Jeri was born in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the third of the four beautiful daughters of Bob and Mavis Jean Ross. Her mother so liked her middle name she named her first child “Jean,” and so liked the letter “J” that she gave all four girls first and middle “J” names.
As a young scholar at Harding Grade School she walked the six blocks from the family home at 1602 Front to Harding School, and on summer days raced on her bicycle down six blocks to 1401 East Lakeshore Drive, her dog Robby trotting beside her, to swim off of Dr. Fox’s beach, their family doctor.
Jeri had become an accomplished musician by the time she was in high school, and was one of many young national musicians to be featured on the Sunday evening Ed Sullivan show. On her clarinet she had diligently practiced the exceedingly complicated “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but on camera she was overcome with stage fright! On national television her clarinet bee could not take flight.
Though when young she felt she was a “tomboy,” at the University of Idaho her natural beauty and vibrant personality led to her being selected as Homecoming Queen. While there she majored in French, admittedly to enable her to more easily see the world. In fact, she spent her final semesterin a program called University at Sea, sailing across the Atlantic and then touring multiple European cities, including going behind “The Iron Curtain,” to visit Moscow.
This experience inoculated Jeri with the travel bug. After graduation she worked for an architecture company in Madrid and Barcelona, and in Australia for a company designing and constructing buildings for the University of Sydney. Then in Fiji as a project managerforresort development, then finally working in the same capacity in Hawai’i forthe immense Dillingham Corporation.
Onward to San Diego, where she purchased her first house, and met Marty Ext, whom she married at age 37. They soon set out, as so many young people plan to do, to sail around the world. They got their 52-foot sailboat as far as Bainbridge Island, Washington, where they stopped for repairs. After living on their boat for three years, Jeri decided she would rather live on land, to have more space and gardens.
The couple purchased a property containing three old cottages built by Japanese-American farm workers in the 1930s.The property had been on the market forten years, and the buildings were rather worn, and engulfed in wild greenery. Only slightly daunted, the couple set out to restore the charming cottages, and to turn the jungle into a well-tended landscape.
Marty continued to be drawn back to his multiple businesses in California, while Jeri steadily burrowed into Bainbridge life, living in one of the three cottages, where she continued to reside until her passing. Lonely afterthe divorce, she joined multiple groups that met to hike, bike, kayak, sing, and to speak French and Spanish. And she resumed her zest fortravel, visiting overtwenty-five countries in a dozen years. One of these was India, which she visited for 18 winters, enriched by the teaching and guidance of the spiritual leader Osho, from whom she received the name “Sada.” In recent years she continued her spiritual practice and growth in gatherings in Costa Rica and Mexico, as well as in the Pacific Northwest.
Sada has been a generous donor to many worthwhile causes, supporting dozens of animal rescue organizations, from stray cats to endangered tigers, especially to PAWS on Bainbridge, that takes in cats in distress, some as young as a few days. She also has been a major donor to the Bainbridge Land Trust, the Bloedel Reserve, and to the Bainbridge Community Foundation.
But most of all she was justifiably proud of her scholarship program at the University of Idaho, which so far has supported a total of 16 students majoring in music, providing checks each semester all through each musician’s four years. And she was glad to know the program will continue after she is no longer around to receive the heartfelt appreciation and affection from “her” students.
For many years, friends had told Sada that John Fox, on whose family beach she swam, and with whom she went through 16 years of school but (being two years younger) never had actually met, was living on Bainbridge. Friends told John that Jeri, now Sada, was living somewhere on Bainbridge. At last, a little over two years ago, they met by accident at a concert by a local band, Ranger and the Re-Arrangers. At the end of the first set the band played the old ballad, “I’ll See You My Dreams.” Some strange force prompted John to tell the stranger sitting next to him that “that was the song always played at the end of the Friday night Eagles Hall Dances in Coeur d’Alene.” Sada responded with a suspicious “Who are you!?” The next evening, at a kind of reunion dinner together, she mentioned to John she was having a knee replaced in five weeks, but the woman who was to take care of her after the surgery had just had a mild heart attack. The next day, again prompted by an unknown force, John sent an email to say he “would be proud and honored” to take care of her after her surgery.
And so he did, and well beyond, as the two soon became committed partners. And so he did again when in mid-June Sada underwent a five-hour emergency surgery. After many extremely painful days and nights, when she was told additional surgery would be needed, she told the doctors, simply and clearly, “It’s time for me to go.” Which she did, serenely, gracefully, and without pain, after hospital visits by her sister and many friends, even one who played his guitar and gently sang to her for a couple of hours. Jeri Jarel “Sada” Ross passed away with a smiling spirit.
