Jo Ann Irene Cleveland

(April 29, 1945, to May 31, 2013)

Early Years:

The second and last child of Jeff Ira Cleveland, born in 1888, and Jo Ann Cleveland, nee Johnson, born in 1902, Jo Ann “Sissy” Cleveland was born on a dairy farm outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 29, 1945. Her father, Jeff (changed from Herbert, which he hated), was a mechanical engineer and graduate of Perdue. He designed assembly lines through the 1920’s, then when his eyes sight could no longer focus on the necessary minutia bought and settled down on the dairy farm during the Great Depression, giving up the urban luxuries of electricity, telephones, and indoor plumbing. Her mother, Jo Ann, was a college graduate and suffragette. During the early years of the Great Depression, her parents filled their car with food and passed it out during their many business trips across the country.

After giving up hope of ever having children, her mother suddenly became pregnant with her brother, Jeff “Buddy” Cleveland. A few years later, they were once again blessed with Jo Ann. While living on the farm, the children’s nannies and baby-sitters were the milk cows and the Clydesdales, Duke and Dolly. Jo Ann grew to love equine, bovine, and horticulture during this time; a love that only grew as she did.

At the age of four, her father took an engineering job with the oil industry and sold the dairy farm to a local farmer, giving Duke and Dolly to a neighbor ensuring their safety. He then moved the family all the way to Corpus Christi, Texas, where he worked with the oil companies designing the newly invented oilrigs being built in the Gulf of Mexico.

Texas:

Growing up from childhood through early adulthood in Corpus Christi, Jo Ann considered herself a Texan through-and-through. She was a tomboy growing up, often playing as quarterback with the neighborhood boys. Although she was tiny, never growing past four foot eleven inches tall, she never had any problems playing tackle football. It was not until she started to mature that her father stopped her from playing with the boys.

It was during this childhood in Corpus Christi that she learned to love sweet onions. There was a patch of Texas Sweet Onions a block over from Daytona Drive. She would often hop the fence, pluck them out of the earth, wipe them off, and eat them like apples. Later she would find that she was never fully satisfied with the Vidalia onions, which were the only sweet onions she could find.

For the times, she learned early on from her parents to be open-minded. She and her father had brunch often with her “adopted” Jewish uncles who owned a local jewelry store. She learned to use chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant owned by the Wu brothers, who delighted in feeding every delicacy they had to the darling blonde, who looked like a porcelain doll.

She graduated at the top her class from Sam Houston High School, and attended junior college for the next two years. During the summers, she would apprentice as a hand on her “uncle’s” ranch outside of town, where she had the opportunity to continue her love of horses and cattle. Years later, she still bragged that she could field strip and re-gear a windmill with no trouble. She learned to shoot by shooting rattlesnakes that threatened her horse. One of the more infamous residents of the ranch was donkey she had rescued as a newborn on the range. Sancho Panza, as he was named, was known to sneak up behind the cowboys and bite them hard on the backside.

After she graduated from junior college, she moved on to Texas A&I, now a part of Texas A&M, in Houston. She met her first fiancé, Harry, there, but their future was cut tragically short by the Vietnam War. In graduate school, she met Reuben Plachy, with whom she fell and love, then married when he was drafted in 1968. During her time in Houston, she went on to receive two masters in English, a masters in Spanish, and her teaching credentials. She then taught junior college while her new husband was in Vietnam.

Florida:

After Reuben returned from Vietnam, he went to work as a hydraulic engineer with the Federal Highway administration. For the first ten years of their marriage, they moved every six months until spending two years outside of Washington, D.C., where she worked as a realtor. Eventually, they were given the opportunity for permanent placement and offered Tallahassee, Florida. Reuben moved first while she sold the house in Dale City, Virginia. After moving to Tallahassee, they bought a piece of land in the new development of Lafayette Oaks and built a house.

A year later in 1979, they had a son, Charlie. She was a stay-at-home mother for the first ten years of his life, during which she learned to hand-paint porcelain and created a studio, Studio J, to do such with two of her friends, June Davis and Jean Bickner, who was tragically murdered shortly thereafter. In 1984, she lost her last parent, her mother, to lung cancer having lost her father in 1978 to an esophageal perforation. She went back to work as junior college teacher, and eventually dean, in 1989. After the college folded, she went to back to work as a disability determination specialist with the State of Florida. She later spent two years at FSU Law School.

After her son went to college, she and Reuben divorced, selling the home in Lafayette Oaks. She had difficulty finding work, but after her son returned to Tallahassee in 2009, she pursued a hobby in orchids. She was quickly consumed by “Orchid Fever” and learned to grow them with great success. She was an active member in both the Thomasville Orchid Society, in which she was secretary, and the Tallahassee Orchid Society, in which was once Vice President and Secretary.

In December 2012, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and after a several month long battle, succumbed to it on May 31, 2013. She is survived by her son, R. Charles Plachy.