Everybody Has a Story – December 2014/January 2015

There are a few people in every town you can count on. These are the people who step-up when work needs to be done, volunteer, and then actually do it when they say they will. Sometimes a town is lucky enough to have one such who also has creative abilities and can design the posters, paint the banners, take the photos, imagine the spaces. Even more rarely, that person is also someone who is both right and left-brained and can organize the heck out of anything. Oh, how lucky is Jacksonville. We have one such in Jeanena Whitewilson.

Jeanena is not just home grown, she has pioneer chops galore. Her mother, Dorothy Hogue, was born in Kerby; her grandmother was born in Waldo. Seven generations of Jeanena’s family can be found in cemeteries throughout the Rogue and Illinois Valleys, including a great-great-grandfather James Collins who arrived in 1852 from a small Missouri township with the local Applegate family. Three of Jeanena’s lineages settled in Jackson County prior to Oregon becoming a state.

Jeanena grew-up in Kerby, just west of Grants Pass, in a house set on the corner of the Hogue family ranch. Her Grandparents, Alice and James Hogue, had a big three-story farmhouse on the ranch, surrounded by a porch big enough to handle all the relatives. Jeanena recalls many weekends spent watching her Dad, Granddad, uncles, and great uncles sitting on that porch challenging each other to see who could peel the most apples or potatoes with their sharp knives without breaking the peel, while her great-aunts, all wearing house dresses and long rolled-down cotton stockings and orthopedic shoes, sat on another part of the porch stringing beans and prepping vegetables for her Grandma, Mom and aunts who were busy cooking in the kitchen. Meanwhile, the children scurried around the vegetable garden, keeping everyone supplied, or grabbed snacks and dashed through wheat and alfalfa fields toward the coolness of the Illinois River.

Jeanena’s father, David White was born in Wellsville, Ohio just months prior to his father, Pvt. Vance White’s death in the WWI trenches of Germany. Young David came west by train with his mother, Viva, and an uncle to sell their pottery dishes to San Francisco restaurants. David came to Oregon looking for work when he was 16-years-old, finding a job on the Hogue Ranch, where he met Jeanena’s mom, the tiny 4’8” adventurous Dorothy. David served in the submarine Navy for 17 years, several of them during World War II. They had three daughters, the youngest, Jeanena, born in 1948.

Jeanena adored her father. “Dad taught me to dance. I would stand on the toes of his shoes while Mom, who didn’t read music, played classical and blues piano beautifully. Dad had the best posture of any man, and was oh so handsome. He was my hero, and I was forever his baby girl.”

David worked on the ranch and Dorothy worked at the Kerby Market, they raised their daughters, and laughed with their families. A few times a year Granddad Hogue would put sides onto his big flatbed truck, load it with horses, and park his grandchildren on the tailgate of the truck. They’d take-off to join the large extended family for a week-long cattle drive, where the women would cook and tell stories and the men and Grandma Hogue would round-up the range cattle, and the whole family would gather in the evenings sharing the day’s tales.

Jeanena was shy and quiet, and seldom spoke unless spoken to. But she listened hard to all the stories, and felt safe and happy surrounded by all that family. In Kerby, she spent a lot of her time exploring the countryside and the forests, taking along her pet cats, and gathering found objects to make into imaginary creatures. She drew pictures and noticed tiny details of the rich world around her. This bucolic life came to an abrupt end just as Jeanena was to enter Middle School, when David and Dorothy moved to Vallejo, California, taking their daughters with them. Vallejo was a shock, big and crowded. There was no extended family there. But it was where a teacher took special notice of Jeanena’s artistic abilities, and encouraged her to sculpt and draw.

In high school she met a boy, and married him when she was not quite 18 years of age before he left for Viet Nam. In December of 1969 they had a daughter, Tracy. They had a son, Eric just weeks after their 1972 move to Napa County where Jeanena upholstered furniture, created and sold art, baked, preserved jam, made venison jerky, raised the children, and began college classes that eventually lead to three degrees in Behavioral and Natural Sciences and Education. She was still shy and mainly focused within her home. When Tracy was 5, the marriage ended and Jeanena needed to come out of her shell. She described herself as having been “a ‘crock-pot Mom.’ I would get up in the morning, feed the kids, pack lunches, and fill the crock pot so it would have a healthy dinner ready when the kids got home from school. I’d meet them for an early dinner, get homework started, and return to work.” Neighbor kids frequently gathered at her home to play and do art projects. Jeanena made it work. She had always worked: contracting housing for Fort Riley, Kansas military families; AT&T in San Francisco; Case Management for persons in Napa and Sonoma with developmental disabilities; then teaching computer graphics, and contracting workplace training through Napa Community College and Adult Schools. In 1982 her organizational abilities and hard work finally paid-off. She earned her California State license in Cosmetology and opened a 5-station salon in downtown Napa, which gave her a flexible schedule to finally get that BA Degree from San Francisco State University, majoring in Fine Arts/Conceptual Design.

It was in the 1980’s that she met Charlie Wilson, but they were simply friends at first. It wasn’t until several years later, when Jeanena’s children were grown, when both Charlie and Jeanena were recuperating from the loss of important relationships, that they started seeing each other. In 2003, they married and moved to Jacksonville. Jeanena likens her return to Oregon as being like the salmon returning home.

Immediately becoming involved in Jacksonville, Jeanena helped with our town’s visioning process, volunteered with Garden Club and Boosters Club, took photos for Jacksonville Review, Chamber, and other non-profits, helped save and add interest to Scheffel-Thurston Park, served as a trolley and home tour history docent, volunteered for Southern Oregon Historical Society, coordinated Jacksonville Celebrates the Arts to raise funds toward creating a new Community Center, and touched virtually every civic celebration.

Here is a woman who loves life, works hard, creates beautiful things, and celebrates community and kindness and family. She is a grandma who would make her pioneer ancestors oh so proud.