Sheila Crane Goldsborough
May 9, 1927 — January 20, 2025

In many ways, Sheila's life matches the arc of women's history in America in the 20th century. Born Sheila Claire Pesek on 9 May 1927, to John Mark and Harriette Claire (Miller) Pesek, she was a young woman during the Second World War, when she and many women worked for the war effort. Sheila worked a clerical job for the government, then graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1949. After the war, and a stint with her parents in Vienna as part of the occupying forces (her father Colonel Pesek was a staff officer to General Mark Clark), they returned stateside to the Presidio in San Francisco. Now she, like many, left the workforce to marry. In 1952, she married her first husband Kip Noelle Ling; they moved to Boca Raton, Florida, and had two children Alexandra and David. Shortly afterwards, though, and a bit unusually, she found herself divorced, and returned to California. Not long after, though, she met and married again, this time the mechanical engineer William F. Crane in 1962; they had two more children, Margaret and Mark. In 1968, she designed and built a house in Los Altos. Yet in 1975, she found herself divorced a second time.

This time, though, she was one of many divorced women in California who moved into the workforce from their previous lives as homemakers. With her superior organizational and engineering skills, Sheila managed first an office for the real estate broker Louise Ketchum (herself a divorced working mother of four) for several years before turning to legal secretary work for Los Altos real estate lawyers Roy Alley & Associates before her final office management job with Los Altos attorney Wm Gerald Dunn. She retired from office work in the early 1990s.

But outside the office, late in the 1970s, she met the best of all the husbands, laser physicist John Paul Goldsborough (Ph.D) whom she married, in the fall of 1981, for good. They lived together in that same Los Altos house for over 40 years together, two brilliant and skillful people working projects for the house, garden, sailing trips, family projects and holiday parties with and for their combined 6 children and many grandchildren.

In addition to her son, David and his wife Darla Crane; Sheila is survived by her daughter Margaret and her husband George Amis; her brother John Pesek; stepchildren Pam and Mark Goldsborough; grandchildren Erika Sporleder; Evan Chambers, Spencer Crane, Abbey Crane; Azrea and Catherine Amis; Arthur and Aillen Siebert; and great-grandchildren Jackson Sporleder and West Chambers.