Summit Hills Welcomes Tara Stevenson as Lifestyle Advisor
11-03-2009
<< Back
Spartanburg, S.C., November 11, 2009 - Trying to cram 83 years of Jim White’s life into a few paragraphs is just plain wrong. Especially for an accomplished storyteller who remembers sitting on the front porch of his parents’ sharecropper home while adults took turns weaving tales into all hours of the sultry, South Carolina night.
Today, the art of storytelling is a far cry from White’s recollection of the practice as the only means of entertainment for a family trying to survive on a cotton crop in early 1930’s Cherokee County, S.C. Facebook and Twitter debunk the idea that face-to-face conversation is something to be valued. But the pinpoint accuracy and like-you-were-there detail that fills White’s life stories are just something you can’t find on a status update.
White is a South Carolina native, born and raised in Cherokee County. The youngest of eight children, he remembers the fallout surrounding the Great Depression, and his family's subsequent journey into the sharecropping lifestyle with picture-perfect detail.
"The slats that made up the floors in our home were spread so far apart, you could see animals moving underneath," White recalled.
White's propensity for reading and his love of English served him well both in childhood and in later life. His early foundation and the comfort he found in books would lead to future careers in journalism, public information and even teaching. But it wasn’t until he entered naval boot camp prior to World War II that he realized his full potential.
Throughout his career as a journalist, White took on stints at increasingly larger newspapers before accepting an opportunity to serve as an information specialist, writer and educator at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.
His role grew until White left to pursue a Masters degree and then later a position as chief information officer for the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Throughout his successful career in Washington, White transitioned into several different departments but made a name for himself at the Environmental Protection Agency, working on projects involving the implementation of state pesticide policies.
Running through career highlights like a grocery list, White abruptly sums up each with a simple "so I did."
"They [EPA] asked me to use my writing background to construct policy procedures for all the states, so I did," White remembers.
It would be so easy to sum up a man like White as a successful businessman, but doing so would eschew the many challenges he overcame in his personal life. A diagnosis of terminal cancer during the peak of his career shaped both his outlook on life and his faith.
"The diagnosis was incredibly hard on my wife and young son Mitch,” White recalls. “But I can understand because the strain of living with someone who is dying is terrible. As it turns out, cancer is harder on the family than it is on the patient."
Although White survived his terminal diagnosis, his first marriage did not. But he is now happily married to his wife Gloria, a former real estate broker and "Mrs. South Carolina."
Despite many happy years of watching his son bloom into a successful tennis player accustomed to a much more privileged life than the one he had led, White found it difficult to help Mitch relate to his own humble beginnings.
But White is confident his son, now a successful consultant in Washington, D.C., has ambitions far greater than his own.
"I recently found a piece of paper from high school with a list of my ambitions,” White said with a laugh. “Number one was becoming a carpenter's helper and number two was working as an attendant at a service station … thankfully I've been able to surpass those."
In his later years, White returned to South Carolina and moved to Summit Hills, a retirement community in Spartanburg, S.C., with his wife Gloria, and is able to look back at his experiences with razor-sharp acuity.
"I still feel like a kid at heart," White exclaimed. "The little boy from the tenant farm is still inside there, and he comes out on occasion. Early on, I was so serious and didn't know how to have any fun because life was so hard, but I've learned there's a whole lot more to Jim White than I realized."
