Entity Collection

: Zelda Jeanne (Ryan) Rouillard; She was born to Calvin and Marie Ryan in Kearney, Nebraska. The 1930 US Census shows that her father was a professor. Her mother was a homemaker. According to an entry about Zelda Rouillard on the blog (r)evolutions, she attended Kearney State College, received a Fullbright scholarship, studied for her M.A. in English at the University of Wyoming, and received her PhD at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The USnewspapers.com Marriage Index indicates that she married Theodore Chase Rouillard of Salt Lake City in 1959. They moved to Colorado, where she taught for a number of years at Nederland High School. She then taught at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado (now Western Colorado University). While at Western State, she taught a class on folklore each year. During the class, students wrote down folktales that they had heard growing up. In this way, she assembled a large amount of Colorado folktales. She was also an expert on the life of the outlaw Belle Starr. *Some information from “Dr. Zelda Jeanne Rouillard, 1929 – 2008” ((r)evolutions, 4 January 2009) **Photograph from the 1968 Nederland High School yearbook.