Susan Evans
For The New Era
One might think that at age 97, Jack Sherrard might be needing some assistance ? perhaps Meals On Wheels, which delivers food to shut-ins and those who can’t make it to the Senior Center.
Fact is, Sherrard has been involved with Meals on Wheels for almost 15 years, but he is the one on the other side of the door.
Every Monday he delivers lunches throughout Sweet Home to those in need.
Sherrard says he has no plans to quit delivering the meals, though he has cut back from three days a week to Mondays only. On that day he delivers meals to between four and six “customers,” as he refers to his deliveries. Sherrard estimates that he has delivered several hundred meals during his time behind the wheel.
Sherrard said the deliveries started after neighbor Harry Anderson introduced him to Fir Lawn Lutheran Church and he heard about the need there for drivers to deliver the home-cooked meals to area residents. Back in the early ’90s, when Sherrard first began, the meals were distributed through the church after being cooked and brought down from Salem. A few years ago the Sweet Home Senior Center became the drop-off point and that is where he heads every Monday to pick up the lunches and his list of customers.
Anderson, a longtime friend and neighbor, says Sherrard is “just remarkable ? full of energy and always wanting to help wherever he can. He’s on the Fir Lawn maintenance crew too.”
Sherrard says he mowed a path that only went to Anderson’s house so the two could visit at will.
A tall, imposing figure and walks with the posture and gait of a much younger man.
“I used to be 6’2″, Sherrard says, but I think I may have shrunk a bit.”
He was born on July 30, 1908 in Kansas City, Mo. and moved with his family to Salt Lake City as a youngster. When Sherrard, the youngest of four children, was 4, the family moved by horse-drawn wagon down across Death Valley and into the Long Beach area.
“My Dad always thought the grass was going to be greener somewhere else, ” Sherrard said of the move, adding that his father was offered good pieces of land in Utah more than once before uprooting and heading to California. His dad played the double bass tuba and played in brass bands when he wasn’t working as a barber.
Sherrard remembers his dad playing on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, and taking the steamers, whose names he still remembers, over to the island and watching the tourists in glass-bottomed boats try to locate the sea shells they had bought that were thrown into the water. He said the dominating feature of the island at the time was a big house owned by the chewing gum-magnate Wrigley family, who owned the island. When the steamers shut down, people traveled to the island by water jitneys.
Sherrard’s speech is peppered with phases such as “Stew-pot Slim,” “bristlecone pine” and other words that evoke images of the old West. His house is furnished with pieces of the past as well. In one corner of the dining room is a massive old headlight from a steam engine. It is ornately cast bronze and still has the original wick.
Sherrard said he remembers, during his family’s trip west 93 years ago, his mother crying at the train whistle when they had reached California because she realized the family could have made the whole trip by train rather than the arduous trek in a wagon.
Sherrard grew up mostly in the El Segundo area south of Los Angeles, where he went to a one-room schoolhouse, never completing high school because he had to work help support his family. He eventually went to work at Standard Oil and retired from there as an executive before moving to Sweet Home with his first wife, Grace in 1982.
His daughter Sherron Sherrard Campbell, four grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren all live in the immediate area.
Several years after being widowed Sherrard married a fellow member of his church, Pearl, and the pair have traveled extensively since. Some of their ports of call have included the Holy Lands, Egypt, Spain, much of Europe, Turkey, Greece, Mexico and Alaska as well as many other states. Along with antiquities from the past Sherrard’s home is decorated with souvenirs of their travels.
Another reminder of his life’s journey and his can-do attitude is a impressive stack of wood split and piled on the back porch.
“When the lights and power went out one winter a few years ago, I had to borrow wood from Stan Fronsky and Pearl cooked on the Sweet Home Stove Works insert. I made up my mind right then that if that ever happened again I wouldn’t be beholden again.”
One gets the impression that doesn’t happen very often with Jack Sherrard.