Editor’s note: Each Monday, the Kenosha News takes a look at the life of a Kenosha County resident who recently died. We share with you, through the memories of family and friends, a life remembered.

Victoria Wellens was a woman who infused humor in everything she did. Her outrageous sense of humor was second nature and took her through good times and bad.

Her oddball nature allowed her to reach that aspect in other people. She liked characters; she liked people, and in her humility never saw herself as different from others.

“Vic was totally zany and had a wonderful sense of humor,” said Trish Petretti, her friend of over 30 years. “The humor, always the humor.”

Victoria Wellens, 58, of Franksville, died March 28 after a courageous battle with cancer, leaving her husband, Jim Polansky, two stepchildren, three grandchildren and a circle of loving friends.

Wellens left this world, leaving her mark on not only the organizations she worked with, but on people’s hearts.

“She was a touchstone friend, one of those friends who knows all the bad stuff and all your secrets, and you know theirs, and it doesn’t make any difference. You keep connected over the years,” Petretti said.

Wellens was born in Kenosha and attended local schools. She lost both her parents when she was young, and she slowly worked her way though college.

“There was an innocence about Vic and this waif-like quality,” Petretti said.

Wellens was driven in her work, no matter what the job, her husband said.

In the 1970s, she was co-founder of the Chiwaukee Prairie Food Co-op on the UW-Parkside campus, which later moved to Racine.

Much of her work life was dedicated to the non-profit sector, including the Girls Scouts and the YWCA.

“She was exceptionally compassionate,” longtime friend Suzanne Potente said. “She’s one of those people who had a real strong back and a real soft front in a lot of ways.”

Wellens was the executive director of the Wisconsin Humane Society where she had worked the last 15 years of her life.

“That job was a symbiotic connection between her personality and that position, where the motivation and the objective matched perfectly,” Petretti said.

She raised several million dollars in private donations in one year to build a new building for the society in Milwaukee. In five years, she took the society, whose building was literally sinking, built a new facility and made it a model operation.

She then spearheaded the purchase of Puppy Haven Kennel in Markesan, Wis., one of the largest puppy mills in the country, effectively shutting down the operation last summer. Accomplishing this feat required working with certain people many animal rights activists wouldn’t have sat across the table from.

“She was very, very smart about people and about how to negotiate with people, and I think that’s why she was so successful at the Humane Society,” Potente said.

“She was willful, but diplomatic,” Janice Erickson, another longtime friend, said.

Her dedication to her work was evident when she was diagnosed with cancer in August 2006.

“After she started chemotherapy, she never missed work. She missed the day (each week) she went to chemo and the day she went to radiation; the other six days a week she went to work,” Polansky said. “She loved that Humane Society, and she wasn’t about to give it up.”

A very private person, Wellens had a way of handily deflecting questions about herself, friends said, even through her illness. She was more interested in what others were doing and feeling than disclosing information about herself.

Friends spoke of Wellens’ love for entertaining friends and her talent as a cook.

But it was her single-minded devotion to her relationships — both professional and private — that the people in her life remember.

“This planet is out one special soul,” Erickson said.