Jodi Graber Pratt

A memorial gathering for Jodi Graber Pratt will be held on Sunday, October 26, 2005, at 2pm

in the Aptos Library Community Room 7695 Soquel Dr., Aptos, CA 95003

**Please RSVP by leaving a tribute comment (at end) indicating your intent to attend.**

*in lieu of flowers, please donate to the Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries, Aptos Branch*

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Jodi Graber Pratt

A grandchild of early twentieth-century immigrants, Jodi Graber Pratt was raised in a working-class household and taught early to be proud-and grateful-to be an American. What that meant to Jodi evolved over her lifetime and found expression in numerous activities. Among the most notable are a career in financial management and fraud prevention, an active mentorship of the many "kids" who made up her chosen family, a self-published memoir about surviving the 9/11 attacks and valuing the better parts of the United States, and a semi-retirement as an active citizen who continued to foster community through artwork, community gardening, and volunteer service. All of these pursuits were united by a primary idea that animated Jodi's life-the idea that life, itself, is a gift, and that we who live must be givers. We must give back, we must give forward, we must bear witness, and we must make things better. And that is what she did in a multitude of ways, with a graciousness and generosity often unparalleled and deeply appreciated by all who knew her.

Jodi Graber was born to Wil (a WWII veteran) and Jeanne Graber in New York City and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Working her first job as a waitress in Phoebe's Pie Shop during high school, Jodi dreamed of a career in the theater. But once in college, she struggled to find direction and dropped out after a year and a half. She met her future husband, Thomas D. Pratt, in a restaurant where she was a waitress and he a short-order cook. They married on December 9, 1972. To put him through college, she took a job as a bank teller trainee at local financial institution, where her talent for business and problem solving emerged. While working her way up to a Vice President position at the bank, she returned to college part-time in the evenings, earning a B.S. in Business from California State University, Hayward, and then an M.B.A. in Management from JFK University. Over her lifetime Jodi accumulated nearly fifty years of experience in bank operations and technology development, with 25 of those years focused on financial fraud management. Jodi particularly appreciated the opportunity, as a businesswoman in the United States who had worked her way up, to eventually become her own boss. Expressing her entrepreneurial spirit and skills, Jodi founded Jodi Pratt & Associates, a fraud management and consulting service for all members of the financial services community that went on to become one of the longest established consulting services in its field. Jodi did not stop there, however. In 2005, JP&A expanded its services to include litigation consultation, with Jodi going on to serve as an expert witness in multiple trials involving bank operations and financial fraud, working with individuals and institutions, alike.

Professionally, Jodi was notably independent, but Jodi also had a robust family life. Though meeting her husband in Arizona, Jodi and Tom spent most of their time together in California, with Tom attending seminary in the Los Angeles area and Jodi finishing her B.S. in the Bay Area before both settled into their careers. In 1995, after Tom took a position at a college in the Santa Cruz mountains, he and Jodi relocated from the Bay Area to the home they would enjoy for nearly thirty years (almost twenty of them together, until Tom's death in 2013) overlooking the expansive ocean in Aptos. The two became the adopted parents of a number of cats and a steady stream of college students, who appreciated both of them for their fierce intellects, their boldness in questioning norms, and their intense ethical commitments.

Throughout her life, Jodi was ardently devoted to those around her-to the chosen family she and Tom had made, to her local community in the Santa Cruz area, and to her country. Jodi often provided comfort and wise counsel to male and female college students alike, but would also encourage the female "kids" who went on to juggle careers and families by telling them: "you can have everything…you just can't have it all at once." Committed to supporting these young women, Jodi filled many roles-from offering cooking lessons and a listening ear to serving as babysitter and "Bubbe" to their children. In fact, one of the "kids" who was particularly close to Jodi in the late 1990s asked Jodi to give her cooking lessons. Before they knew it, a tradition and a legend was born. The following year, they made Christmas cookies with a few other friends, and after that, "Cookie Day" became an annual event, with some kids moving in and some kids moving on, but a stable core of Cookie Day bakers gathering every December to create hundreds of sweet confections and packaging them up to send to friends and family around the country. Baked items were not all that was made. Rather, Jodi hosted this tradition, and others, to also provide community and continuity as the "kids" branched out in their own worlds. As in many other ways, Jodi was the stable core of her community, and deeply loved for it-something that became utterly apparent when her various communities nearly lost her.

In September of 2001, Jodi had just wrapped up breakfast at World Trade Center 7 and walked into the plaza en route to her first meeting when the first plane of the 9/11 attacks hit the World Trade Center. Boulders of concrete and panes of glass showered down before her as she pressed herself up against the building she had just left. Miraculously, Jodi was not seriously injured, and she quickly gathered her belongings and moved out of the area to allow first responders access. Shortly thereafter, the second plane hit, and as a plume of dust and debris covered the area, Jodi began a miles-long walk, suitcase in one hand and briefcase in the other, to evacuate and find shelter. A week later, she returned to California to find Tom waiting at the airport with a collection of "kids" desperate to hold her again. In 2019, Jodi self-published her gripping book about the account, In Its Shadow: a 9/11 Memoir, which was soon awarded the 2020 Readers Favorite International Bronze Medal in the category of Government/Politics. Having been granted a platform she had not requested, Jodi used that book to encourage readers toward gratitude and greater civic engagement-a practice she kept up, including through critique of some government policies, on social media for the rest of her life. It was also a practice she modeled at home.

A decade later, as she contemplated semi-retirement, Jodi combined other artistic endeavors with her long practice of giving back. She began a painting course and soon filled her home with gorgeous watercolors while at the same time participating in a community garden and volunteering at the Aptos library. She continued to create community around her and continuously gave back, all the while maintaining the relationships she'd fostered with kids and friends, cats and grandkids, colleagues and community members, until her passing in August of 2025. This included an ever-closer relationship with her sister and brother-in-law, Rorie and Ed Measure, and her nephews, Alex and Erik. Particularly after Tom's passing, Jodi spent increasing amounts of time traveling to see her sister or traveling with her sister, and their relationship became one of the greatest late joys of her life. Jodi is survived by these family members, by her two cats, by her adopted kids and their children, by and by innumerable people whose lives she touched.

Rest in peace and power, Jodi Pratt.