Jeannine Marie Gill

Jeannine Marie Elser was born to Lawrence J. and Cecilia Rose Elser in Vallejo, California on April 17, 1942. Her father worked at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard supporting the war effort, but once the war ended, the family packed their belongings into a homemade trailer and moved to Sammamish where he took a job as a carpenter at a chicken ranch.

The Sammamish Plateau was a rural area then, and Jeannine spent her days riding horses over what is now the Sammamish Highlands Shopping Center, fishing in Pine Lake, and playing with neighborhood kids around the beaver pond that eventually became the Sammamish Commons.

Jeannine attended Lake Washington High School, working during her junior and senior years as a soda jerk at Douglas Drug Store in Redmond. She graduated from high school in June, and two weeks later, on June 25, 1960, married Norman Gill. They would be married for 62 years.

The couple moved to Seattle where Norm set hot type in the composing room of Craftsman Press. In 1962 their son Steven was born, followed a year later by a second son, Gordon. After finding the boys toddling out of the yard and onto a busy road in front of their house, Norm and Jeannine decided to move back to Sammamish where the kids could have room to roam. Norm built the family home on property adjacent to where Jeannine had grown up, and there they remained for the rest of Jeannine’s life.

When Steven and Gordon were old enough to go to school, Jeannine went back to work, first as a sileage truck driver and then as a school bus driver for the Lake Washington School District. Driving the school bus proved to be a perfect fit for Jeannine, and she quickly became one of the more popular drivers among the students due to her affinity for dressing in costumes when the occasion called for it, yodeling, handing out candy, and holding singalongs.

Jeannine loved the holidays where she would decorate the house and yard to celebrate each season. She particularly loved Halloween and would dress as a green-faced witch before inviting the neighborhood kids in each year to explore the haunted house she had created just for them.

Weekends would find Jeannine on the garage-sale circuit. Anything and everything qualified as a fascinating find, from a coffee can filled with nails to vintage books, extension cords, rusted farm equipment, lamps, kitchen gadgets, and more. Family and friends would put in orders, which somehow Jeannine always managed to fill. One time, she came home with a fireplace mantle. Another, with the receipt for a down payment on a house.

Eventually, Jeannine retired and applied her substantial energy to caring for her young grandchildren, Jason and Kalyn. Together they would bake cookies from scratch, drive her golf cart around the neighborhood, and raise tadpoles in the pond. Jeannine treasured time with her grandchildren, and, when she wasn’t asking if they had eaten recently, would often sit with them, watching murder mysteries deep into the night.

In her later years, Jeannine enjoyed gardening, shopping, spending time with family and friends, watching the birds and other wildlife that grazed on the property, revisiting old family photos, and decorating for the holidays. Any visit, especially from her grandchildren, was a chance to catch up on the going-on of her family’s lives, and she loved to hear of Jason and Kalyn’s doings as much as she enjoyed regaling the family with stories of her own adventures, from favorite school bus passengers to how she got the nickname “atom bomb.”

Of particular importance to Jeannine was her faith. Though her health eventually kept her from attending Mass in person, she could regularly be found watching a televised service, whether from St. James Cathedral in Seattle or from St. Peter’s in Rome. When her grandchildren were very young, she taught them their prayers and was overjoyed to see her efforts pay off when both Jason and Kalyn were eventually baptized into the Catholic Church.

Jeannine is survived by her husband Norm, brother and sister James Elser and Kathleen (Paul) Keller, sons Steven (Megan) and Gordon (Tricia) Gill, grandchildren Jason and Kalyn Gill, and numerous nieces and nephews.