Dorothy Jan Harelson

Dorothy Jan Harelson, born in Jacksonville, IL on Oct. 15, 1937, died Aug. 28, after complications during heart surgery. Jan moved to Arizona when she was 5 years old and spent the rest of her life enjoying family and friends and the beautiful deserts and mountains across the state. Jan graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Arts degree in education and later earned a Master’s degree from Arizona State University. While she was at the UA, she met her future husband, Hugh Harelson, while he was working as the southern Arizona correspondent for the Arizona Republic. They married in 1958 and had been together just short of 40 years at the time of his death in 1998. Jan taught Head Start, second grade and kindergarten in the Tucson and Phoenix areas and later taught school in private, public and charter schools. She remembers teaching kindergarten as her favorite job and once said that nothing compared to the excitement of teaching a child to read. She is still remembered fondly today by former students and parents. While in Tucson, Jan showed her business acumen as the owner of a quilt store. Later she served as director of a domestic violence shelter for women and children in the Phoenix area and volunteered on the Foster Care Review Board, chaired the Maricopa Task Force Against Domestic Violence and was president of the Sojourner Center. Jan was a lover of books and an avid reader. She shared that love of reading by serving on the board of directors for the Friends of the Phoenix Public Library and volunteering for the Arizona Center for the Book and for the Arizona Humanities Council’s committee for the annual Festival of the Book. Another of Jan’s passions was journalism. In the mid 90’s, when the UA’s journalism department was threatened by budget cuts, both Jan and Hugh and many others stepped in to help preserve the department. After Hugh passed in 1998, Jan continued their work by leading the Advisory Council for the UA Department of Journalism and starting an endowment that continues to fund a teaching award and created the school’s computer lab, the Hugh Harelson Reporting Laboratory. Despite her many interests, jobs and volunteering commitments, Jan found time to enjoy the outdoors, particularly at the family’s cabin in Prescott. But her true passion was her family. She was fiercely loyal to and supportive of her two sons, Matt and Scott, and was a committed and loving grandmother to her five grandchildren, Sara, Claire, Kate, Haley Rose and Hugh Grayson. She passed on her love of reading with gifts of books on special occasions and hand crafted a quilt for each one of the grandkids. Jan also was a wonderful and inspiring mother-in-law to her son’s wives, Julie and Marisa and close friends with her sister Jill. Jan will be sorely missed by her family and many friends and the community she served so faithfully. A Celebration of Life will be held at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, where she was a member and volunteer. The event will take place on Monday, Oct. 19, beginning at 5 p.m. in the Garden’s Dorrance Hall. Those wishing to honor Jan Harelson can make donations to the University of Arizona Foundation’s Hugh and Jan Harelson Endowment in Journalism. Checks can be made payable to the UA Foundation/School of Journalism – in the memo section write Hugh and Jan Harelson Operating Endowment – and sent to Jennifer Rascon, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences The University of Arizona, Douglass Building 200W, PO Box 210028 Tucson, Arizona 85721-0028, or online at http://www.uafoundation.org/give/sbs/harelsonendowment. In addition to her two sons, Jan is survived by her sister Jill Tench, five grandchildren and two daughters-in-law.