Beverly Jackson

09/15/1942 - 08/09/2025

Beverly Y. Jackson, a retired public-relations professional whose career spanned four decades in Washington DC, died August 9, 2025 of unexpected complications during surgery, ending an 11-year struggle with Alzheimer's dementia. She was 82 and living in St. Mary's County, in southern Maryland.
Beverly grew up on a series of farms, some without indoor plumbing, near Galesburg, Illinois. Her father Louis Wyckoff was a struggling tenant farmer, and her mother Marge (nee Wilson) was a traditional housewife. Beverly attended a one-room schoolhouse and later graduated from Galesburg High School with an abiding desire to put rural life behind her, while retaining immense pride in her family's tenacity and unflinching work ethic.
At age 19 she married a Galesburg man and moved to Washington DC, where he was a police officer. She worked as a medical transcriptionist at the old Walter Reed Army Medical Center, putting herself through night school at the University of Maryland and completing a degree in English. She then worked as an assistant to the psychiatrist who headed the criminal division at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where she sometimes played volleyball at lunch with inmates. From hospital's hilltop site she watched smoke rising from downtown during the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
After divorce, Beverly lived on Capitol Hill with several other single women in a Victorian house one block behind the Supreme Court building. She was hired as a public relations officer by the Office of Emergency Preparedness (forerunner of today's Federal Emergency Management Agency), where she kept a suitcase packed, in case she should be dispatched on short notice to work at a hurricane or other disaster site. (Co-workers advised that the first order of business would be to set up shop at a motel with a working ice machine.)
During that time, she met her future business partner, Sheila Summers, and took up skiing. A car crash on an icy road in the Alps nearly killed her, resulting in a lengthy stay in an Austrian hospital.
In 1970 Beverly was detailed to a new federal agency, the Price Commission, set up hurriedly by then-president Richard Nixon to regulate the prices of nearly everything. It was a huge news story. One of those covering it was a 28-year-old reporter for The Associated Press, Brooks Jackson, who later went on to cover the presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern. Beverly and Brooks married shortly after, on Nov. 18, 1972. The marriage lasted until her death nearly 53 years later.
While raising two children, Bev worked for a Washington DC public relations firm, and in 1975 founded her own -- Jackson/Summers Associates, which operated until 1985, first from her home and then from a K street office. She was a founding member of the National Association of Women Business Owners.
For a time, she headed public affairs for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts. She recalled not getting along well with another Beverly, opera singer Sills. Family members observed that divas do not coexist easily.
In 1987 Beverly was drawn back to the medical world, becoming Vice President for Public Affairs at Children's National Medical Center. In 1996 she returned to government service, as chief of the Public Information Branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. She retired in 2004.
Throughout, she mentored countless young PR professionals, was an avid photographer and a tireless producer of knitted and crocheted art. Her art was displayed publicly and sold until about 2015.
Survivors include husband Brooks Jackson, of California MD, sister Debra Corban, also of California MD, daughter Dr. Courtney Jackson Blair, an allergist/immunologist of Arlington VA; son Mark Jackson, a lawyer of Brooklyn NY, and five grandchildren: Chloe Blair, Duncan Blair, Vera Jackson, Celeste Jackson, and Lucien Jackson.
Interment will be private. A memorial service will be scheduled for a later date.