Longtime Darien resident Julianna (“Julie”) Ashley Mortensen passed away peacefully on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2019 at the age of 90, in Gainesville, Florida.
Julianna Mortensen, 90, passed away on Sept. 4.
Julie was born on July 20, 1929 in San Diego to Richard F. Kahle and Katherine Morrison Kahle. After her parents got divorced and her mother married Harold L. McClinton, Julie went by the name Julie McClinton.
Julie graduated from Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1947 and attended Oberlin University in Ohio in 1948-1949.
In 1950, Julie married William V. Ashley, son of Daniel W. Ashley and Lillian Keith Ashley of Darien, whom she met while working as a teller at the Union Trust Company branch (now the Wells Fargo branch) near the Darien train station.
After they married, they moved into a newly built house on Highfield Lane on property split off from the elder Ashleys’ property. Julie continued to live in the same house on Highfield for the next 60 years, until 2010.
— This obituary was previously published in the Darien Times.
Julie and Mr. Ashley divorced in 1969. In 1973, she married Martin A. Mortensen, who passed away in 1991.
She had been living near the home of her daughter, Catharine Ashley Muskus.
Julie was a member of the Junior League and the Wee Burn Country Club. In the 1970s, she worked as the audio/video department manager at Darien High School and in the 1980s as a bookkeeper for an accounting firm in Stamford and for her second husband’s insurance company.
Her true vocation, however, was her children and grandchildren and her gothic romance novels, which she read at a pace of one a day.
Julie is survived by her daughter Catharine Ashley Muskus and her husband Patrick Muskus of Williston, Florida, son Chase Ashley and his wife Kathleen Ashley of New Canaan, grandchildren Tricia Muskus Perez, Katrina Muskus, Kaitlin Ashley, Hillary Ashley, Samantha Ashley and Connor Ashley, and great-grandchildren Michaela Perez and Logan Perez.