She was much appreciated and will be sorely missed.

Rick Vitray

This is my church.
Over 50 years ago my mother brought me to this church to nursery school while she worked as the church secretary.
Of course then the church was just the old wooden chapel.
I was married in that chapel.
My father’s funeral was in the new chapel on the top of the hill which has since been turned into class rooms.
And now I’m here for my mother.

My mother taught me so much.
She taught me to drive (that was scary, for both of us).
She taught me to read.
She taught me how to live.

She used to say everything she knew about life she learned from Broadway musicals.
Her mother died when she was a child and one of her most cherished memories was of her father taking her to those musicals. It was their special time together.

My special time with my mother was when I would come home, usually late at night, and we would sit and talk about family, friends, and politics.

She and my father took me to my first Broadway musical when I was still in elementary school.
Fiorello.
It’s the story of a rag tag bunch of loser democrats working on the side of the angels and unbelievably defeating the unbeatable Tammany Hall machine.

A few years later she made perhaps her first mark in Virginia politics fighting with her own rag tag outfit against the unbeatable Byrd machine candidate Howard Smith.
AND THEY WON
(the primary, they lost the general election because all the dixie democrats finally realized they were really republicans).

My mother didn’t do what she did for power or glory (or, heaven knows, money). She did it to make things better.

At her eightieth birthday celebration my mother gave me one of her last lessons. Typically, it came in the form of the words of a song from an old Broadway musical.

“Oh it’s a long, long while, from May to December

But the days grow short, when you reach September.
And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.
These precious days, I’ll spend with you.”

Mom always said she was a child of the depression and that was why she was so frugal. I think that was a myth she created to avoid embarrassing my father. Mom’s mother died when she was 4 years old and her father felt she should be under the care of her Aunt Edith, during Mom’s early formative years. Thus, during the depression, Mom lived with her Uncle Doc in Hoboken, NJ. He was a successful doctor and they lived in one of the largest brownstones on Hudson Street. Her father was a dentist who also made a decent living. He would often take Mom to Broadway shows. (Mom always said she learned all of the important lessons of life from the lyrics of Broadway musicals.) Although I’m sure money was tight, Mom lived fairly comfortably. After she married Dad, however, she had to learn to make do on a lot less. In the years before Dad died, she was feeding a family of six on the meager salary of a government employee. That is when Women’s Day Magazine recipes for meals like tuna casserole and eggplant Parmesan became important. My brother Bob remembers an article titled “How to Feed a Family of Four on a Dollar a Day.” With a little rice, Mom could stretch a dollar to feed a family of four.

Mom always had a political bent even before she got into politics. Mom and Dad were active in the civil rights movement and Janine and my brothers and I were expected to participate. When we were old enough to drive, we got involved driving people to the polls and canvassing for candidates. Even before that, we participated in the first integrated swim in Fairfax County. My parents joined the effort to integrate the schools after touring the local elementary school “Louise Archer”, and seeing the truth of “separate but equal”. Janine was among the first white children to attend that school. Many letters to the editor by Mom appeared in the Washington Post around this time. Although the sentiment was certainly Mom’s, the writing was of a professional caliber of the level of my Dad. My father, of course could not openly participate in party politics because he was a government employee.

When Dad died, Mom was devastated. I was just 18 years old and I was scared for her. She seemed hopeless and lost. Nevertheless, she got it together and helped me get financial aid so I could continue in college. I think politics saved her. I will never forget when a few years later, I attended a Fairfax County Democratic Committee meeting that my Mom was chairing. It was in a high school auditorium and it was full of people, mostly professional men in business suits. And there was my Mom at the podium banging the gavel and calling the meeting to order. She ran the meeting with style and confidence. She would call for voice votes, declare the winner, and handle objections, occasionally with the slam of the gavel and an appropriate reference from Robert’s Rules of Order. I was impressed as I’m sure were most of the people in the room. Mostly, I was glad that she had found herself, that she had come out from under the wing of my father to become a confident, self-assured person in her own right.

Mom loved the beach. Every year for the past 40 years our family has rented a house on Bethany Beach for a week in August. Mom would get up at the crack of dawn every day and walk to the water tower and back (about a three mile walk on soft sand). I tried to go with her a few times and she just wore me out. She loved to watch the birds and the dolphins jumping in the ocean. This January, Mary and I decided to invite Mom to go with us on the auto-train to Florida. We were taking my car and we had reserved a sleeping cabin for two. We told Mom we would arrange another sleeping cabin for her. She said we should not waste the money; that she would be fine sitting up in a coach seat all night. I told Mom I wouldn’t be able to sleep and I would I never live it down if I traveled to Florida in a sleeper with my mother spending the night in a coach seat. Only then did she reluctantly allow me to reserve a sleeper cabin for her. We visited Rick and Alethea in Altamonte Springs and spent a week in a condo on Fort Meyers Beach. She walked a mile on the beach every day and loved seeing the pelicans dive-bombing into the ocean. That was just a month ago. We are all sad that she went so quickly but we were blessed that we had her for such a long full life.
Randy Vitray
April, 4, 2009

I first met Jane at the old Democratic headquarters in Falls Church city in the early 1970s. I later had the pleasure of working with her on five House of Delegates re-election campaigns of her dear friend, the late Dorothy McDiarmid. If I am not mistaken, it was Jane who coined Dorothy’s motto: “The Lady’s Got Clout!”

She was also the Secretary of the Fairfax County Electoral Board when I first ran for office. In all of these roles I found Jane to have a huge dose of common sense and she always seemed to me to have a zest for life.