Yakima remembers Helen Jewett

Amid smiles and laughter, misted with tears, Yakima said goodbye Friday to Helen Jewett, the greatest philanthropist the community has ever known.

But during a 90-minute memorial service attended by an overflow crowd at Wesley United Methodist Church, the remembrances focused more on the kind of woman Helen Margaret Neal Jewett was than the many things she and her late husband, Donald Jewett, had accomplished.

The 94-year-old Jewett died a week ago at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital.

An example of who she was played out a few miles away from the site of the service.

At the offices of RBC Wealth Management off North 40th Avenue, a group of children from the Helen Jewett Child Development Center trick-or-treated, a practice that began about five years ago.

Jewett had been there each of those years, said Mikeal Doyle, director of Child Care Development for the Yakima Family YMCA.

“She handed out the candy and greeted them and just giggled,” Doyle recalled prior to the 11 a.m. service. “She got such a kick out of the kids.”

It was that love of life and love of children that gave Jewett much joy, speakers recounted at the memorial service, which was attended by more than 175 people.

She wanted things to be beautiful and she wanted them to be right. She was willing to pay for it, even though the line in her checkbook sometimes wasn’t long enough for all the zeroes.

“Her projects were like her children,” said Chuck Bohoskey, who was financial adviser for the Jewetts besides being their close friend. “She nurtured them and guided them. They gave her joy.”

Bohoskey said he remembers sitting at their kitchen table when the Jewetts agreed to sell their stock when the Farmers Insurance Group, the company Don Jewett’s father helped found and Don Jewett helped to grow, was sold.

“As they signed their stock certificates, they had tears in their eyes. They did not want to sell,” he added.

But the sales of stock and other investments later provided the source for the millions of dollars they donated across the Yakima Valley. The child center, the Capitol Theatre, Heritage University, the Yakima Greenway Foundation, Yakima Area Arboretum, Yakima Valley Museum — these and many more benefited from her desire to help.

All those facilities have something named after the Jewetts in a legacy that will live on. Don Jewett died in 1993, a couple of years after they began sharing their fortune with the community.

She continued with her work, donating millions of dollars in gifts and endowments.

Brooke Creswell, music director for the Yakima Symphony Orchestra, said Jewett gave him three gifts: The ability to be comfortable asking for money, her endowment of the music director’s position with the orchestra and her friendship.

John Baule, Yakima Valley Museum director, called Jewett an elegant lady who wanted the things she invested in to be elegant as well. She also felt comfortable in the company of men, Baule said, recalling a story in which Jewett failed twice to renew her driver’s license with two women license examiners. However, when she took the test a third time with a male examiner, she was more relaxed and she passed.

“You have had a great calming effect on the community,” Baule said of Jewett. “We are so gratified to have known you.”

Jewett, an Oregon native, was married three times. In addition to Jewett, she wed her college sweetheart, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who died in World War II; and longtime friend Walt Shields, who died in 2004.

JT Tjarnberg, who’s married to Brooke Creswell, recalled Jewett joking about once being courted at the same time by an Oregon Duck and an Oregon State Beaver. Tjarnberg said Jewett decided to let the annual football game between the two schools decide her choice.

The game, Tjarnberg said, ended in a tie.

“Yakima has lost a philanthropist, but we have lost a friend,” she said.

Others said Jewett loved to have a good time, had a great sense of humor and loved to laugh.

Steve Caffery, chief executive officer of the Capitol Theatre, said in addition to her love of beauty, Jewett was a smart and astute woman who had the “surgical ability to size up people.”

Betty Milberger, Jewett’s sole surviving sibling and her constant companion in recent years, said theirs had been a close-knit family, singing around the kitchen table during dinners that were always eaten together.

“She was very special to me. She liked to do things for other people,” she said.

The Rev. Terry Hall, pastor of Wesley United Methodist Church, said Jewett, because of her wealth, could have chosen to live in seclusion or live anywhere she wished.

“That is not how she chose to live,” he said.

Instead, she decided to stay in Yakima, her home since the late 1940s when she and her husband expanded Farmers Insurance Group.

“She understood our souls need to be fed,” Hall said near the conclusion of the service. “What feeds our souls are beauty, kindness and hope, and there is more to life than we get to experience.”