Mourning the Passing of Friends: Forthcoming Funeral Services

“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose.  All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” ~ Helen Keller

Forthcoming funeral services are planned for the following friends from our community. Complete versions of these obituaries may also be found in The Payson Chronicle.

JULIE WEST STAHELI

Julie West Staheli passed away at her home on April 23rd, 2018. She was born on June 25, 1939 in Payson, Utah where her parents, Lucille McMullin West and Ray B. West Jr. had travelled from Cedar City for the event. After Julie was born, the family moved on to Ogden where Julie’s father taught English. This move would set the pattern for the rest of Julie’s life and she would go on to live in Montana, Kansas, Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, California, Innsbruck, Austria, Salzburg, Austria and Cannes, France, as well as various other places on-location designing costumes for stage and film. 

During Julie’s young life, her family would return to Utah every summer to visit relatives.  In her 16th  year Julie met a farm boy, decided he was “the one” and asked him on a date. That date would last for the next 63 years. Julie’s passion was the creative process and she would turn her new boyfriend into an artist rather than a student studying forestry and playing football at Utah State University.  On Valentine’s day, 1959 Julie and Paul eloped to Las Vegas and were married. Over the following years, they would have four children: Sarah, Heather, Jessica and Joshua. 

Paul graduated from USU in 1962 and earning that degree was a joint effort: Paul attended the classes and took the tests and Julie wrote the papers! During their college days Julie took classes in the Art Department as well as worked in the Theater Arts Department’s costume shop and acted in several productions. Her work in the costume shop was where she discovered her affinity for costume design and the experience earned her a position at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Julie was then hired as a guest lecturer in costuming and designed the costumes for the university’s production of “Hamlet” to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th birthday. That year the Corvallis Arts Center also gave her a one-woman show of her paintings. Julie returned to Ashland one more time for the 1965 theater season, this time designing and building the armor, jewelry and crowns used in the plays that season.

Over the next few years, Julie would go on to design costumes for the Millan Theatre Company in Detroit, Michigan, the Citadel Theater in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. During this time her paintings and costume renderings were also shown at several galleries in the San Francisco Bay area.
In the Fall of 1970 Julie and her family moved to San Diego where she taught costume design, construction, and elements of design at the United States International University, School of Performing Arts. This was a busy and fruitful time as Julie also designed costumes for Star Light Opera Company, The Old Globe Theater and the San Francisco Opera traveling company, as well as gave birth to her third daughter. 

In 1972 Julie moved into designing for film. Her first was an educational film for Encyclopedia Britannica, followed by a bicentennial film for the US post office.  During this time she also took classes in ceramics, weaving, porcelain doll making, and stained glass making – all of which would remain creative mediums for the rest of her life. 

Julie then spent the next several years as costume designer for Sunn Classic Pictures, designing a number of NBC mini-series. One mini-series - “Greatest Heroes of the Bible” - was shot on location in Page, Arizona. Later Julie would say that she hired “every lady in Page who could sew” so they could build the hundreds of biblical costumes needed for the show.

During those years, the family lived in Park City where Julie continued to pursue her passion for creativity, taking art classes at the Kimball Art Center. One of her paintings titled “Portrait of the Artist’s Family with the Artist Conspicuously Missing” was featured in the Salt Lake Tribune’s review of the Park City Kimball Arts Festival. This painting remains a favorite of her family and her conspicuous absence is felt deeply.

Over the rest of her life, Julie would continue to design costumes for feature films and the first season of the “Father Dowling” TV series, but she always pursued her own creative endeavors and the family home in Payson became one of her artistic passions. Julie made stained glass windows for the Victorian home and for her tree house, where she would retreat to write without interruption. This was a particularly productive time for her creativity: her short story “Killer Horses” won first place in the William Van Wert Award for Fiction from Hidden River Arts; several of her stories where recognized by the League Utah Writers Guild, and she was published in Irreantum, a Mormon literary magazine. San Francisco’s Troubador press also published her educational coloring book titled “Kachina Dolls: Color and Cut-Out Collection Adapted from Hopi Originals” for which Julie created all the art work and wrote the text.

Julie also transformed the grounds of the family’s home into a park-like setting, which drew friends and family from as close as across town to as far away as Paris for her yearly Labor Day gathering. Julie loved being surrounded by her loved ones, family and friends alike, and this gathering has provided many fond memories.

Julie always set the bar high for herself in everything she did, whether it was her art, her writing, her costume design, her doll-making, her gardening or her mothering of her four children. She is deeply missed and is survived by her husband, Paul Staheli; her four children, Sarah Boyle, Heather Staheli, Jessica Staheli and Joshua Staheli; and her seven grandchildren Christopher Ezell, Matthew Staheli, Nicholas Ezell, Austin Ezell, Austin Travis, Madelyn Boyle and Audrey Boyle.