Jean Justice of Bella Vista is passionate in her pursuit of several interests.
When she moved to her current home in Bella Vista, it was her 31st move, she said. Before that, she and her husband, John, lived in the same house in Minnesota for 20 years, so she and her family moved a lot when she was a child.
She was born in Wayne, Neb., and the family moved around a lot until her father became a United Methodist pastor, and that slowed the moving a bit. When she was a senior in high school in Flandreau, S.D., her father received an offer to move to Sioux Falls, S.D., and serve as pastor as well as chaplain at the local penitentiary. He initially turned the offer down because his daughter was a senior in high school, but Jean told her father he should take the offer because it was a great career move for him and also the schools in Flandreau were not good, so it would be a positive move for her younger siblings. As for her, she was staying with a friend to finish out the school year.
She commuted the 40 miles to Sioux Falls on the weekends with teachers working at the federal Indian school in Flandreau and living in Sioux Falls. At one point her three-year-old brother became very ill with a kidney infection and was hospitalized and almost died. While he was in the hospital she made the trip to Sioux Falls every day, she said.
After high school, Jean returned to Wayne, Neb., and attended Wayne State College. She double majored in English and Spanish education. She married the campus pastor at the end of her sophomore year. Following graduation, she taught English and speech for one year. She and her husband moved to a suburb of Omaha, where he was a pastor, and they adopted a baby boy. Then that marriage did not work out, she said.
She got a job with IBM as a typist. In 1982 she married John Justice, an air force officer. IBM promoted her to regional administrative staff in Minneapolis. She was traveling with her job and had a third grader at home, so she asked for something else, so IBM made her first line manager, and then she moved on to area staff.
"IBM was a wonderful experience for me," she said. "I learned lots of wonderful skills of time management and working with people, but I figured out a multinational corporation was not where I wanted to be."
She went to seminary, graduating in 1999, and got a job as ecumenical coordinator at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., working with non-Lutheran students. Meanwhile, John had gone into real estate.
In 2004 they moved to Bella Vista. Her parents had moved here in 1987, and so they had visited the area frequently. They built a house and moved into it in 2005, making Jean's 31st move.
She became a member of the Philanthropic Educational Organization, one of her passions. PEO was founded in 1869 and has given $383 million for scholarships, grants, awards and low-interest loans for women going to college, she said.
"I've always said when you educate a woman you can change the world," she said.
She served on the Arkansas state board of PEO, serving as president in 2017-2018. Her chapter established a program for continuing education in her honor.
Another passion of Jean's is quilting, evidence of which can be seen throughout her home. She started quilting when she was the adult education director at a large church in Minnesota, she said. There were a lot of women in the church interested in quilting, so they hired a teacher and met weekly for 10 weeks. They learned hand quilting. Then they hired another teacher to teach them machine piecing and machine quilting. Jean got her sister in Independence, Mo., interested in quilting, and they and a few others sometimes meet halfway and quilt on a weekend. Jean is now working on a quilt with 31 houses on it to represent her 31 moves.
Jean is also passionate about camping. She and John have an RV.
"Last year, because we couldn't do anything else, we camped 108 days," she said.
They are campground hosts at two Arkansas campgrounds, Petit Jean and Bull Shoals. Being hosts means they work every other day checking the campsites and talking to guests, and they camp for free. They are also part of a national camping organization called Good Sam.
A fourth passion Jean mentioned is the Daughters of the American Revolution. She is a registrar and helps women identify their lineage back to the Revolutionary War. She has been doing genealogies since she was 12 and has published books on both sides of her family and John's family, she said.
Lastly, she is passionate about birds. She is part of a Bella Vista birding group and enjoys photographing birds.
"I keep pretty busy," she said.