Jean Etcheverry

Jean Etcheverry Born February 24, 1927, to Xavier and Catherine in Arneguy, France, a small French Basque town on the border with Spain. Raised with thirteen brothers and sisters, Jean was a star student until he was forced out of school at age twelve to work on a neighbor's farm. Jean lived in his town through the German occupation where he was forced to dig ditches for the Nazis during the day and ran contraband across the Pyrenees to Spain at night. Toward the end of the war, Jean's family fled to Spain, where the entire family took refuge in one room of a relative's house, where they lived off the crumbs given to them by their relatives. Jean nearly starved through this ordeal. After the war, Jean served in the French Army for a year before deciding it was time to move on. Jean was admitted to the United States in New York on July 19, 1951, speaking no English and with a few dollars in his pocket. His destination was Bakersfield, California, where he was taken under employ as a shepherd, a popular thing for Basque immigrants of the day. After four years of living in the field with sheep and dogs, this extrovert found the loneliness intolerable and went in search of different employment. Moving to Nevada, he found work as a miner in Winnemucca and as a carpenter in Reno before moving with a friend to Marin County, where there was a gardening business for sale. Knowing nothing about gardening, he taught himself all there was to know about gardening and landscaping and earned his license. He founded the landscaping business of Etcheverry and Son, a business which still thrives today. In 1958, Jean decided it was time to get married, and, as fate would have it, attended a Basque picnic in San Mateo, where he found Emily, an 18-year old immigrant from a town in the high Pyrenees of France. The two fell in love and were married on August 31, 1958. They were to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary this summer. Jean enjoyed a wonderful life, filled with great friends, great wine, plenty of Petanque, hunting and fishing, loving family and all the other blessings attendant to a life in Marin County. He leaves behind his loving wife of 60 years, Emily, his son, Claude (Olga), his daughter Lillian (Tom), wonderful grandsons Kyle and Matthew, sister Marie Ann Chiquirin and many nephews and nieces in France. A Mass in honor of Jean's life will be served at St. Isabella in Terra Linda at 10:00 on Friday, April 27th followed by his committal at Mt. Olivet Catholic Cemetery immediately afterwards