Jean Heritage: ‘Always positive’

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Jean Heritage died peacefully in her Southern Humboldt home on June 11, 2024.

She was born on June 7, 1940 in Santa Maria, CA. She was the only child of Emma and John Heritage. In high school, she played tennis and was in the marching band.

She was accepted into UC Berkeley and San Jose State. She attended San Jose State, intending to major in chemistry. After one semester, she dropped out and hitchhiked to New York with two friends.

Jean worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, where she met Jovan Floric, who frequented the coffee shops in the village looking for chess games. Jovan had recently immigrated from what was then Yugoslavia and spent 3 years in the US Army before becoming a chess bum.

In late 1961, Jean got pregnant with her first child, Deirdre. Jean and Jovan got married and moved to the Catskills. But the winters proved too harsh for them, so in late 1962, they moved back to California, living in the happening music scene of San Francisco. At the shower before the birth of her second child, Erika, Grace Slick (of Jefferson Airplane/Starship) gave Jean 2 joints and a silver dollar as a shower gift. Erika was born in December of 1963. Erika recalls Jean telling her about being in a room with about 12 other people, all smoking weed and playing music, one of the other people, it turned out, was Paul McCartney.

Jean and Jovan lived in SF until they separated in 1970. Jean moved to Berkeley and Jovan took the two girls up to Sonoma County. Jean spent the next few years in Berkeley with a motley collection of hippies who owned and ran a VW repair shop and all lived together in an old Victorian in Berkeley. She and her partner Chris tried their hand at back to the land living first in the foothills of the Sierras in 1972, but the property they were on burned in a late season wildfire. The climate and conditions were too harsh there and they began to look elsewhere.

They ultimately found and bought 75 acres in the Barley Hill area of SoHum.

Jean worked in several local community jobs,

including at the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union, Redwoods Rural Health Clinic, and Heart of the Redwoods Community Hospice. She set up systems in all three of those establishments, many which are still in effect today. She was a pleasure to work with, always positive and ready to teach new folks about how things worked.

She retired from Hospice and dedicated all of her time to her incredible garden, making her place more fire-safe, doing jigsaw puzzles and teaching anyone that asked about her gardening practices. 

Jean was afflicted with a non-Parkinson’s tremor that seriously depleted her energy in the last months. Before the tremor she was extremely good at both table tennis and badminton. There was nothing she hated more than a bully and nothing she loved more than a little dose of karma.

She donated her body to science through the UCSF Willed Body program. She will be greatly missed by many.

There will be no formal memorial for Jean — she didn’t like them. To honor her, plant some beautiful flowers or do some fuels reduction around your home to make it more fire-safe.

Or make a donation to Heart of the Redwoods Community Hospice in her name. Checks can be mailed to 464 Maple Lane, Garberville, CA 95542.

To hear an interview with her about her life, go to the KMUD archives at kmud.org. Click on Audio Archives. Scroll down to July 4^th. 7pm.

Interviews with Jean Heritage and Ernie Branscomb from 2011.

Rough transcript of the interview but listen to their voices if you can.

Ernie: I really love this place… I really do. I like the redwoods. I like the streams. I like the people. I like everything about it. My name is Ernie Branscomb. I have always felt this was genetic because my family’s been here so long. It always feels good to come back over those mountains and look down and see the green valley of the Sacramento Valley, and finally, start seeing redwood trees coming up Highway 101, you’ll start feeling like you’re home.

Before the Back to the landers came, it was a loggers and ranchers and fishermen and tourist area. I was a logger. Yeah, I … skinned cat, fell trees and loved it. As logging went out back to the landers, they came in and bought logged over land.

Jean: My name is Jean Heritage. I’ve been here since ’72 so what does that make 38 years? I just have a peculiar way of looking at life. I always had to kind of hide and pretend that I was more like people, that twisted me. Coming here was like finding the best place on the earth. I could actually be a good citizen of this community and add to its value by being myself. And when I came here in the 70s, there was still that feeling that we were making our own community here. We can make it like we always hoped for a community to be.

Jean: To come to an area where everybody is just really …was so exciting. I couldn’t believe that I was lucky enough to be able to come here. I couldn’t wait to get up every morning and do what I was going to do that day. You know, my life just turned into something golden when I came here. We had all this energy and all these ideas. And in the beginning we had no money. We threw work parties. They asked 20 people to come over and have whole days for some work. And we build barrel concrete water tanks, for instance, and then you threw a really big dinner and party afterwards. That was how things got done.

Ernie: They bought anything with a south facing exposure and water that they could grow a garden in. We used to laugh like crazy about these people coming up here growing garden on the hillside and thinking they were going to make a living. They fooled us. We imagined carrots and tomatoes and corn stalks, and boy, were we wrong.

Jean: And in the beginning, nobody was growing to sell. People threw maybe a plant or two for their own use. And then bingo.

Ernie: They moved up here for the land, and I think they discovered that they could grow marijuana here and make a killing. We thought they were growing a harmful drug at the time. Have you ever you heard the term Hate the sin, but love the sinner. I like the people that were moving up here. I like them a lot. I admired the music that they brought us, and the parties. They bought the Fireman’s Hall, and they called it their Boogie Barns. Have a boogie every weekend.

Ernie: Most of us up here at the time worked 60 hours a week while they were playing 60 hours a week. So that went down hard for a lot of people, but we got over it.
Jean: You could put maybe six or seven plants and get a little extra money, which would build the road or put in that water tank or build a house for your family.

Ernie: A lot of the people that lived up here came up from Berkeley and had degrees. They knew a lot about biology, and they knew how to develop strains of marijuana that were much stronger than they’d ever used before around here. And yeah, they, they developed the strain of marijuana, that was quite potent. It is world famous. Now they call it Humboldt Homegrown.

Jean: I think when I saw this, I thought, this is planet working with us.

Ernie: Back in the 80s, they developed CAMP, Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.

Jean: They brought the military in here to chase down children in the woods.

Ernie: They came in here to eradicate marijuana. Right? They came in with helicopters and dangled from ropes and they’d fly over the crops and …in and chop up the crops and fly them out.

Jean: They came in with rifles and helicopters and

Ernie: bulletproof vests and machine guns.

Jean: That was like living in another country or something.

Ernie: We thought, great. This is, this is really getting rid of the marijuana. We’re done with it. No more.

Jean: It was like being attacked. It was like being in a war. It was awful.

Ernie: Got to be real apparent that they were playing cops and robbers. They weren’t trying to get the marijuana growers. They were playing games with their fancy equipment, and they were pulling marijuana, but they weren’t arrested anybody. It was pretty obvious to everybody that it was not going to get rid of the marijuana. I don’t really think that anybody seriously wanted to get rid of the marijuana. The grower was happy that the prices were kept up, because they did for a few crops. And the cops were happy, because it got a lot of fun and got swing from ropes on helicopters.

Ernie: You know, without the marijuana dollar, you’d be seriously hurting. And you know, put all the moral issues aside and all the criminal activities that were dependent on the marijuana.

Jean: We had just enough income from those few marijuana plants to be able to support the nonprofits that would make this community be the community that would we had always hoped for to have a clinic whose main view was compassion, to have a credit union that would loan to us, to have a public radio station that would tell you the real truth. These are things that I think all of us dreamed about in some previous life and came here in order to make it happen, and because we had that little bit of marijuana, we could do it.