M. Barbara Jackson

M. Barbara Jackson East Lansing Formerly of Berkeley, CA M. Barbara Jackson was born on April 30, 1927 in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her mother Dora E. Olson and father Wilbert H. Cook were from Woburn, Massachusetts and Palmyra, Maine respectively. Barbara grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her sister Laurel and cousin Stanley in the family of her Aunt Melba, after her mother's death of pneumonia in 1937. As a student at the well-known Cambridge High and Latin School, she loved and excelled in mathematics and literature. After graduation, she attended Massachusetts School of Art in Boston (1947-49) and later worked at the Christian Science Publishing House. In 1947 she met J. David Jackson at a Valentine's Day dance in Trinity Church on Copley Plaza in Boston. They married in 1949. Barbara studied French and English literature at University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where she lived with her husband and four children between 1958 and 1966. In Urbana she was active in the Democratic Party and the Unitarian Church. While living in Berkeley, California, where the family moved in 1967, she received a Bachelor's Degree in French Literature in 1971 from Cal State at Hayward (current name Cal State East Bay) and was active in the Berkeley Women's Center. Her travels have taken her to innumerable cities in the United States and Canada, as well as abroad to France, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Morocco, Sweden, Japan, and most recently to Istanbul, Turkey in the summer of 2006. Barbara will be remembered by her friends and family in ways too many to enumerate-for her wit, love of language, beautiful voice and laughter; for her aesthetic sensibility in clothing and design; for her kindness, warmth, wise counsel, discretion, and self-respect; for refraining from premature judgment about anyone or anything. She is survived by her husband of 65 years; her children Ian, Nan, Maureen, and Mark; her son-in-law Vern Mesler and daughter-in-law Ann Arnold; her grandchildren Aldo Jackson, Nico Jackson Urueña, and Catalina Jackson Urueña; and her nieces Lee Blonder, Erica Cook, Kim Fujishige Rosman, and Amy Boggs. Memorial celebrations will be planned for future dates in Lansing, Michigan and Berkeley, California.