Adah Jeanne Jacques

A veteran of the U.S. Navy, she will be remembered for her sense of humor, kindness, sewing skills, and her dedication to frugality and resourcefulness. Once, when complimented on her nightgown, she replied “Thanks! It used to be a shower curtain.”

Jeanne loved music, playing bingo and trivia with her friends at Brookdale Farmers Branch, NPR, her home state of Pennsylvania, the Tex-Mex in her adopted state of Texas, James Patterson Agatha Christie books, ABC News anchorman David Muir, the ladies of The View, and her cats, having provided a home to a dozen or more over the course of her lifetime.

Most of all, she loved her family: her three children, Bill Boardman, Iffat Khan, and Amy Hunt; her grandchildren, Saalika Khan, Margaret Hunt, and Julia Hunt; her sisters, Jacqueline Driscoll and Josephine Caron (who passed away in July 2019); her nieces; and her sons-in-law, Faisal Khan and Brian Hunt.

Shortly after her birth in Reading in 1930, her family (along with the rest of the country) hit on hard times, and Jeanne, her sisters, and her now-single mom moved to Selinsgrove, Penn., a small town on the banks of the Susquehanna River, to live with her grandparents and weather the Depression. Thanks to her family’s livestock and voluminous garden, they were always well-fed.

She graduated from Selinsgrove High School in 1948 and went on to attend Susquehanna University. In 1952, she joined the U.S. Navy, attending boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, and later serving in the pediatric unit and as an operating room technician at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Long Island, New York.

After her honorable discharge from the Navy in 1956, Jeanne moved to Philadelphia, where she attended Columbia Business School and worked at Pennsylvania Hospital, the first public hospital in the United States. In 1958, after her graduation from Columbia, she moved to Texas to join her sister, Josephine, in San Antonio, “where all the men were,” as she later explained.

The move paid off, as she met and married Bruce Boardman in 1960, and gave birth to their three children. The family moved to Dallas in 1970, where Jeanne worked as an operating room technician at Doctors Hospital and then as a medical secretary until 1989. Jeanne then returned to her beloved Pennsylvania (she and Bruce divorced in 1980) and she continued working as a medical secretary in Harrisburg until her retirement.

In 2016, she returned to the Dallas area, where she lived at an assisted living community in Farmers Branch, just a few minutes away from her daughter Amy and her family.

She will be greatly missed by those who loved her.

Those wishing to honor her memory are encouraged to make a donation to the St. Jude Center, which provides housing to homeless senior citizens, at https://ccdallas.org/need-help/st-jude-center/