James Wilson "Jim" Jessee (72) Passed Away on November 30, 2020
A Celebration of the Life of
James Wilson “Jim” Jessee
in “Jim Jessee Fashion”
Scroll to bottom for funeral and celebration of life information
Brownie, Toby, and little Jimmy Jessee
Jim Jessee (72) was born on November 16, 1948 at Enloe Hospital in Chico, CA to Earl Wilson “Toby” JESSEE of Chico and Frances Sylvia “Brownie” BROWNFIELD of San Francisco, CA. He died on November 30, 2020, peacefully, if not suddenly and all-too-soon, in his sleep with his hands serenely folded across his chest.
As he had on many Sunday evenings with friends and neighbors in “the Avenues,” during his 49-year residency on Hobart Street, Jim enjoyed “a good supper” of stuffed peppers from this year’s last harvest of his and his wife Nelda Faye (MELINE) Jessee’s summer garden. Under the full moon’s silvery lining of the sycamore branches that arch high over their home, and with his toes left out, Jim tucked himself and his newly-adopted terrier mutt, Mollie, into their beds and fell into the last and longest rest of his storied life.
GOD WOULD SAY:
“I can't tell you if there's anything after this life but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is not. As if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.”
— Spinoza —
Inseparable from the Jessee Family’s four-generation history in Chico, Jim lived, wrote, and worked to preserve local history as an author, publisher, volunteer, citizen, and rabble-rouser.
He used to take the bus from the Jessee Family Home Place on north side of Sandy Gulch, just east of the railroad tracks, and as one of the earliest drop-offs for the bus route, “Jimmy” would frequently run and slide on his knees on the freshly-waxed hallway floors of Citrus Elementary School in the 1950s. That was, until the time he slid right into the legs of the unsuspecting school principal, who rounded the corner to a low, stealth-attack. Though not at that time funny to young Jimmy, he relished telling the story at the Citrus School’s 75th Anniversary assembly, when he waxed on about the old days to an assembly that included his own children, Earl and Emma Jessee, as legacy students of Citrus Elementary at that time. It was neither the first, nor last of many stories lived, told, and re-told— at times unedited and unsuitable for all audiences— and always with bright eyes and bountiful laugh.
Jim’s generations-long memory, wit, humor, and storytelling abilities have, in recent years, found him a natural author and eulogist for the Jessee Family, and the large “family of friends” that has always flowed through Jim and Nelda’s home and often around their supper table during their 49-year marriage.
Jim and Nelda Jessee on their 49th Wedding Anniversary, October 23, 2020 at Llano Seco Wildlife Refuge
Jim and Nelda both graduated from Chico High School in 1966, during the throes of the Viet Nam War and “the draft” looming large in the lives of American families. Having lost his father, a wounded veteran of WWII, at the tender age of 10, Jim was exempt from military service as a “sole surviving son,” but he quickly thrust himself into what became a life-long commitment of service to the community, and to peace and justice in the world. As a Boy Scout and proud American Democrat with a love of history, Jim was instilled with the ideals of democracy and service, and he threw himself into the work that he felt the world needed. Jim, like many young men and women of the time, stood to answer the call of the times:
“Ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country.”
— President John F. Kennedy
As an undergraduate and graduate student at Chico State College from ‘66–‘74, Jim was an eager volunteer at Community Action Volunteers in Education (CAVE), and its director from ‘71–‘73. “It was a time of great foment and action of all kinds on campus,” Jim recently said in an interview for the 50th Anniversary of CAVE. “Social issues and causes motivated us, including Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, Peace Corps, and much of the liberal agenda of the day. And let’s not forget that marijuana and psychedelics were having their day.”
When he left CAVE in 1975, Jim was founder and founding board member of “CHIP,” Community Housing Improvement Program, for which he served as president for most of the next 38 years. CHIP continues to bring alive the American Dream for many families who might otherwise never own a home. Jim’s volunteerism and leadership at CHIP was one his proudest accomplishments, only to be eclipsed by his extremely good fortune to marry the girl of his dreams, Nelda Faye MELINE, with whom he raised his children. He always said that he was “very, very lucky to marry as far up as I did.” Don’t we know it.
“The Early Gang” at CHIP
Jim Jessee contemplate’s CHIP’s future.
GOD WOULD SAY:
“Stop asking me ‘will you tell me how to do my job?’ Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you or criticize you, nor get angry, or bothered. I am pure love.”
– Spinoza —
Jim in Dubrovnik, 1975
In the mid-1970s, Jim and Nelda, then graduate students in their early twenties, traveled extensively.
They spent a year in Europe, mostly in Macedonia, where they pioneered a graduate student exchange program to Skopje, Macedonia, in then-Yugoslavia. As he’s told them, Jim’s stories have grown in scope and color through the years, and though he considered Nelda priceless, he was, indeed, offered 14 camels and 100 sheep for her, while enjoying a hookah and luxuriating on a rug in Jericho with a man who claimed the name Ali Baba.
In Germany in 1974, they purchased a 1966 Volkswagen Bug with a blown engine. With the help of a gift from friend Allen Barter, a book called “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot,” they replaced the engine, and ultimately shipped the car back to the United States and by way of many backroads, traversed the country, visiting as much family and seeing as much country as a couple broke bohemians could. That bug, fondly known as “Dudu Dubois” (it means “beetle” in Swahili… plus some hippy-dippy bohemian creole mash-up) is still in the family, today.
Nelda in Dubrovnik, 1975
Jim at Montclair, 1968
In his junior year of college in ’68-‘69, Jim was a National Student Exchange to Montclair State University in New Jersey, and met his life-long and best friend, Ray Cooper from Bayonne, NJ, who would a few years later come to graduate school at Chico State, and live with Jim, Nelda, and their young children, who affectionately still refer to him as “Uncle Bun.” Like Jim, he was an a-“bun”-dant man of enormous personality and intellect, and a real “gentle giant.”
“It was the first year that Montclair University allowed gays and blacks into the college dorms, and they stuck them all together on the same floor with the Californians and the other odd balls,” Jim told it, many times. “I didn’t quite understand why I didn’t get along with my fastidious roommate— but, when I met Ray, a 6’3” All-State New Jersey linebacker, and saw that this guy had salami hanging in his closet, I thought, ALL-RIGHT, MAN, this is my kinda guy!” Jim would let out a commanding peal of laughter, at this point in the story. “He was the first black person I ever talked to, and we immediately fell in like long lost brothers,” Jim wrote in a remembrance.
Ray at Montclair, 1968
His year “abroad,” as he called his stint in New Jersey was extremely formative. Jim was welcomed into Ray’s large family in Bayonne, and with their warmth, guidance, and love, began his unabashed “re-education.” Ray and Jim considered themselves brothers and were each other’s mentor and closest confidante.
While on the East Coast, Jim also cemented his relationship with his cousins Sidney & Sally SHLOMKOWITZ. Sidney was one of the five members of Jim’s Polish-Jewish family to survive the Holocaust, and in Sidney’s later years, Jim and Nelda would travel back to visit Sydney in Far Rockaway, NY, always staying with best friend Ray Cooper, his wife Lee and sister Diane “Di” LADSON.
Back in Chico, Jim became the Chico State International Studies Program director.
In the late-70s and early-‘80s Jim organized, and he and Nelda welcomed, and often housed, many students from lands as far-flung as Sierra Leone, West Africa, and as foreign as Bayonne, NJ. This international influence left a deeply-seeded influence of music, culture, and common humanity in Jim and Nelda’s family, and upon their children.
Sydney Shlomkowitz
GOD WOULD SAY:
“Respect your peers and don't do what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that alertness is your guide.”
– Spinoza —
In 1975, Jim joined the staff of the Office of the Provost at CSU, Chico, and wore many hats. He retired as the “Director of Academic Facilities, Publications, and Database” aka “Director of Space and Time,” as Nelda affectionately put it, in 2008, just before his 60th birthday.
In 1978 and 1980, Jim and Nelda had two children, Earl Wilson JESSEE (42) and Emma Elizabeth JESSEE (40), both at Enloe Hospital in Chico— and in the very maternity ward their grandma Brownie, Jim’s mom, worked for many years as a pediatric nurse.
Over the years, Jim and Nelda welcomed many of their children’s friends into their family— sharing home-cooked meals to whomever happened to be there at supper time— which many made a point of doing, as Nelda is a fabulous cook. Jim, especially, was always eager to have company at the dinner table, and to sit in the living room or his upstairs “den” and ponder the world with the young friends his children brought around. A close friend of Earl’s commented, “he [Jim] was probably the first adult I ever met with whom I could casually explore intellectual heresies.” And Jim loved a new set of ears for his stories, so long as— for their eye’s sake— they confirmed from the doorway that he had pants on and gave him the opportunity to pull the newspaper across his lap.
GOD WOULD SAY:
“Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son's eyes… you will find me in no book!”
— Spinoza —
“Over-sharing” was a theme in Jim’s life.
One thyroid down, Jim developed a frequent chill, as he aged. The once rarely-clad-after-5pm Jim grew very fond of his locally-woven Magic Strands scarves, thick flannel shirts (preferably with flaps on the pockets), and with increased frequency, he had warm pants on— though it was always wise to check. His son, now 42 and with two young girls to embar— er, raise, carries on this family tradition.
It was on his 60th birthday that, after years of study and a lifelong, perhaps now-eternal “wrestle with God,” Jim fully embraced his Judaism and had his “Bar Torah”— which is a “Bar Mitzvah for late bloomers,” as his son teasingly puts it. Having been raised in a household of mixed faith, in the considerably smaller and more rural Chico of the 1940s and ‘50s, Jim’s Jewish mother (a transplant from San Francisco) and the Jessee clan embraced all of the Judeo-Christian holidays, and perhaps more to Jim’s delight, all the holiday meals.
During the 12 years of his retirement, Jim continued to study philosophy, literature, history, politics, family, faith, and more than a few Hallmark movies— especially if they had dogs, which always choked him up. He really hated it when they went “Old Yeller” on him.
Between naps, Jim would fill his time writing, researching, and documenting our genealogy “for the grandkids,” compiling local history, crying with the Hallmark Channel, and yelling at MSNBC. He was passionate and filled with “righteous anger,” as he called it. He held disbelief that the world’s challenges, to which he had committed his life of service, were as strong and seemingly unsurmountable, today, as they were when he awoke as a “thinking ape” in the late ‘60s. Jim was well-read and opinionated, but not entrenched in his understanding of the world under the enormous sycamore trees on Hobart Street, and he welcomed new people and perspectives with open arms, and without cynicism.
GOD WOULD SAY:
“Stop asking for forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. If I made you... I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies... free will. How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you?”
– Spinoza —
Jim had an affinity for beige cars, and with his golden-buff-colored hybrid, he and Nelda joined the “Parade of Priuses” and immersed themselves in Congregation Beth Israel, a progressive Jewish congregation in Chico. Jim fully embraced the friendship and fellowship of the CBI community, and rarely missed a service, book club, or potluck. In this wonderful community, he felt very at home, growing in faith, love, and perspective. We hope, ultimately, that he found what he was looking for, but we know that he had more than a few questions for the “God of Spinoza,” whom, along with Albert Einstein, Jim came to respect highly in his last years.
Friday night Shabbat candles were lit, religiously (Dad jokes were his legacy, too), in the last decade of Jim’s life, and Saturday mornings often brought another sort of gathering. Without Jim stopping up foot traffic at the end of an aisle at the Saturday Morning Chico Certified Farmer’s Market, the market will feel a little different for many Chicoans (he preferred “Chicans”) as the last leaves Fall, this year. For him, the Farmer’s Market was more a social outing than it was to buy local foods or tomato starts for the garden he meticulously planned and tended his entire life in the Avenues.
The web browser on Jim’s computer was left open to heirloom and rare pepper seed catalogs, as he planned next Spring’s planting— always in search of the perfect pepper to capture that Macedonian Ajvar flavor that he and Nelda fell in love with during their travels. Every harvesttime, throughout the year, Grandpa Jim (or “Ompa,” as Earl’s daughters call him) absolutely delighted in having his four granddaughters come to dig potatoes, pick tomatoes (Helen’s favorite are the Juliettes), pull onions and carrots, and raid the raspberry patch. We rarely saw many fresh berries make it into the same, yellow colander that Earl and Emma picked into, some 30 years before.
Consistently seeking weekend respite at his beloved cabin along the creek in Butte Meadows, Jim gravitated toward a hammock, a good book, and spent evenings listening to Afro-pop on the radio, before he clicked it over to BBC on the AM Shortwave.
He loved to travel to the coast, and to spend time with Nelda, a good book, and a good dog. He and Nelda hosted many family reunions, and welcomed many friends to share their slice of Heaven at the cabin.
GOD WOULD SAY:
“Stop going into those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and saying they are my house. My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That's where I live, and there I express my love for you.”
– Spinoza —
Jim’s musical tastes were eclectic, and, forgiving his Yanni and Pharoah Sanders CD collection— he wasn’t of perfect taste— he often volunteered to usher for Chico State Performances productions. He loved to be out in the Chico State community with friends, new-found and life-long, always seeking the way in which “we are all cousins, if we just go back far enough,” as he frequently said.
Jim was a genealogist of a most storied scale, boasting more than 100,000 records in his genealogy database.
Jessees the world over have lost, perhaps, their greatest archivist. Beginning at 13-years-old, Jim hungrily researched his and then Nelda’s family ancestry around the world, and delighted in the advent of affordable DNA testing, which allowed him to find new cousins, add new branches to his family tree, and to proudly point out just how much Neanderthal blood he had in his veins. It was common for Jim to have phone calls with 5th cousins two-and-a-half-somehow removed, mentoring, and helping them to discover their, and our own common humanity. He could see and organize the connections between us all, and spin many a family yarn— but always sought confirmation and truth before committing to an entry. A true researcher and intellectual historian, Jim would happily bound down the stairs from his “den” and share with his family his new, and often very old discoveries of linkages, new stories, and at times disappointing contradictions.
Jim recently, via video chat, thoroughly enjoyed telling his granddaughters, Helen (8) and Clara (6), about the princesses from which they are descended, complete with illustrations and Google Earth Maps. But, as a lifelong champion of the underdog, he didn’t forget to make a plug for the common man. “There are more paupers than princes, he would say.”
Julie Ann Jessee, Jim’s sister, 1970s.
Jim is preceded in death by his parents; his sole sister, Julie Ann JESSEE (65) of Chico, CA; and his chosen-brother, Ray Maurice COOPER (64) of Orange, NJ.
He is survived by his wife of 49 years, Nelda Faye (Meline) JESSEE; his son Earl Wilson JESSEE and partner Meegan Tara Condon JESSEE with their daughters Helen Violet (8) and Clara Kelly (6) JESSEE; his daughter Emma Elizabeth JESSEE and partner Robb GAGE with their daughters Margaret Elizabeth “Maggie Bess” GAGE (4) and Emmeline Jessee “Emmie” GAGE (2); his first cousins and considered brothers Gary JESSEE of Auburn, CA and Jay JESSEE of Junction City, OR, with whom he shared a home for many years, growing up on the Jessee Ranch; countless cousins, and a wide gamut of friends, all of whom he kept contact with through his research and intimate Annual Letters, in which he often relayed the news with cringing honesty; and his little, rescued dog, Mollie.
Earl, Meegan, Helen, and Clara Jessee at Bumpass Hell, Lassen National Park, 2020
Nelda and her grandchildren, 2018.
Robb, Maggie, Emmie, and Emma enjoying the outdoors during the pandemic, 2020
Emmie, Maggie Bess, Helen, and Clara, Thanksgiving, 2019.
Jim Jessee is a presence that will walk alongside many, many souls on this Earth and beyond.
To all those who cannot come together to grieve, we ask you consider doing some of the following:
Light a candle for Jim.
Put on some nice music you love.
Have an excellent dinner.
Hug the ones you love (who are in your household).
Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while and share a laugh (or a cry, whatever you need).
Have a stiff drink in his honor (he loved Bourbon, Scotch, and Slivovitz).
p.s. Mollie found a place with Earl, Meegan, Helen, Clara, and their dog Millie, whom Jim also loved very much… and she’s made herself right at home.
Funeral
CBI Funeral Service: Video Chat via Zoom
Monday, December 7, 2020 at 9:30am.
To allow us all to gather in a Covid-safe way, the service will be on Zoom for family, friends, and Congregation Beth Israel members.
Passcode 642270.
Shiva Minyan: Video Chat via Zoom
Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 9:30am.
To allow us to gather together in a pandemic-safe way, AND to include all those who loved and cherished Jim around the country (and world), this gathering will be on Zoom.
Passcode 078936
To allow for more time to share stories, and to grieve Jim’s passing and celebrate his life, we invite you to join the family in sharing stories of Jim. During the Zoom gathering, we encourage you to engage us in the Chat View, in order to be called upon to share stories.
In-Person Celebration of Life
Once the pandemic passes, we will be organizing a real-live, in-person, old-time Chico Potluck and celebration of Jim’s life, just as he would have wanted it, at the Chico Grange Hall. He even included the menu planning in his memorial wishes: fried chicken and Mom Jessee’s Sparerib Rub and Sauce, so Chico is really on the hook to show up for this thing once we get through this pandemic.
Please let us know your interest in being notified of the gathering by filling out this quick form, at the link, below. We promise we won’t do anything weird with your information.
With a little luck and a lot of good science, we hope to schedule the Celebration of Life around what would have been Jim’s 73rd birthday, in Mid-November, 2021.
***
Donations
In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the causes that Jim Jessee believed in. When the dust settles, we will continue his legacy. The purpose of the fund is:
“To support the pursuit of our common humanity, including affordable housing, lifelong learning, spiritual exploration, and dogs.”
“Jim Jessee Common Humanity Fund - NVCF”
c/o North Valley Community Foundation
1811 Concord Avenue
Suite 220
Chico, CA 95928