Being interviewed by Jackson “felt like talking to an old friend,” agreed Chad Fillinger, a star pitcher at Casa Grande who played minor league baseball in the Seattle Mariners system before returning to coach the Gauchos for two seasons.
Jackson had a style that “softened” tough questions, said Fillinger. “With JJ, there was no malice, never any intent to embarrass you or put you on the spot.”
‘Why are you wearing that Casa hat?’
It was Fillinger’s custom to give Jackson a ballcap from each of the minor league teams he played for, including the Everett AquaSox, Inland Empire 66ers and Joliet Jackhammers.
Other coaches, including Maytorena, his predecessor at Casa Grande, would tease him for currying the writer’s favor.
Jackson’s choice of headgear was often the subject of friendly ribbing from coaches on both sides of Petaluma, depending on the hat.
“I’d see him at a ball game and give him a hard time: ‘Why are you wearing that Casa hat?’” recalled Doug Johnson, who has coached the Petaluma High School track and field team for more than 50 years.
“I’d give him a bad time about coverage between us and Casa. It was all in fun,” said Johnson, who still remembers the first time Jackson covered one of his cross-country meets.
“It was in the early 1970s. I picked up the paper the next day and thought, My gosh, what’s going on here?”
Jackson had painted a vivid picture with his words, describing the direction of the wind and the angle of the setting sun at Helen Putnam park.
“John has a knack, when he writes an article. It ends up not just being about sports. It’s about life itself.”
Jackson’s life was not without dire hardship. Like many others in Sonoma County, he lost his home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Emily Charrier, a friend and longtime colleague who is now publisher of the Argus-Courier and Sonoma Index-Tribune, recalled that the day after losing everything in the fires, Jackson was “in the newsroom, wearing his PJs, ‘cause he had no other clothes, putting out the sports pages like nothing happened.”
Influence beyond the sports section
There was “no brighter light in the newsroom than JJ,” Charrier added. “He was a ray of sunshine who walked among us,” always delivering coverage “with equal doses of compassion and commitment, teaching us all the true meaning of community journalism. His passing leaves a void in our operation that will be impossible to fill.
“There will never be another JJ, and our hearts are broken by this loss.”
After leaving the U.S. Army, Jackson was hired in 1970 by the Argus-Courier, which back then published six days a week. In 1978, he took a job with a paper in Coos Bay, Oregon. He came back to California soon after, editing the weekly Novato Advance for “around two decades,” he said in 2022.
Jackson was toiling as managing editor of five small weekly publications in Marin County when he noticed in 2003 that the Argus-Courier was looking for a sports editor. He leapt at the opening, and was hired back by then-publisher John Burns – who’d been his publisher in Novato.
“I’ve known a lot of reporters and editors,” said Burns, “and I’ve never known someone as professional, hardworking and dedicated to their craft as JJ.”
Nobody who worked at the Argus ever got closer to so many families, said Burns. Whether in his sports stories or weekly columns, Jackson “wasn’t just writing about scores and stats. He was able to capture the essence of kids and parents and coaches.”
Jackson’s vocation was “more than just a job,” said Chris Samson, a former Argus-Courier editor who overlapped with him at that paper for a dozen years. “It was an all-consuming part of his life. JJ was the most dedicated community journalist that I ever worked with.”
Jackson’s influence at the newspaper transcended the sports pages. In newsroom meetings, recalled Matt Brown, the paper’s editor from 2015 to 2021, when younger reporters suggested story ideas, “JJ would chime in with three or four sources, then rattle off the last 10 stories we’d done on that topic.”
Jackson would then share those sources, Brown recalled, sometimes after consulting his Rolodex, which rivaled, in its amount of content, the Oxford English Dictionary. “He knew everyone in the city.”
Irreplaceable
A deep well of institutional knowledge, Jackson was happy to mentor and help younger journalists, even if he got no credit for it.
It was often the case that “his fingerprints were all over a story, even if his byline wasn’t,” said Brown.
The same way longtime Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron became a historian for the city of Santa Rosa, Brown pointed out, Jackson had a similar, sweeping grasp and knowledge of Petaluma sports.
Brown’s successor, Tyler Silvy, was struck by, among other things, Jackson’s focus on the future.
Silvy had worked with his share of salty veterans, “and those guys had great stories to tell.”
Rather than “lean on old war stories,” however, “JJ was just as excited, if not more so, about the kids coming up – rising juniors and seniors. He was very much in the moment with his coverage, looking forward.”
The city should “throw him a parade,” opined Don Frances, who took over editorship of the Argus-Courier last September. Like all his predecessors, Frances struggled and pleaded with Jackson, usually in vain, to please take at least some of his vacation days.
Faced with the loss of the journalist he described as an icon, Frances acknowledged the obvious:
“There is no replacing this guy.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.