Absent Friends - Gil Jaramillo
I've thought a lot about my friend Gil Jaramillo over the past few momentous days.
Gil loved to discuss politics and although a committed Democrat he was the polar opposite of an ideologue.
Gil could always see other people's point of view and understood the importance of negotiating and trying to reach agreement even in difficult circumstances.
So I'm sure Gil would have approved of Joe Biden's powerful words, especially his call for unity and tolerance:
“Let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric.To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy.
"We are not enemies. We are Americans.”
Gil was not a 'big' man, in fact he was quite short in stature, but Gil made up for that by having the heart of a giant; strangely one of the things that made us such firm friends was his support for equality issues and the fight for equal pay.
Sometime ago Gil gave me a necklace which I plan to wear tomorrow at tonight's PayFest party in The Barrowlands - see photo below.
PayFest - Absent Friends (06/07/20)
A dear friend of mine,Gil Jaramillo, passed away earlier this year and I think it's fair to say that Gil's life was one great adventure - a life 'well lived' as they say.
Gil was not a 'big' man, in fact he was quite short in stature, but Gil made up for that by having the heart of a giant; strangely one of the things that made us such firm friends was his support for equality issues and the fight for equal pay.
Sometime ago Gil gave me a necklace which I plan to wear tomorrow at tonight's PayFest party in The Barrowlands - see photo below.
So Gil will be part of a very special night and I think he would also be 'tickled pink' at having pride of place on my blog - in fact I can hear him laughing now!
Here's a wonderful tribute to Gil from a family friend, Paul.
Telesfor Gilbert Jaramillo, known as Gil, was born in 1938 in the village of Los Lunas, New Mexico, just south of Albuquerque. He was the third of five children. After high school he served in the Air Force then settled in San Jose and worked 32 years for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale.
In 1995 he retired and moved with his wife Terrie and their grade school children to the northern California town of Meadow Vista. There they built their dream home in Naturewood estates on 12 acres of wildland where they raised their daughter Marina and son Kenneth and where Gil's adult daughter Pamela came often to visit.
On the afternoon of March 7, 2019, Gil passed away in his home at the age of 80 in the presence of family and friends. This genuine and accomplished man who lived a life of service and compassion will be missed by his loved ones and the many people who knew him as their friend.
Family Origins
Gil was named after his father Telesfor from the ancient Greek, Telesphorus which was taken by a first century Pope and meansone who brings things to fruition; and that, said his wife Terrie, describes him perfectly, though he couldn't pronounce the word fruition. "He'd say fruisha and I'd say, it's fruition." There were other words. "He'd say mag-man-inous and I'd correct him, but he'd forever say those words the way he is wanted to.”
The Jaramillos came from Spain and the first to settle in America were Alonso Varela and his brother Pedro, Spanish soldiers who in 1598 came ashore most likely near the Gulf port of Tampico, Mexico. They traveled inland to Zacatecas City to meet up with an expedition of about 400 settlers, some with families, along with 83 wagons and carts coming north from Mexico City. Led by conquistador Don Juan de Onate, their destination was land in northern New Mexico. They journeyed for some 1800 miles through present day Chihuahua, forded the Rio Grande into New Mexico and trekked onward to land near Santa Fe where today stands the town of Ohkay Owingh. Here, they set up their colony some 90 miles north of where Gil was born.
In the summer of 1942 in the family’s Los Lunas, New Mexico ranch house, Gil was three years old. He was sitting in the lap of his grandfather Carlos, known as Charley. He believed in being strict with his three grandchildren, Gil's brother Alfonso an sister Pauline. Gil was fiddling with the buttons on the shirt of Grandpa who said sternly, "Conmigo no vas a jugar," (Don't mess with me). The toddler looked up and said to him "Pues, conmigo no vas a jugar tampoco!" (Well, don't you mess with me either). Rather than scolding the child for talking back, Charley laughed and seemed to take pride in little Gil's moxie.
Early Adulthood
Soon after, the family moved to south Los Angeles. Within months Gil's father was drafted and sent off to the war, leaving Gil's mother Flora alone with three children; Alfonso was seven, Pauline, six and Gil was four. When Telesfor returned from overseas, the family moved five miles south to Compton where Gil attended High School.
Just one week into his senior year, in 1955, Gil told his father that he was quitting school to get a job and marry his girl friend Georgia. His dad took about $100 from his wallet and offered it to Gil to help him out--but said that if he listened to reason and stayed in school to get a diploma, he’d pay for his college education. Gil snatched the cash from his hand, found a job replacing windshields and got married.
But the pay wasn’t enough to support his wife so he enlisted in the Air Force. This was two years after the Korean war and a decade into the Cold War.
At Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training, Gil thought it silly, the idea of making his bed in the precise military style, with sheets and blanket pulled tight as a drum across the mattress. In the barracks for inspection one morning, the airmen all stood at attention as the drill sergeant approached Gil's bed, holding between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger, a coin, the quarter, level to the floor. With a sharp downward motion he snapped onto the mattress. Thud. No bounce. Gil had flunked bed making.
"Drop down and give me 50 pushups,” demanded the sergeant. Well, that was hardly a challenge to Gil who in high school competed as a gymnast on the rings which require extreme upper body strength. Halfway into the exercise he switched to one armed push-ups, showing off, as the sergeant saw it. He made him do 50 more two-armed push-ups.
Gil served in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) which is responsible for deterring or fighting nuclear war. SAC kept B-52 bombers armed with nukes, ready to take off at a moment's notice. As a hydraulics technician, Gil serviced those aircraft. He was stationed at airbases in Japan, Spain, France, and at Walker Air Force base in New Mexico, which for a time, was largest SAC base in the country. Closed in 1967, it was known for the UFO incident of June 1947, when an alleged flying saucer crashed nearby on a sheep ranch alongside the town of Roswell. Airmen had pulled from the wreckage, according to news reports and rumors, the bodies of four space aliens preserved in the Blue Room of a hangar on the base. And Gil was assigned to guard it. His superior officer was deadly serious, as Gil remembered it, and ordered him to shoot anyone who attempted to enter
When Gil left the Air force, he returned to southern California and, with his experience in hydraulics, hired on with a company called Convair which manufactured aircraft and missiles. At home Gil found that his absence had taken a toll on his marriage to Georgia and the high school sweethearts soon divorced. Gil headed north to take a job at the aerospace company Lockheed in the Bay Area.It was there, in 1962, that he met Lee McAdams, a woman with a precious six-month-old daughter named Pamela. Gil became her father then, and married Lee in 1968.
At Lockheed some nine years later, managers were bringing 35,000 workers into meetings, advising them belatedly of rights they had under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of the company's obligation to take affirmative action to ensure that employees are treated equitably--without regard to race, nationality or gender in hiring and promotion. On the wall of each building on the vast Lockheed campus was posted an organization chart with a picture of each person holding an upper management position. Gil perused it and saw that they were all white men. So Gil, who had once marched with Cesar Chavez, set out to change that and bring Lockheed into compliance with the law.
For six years, at almost every turn, senior executives responded to Gil's entreaties with resistance and obstruction. In the mid seventies he made a bold move. With 16 fellow employees he filed a lawsuit in federal court against Lockheed for discrimination. It was settled four years later by consent decree that Lockheed, according to a court supervised schedules and goals, must hire more females and people of color, promote more of them into management, and provide equal pay to women doing the same work as men.
In October 1977, Lockheed's labor woes persisted as contract negotiations broke down between Lockheed and the machinist union. Thousands of workers walked out and management confronted the resolute Ken Benda whose campaign for union president Gil had managed some years before. In the end, Benda would win major concessions, though the strike went on for seven weeks.
On the picket line Gil saw his friend from work, Terrie Cloutier. He took her to lunch and, she recalled, "We really hit it off." She had first seen him, a few months before, walking through the building where she worked. "I thought he was good looking and seemed self- assured," she said, then laughed. "I remember thinking that he walked like a peacock."
Intent on moving up the ranks to vice president, Gil was taking night courses at San Jose State for a degree in industrial technology. But he soon learned that senior executives had quashed his prospects for promotion and a much higher salary. One told him directly that,because of the lawsuit, he had ruined his career. Gil had rarely seen a problem he couldn't solve or a barrier he could't break through. So he went and got a realtors license.
As a second job, he would sell real estate and invest in property. He'd partnered some years before with his friend Ken Benda to buy a beach house in Monterey. He sold his interest back to him for a good profit which he used to make down payments on two 'fourplexes' as rentals.
In the years ahead he and Terrie would come to own a number of rentals in the profitable business they formed, Jaramillo Property Management. By 1985 their friendship had deepened into love and upon Gil's divorce from Lee, they got married and started a family.
On their tenth anniversary, their daughter Marina was in fourth grade and son Kenny in the second grade. It was 1995 and San Jose was in the midst of a war in thestreets between rival gangs. The members, some younger than 18, were dealing drugs, stealing cars, carrying guns and sometimes killing each other. It was no place to raise children so Gil moved the family 160 miles east, up into the Sierra foothills to the idyllic Meadow Vista.
California.
When they came to town, two weeks had barely passed when Gil said, "What this place needs is a community center." He asked around to find Bruce and Celia Broadwell, who years before had formed a community center association to raise money, acquire property and build a facility. "Our fundraising had all but stopped," said Bruce. "Then Gil came along to reinvigorate our effort."
A few months into the winter of 2000 at Mountain Mike's Pizza for a board meeting, Gil was reviewing the association books as treasurer. He reported that they'd raised $350,000 toward a building projected to cost $900,000. Not enough money was coming in. They talked about starting to build the center with the money they had, thinking that when folks saw progress, they'd jump in and help out with money, donated labor and materials. They voted to take this leap of faith.
They broke ground in June and one year later the 7,300 square foot structure was up, wrapped in weather-proofing Tyvex and sitting in the weather. They were scrambling for $80,000 to apply stucco to the exterior. A contractor called. He said, "The Tyvex won't last much longer, exposed like that.” He'd grown up in Meadow Vista and wanted to do something for the town, he said, “To make up for the hell I raised as a teenager.” So he donated the entire job. Then a woman, a known codger called. "What are you going to do about that roof?" she demanded, "it's going to start raining." Bruce told her they were raising funds for it. "How much will it cost?" she asked. The answer was $63,000. She hesitated, then said, "Okay, I'll pay for it."
Today the exterior of the building is finished, the plumbing and electrical roughed in. The park in which the center sits is coming alive with the spring, the foliage deep green and healthy after all the rain this winter. And open for business is the north wing of the center where on April 20, 2019, friends and family are gathering to celebrate the remarkable life of Gil Jaramillo.
In Meadow Vista, Gil and Terrie would build the house that he and Terrie, for three decades, had dreamed of. They had sketched out the floor plan: u-shaped with a sunken living room, a crafts room for Terrie, a four car garage with a space for Gil to park his 1968 red Porsche. Surrounded by wildlife, the house would perch on a hillside overlooking a pond where ducks bobbed along and into which a waterfall fell; where at dusk wild turkeys would fly awkwardly to roost high in the branches of towering pines. These are some of the things that Gil and Terrie loved about the place.
Volunteering his time generously over the years of his retirement, Gil served on the Placer County Grand Jury and on the Meadow Vista Municipal Advisory Council. For more than 20 years he was active in the Meadow Vista Garden Club with four terms aspresident and concurrently as treasurer and board member of the Meadow Vista Community Center Association.
He is survived by his wife, Terrie, his daughters Pam Belgum and Marina Jaramillo, his son Kenny Jaramillo, and his three grandsons, Jeff, Greg and Tommy Belgum. He is survived also by three sisters, Pauline Jaramillo, Lucille Perrine and Debbie Billips, but was predeceased by his father, Telesfor, his mother Flora Trujillo and his brother Alfonso.
My dear friend Gil (Gilberto) Jaramillo sent me this great photo of draft dodger-in-chief Donald Trump who is pictured below at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while simultaneously declaring a bogus 'national emergency' on America's southern border with Mexico.
Gil hails from New Mexico originally and now lives in California where he made a successful career in America's aviation industry after serving his country with distinction, at home and abroad, in the US Air Force.
Gil and I met at my daughter Amy's wedding in San Jose where all the (mainly American) male wedding guests wore Scottish dress kilts despite the sweltering 90 degree heat on the day.
Gil and I became great 'amigos' from that day onwards and I later discovered that Gil was also a committed equalities campaigner and a big equal pay champion during his time at Lockheed, one of America's largest and most influential aerospace corporations.
Now isn't that a strange and unlikely coincidence, albeit one I'll always be thankful for.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Here's a wonderful tribute to Gil from a family friend, Paul.
Remembering Gil Jaramillo
Telesfor Gilbert Jaramillo, known as Gil, was born in 1938 in the village of Los Lunas, New Mexico, just south of Albuquerque. He was the third of five children. After high school he served in the Air Force then settled in San Jose and worked 32 years for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale.
In 1995 he retired and moved with his wife Terrie and their grade school children to the northern California town of Meadow Vista. There they built their dream home in Naturewood estates on 12 acres of wildland where they raised their daughter Marina and son Kenneth and where Gil's adult daughter Pamela came often to visit.
On the afternoon of March 7, 2019, Gil passed away in his home at the age of 80 in the presence of family and friends. This genuine and accomplished man who lived a life of service and compassion will be missed by his loved ones and the many people who knew him as their friend.
Family Origins
Gil was named after his father Telesfor from the ancient Greek, Telesphorus which was taken by a first century Pope and meansone who brings things to fruition; and that, said his wife Terrie, describes him perfectly, though he couldn't pronounce the word fruition. "He'd say fruisha and I'd say, it's fruition." There were other words. "He'd say mag-man-inous and I'd correct him, but he'd forever say those words the way he is wanted to.”
The Jaramillos came from Spain and the first to settle in America were Alonso Varela and his brother Pedro, Spanish soldiers who in 1598 came ashore most likely near the Gulf port of Tampico, Mexico. They traveled inland to Zacatecas City to meet up with an expedition of about 400 settlers, some with families, along with 83 wagons and carts coming north from Mexico City. Led by conquistador Don Juan de Onate, their destination was land in northern New Mexico. They journeyed for some 1800 miles through present day Chihuahua, forded the Rio Grande into New Mexico and trekked onward to land near Santa Fe where today stands the town of Ohkay Owingh. Here, they set up their colony some 90 miles north of where Gil was born.
In the summer of 1942 in the family’s Los Lunas, New Mexico ranch house, Gil was three years old. He was sitting in the lap of his grandfather Carlos, known as Charley. He believed in being strict with his three grandchildren, Gil's brother Alfonso an sister Pauline. Gil was fiddling with the buttons on the shirt of Grandpa who said sternly, "Conmigo no vas a jugar," (Don't mess with me). The toddler looked up and said to him "Pues, conmigo no vas a jugar tampoco!" (Well, don't you mess with me either). Rather than scolding the child for talking back, Charley laughed and seemed to take pride in little Gil's moxie.
Early Adulthood
Soon after, the family moved to south Los Angeles. Within months Gil's father was drafted and sent off to the war, leaving Gil's mother Flora alone with three children; Alfonso was seven, Pauline, six and Gil was four. When Telesfor returned from overseas, the family moved five miles south to Compton where Gil attended High School.
Just one week into his senior year, in 1955, Gil told his father that he was quitting school to get a job and marry his girl friend Georgia. His dad took about $100 from his wallet and offered it to Gil to help him out--but said that if he listened to reason and stayed in school to get a diploma, he’d pay for his college education. Gil snatched the cash from his hand, found a job replacing windshields and got married.
But the pay wasn’t enough to support his wife so he enlisted in the Air Force. This was two years after the Korean war and a decade into the Cold War.
At Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training, Gil thought it silly, the idea of making his bed in the precise military style, with sheets and blanket pulled tight as a drum across the mattress. In the barracks for inspection one morning, the airmen all stood at attention as the drill sergeant approached Gil's bed, holding between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger, a coin, the quarter, level to the floor. With a sharp downward motion he snapped onto the mattress. Thud. No bounce. Gil had flunked bed making.
"Drop down and give me 50 pushups,” demanded the sergeant. Well, that was hardly a challenge to Gil who in high school competed as a gymnast on the rings which require extreme upper body strength. Halfway into the exercise he switched to one armed push-ups, showing off, as the sergeant saw it. He made him do 50 more two-armed push-ups.
Gil served in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) which is responsible for deterring or fighting nuclear war. SAC kept B-52 bombers armed with nukes, ready to take off at a moment's notice. As a hydraulics technician, Gil serviced those aircraft. He was stationed at airbases in Japan, Spain, France, and at Walker Air Force base in New Mexico, which for a time, was largest SAC base in the country. Closed in 1967, it was known for the UFO incident of June 1947, when an alleged flying saucer crashed nearby on a sheep ranch alongside the town of Roswell. Airmen had pulled from the wreckage, according to news reports and rumors, the bodies of four space aliens preserved in the Blue Room of a hangar on the base. And Gil was assigned to guard it. His superior officer was deadly serious, as Gil remembered it, and ordered him to shoot anyone who attempted to enter
When Gil left the Air force, he returned to southern California and, with his experience in hydraulics, hired on with a company called Convair which manufactured aircraft and missiles. At home Gil found that his absence had taken a toll on his marriage to Georgia and the high school sweethearts soon divorced. Gil headed north to take a job at the aerospace company Lockheed in the Bay Area.It was there, in 1962, that he met Lee McAdams, a woman with a precious six-month-old daughter named Pamela. Gil became her father then, and married Lee in 1968.
Middle Years
At Lockheed some nine years later, managers were bringing 35,000 workers into meetings, advising them belatedly of rights they had under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and of the company's obligation to take affirmative action to ensure that employees are treated equitably--without regard to race, nationality or gender in hiring and promotion. On the wall of each building on the vast Lockheed campus was posted an organization chart with a picture of each person holding an upper management position. Gil perused it and saw that they were all white men. So Gil, who had once marched with Cesar Chavez, set out to change that and bring Lockheed into compliance with the law.
For six years, at almost every turn, senior executives responded to Gil's entreaties with resistance and obstruction. In the mid seventies he made a bold move. With 16 fellow employees he filed a lawsuit in federal court against Lockheed for discrimination. It was settled four years later by consent decree that Lockheed, according to a court supervised schedules and goals, must hire more females and people of color, promote more of them into management, and provide equal pay to women doing the same work as men.
In October 1977, Lockheed's labor woes persisted as contract negotiations broke down between Lockheed and the machinist union. Thousands of workers walked out and management confronted the resolute Ken Benda whose campaign for union president Gil had managed some years before. In the end, Benda would win major concessions, though the strike went on for seven weeks.
On the picket line Gil saw his friend from work, Terrie Cloutier. He took her to lunch and, she recalled, "We really hit it off." She had first seen him, a few months before, walking through the building where she worked. "I thought he was good looking and seemed self- assured," she said, then laughed. "I remember thinking that he walked like a peacock."
Intent on moving up the ranks to vice president, Gil was taking night courses at San Jose State for a degree in industrial technology. But he soon learned that senior executives had quashed his prospects for promotion and a much higher salary. One told him directly that,because of the lawsuit, he had ruined his career. Gil had rarely seen a problem he couldn't solve or a barrier he could't break through. So he went and got a realtors license.
As a second job, he would sell real estate and invest in property. He'd partnered some years before with his friend Ken Benda to buy a beach house in Monterey. He sold his interest back to him for a good profit which he used to make down payments on two 'fourplexes' as rentals.
A New Beginning
In the years ahead he and Terrie would come to own a number of rentals in the profitable business they formed, Jaramillo Property Management. By 1985 their friendship had deepened into love and upon Gil's divorce from Lee, they got married and started a family.
On their tenth anniversary, their daughter Marina was in fourth grade and son Kenny in the second grade. It was 1995 and San Jose was in the midst of a war in thestreets between rival gangs. The members, some younger than 18, were dealing drugs, stealing cars, carrying guns and sometimes killing each other. It was no place to raise children so Gil moved the family 160 miles east, up into the Sierra foothills to the idyllic Meadow Vista.
California.
When they came to town, two weeks had barely passed when Gil said, "What this place needs is a community center." He asked around to find Bruce and Celia Broadwell, who years before had formed a community center association to raise money, acquire property and build a facility. "Our fundraising had all but stopped," said Bruce. "Then Gil came along to reinvigorate our effort."
A few months into the winter of 2000 at Mountain Mike's Pizza for a board meeting, Gil was reviewing the association books as treasurer. He reported that they'd raised $350,000 toward a building projected to cost $900,000. Not enough money was coming in. They talked about starting to build the center with the money they had, thinking that when folks saw progress, they'd jump in and help out with money, donated labor and materials. They voted to take this leap of faith.
They broke ground in June and one year later the 7,300 square foot structure was up, wrapped in weather-proofing Tyvex and sitting in the weather. They were scrambling for $80,000 to apply stucco to the exterior. A contractor called. He said, "The Tyvex won't last much longer, exposed like that.” He'd grown up in Meadow Vista and wanted to do something for the town, he said, “To make up for the hell I raised as a teenager.” So he donated the entire job. Then a woman, a known codger called. "What are you going to do about that roof?" she demanded, "it's going to start raining." Bruce told her they were raising funds for it. "How much will it cost?" she asked. The answer was $63,000. She hesitated, then said, "Okay, I'll pay for it."
Today the exterior of the building is finished, the plumbing and electrical roughed in. The park in which the center sits is coming alive with the spring, the foliage deep green and healthy after all the rain this winter. And open for business is the north wing of the center where on April 20, 2019, friends and family are gathering to celebrate the remarkable life of Gil Jaramillo.
In Meadow Vista, Gil and Terrie would build the house that he and Terrie, for three decades, had dreamed of. They had sketched out the floor plan: u-shaped with a sunken living room, a crafts room for Terrie, a four car garage with a space for Gil to park his 1968 red Porsche. Surrounded by wildlife, the house would perch on a hillside overlooking a pond where ducks bobbed along and into which a waterfall fell; where at dusk wild turkeys would fly awkwardly to roost high in the branches of towering pines. These are some of the things that Gil and Terrie loved about the place.
Volunteering his time generously over the years of his retirement, Gil served on the Placer County Grand Jury and on the Meadow Vista Municipal Advisory Council. For more than 20 years he was active in the Meadow Vista Garden Club with four terms aspresident and concurrently as treasurer and board member of the Meadow Vista Community Center Association.
He is survived by his wife, Terrie, his daughters Pam Belgum and Marina Jaramillo, his son Kenny Jaramillo, and his three grandsons, Jeff, Greg and Tommy Belgum. He is survived also by three sisters, Pauline Jaramillo, Lucille Perrine and Debbie Billips, but was predeceased by his father, Telesfor, his mother Flora Trujillo and his brother Alfonso.
Gil Trolls Trump (07/03/19)
My dear friend Gil (Gilberto) Jaramillo sent me this great photo of draft dodger-in-chief Donald Trump who is pictured below at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while simultaneously declaring a bogus 'national emergency' on America's southern border with Mexico.
Gil hails from New Mexico originally and now lives in California where he made a successful career in America's aviation industry after serving his country with distinction, at home and abroad, in the US Air Force.
Gil and I met at my daughter Amy's wedding in San Jose where all the (mainly American) male wedding guests wore Scottish dress kilts despite the sweltering 90 degree heat on the day.
Gil and I became great 'amigos' from that day onwards and I later discovered that Gil was also a committed equalities campaigner and a big equal pay champion during his time at Lockheed, one of America's largest and most influential aerospace corporations.
Now isn't that a strange and unlikely coincidence, albeit one I'll always be thankful for.
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
