Shirley L. Pefley's Obituary
Shirley was born in Chicago but raised in Montclair, California from age 2. Growing up she always enjoyed the sunshine and the Southern California beaches. This later evolved to loving the Hawaiian coast and snorkeling with the sea turtles.Shirley attended California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, where she enjoyed working with student teams to build the school’s award winning Rose Parade Floats doing everything from picking flowers to welding.During the summer of 1980 she met her future husband in Pasadena while both were working as young summer interns at a computer company. Their first date was at Disneyland. That would be the start of a 37-year love story. Shirley and David would be married 4 years later to the day from their first date.Shirley graduated with honors in Business in 1982 and began her 17-year career at Intel, with her first job being responsible for purchasing the Silicon for all the worldwide fabs for the rapidly growing company. Her production control and purchasing management career would take her many interesting places including a 4 year period with frequent trips to Japan, with many long hours of intensive Japanese language training. Shirley came to love the Japanese culture and people.After Intel, Shirley soon became a full time Mom, her favorite role. She enjoyed volunteering at the kid’s schools, whether helping the PTA, the marching band, or later just visiting the kids in college on Parent’s Days.Soon after Intel she also started searching for the next chapter of her life, but kept coming back to photography as her passion. She took many classes and worked hard to learn as much as she could from coursework at various institutions, seminars, and at Stanford where she would later find a home photographing collegiate sports as part of the team responsible for sports photography for the university, and on occasion Cal sports as well. She was also a long time photographer for the Los Altos Town Crier covering high school sports and managing the Youth Athletics page for over 6 years.Other photography highlights included covering Giants/Dodgers games for a local newspaper, attending Sports Shooter Academy, winning a photography contest shooting racecars at Sonoma Raceway, and serving as TA in Stanford photography classes.Besides her family and photography, Shirley’s passions included travel, reading books, saxophone, Cinderella, sea turtles, but most of all enjoying a game at AT&T Park watching her San Francisco Giants.After a private 3-year battle with stage four breast cancer, Shirley has passed away. She chose not to share because she wanted to live life as normally as possible. Her passion for family and photography was evident to the end. Prior to the battle, the cancer was present undetected despite mammograms and regular checkups. Services will be private for immediate family only. In lieu of flowers donations to the breast cancer society or charity of your choice in her name can be made if you feel so inclined.Of all her roles, Shirley most enjoyed being a wife and mother, and at that she was the world’s best. Shirley, you will always be remembered and loved, and missed. You made everyone’s life better and we were blessed to have had you in our life.Love from David, Shelby, Daniel, your family and friends.Shirley is survived by her husband David, daughter Shelby, son Daniel, mother Sallie, brother Gary, sister Linda, and nephew and niece Scott and Rachel and many other loving relatives. She was preceded by her very warmly loved father Bill
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