant lands by taking her children, dogs and cats to points even further west before finally settling back in La Crosse in 1991.  During that time she attempted to teach her children multiple valuable lessons, including the fact that you should never put a dish in the sink without immediately washing it, eggs are always better with ketchup, all James Bond movies are good James Bond movies and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the greatest football team in the world.  Although not all of those lessons stuck, she did provide us with a beautiful example of a wonderful mother, confidant, and friend. She was also part of the duo that brought you the International Bake Shoppe in the 1980’s. If you were living in La Crosse during that decade there is a very good chance that your life was made a little sweeter by those delicious treats.  Sadly, her later years were marked by the long-term illness that would eventually rob her of both her memory and physical health, but in spite of that, she maintained that sassy cowgirl spirit until the very end.  We hope she is in Heaven dancing her heart out.

Funeral services will be held at 10:30 A.M. on Saturday, January 11, 2020 at Schumacher-Kish Funeral and Cremation Services La Crescent chapel; 111 South Oak St. Pastor Dan Cravillion will officiate. Burial will follow in the Toledo Cemetery, rural La Crescent. Friends may call on the family at the funeral home on Saturday from 9:30 A.M. until the time of services. All are welcome. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Alzheimer’s Association.