My Father's Obituary

Jake Mitchell
December 30th, 1924 - March 19th 2016

Jake Mitchell was born on December 30th, 1924, in Gallup, New Mexico, one of Reynalda Mitchell’s eight children. Pop’s father was a musician and bootlegger who went on the lam from the FBI during Prohibition when Pop was four. Pop’s family never heard from him again. Reynalda was a very poor single woman who couldn’t afford to take care of all her children during the Depression, so the youngest three, including my pop, were sent to live in an orphanage for about eight years.

After Pop graduated high school in 1942, he joined the Navy and was stationed in the Pacific through the end of the War. He stayed in California when he got back, and began working in construction, which ended up being his lifetime occupation. He met my mom JoAnn Koviak in 1952, they got married in 1954, and settled into a suburban housing tract in Hawthorne, CA.

Then Mom & Pop began popping out kids: Misty in 1956, Heather in 1959, and Jeffrey in 1961. While Mom worked at home raising the kids, Pop worked as a bricktender and scaffolder, a proud member of the Operating Engineers Union. He used to come home caked in cement. If it was hot, one of us kids would go get him an ice cold Brew 102 to drink while he took off his filthy clothes on the back steps. Mom would make sure an onion was frying so he’d think dinner was on the way, even though she had no idea what she was going to do with that frying onion!

Once upon a time, Pop was a Republican, but that stopped after Nixon. Pop used to be rather conservative and didn’t like the “naked hippies” at Big Sur during our family camping trip there in the late 1960’s! But the 1970’s was a time of great change and social growth not only for society at large, but for my pop as well. My mom, who was 12 years younger than him, was more influenced by the energy of the 1960’s, listening to Bob Dylan, while Pop was strictly an Andrews Sisters fan! Mom wanted to pursue higher education and work full-time, rejecting society’s gender expectations for women at the time. By the mid-70’s, Mom & Pop’s marriage had dissolved. Shortly thereafter, my mom met her next life partner, Betty Monaghan.

(For a while in the 1990’s, my pop, mom and Betty all lived together in the Seaside house, a successful experience in Modern Family that worked quite well for a while and made it easier for them to visit with their beloved granddaughters Paige and Briley. But after about eight years, my mother and father remembered why they divorced each other in the first place, and he moved into a little studio apartment a block away. There he stayed until my mom died in 2004. Then he moved back into the Seaside house with Betty and lived with her until she died a year later. And he’s lived there alone ever since. Not everyone experiences the benefits and delights of having had three loving and supportive parents. May they all now rest in peace.)

By the end of the 1970’s, Pop’s culture shock was in full swing. His wife had left him and was now in a lesbian relationship, his teen-aged daughters were having sex and doing drugs, while his son was blooming into a quite the homosexual as well! Yet he deeply loved all of us (including Mom and Betty) so he just learned to adapt with the changing times, in order to grow along with his family. During the Reagan years, Pop grew disgusted with the Republican party and moved further and further to the left, and at the end of his life he identified as a Democratic Socialist. His final check was written to Bernie Sanders. Pop never made a big deal about his WWII vet status, and he didn’t like the phrase “Thank-you for your Service.”  Ever since Viet Nam, he’d said we should be telling vets: “We’re sorry we made you go.” He also had lost all patience with all religion and was proud to identify as secular humanist. (Actually, he invented his own religion, Jakism, but that’s a story for another time.) He was a strong supporter of equality for all people, and supported people’s rights to do as they wish with their own bodies.

If Pop had had a different start in life, he would have made an excellent academic. He was extremely intelligent, loved to read, and engaged in his own form of self-study throughout his life. He always said he would’ve liked to have been an archeologist, and he would have made a damn fine one. Many of you know his love of crossword puzzles, and he did the HARD ones!

Let’s sum up by saying that Pop was a dedicated husband, an unconditionally-loving parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent, and a hard-working, long-living human being. He had a good heart and soul. Many of us are mourning his loss today. If you wish to ask for a ghostly visit (which he said he’d be willing to do if it’s possible), please do so right away so that he can quickly depart this astral plane and get on with whatever happens next. Fly freely, Pop! Love and Peace to All.

~ Amen ~

 

If you would like to make a charitable contribution in Pop’s memory, these were two of his favorites:

Animal Friends Rescue Project:  https://www.animalfriendsrescue.org/AFRPDonation.php

Americans United:  https://support.au.org/donate